Taking Care of Your Team’s Mental Health, with Calvin Benton

Announcer (00:03):

Welcome to the Lawyerist podcast, a series of discussions with entrepreneurs and innovators about building a successful law practice in today’s challenging and constantly changing legal market lawyers, supports attorneys, building client centered, and future-oriented small law firms through community content and coaching both online and through the lawyer lab. And now from the team that brought you the small firm roadmap and your podcast host,

Stephanie (00:35):

Hi, I’m Stephanie Everett

Ashley (00:36):

And I’m Ashley Steckler. And this is episode 375 of the Lawyerist podcast. Part of the legal talk network today, Stephanie is talking with Spill, founder, Calvin Benton, about how he’s helping employers take care of their team through wellness check-ins and access to licensed therapists.

Stephanie (00:55):

Today’s podcast is brought to you by Postali, Posh, virtual receptionist and Law Pay. We wouldn’t be able to do our show without their support. So stay tuned, cuz we’re gonna tell you more about them later on. So today Ashley, we have a big win that just happened in our lab community, which is our paid community. One of our lawyers that we work with posted that she’s finally not working on the weekends. She is scheduling time with her family and she’s gonna read the book from her book club that she’s been putting off forever.

Ashley (01:30):

That’s awesome.

Stephanie (01:31):

I know it sounds small, but it’s really huge, right?

Ashley (01:35):

Oh, that’s huge. It’s a lot of big wins. Yeah.

Stephanie (01:38):

And what’s interesting is when, you know, press some of the things she able to do to make that happen were really super simple. One of which was just allowing her assistant to take over her calendar and actually block out the times that she needed to focus on different types of work and they even color coded it. So it could be super easy to see in a glance like, okay, here’s where I’m focused on client meetings and here’s when I’m gonna focus on client work. And now she has like no meetings on Fridays, which is awesome. So that way she can do heads down, work on her business and on client matters. So it sounds really simple, but sometimes it can be hard to actually implement and give over to have that trust that you can give to someone to take it over.

Ashley (02:24):

Yeah. I was actually having a conversation with one of the people on our team, one of our team members about, well, I’m in there already. I’ll just do it. You know, and we were trying to unlock a little bit more time, a little bit more space for things that are highly valuable for their position and highly interesting to them as a person. And we could identify lots of little areas that were I’m in there. I’ll get it done. And I think for a lot of people, our calendar is one of those areas that you don’t recognize. One, you don’t necessarily want to give up that control because you maybe would’ve scheduled it an hour different, but it’s something that someone could go in and the amount that they’re taking away from you in doing that for you adds up so quick.

Stephanie (03:19):

Yeah. And I think, I think I’ve used this example before, but you know, if you, if you watch the west wing Charlie’s character on the show was it’s a silly name in my opinion, but he’s like called a body man. But basically it was his job to keep up with the president’s schedule and just to get him prepped, right? Like he was the one that it was like, Mr. President, you do this next and now you’re doing this. Here’s the file you need. Here’s what you need to focus on. If you’re the president of the United States, you do not have the mental capacity to keep track of who am I supposed to be talking to next? What document do I need? Or what file do I need to have in front of me to prepare for this meeting? You have someone that just does that for you. It, and it manages your head space, right? It’s not just your schedule, it’s the mental energy to figure out what you should be doing next and where you need to put your time. And I’m here to tell you lawyers, you may not be the president, but you could use that help. Like that would be amazing. Like you can do it.

Ashley (04:17):

Yeah. And another thing we talk about here at Lawyerist is that you need to batch the type of work that you’re doing, just because you could go in there and do that next as part of your, whatever you’re working on. Doesn’t mean that that’s the most efficient use of time because if someone else had that task and they batched 10 to 15 things of that type, it would be much more efficient. And you can do, if we borrow, you know, from agile language and talk about sprints, it makes more sense for them to do the sprint of that function instead of you doing that function as it comes up next.

Stephanie (04:58):

Yeah. And so an example of that might look like, I know some people will have client intake specialists who are talking to potential clients all day long, and maybe you as the lawyer need to review that and figure out which ones you want to move on to the next stage or what that might look like. Right. It seems pretty obvious to say, but I’ll just say it, it would be very inefficient for you to review those requests as they came in all day long, then you’re just getting interrupted and bombarded a much better system might be to batch all that at the end of the day. And you take one final, look through, you know, the 30 requests that came in that day and pass or decline on those 30 all at once. And now you’re done.

