Show notes
In this episode, I interviewed Jack Pringle. Jack Pringle is a partner with Adams and Reese in Columbia, South Carolina, and focuses his practice on privacy, information security, and information governance; administrative and regulatory law; public utilities; land use litigation; and class action litigation. Jack and I discuss the important connection between a healthy mind, spirit, and body and how to achieve a balance in such a turbulent field of work. Topics covered: How he started and maintained his yoga practice and helped him become better at his career. Understanding the importance of a nimble mind. Defining yoga and how to begin practicing. You can learn more about Jack at http://www.adamsandreese.com/jack-pringle/ Find him on Twitter at https://twitter.com/jjpringlesc And read some of the things he writes at https://pringlepracticeblog.blogspot.com/ or https://medium.com/@jjpringlesc Questions? Comments? Email Jeena! hello@jeenacho.com. You can also connect with Jeena on Twitter: @Jeena_Cho For more information, visit: jeenacho.com Order The Anxious Lawyer book — Available in hardcover, Kindle and Audible Find Your Ease: Retreat for Lawyers I’m creating a retreat that will provide a perfect gift of relaxation and rejuvenation with an intimate group of lawyers. Interested? Please complete this form: https://jeena3.typeform.com/to/VXfIXq MINDFUL PAUSE: Bite-Sized Practices for Cultivating More Joy and Focus 5-week program. Spend just 6 minutes everyday to practice mindfulness and meditation. Decrease stress/anxiety, increase focus and concentration. Interested? Please complete this form: https://jeena3.typeform.com/to/gLlo7b Sponsor: Spotlight Branding provides internet marketing services exclusively for solo & small law firms. Unlike most internet marketing firms, they do NOT focus on SEO. Instead, they specialize in branding their clients as trusted, credible experts, increasing referrals, and ultimately driving growth. For our listeners, Spotlight Branding is offering a complimentary website review. Go to: SpotlightBranding.com/trl Check out this episode! Transcript Jack: In order to be effective, whether it’s oppose and holding oppose or going a little bit farther, it can’t be accomplished by having every muscle in your body being tensed. You’ve got to figure out how to relax. Intro: Welcome to the Resilient Lawyer Podcast, brought to you by Start Here HQ -- a consulting company that works with lawyers to create a purpose driven and sustainable legal career. In this podcast, we have meaningful, in-depth conversations with lawyers, entrepreneurs, and change agents. We offer tools and strategies for creating a more joyful and satisfying life. Now your host, Jeena Cho. Jeena: Hello my friends. Welcome back to another episode of The Resilient Lawyer Podcast. Today, I am so happy to have Jack Pringle back on the show. For those listeners that’s been listening to this podcast for awhile, you’ll remember that I interviewed Jack Pringle while I was at the World Domination Summit in Portland, Oregon. Jack Pringle is a partner with Adams and Reese in Columbia, South Carolina and he focuses his practice on privacy, information security, and information governance. But the thing that I really love about Jack is that he has this really interesting balance between his law practice and also, perhaps, what I would consider to be a more of a spiritual practice. He has a regular meditation practice and a yoga practice. In this episode we’ll chat about both and how those practices actually helps him to be a better lawyer. But before we get to the episode, I want to share a couple of exciting upcoming event. The first is a retreat. I’ve been having this daydream about having a retreat, just for lawyers, where we can truly unplug, restore, and rejuvenate. So I put a link to a quick survey in the show note. If you’re interested in joining me for a weekend retreat, it will be sometime next year -- most likely in the April or May time period -- please complete the survey and I will be in touch with you. The other program that I have coming up will start on October 9th and this will be a 6-week mindful pause program. This program is really designed to offer you bite-size actionable tips and tools and practices that you can do every single day. So the challenge is to spend 6 minutes really focusing on yourself and your well-being. The intention behind the 6-week program is that we’re really going to look at our life a little bit more closely, with a little more introspection. And actually think about how to structure it so that we can find more ease and joy and actually have more satisfaction in our life. Again, if you’re interested in the upcoming retreat or the 6-week mindful pause program, just look in the show notes. With that, here’s Jack Pringle. Jeena: Jack, welcome back to the show. I am so happy to have you back. Jack: It is my pleasure to be back talking to you, Jeena. Jeena: I think it was just about 2 years ago when we first met each other at the World Domination Summit. Jack: That’s exactly right. As I’ve described that experience, and no disrespect to the conference and its organizers -- it’s interesting name, great experience because that name was off-putting to some when they heard it. I can’t believe it’s been 2 years. Jeena: I know, yeah. For