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Evansville Bar Association's President's Message:

Seek Your Challenge

April 28, 2011  |  By Krista B. Lockyear

Life can be challenging on a daily basis. Rainy Mondays, flood water rising as quickly as gasoline prices, never recovering economy, overseas crises engaging our troops, behavioral squabbles of children, aging parents. Don’t forget the relentless practice of law involving billable hour quotas, filing deadlines, argumentative opposing counsel, unsympathetic public servants and disgruntled clients. If I let myself dwell on these matters, I find that the only thing I wish for is a day with no meetings or deadlines where I can quietly work in my office or better yet, at home on the couch.

Krista B. Lockyear        812-422-9444       kbl@rfpj.com

But I, like most lawyers, tend to exhibit that type A personality, defined by pop culture (as reported by Wikipedia) as “ambitious, aggressive, business-like, controlling, highly competitive, impatient, preoccupied with his or her status, time-conscious, and tightly-wound. People with Type A personalities are often high-achieving "workaholics" who multi-task, push themselves with deadlines, and hate both delays and ambivalence.” For type A’s, the daily challenges affect our performance, but don’t stop us from driving forward. The daily challenges are nuisances, but we get by, without suffering much harm or gaining much strength.

But what about challenges beyond what we ordinarily face? Those occurrences that cause us to dig deeper, commit more, and push ourselves past our comfort levels to achieve a goal. Like athletes who only become stronger through pushing their training, these are the challenges we need to seek, because through these challenges we grow. A Chinese Proverb proclaims “The gem cannot be polished without friction, nor man perfected without trials.”

I don’t believe it is in human nature or ability to operate on a continuous circuit of challenges. Rather, when we are confronted with a possible challenge, we study it, assess our ability to handle it, and then decide whether or not to accept it. If we do rise to the challenge, we work toward the goal to the best of our ability, then rest before seeking the next. But we should not rest too long -- rest is not much fun and there’s too much out there to tackle.

So, think about the stage of challenge in your life. Are you ready to take on a new one? It could be a pro-bono case that will force you to work harder, or require that you learn new law. It could be tackling a tough legal challenge facing a client with much to lose. It could be a community project, not for profit board, or other common good that needs volunteers to tackle a project larger than normal. Whatever it may be - write a book, write a letter to the editor, start a new business, form a new partnership - seek your challenge.

Our EBA has, collectively, risen to such a challenge to restore the Old Superior Courtroom and to create the Vanderburgh County Legal History Center . Now, we may rest a while, but I can’t wait to see what is next.

This article was originally published in the May 2011 issue of the Evansville Bar Association’s monthly newsletter The Summation. Krista B. Lockyear is president of the EBA and a partner at Rudolph, Fine, Porter & Johnson, LLP.