Ashley (05:38):

Yeah. And I think it’s a, it is built a little bit around the idea of trust and control that it doesn’t need to be on our plate. And so we need to make sure that we’re delegating those things and you know, on someone else’s plate.

Stephanie (05:54):

Yeah. It’s easy to say. It’s hard to do, but I used to keep a list of like, what’s on my plate and what have I delegated to my team? And if my list was longer than theirs, I would force myself like, okay, something’s wrong? What, let me look at my list again. What are some three or four things to move over? Cause chances are the reason I’m not delegating it and I’m not moving it over. It was simply because of that fear, right. Of that control, like you said, like, oh, I need to be the one to do this when really I don’t.

Ashley (06:26):

Yeah. Or time that it comes up and we just identify, it’s a process kind of like cleaning your space. Right?

Stephanie (06:33):

Yeah. So I hope everyone will think of three things you can get off plate. And one of ’em could be your calendar. There’s no reason you have to manage your calendar or for sure your inbox, that’s probably a whole another conversation. You don’t have to give it up forever. If this feels really super scary to you just experiment, just say this week, I’m gonna experiment with this one thing and see how that feels. And then check in at the end of the week, see what went well about it. What didn’t go the right way you can adjust. And then the next week you do a new experiment and you just keep experiment, keep tweaking it until it works the way you want it to.

Ashley (07:08):

Yeah. And now here is Stephanie’s conversation with Calvin.

Calvin (07:12):

Hello, I’m Calvin. I am the founder at Spill. Spill is a mental health company that works with other companies to support their employees with their mental health. And in case you can’t tell by the accent, um, I’m based across the pond, um, over in London, in the UK.

Stephanie (07:29):

Nice. Welcome to the show. Calvin. I’m so excited to talk with you today.

Calvin (07:33):

Thank you.

Stephanie (07:34):

Maybe to kick this off, I’d love it. If you would sort of share a little about your story and kinda what got you into this and thinking about how to support teams mental health.

Calvin (07:45):

Yeah, sure. So I guess a little bit of helpful context about me. So both of my parents are actually therapists. My mom’s a counselor. My dad is a clinical psychologist. So like growing up, I pretty familiar with like the concept of therapy and I guess saw how like how much it helped people, um, who got the chance to speak to someone about how they were feeling. And then as I grew up, I guess I saw, and also experienced like how difficult a lot of this services we have, um, at the moment, like how difficult are to navigate in terms of like accessing support. So things like health insurance or going through government services or even using kind of things that employers often provide, like employer assistance programs. A lot of these systems like turned people away from, from support. I had friends who tried to reach out for support and got told to kind of like come back when they were, when they were severe enough. Um, um, I had one friend who got told to come back when they’d had a panic attack and I was just like, that is not a good attitude by like people who are supposed to be carrying.

Ashley (08:53):

Yeah.

Calvin (08:54):

And I guess for me, like this just seemed like, I dunno, definitely a problem that that was worth solving, um, in the world. Like I personally had, um, a technical background and at the time kind of Headspace, like the Headspace, the mindfulness app, um, was kind of becoming popular and I was just so inspired how kind of they’d made thing that was kind of in like Tibetan monasteries and, you know, available to like maybe like thousands of people. And then it they’ve been able to like use like what technology can do really, really well, um, to make it available to like millions of people across the world. So I guess those two ideas for me kind of like really came together, like firstly, this idea of kind of, you know, therapy and how it can be really helpful for people, um, like who need support, but then also how technology can help us make that support more accessible to people. And then like those two things kind of led to led to me starting spill around four years ago now.

Stephanie (09:51):

Yeah. I love that. And uh, you know, imagine conversation around your dinner table, growing up were pretty interesting with your, with your parents, but I love that you were able to take that background and say, wait, how can I use my tech background to really provide a new way for employees to get help before we jump in? I mean, I do wanna talk a little bit about what the tool does because we use it on our team. And I think it’s been so helpful. I wonder if we could just spend a minute though, talking about therapy because this is something you talked to our team about. I think sometimes it’s a big word. It feels like one of those big kinda, I mean, we’re working to normalize it. Right. But the idea that yeah, people might need therapy. They might honestly, there probably are a lot of people I out there that think, well, I don’t need therapy unless it’s severe, unless I’m having panic attacks. Like the idea that you would just call a therapist without a reason.

