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  • Wellness Matters

    Consulting

Sustainable Lawyering

Debra Fortenberry, lawyer, and Dr. Sandra Thebaud, psychologist, envision a legal system anchored in meaningful relationship and honorable purpose. Debra and Sandra offer experiential in-house trainings to develop and expand skills essential to lawyer well-being. Trainings focus on improving ethical decision-making, cultivating deep listening skills, conflict de-escalation strategies, generative communications, and self- awareness. Each training connects the lawyer more deeply into the whole brain consciousness of skillful advocacy and wise counsel.

Working in ubiquitous conflict is stressful. Trainings include practices and strategies for reducing stress, participating respectfully in relationships, and creating a work climate that is life affirming. Debra, Sandra and the Wellness Matters Consulting team train and support lawyers so their actions are congruent with their beneficial intentions.


Lawyer Trainings

Lawyer Well-Being Evaluation and In-House Training

During this 1.5-hour training, each participating lawyer will complete the well-being assessment. Tailored to the team’s evaluation results, lawyers will engage in facilitated conversations and exercises to support insights and identify strategies for enhanced personal and organizational well-being.

Schedule a half-hour meeting to discuss offering this In-House Training

Whole Brain Ethical Decision-Making

This accredited CLE explores the connection between attorney well-being, decisions, and actions.

A growing number of scientists theorize that ethical action is supported by the brain’s right hemisphere capacity for noticing and wisely guiding us. Our program assumes that the emphasis and reward of left hemisphere function can disconnect attorneys from valuing their own well-being and the well-being of others, impairing communications and decision-making. The training will enhance self-awareness, listening skills, and commitment to well-being practices, informed by a deeper understanding of the different approaches our brains employ. Participants will experience modalities that demonstrate the importance of the right hemisphere perspective and receive support for creating their well-being plan.

7 general CLE credits; 6.6 ethics credits (Colorado)

Schedule a half-hour meeting to discuss offering this In-House Training


About The Founders

Debra Fortenberry, Esq

Debra FortenberryIn her three decades as a trial lawyer in service to over a thousand clients, Debra Fortenberry is a highly regarded advocate and trusted advisor to businesses, nonprofits, families, and individuals. She attributes her success to skills and practices that expand her capacity to listen deeply during difficult exchanges and communicate in ways that stay true to a path through and beyond conflict. The medical community’s growing understanding that intentional connectedness with the right hemisphere of the brain may support beneficial and ethical conduct, as discussed by Dr. Jill Bolte Taylor in her book Whole Brain Living, informs Debra’s approach to lawyer wellbeing.

Debra offers experiential trainings that steward lawyers and law students into skills and strategies that will support their wellbeing and alignment with their beneficial intentions. Her work with Wellness Matters Consulting P.B.C. contributes to a legal system anchored in meaningful relationship and honorable purpose.

Sandra Thébaud, PhD

Sandra ThébaudOver the past 30 years as a Psychologist, Sandra has discovered that having the life you want starts with embodying the right knowledge and skills. Sandra began her career as a Navy Psychologist and consultant to the Marine Corps’ 1st Special Forces Group. It was during her first year in the Navy that Sandra was tasked with teaching stress management to the medical staff. After doing much research, she presented on stress management and was asked to do so several times afterwards. Realizing how little the medical staff understood stress and its effects on health and happiness, Sandra began facilitating groups for her active-duty patients on stress management as well.

After serving her country, Sandra worked as a Behavioral Medicine Specialist and Hospital Psychologist for Kaiser Permanente while remaining on inactive duty for seven more years. She is a co-creator of the Wellness Matters Consulting programs, author, speaker and experienced consultant on organizational wellness.


Certification

Leading From the Emerging Future

A course of study offered by MITx, an online learning initiative of the Massachusetts Institute of Technology.

To request further information about upcoming trainings or general inquiries, please provide us your contact information below.

Meaningful Relationship
Honorable Purpose