the listeners, you can go back to episode #21. It was released on July 24, 2015. So it’s really fun to have you back on the show. Of course we’ve stayed in touch through all the various social media and we even got to do a presentation together for the Canadian Bar Association so that was really interesting. Jack: That was and that was about a year ago. And then, of course, you were kind enough to come and speak to a overflow room at the South Carolina Bar Convention in Greenville earlier this year. That was tremendously well-received and I was proud to mention to everybody that I knew you before you got all famous. Jeena: Maybe for those listeners who didn’t hear the first episode, you can just give us a little bit of an introduction to who you are and what you do. Jack: Sure. Well, I am a partner with the firm of Adams and Reese LLP and I’m located in Columbia, South Carolina. Our firm is located throughout the southeast, generally speaking, plus Washington DC. My practice day-to-day, in large part, is information technology and information governance which includes a fair bit of privacy and information security. I also do what can be best characterized as a lot of regulatory law. And, as we’ll talk about, I’ve had the benefit of having a pretty consistent yoga and mindfulness practice for a number of years which, as we’ll also discuss, has been pretty helpful in my law practice day-to-day. Jeena: Let’s just jump right in and talk about yoga. How did you start your journey to practicing yoga? How long have you been practicing it and why did you get started? Jack: Well, oddly enough, after I graduated from college in 1990 -- which, I guess, is really beginning to date me -- I moved up to Washington DC to look for a job on Capitol Hill or in government affairs. A number of my friends were moving up there with me. As a lot of people were in that timeframe, I was pretty, pretty anxious and pretty much in my head worried about getting a job, not so happy to be out of college, and thrown in to the world. I actually saw in the back of the -- what was then the Capitol Hill paper/newspaper called Roll Call, there was an ad asking if I was stressed or anxious or wanted to try something that might help deal with day-to-day stresses and anxieties. It was a insight mindfulness class that was taught in Northern Virginia by someone named Tara Brock who went on to, and has gone on, to have quite an active and notable practice. It was, at that point, that I had the opportunity to begin the movement of yoga and service, at that time, of actually trying to do vipassana insight meditation to use some movement in order to help me and others in the class sit for long periods of time. And to practice the mindfulness and focus practices that now seem to have come into the culture a little bit more fully. That was, and ever since then, and it sort of waxed and waned at times, law school, professionally and with children. But have developed a fairly regular practice that combines some amount of yoga along with sitting, trying to sit still for a certain amount of time every morning. Again, it hasn’t been… certainly hasn’t been consistent and unbroken since 1990 or 1991 but at least, as of right now, it’s become a pretty regular part of my routine. Jeena: I think that’s such an interesting point that yoga isn’t or wasn’t started as sort of an aerobics or an exercise practice that really where yoga stems from is to actually ready the body so that we can sit and meditate. Jack: Absolutely. I come off sounding like a scold when I mention that from time to time because someone will tell me these things are all true and are all reasons to do yoga by themselves but they’ll say, “Wow, I’m so relaxed” or, “It makes me feel so flexible” or, “I feel three-quarters of an inch taller” or, “It really helped me deal with some anxiety.” I then respond and say, “Well, it really makes sense to do it as a prelude or as preparation for sitting still.” Because I remember when I started sitting and as with Tara’s classes and things, there were actually sittings that took place for… sometimes even several hours at a time. I remember, in that timeframe being so painful to -- it’s still even for a few minutes -- and recognizing the benefits of some of those postures and practices and service of being able to sit still or still enough in order to start to try some of those mindfulness practices was really helpful and, without being too clichéd about it, eye-opening or enlightening in terms of… Because, the truth is, sometimes if your body is too rigid and if you’re holding too much pain, it can be a very, very hard row to hoe to ask somebody “Well, just sit still.” That can be too difficult, in some instances, and so it’s another one of these wonderful paradoxes about doing some movement in order to be able to sit still. But it’s pretty profound. Jeena: What does your day-to-day or, let’s say, an average week of yoga practice look like for you? Jack: Well, sometimes it involves actually going to a studio, City Yoga, here in Columbia, Stacy Millner-Collins’ studio. But, I guess, ever since children came along and professional obligations become more and more prevalent, I’ve developed a daily practice on my own that involves waking up and having some coffee and then really doing a series of poses or