Calvin (10:45):

Yeah, though. Uh, it’s a funny concept. I mean, the way that I think about it really, um, is this, I mean, people certainly can have therapy to learn to kind of like self express more or kind of like self actualize. And there’s been times in the past where I’ve kind of like been in therapy and I’ve felt like, you know, pretty, pretty good in my life, but I guess I’ve kind of like learned to like self express more and kind of like learn more about myself and how I can like live a better life. But in truth that kind of is not the reason most people do use therapy. I think the way the kind of like stigma comes from is because the access to support has been so tricky for so many people. It ends up being kind of reserved for people who are kind of on like the more severe end of the mental health spectrum.

Calvin (11:33):

But then a lot of people actually would like to use therapy a little bit earlier or even quite a lot earlier. And most of the reasons why, why people use therapy on spill, it’s really just kind of like for life problems that we like all encounter, you know, whether it’s kind of, you’ve just gone through a breakup or kind of, maybe you haven’t been in a relationship in a while and you wanna talk about that or maybe someone’s passed away in your family or you’re having a tough time, like in your job or you’re having a tough time outside of work. It’s these kind of like life problems that I think therapy is like a, a really good solution for a lot of the time. And, and I think why a lot of people like do end up using therapy. Um, I have some stats like on, on spill, um, you know, of all of the employees that have kind of access to spill over 40% of those employees, like have at least one therapy session, like per year on spill.

Calvin (12:26):

So that if you want kind of a benchmark is like roughly kind of, if you make therapy really easy to access, like that’s how, how many people take it up per year. So, you know, it’s not a hundred percent and you know, you do have some people who, you know, each year maybe don’t feel it’s for them, but then a lot of people, you know, each, if you think about like what our lives look like throughout the year, like there’s a lot of ups and downs and all of us at some point, you know, do have some kind of like, well, most of us at some point in the year do go through one of those life events where it’s like, yeah, it, it could be helpful to talk to someone about this. Someone in my team the other day, like recently changed roles within the company and kind of became a manager for the first time and was like, ah, this is really scary and very unusual. And I dunno how I’m gonna feel about this. And I might not even like being a manager and I actually wanna explore that with a therapist. So those kind of like lives events, they crop up for most of us. And I think it’s because it’s been so inaccessible, it is almost kind of like why it’s framed as something that’s only really full, severe, like when you’re on the severe end of the spectrum.

Stephanie (13:23):

Yeah. That makes a lot of sense. And I like that the tool you’ve developed makes it easy to access a therapist and to actually have a session, but you guys have been really thoughtful in, in other ways of checking in and helping and supporting people’s mental health. So what could that look like? Because I think probably a lot of people are like, okay, therapy. Got it. But, but they might not be thinking about other things that they could be doing or should be doing to support their team.

Calvin (13:52):

Yeah. So I guess there’s a few things here. Uh, one of the things that, that we kind of created, which I guess with a lot of our features, we always, or a lot of the way that the product works, we always bring therapists into the product. So they always kind of have like some space within it. It just might not be like a video therapy session. So one of our features that I really like is called ask a therapist and basically just allow to get like very quick advice from a therapist I’ve used it where I’ve been like, I’m not sleeping too good. I don’t want a 50 minute therapy session. Like how do I solve this problem? Yeah. Um, and I just got like psychoeducation that, you know, if I went to speak to like, you know, well, obviously I could speak to my parents, but if I spoke to a parent who didn’t have like a psychological background, like they wouldn’t have like a particular it, a good answer.

Calvin (14:36):

And my friends wouldn’t either. So that is a really nice way to just get like a quick answer. But then, um, yeah, we also have like a regular kind of check-in feature where you can like check in on, on how you’re feeling each week. And there are apps that kind of allow you to do this, but a lot of the time they do kind of feel a, a little bit pointless because you’re not really sure what the end result is, but what we kind of developed was a therapist will, will check those responses and, and kind of like check if someone’s not feeling great for a few weeks in a row and then reach out and say like, you know, could you benefit from kind of like asking us a question or kind of like having a session. It’s really interesting, cuz I, a therapist have kind of started to notice like the patterns over time. So you kind of see like week one, like someone’s feeling busy like week two, someone’s feeling tired and their mood drops a little bit, week three, like someone’s feeling tired and stressed and their mood drops even more. So it’s kind of like bringing that like, you know, insight that therapists can have and kind of like spotting those things. Um, a little bit earlier one, I think one of our product principles is kind of like really believing in the power of like humans and, and kind of what therapists, how therapists can be helpful.

