About the Course
Introduction
This CLE webinar will explore how attorneys can apply elite athletic training principles to sustain competence, resilience, and well-being in a high pressure legal practice. Drawing on her book Lawyer Like an Athlete: How to Up Your Game at Work and in Life, clinical psychologist and attorney wellness expert Dr. Amy Wood will translate sports psychology tools into practical strategies attorneys can use to sharpen focus, manage stress, and protect their mental health.
Description
Lawyer distress is uniquely shaped by the demands of legal practice, including constant adversarial conflict, perfectionism, heavy cognitive load, and the expectation of uninterrupted availability.
Building on core performance habits used by world-class athletes, Dr. Wood will cover techniques such as internal and external balancing, thought conditioning, and "envisioning the win" to help attorneys recognize their personal stress signatures, reset counterproductive thinking, and design routines that support sustained peak performance. Participants will learn how to respond when performance has already started to slip, identifying early warning signs of burnout, understanding when to seek help, and framing personal well-being as a professional strength rather than a liability.
The program will connect these skills to competence and professional responsibility, showing how sleep, recovery, emotional regulation, and boundaries are essential elements in meeting ethical obligations.
Listen as our panel (featuring Dr. Wood) explains how to think and train like an elite athlete so that you can maintain competence, protect your mental health, and build a sustainable, satisfying legal career.
Presented By
Ms. Brown is the attorney owner of Brown Law and Consulting, a firm dedicated to conducting workplace investigations regarding harassment, discrimination, and other misconduct in public and private organizations. She also mediates employment and education law disputes. With several decades of labor and employment law experience, Ms. Brown has held a variety of both HR and legal roles, including private practice labor and employment defense as well as executive level in-house HR and legal roles. She is a member of the Board of Directors for the Association of Workplace Investigators (AWI), a Fellow in the College of Labor and Employment Lawyers, and a Florida Supreme Court Certified Circuit Civil and County Mediator. Ms. Brown holds both the SHRM-SCP and Senior Professional in Human Resources (SPHR) certifications and is an AWI Certificate Holder (AWI-CH). She was awarded a Diversity, Equity and Inclusion in the Workplace Certificate from USF ‘s Office of Corporate Training and Professional Education in 2021. Ms. Brown has also been recognized as a leading labor and employment law attorney in multiple publications over the years, including Best Lawyers®, Florida Trend’s Florida Legal Elite™, Florida Super Lawyers® magazine, and Tampa Bay Magazine’s Tampa Bay’s Top Lawyers®.
Dr. Wood is a licensed psychologist, certified executive coach, and award-winning author who has devoted her career to helping individuals and organizations articulate and arrive at new and more empowering versions of success. In particular, she is known for helping individuals and organizations to edit down overwhelm to their own customized productivity and happiness essentials. With a doctorate from Adler University and a prior career in communications, Dr. Wood inspires transformation with a unique blend of humor, directness, and psychological insight. Her intention is always to live and work in ways that bring out the best in herself and others.
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An excellent opportunity to earn Ethics CLE credits. Note: BARBRI cannot guarantee that this course will be approved for ethics credits in all states. To confirm, please contact our CLE department at pdservice@barbri.com.
Date + Time
- event
Tuesday, January 27, 2026
- schedule
1:00 PM E.T.
I. Introduction: Why lawyers need an athlete's mindset
II. Understanding the "playing field": stressors unique to legal practice
III. Core concept: lawyer like an athlete framework
IV. Mental conditioning: thought patterns, focus, and emotional regulation
V. Physical and lifestyle foundations of competence
VI. Designing your personal performance plan
VII. Recognizing trouble spots and knowing when to seek help
VIII. Organizational and cultural change: teams, firms, and courts
IX. Conclusion with Q&A
The panel will discuss these and other important topics:
- How applying an "elite athlete" mindset helps lawyers sustain competence and performance
- Stressors unique to legal practice and how they undermine judgment, focus, and ethical decision-making
- Tools lawyers use immediately to improve focus, resilience, and emotional regulation in daily practice
- Core components of professional competence and what practical routines attorneys can adopt to protect these foundations
- Early warning signs that stress, burnout, or mental health concerns are impairing competence
- Organizational adaptation of high performance team practices from sports to build a culture that supports wellness and long-term, sustainable excellence
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Lawyer Like an Athlete: How to Up Your Game at Work and in Life
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