series of movements not set amount of time. And then followed by, actually sitting using, say, headspace or sometimes just my own stopwatch to try to be still and then you use any number of those types of sitting techniques whether it’s counting the breath, or visualizing, or just letting the mind wonder. Jeena: How does yoga help you to be a better lawyer? Does it help you be a better lawyer? Jack: Well, I think it certainly does. Purely on the physical plain, I think it’s being shown over and over again that regular movement and, specifically in yoga, being able to sort of be a little bit of a student of your own body is extraordinarily helpful in managing the aches and pains and difficulties that tend to happen as one agent. Or, frankly, just as one as you exist. Jeena: Yeah. Jack: Learning to notice where you’re holding tension and, as you’re aware, there’s a fair amount of tension that can exist and build up in the law practice or in any profession where there are high steaks, ore there are raw emotions, or there are deadlines. In the first instance, learning to recognize that and a way to deal with it; to be able to, frankly, know where your core is and know how you’re moving. The way you can hold yourself and stand and sit, move in order to kind of minimize the stresses that inevitably come. In terms of the mind and the thinking, you and I have talked about this before, the ability to see, or to get a little bit of a sense when you’re being set off, or when you’re becoming distressed, or when things aren’t going well and to use the breath as an anchor. Something you can just come back to notice that you’re getting a little bit upset or you’re getting distracted. Or someone or something is throwing you off your game is extraordinarily important and extraordinarily useful in terms of, “Well, what am I doing?” Come back to what’s important here. “What are my themes? What’s going on with me and how can I come back to the focus on where I am and what I’m supposed to be doing right now.” That sense of whether you call it insight, or perspective, or context and seeing the way your own brain and mind work, I think is invaluable when you’re dealing with other people, dealing with decision-makers, dealing with the myriad tasks and challenges that you have in a given day. It’s hard to measure it but I would say that just that ability to be somewhat flexible and the way you think and the way you respond is very important in this business. Jeena: Yeah. Do you think there’s a correlation between having the body be more flexible and the mind becoming more nimble? Jack: Without question. That’s one of the ways that yoga is such a good metaphor. You can see this in athletics too. I used to play a fair amount of sports and still try to although it looks a little comical as I get grayer and older. But is recognizing that in whether -- and yoga is a good example of this. In order to be effective in whether it’s oppose and holding oppose or going a little bit farther, it can’t be accomplished by having every muscle and your body being tensed. You’ve got to figure out how to relax in order to really focus and extend. Likewise, I think it’s taking it to the professional realm. I can’t remember if it was David Allan who said that if you want to be effective, truly effective, you have to relax and figuring out how to have a relaxed mind that is receptive and nimble. The other way that I connected back to technology where I spent a lot of my days and this… I happen to see this. I read Kevin Kelly’s book which is called The Inevitable. It’s about the technologies that are going to change our world. He said that because of the pace of change that we’re all going to have to be and we are going to be perpetual newbies meaning always learning things for the first time. Always having to have the ability and that just… you make a direct line between that and the idea of beginner’s mind. Being able to see things without undo bias, or prejudice, or routine and to see things with a fresh outlook that you’ll need to solve problems when you’re seeing new things for which you don’t necessarily have a framework to evaluate them anyway. So, I think, it really does help with that idea of a nimble mind that can be, certainly, somewhat fresh, somewhat rested, and somewhat capable of seeing things for the first time or in a way that’s not blundered or too encumbered by other things. Whether those things are the past, or the future, or the stresses of your life, or making America great again, or whatever might be… Jeena: Sure. Jack: …on your mind. Jeena: Yeah, so true. One of the things that I often hear in yoga classes, or even in a lot of meditation teachers, is that the body has a wisdom and that by practicing yoga we can tap into that wisdom that’s contained in the body. Talk a little bit about that. Jack: Well, I think that’s absolutely true and it sort of helps me remember or recognize that the… just how connected the mind and the body are. As somebody, and lawyers aren’t the only… or the law isn’t the only profession that has this but you end up spending a lot of time in your head and thinking about a lot of things over and over again. Starting to tap into the body and recognize what the body does in certain situations and what you’r…
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