Stephanie (15:40):

Yeah. I love that. And we use the check in feature before our team meetings on Monday. And so we go to this Spill, Spill directs us to this little app and everyone says how they’re feeling and they can use some words to describe it and they can decide to share it or not. But most of our team is pretty open and will generally share. And then on our call, like one, I get a global report that kind of lets me know how the team’s feeling, which is super like super useful. This is not information I ever had before that I can even see how the team’s feeling, but then on our call, like we give people the opportunity to say more like, so people will actually share and say, yeah, I said, I was frustrated and it’s because this thing happened this morning. And like on last week’s call, we were actually able to solve the source of someone’s frustration just because they shared it with the team and somebody else was able to say, Hey, wait, I can solve that for you. And I feel like that’s something that that’s not a conversation we were sort of equipped to have. We wanted to have those kind of conversations with our team, but we just, sometimes it’s not having the platform or the space to make that happen. Right. You just need, we needed some extra open prodding to have the conversation go where we wanted it.

Calvin (16:56):

Totally. And, and kind of, I think about like the Headspace example that I gave earlier, you know, I’m sure lots of people like wanted to meditate, but kind of, you know, when you’ve got Andy’s voice in your ear for, for 10 minutes kind of telling you exactly how to do it and guiding you through the process and giving you the structure. I think, yeah. That’s when people can have like real life experiences that are kind of like a little bit greater and like aided by the technology.

Stephanie (17:20):

Yeah. That’s super helpful. Let’s take a quick break. We’ll hear from our sponsors. When we come back, I wanna get into some of the other things that you’re thinking about, which is really how to support managers, who support team members. Cuz I find this really fast.

Speaker 5 (17:35):

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Stephanie (19:39):

All right. So we’re back with Calvin who founded the app spill or really it’s more than an app, right? Like it’s a whole service because I don’t even know if we’ve actually defined it for our listeners. So we just probably in and assumed people knew what we were talking about. Our team at Lois, um, uses it. And so it’s really a service that connects for us through slack, but you could also connect through teams and it gives everyone on our team access to a therapist. They can have a therapy session, they can ask a therapist, a question. We have these check in to tools now that we can use. And like I was just explaining, we used before our team meetings, there’s so many different resources. And one of the resources that you provide that we’ve taken advantage of is actually a training session for everyone who manages someone on our team. We had a training session with a therapist who taught us as managers, how we could be thinking about and better supporting our team’s mental health, what to watch for, and then, and then really how to respond and, and how to take care of ourselves as managers, because sometimes we take on our team’s feelings and we don’t even realize it. And so I’m, I’m super curious, like how you came up with that and tell me more. Yeah. It’s it’s awesome.

Calvin (20:54):

Yeah. Thank you. Um, so how did we come up with it? Well, we started running these kind of like group therapy sessions basically. Um, we, we used to run them kind of around like mental health awareness week. Um, we used to just, I opened them up to the public and what we found was a lot of people were coming with kind of like problems of how to support other people with their mental health. Like it wasn’t necessarily theirs. And we started talking to managers and I guess, you know, often within smaller businesses, you kind of have managers who are having to support people who they, they really, really care about. And you know, when someone says like, oh, you know, like I’m going through a really tough time. Like in my life, the manager, like immediately, like they really care about the person and they really wanna help the person, but then they also feel like totally unequipped to help the person because they don’t really know what to say a lot of the time.

Calvin (21:43):

And I think one of the things that we were finding was managers were really kind of like taking on a lot of emotional burden so much so that, that it was almost like unhelpful a lot of the time, because it’s not as if they have infinite capacity to be kind of like supporting every single member of their team all of the time with, with the things that are going on for them. And a lot of what the sessions, a lot of what the training we do is about, is actually kind of letting managers know about boundaries and, and kind of like how to kind of like bound conversations to the things that they’re capable of, like supporting someone with, um, and saying like, you know what, we’ve got this conversation for an hour and I can support you with this hour, but hopefully we’re gonna within this conversation find some external support for you as well. So you, so you’re not just talking to me about this. It kind of came really just from hearing like hearing managers say like how much like emotional burden that they had to take on and, and kind of not being super equipped with kind of like the knowledge of, of, um, like what support people needed. I guess we really saw a knowledge gap there and, and wanted to fill it I’m yeah. Really pleased that, um, that you found the session helpful.

Stephanie (22:47):

Yeah. So I think that that message will resonate so much with our audience, both in terms of that they’re managing people and trying to support those people. But also I think what you said reminded me of, and we’ve talked about this on our show before, as lawyers, we often take on the trauma of our clients. Yep. Mean, in fact, it’s funny, cuz I was on a coaching call with, um, one of our members of lab of our coaching program this morning and she is runs an immigration firm. And at the time that we were our recording, this, the Russian invasion of Ukraine started this morning and she was dealing with clients who are in Ukraine right now trying to leave. And you could just, I mean, we both teared up, like she was telling me some of their stories and just, you could tell that she was carrying all this trauma, emotion, stress, anxiety for her clients.

Stephanie (23:47):

And I know that she also is a spill client. So I was able to say to her, Hey, why don’t you book a session in with someone at spill because you need to take care of yourself and you need to be able to take care of your team. And you could almost just see the air kind of Lee even, or she just was like, oh, you’re right. I have that as a resource. Like thank you for reminding me of that. And I was honestly happy that I knew she had it because it also allowed me to not have to, like, I’m not trained as a therapist. I don’t know how to support her in this very specific way. And now I can do that for my team as well. So it’s that so helpful?

Calvin (24:26):

Yeah. We, we, we work with quite a few, um, legal firms and I I’ve heard a very similar thing, um, around immigration and, and how difficult a job that can be similar things from like family lawyers when people are going, when people are going through divorce. It’s one of the hardest times in people’s life and, and the, and the lawyer in a lot of way ends up becoming like the confidant for, for their client. And, and, and I think most people don’t know this, but all therapists have therapists it’s, it’s required by the, by the ethical guidelines that they have regular therapy. And the reason for this is because, you know, they need a space to offload and, and a space to get support. Um, well, and, and I think I’ve found it kind of, you know, really surprising talking to a lot of people in, in the legal space, how, how they don’t have the professional support, like kind of mandated a lot of the time. And, you know, anyway, I I’m really pleased to hear like that there was a good outcome there, but I, I, I’ve spoken to a lot of, a lot of lawyers and over here in the UK as well. And, and it’s kind of, of, we just kind of get by and, and muddle on. But, um, yeah, I, I think the idea about kind of like who, who supports the people who are supporting other people? Um, I think there’s gotta be, there’s gotta be that person there.

Stephanie (25:38):

Yeah, for sure. And a lot of bar associations here are offering more kind of assistance. And like in the state of Georgia where I’m a member of the bar, we now get, I think five or six sessions a year, but that’s only, you know, that’s only as a lawyer. And what I like about spill in our relationship is that we’re able to provide that now to everyone on our team. It doesn’t matter what the position there is, because if you’re let’s face it, if you’re a paralegal, if you’re the person answering the phone, you’re hearing it, you’re getting that anxiety. And I, I agree. I’ve, I’ve had family law lawyers, personal injury lawyers, lots of different types of lawyers. I mean, we had an, a lawyer recently that I work with, one of his team members was hospitalized from it’s like, and it kind of started with anxiety. Right. And so, yeah, it’s real, it’s a real, a problem. And, and, you know, I think in some of your materials, you talk about as employers, our team and their brains are really our most valuable asset. Like, and so we as employers, it’s up to us to sort of protect that and make sure that they’re okay and that we can, we can do more than just provide lip service to it. I think.

Calvin (26:50):

Yeah. I, I think, you know, you kind of saw like a wave, like, you know, maybe like 20, 20 years ago of kind of like people providing like health insurance and it made a lot of sense because, you know, you had workers who were kind of like working, working with that of hands and, and kind of, you kind of see what happens now and, and it’s like, you almost need like a, like a brain like mental health insurance, I guess, for, for a similar reason, because you know, people are kind of employed to work with their minds. Yeah. I really kind of like, like kind of just looking back and seeing how it’s evolved. And then you also like noticed like the moment in time that we are now where, um, yeah. Employers are really still to kind of like pay attention more to kind of like how their team is feeling, because it really matters. Um, you know, it matters to kind of like, um, just on a, on a human level and, and it matters on kind of like a, you know, how, how well they’re able to, to do their work level as

Stephanie (27:36):

Well. Yeah, for sure. I mean, you encouraged me. I think you strongly encouraged me, which I appreciated. Um, we signed up for spill, you know, you were like, Hey, you should get a therapy session. Like before we roll it out to the team, because you should experience it. You should know what you’re providing and you should. And we want people to be able to say, Hey, I did this. And it wasn’t, it was not so bad. And it, and it wasn’t. And so, you know, I, I got onto my session with the therapist, which by the way, I’ll just give a shout out because all your therapists are based. I think in the UK. And for me, just listening to you guys is somewhat soothing.

Stephanie (28:15):

Like I got on and she’s like, oh, I have you in my diary for the next whatever minutes. And I was like, oh yes, you do. I love it. So there there’s like a added benefit for us for the accent. It’s, it’s lovely. I love it. But anyway, in my session with her, I didn’t even know what I was gonna talk about. Right. Like it wasn’t, I didn’t even, you know, I wasn’t, like I had some overarching thing I just kind of showed up and I was like, yeah, here’s how I’m feeling. Here’s what’s going on. And, but what we uncovered and what she, to me was, you know, living through this pandemic, we have all experienced trauma. Like this is a yeah. A true traumatic event. And it kind of made me pause a little bit. And I know we say that a lot and we’ve talked about it a lot, but it really just kind of gave me a moment, something about having a therapist, say it directly to me that I was like, yeah, you know, she’s right.

Stephanie (29:10):

Like we have lived through this moment in time and we’re still in it. And, and we don’t even realize the impact that it’s had on us and our daily routines. And, you know, I think I was sharing that some of my clothing wasn’t fit, fitting the right way. And I was like, my, maybe I need to do something about that, which I have by the way, I’m working on it. But, um, so it’s just so helpful. Like anyone, you know, I just wanna advocate for that, cuz sometimes we think, well, there’s not a big reason for me to get on with a therapist, but then I did. And I just felt so much better afterwards. And I had a new perspective to kind of just think about my day.

Calvin (29:45):

Yeah. I, I think, um, I mean, I think there’s two things there. I mean, for sure, you know, kind of like when you look at, you know, the, the result of the pandemic from, from just kind of a logistical perspective, you know, it really kind of like affected a lot of people’s lives in the way that, uh, um, you know, often people would maybe grieve kind of like holidays abroad or kind of like not being able to see people and, and kind of like, there really was like a sense of it. It was a lot of grief that, that people had to had to deal with, like, because their lives drastically changed in lots of ways. And, and so did all of the lives of people around them. It was kind of like a real kind of natural, it was a real natural and that affects people’s mental health.

Calvin (30:23):

And then on kind of the session itself, I think there, there was a really interesting study that found that simply like naming, like what you were experiencing, like affected your brain, such that like you felt like meaningfully like better having just named it. And I think really that, that’s kind of like a lot of, a lot of what happened. It’s just actually sitting and, and kind of like having the space to talk about the experience and, and then naming it. And then just by the pure virtue of doing that, that you, you kind of are able to feel a little bit better and, and more in control over it afterwards. Yeah. And yeah, the pandemics for sure. Been hard on, I mean, literally every in the world and I still think kind of 10 years time, we’re gonna look back and, and still not quite understand the magnitude of it.

Stephanie (31:09):

Yeah, for sure. And our children, quite frankly, I accidentally, but then intentionally right. Stumbled upon my 10 year old daughter’s diary last night. And there were a lot of injuries, but for some reason I just kind of flipped and I got to an entry she made right in March of 2020, right. When the pandemic was starting. And it was just so interesting. And I mean, I think she was eight then. And to read what she wrote about, you know, school being shut down. And she was at home with her family and she was, and she said, I’m feeling very, the more, the longer I’m in the, this house, the more negative I’m feeling. And it was very sweet. She wrote that she had been mean to me that day. And she was trying to find the right words to apologize to me cuz she really wanted to say the right things. I know I started crying reading. I was like, then I had a, I was like, okay, I gotta get outta this diary. I’m not supposed to be reading it. But, but yeah, it just, I think we need to take a moment. It’s a okay. To acknowledge that this thing is impacting us in our families in lots of ways. And so being able to have a place to go and, and to put those feelings makes a lot of sense. So thank you. Thank you for providing this

Calvin (32:16):

That’s right.

Stephanie (32:17):

So I guess the last thing I’ll say, because I don’t wanna hold there’s no secret here. So I’ve already mentioned that lawyers is use Z spill. We have really, really the whole team has embraced it and enjoyed it. And I will just share as the owner, um, and as the CEO of the company and owner, for me, when we were able to offer this as a benefit to our team, I felt like we talk about values a lot around here and everyone who’s listened to our podcast hears us talk about values. And for me it was a way to say, like to give my team something really tangible, that backed up. You know, we’ve always said values. We’ve always talked about wellness. We’ve all, you know, all of our values always had this culture of we care and we wanna take care of you. And then when we were able to say, Hey, here’s spill, you can go connect with a therapist for free just by clicking this button. I was like, wow. Now I’m kind of putting my what’s the saying, like putting my money where my mouth is, whatever it is. Like I I’m doing something tangible. It’s real. And I’m backing a it up.

Calvin (33:20):

Yeah. I think especially kind of during the pandemic we saw, we saw a lot of companies, like, I guess really struggle to feel like they were kind of able to like articulate what they really wanted to, to their employees. I mean, you had kind of like the famous example of like kind of like zoom yoga and, and kind of like, you know, things that we did where like, you know, we did like meetings over zoom and, and, and I think a lot of companies like, you know, when they found, but it was like, finally I’m able to kind of like really articulate what I’m trying to express with things like zoom, yoga, and kind of like doing these informal coffee chats. And sometimes they work and sometimes they don’t, but like, it felt like quite a pure way to say, like, you know, I genuinely do care about how you are feeling. Um, and here is like a resource that you could access, like with no strings attached. I think we really observed that kind of like struggle to, to, to find the right fit of kind of like what really kind of like says that, you know, we found companies struggle with that over the last, last year.

Stephanie (34:13):

Yeah. But you know, the stats that you’re seeing now is great. Like people are, I mean, we should just follow this up and say like, people are getting real results and you’re seeing real improvement. You’re able to track yep. How people are feeling and it’s working.

Calvin (34:28):

Yeah. We, we, uh, we’ve had a look. I mean, there’s an incredible team at spill and we’ve always tried to be kind of like quite research and science back. I mean, you do kind of find sometimes like mental health and things like this can be quite fluffy, but we’ve tried to you to stick the numbers. I think we have like 42, like people who have, um, you know, a series of successions on spill, see your reduction in like depression of, of 42%, which is like incredibly meaningful. It’s the equivalent of going from, you know, moderately, severe all the way down to mild. So like, yeah. There’s like a, a real genuine, yeah. Real genuine impact, um, on people’s lives.

Stephanie (35:04):

Yeah. It’s powerful stuff. And um, I’m excited to be able to share it with the world since we’ve started working with you, you know, I’ve become your biggest fan and advocate. And so, so several of our law firms also then signed up that we work with cuz I was bragging about it so much that they were like, yeah, we want that too. Um, and so we decided to make it official. So we now have a partnership with spill. The last thing I will say is lawyers as a small company, smaller company. And I was so surprised and pleasantly surprised that this is something that we could afford to do. Like you’ve also priced it in a very reasonable way that makes it super accessible to everybody. So if you know, so I’m excited to share this with our community in a more formal way that we have this partnership now.

Stephanie (35:51):

So if you’re listening and this is something you wanna explore, we’re gonna put it in the notes to the podcast, how you can get in touch with the folks at Spill. And because you’re coming from Lawyerist, they’ll give you a little discount and I’m sure that it will be you’ll welcome. It it’ll be great because it really is accessible and your team will really use it. Like that’s always, the question is like, right. Are people gonna use the like, okay, we’re gonna offer another thing. It’s gonna be like something else. Nobody really uses. But you get a report each month and you, you don’t see names or anything, but you do just see how many people ask to therapist a question or how many people went to a session and yeah. People are using it, which is great. Yeah. So you Calvin for being with me today and anybody who wants to learn more about spill, we’ll put the link on the show notes. So please go check it out.

Calvin (36:44):

Thank you, Stephanie. It’s been a treat.

Announcer (36:48):

The Lawyerist podcast is edited by Brittany. Felix, are you ready to implement the ideas we discuss here into your practice? Wondering what to do next? Here are your are first two steps. First. If you haven’t read the small firm roadmap yet, grab the first chapter for free at lawyers.com/book. Looking for help beyond the book. Let’s chat about whether our coaching communities are right for you. Head to lawyers.com/community/lab to schedule a 10 minute call with our team to learn more. The views express by the participants are their own and are not endorsed by legal talk network. Nothing said in this podcast is legal advice for you.