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What if time isn’t actually your problem? In this episode, John Kormanik explains why many high performers feel overwhelmed despite having the same 168 hours as everyone else. He shares how focusing on energy instead of time can unlock better decision-making, clearer thinking, and more meaningful progress.
John introduces the difference between catabolic energy, which drains us during stress, and anabolic energy, which helps us think strategically and respond intentionally. He also discusses how attitude and beliefs shape performance more than most people realize.
The conversation also explores biological energy patterns, including whether you are a morning or evening person, and how aligning your schedule with your natural rhythms can improve productivity and reduce frustration.
Creators and Guests
Host
Tyson Mutrux
Tyson is the founder of Mutrux Firm Injury Lawyers and the co-founder of Maximum Lawyer.
What is Maximum Lawyer?
Maximum Lawyer is the podcast for law firm owners who want to scale with intention and build a business that works for their life.
Hosted by Tyson Mutrux, each weekly episode features candid conversations with law firm owners, business experts, and industry leaders sharing real strategies and lessons learned in the trenches.
If you're ready to grow your firm with less stress and more support, this is your next must listen. Subscribe today.
John Kormanik 00:00:00 Hi, everybody. You are my people. The reason I say that is because when I practice law, I would go to class, of course, and I would go with my law partners and my law partners would bail, like, not show up the second day or not show up after the second day's lunch, things like that. And they knew that I would stay until the bitter end. I would never, ever leave. So you are my people. You know, I was talking with Tyson yesterday and he was like, oh, dude, the afternoon. I know it's really hard. I'm, you know, I'm kind of sorry. You know, we have these slots. He blamed Becca and I said, no, no, no, no, you don't understand. It's a gift to be able to be with you all after the break in the afternoon of the second day of this fantastic conference. The only conference I've ever been to. Where the second speaker of the conference started off talking about failure.
John Kormanik 00:01:09 What a fantastic thing to do because we all fail. Every day I fail. Every day. I get back up and I move forward, but I fail. So practice law for 25 years. Owned and led a successful law firm for 16. Importantly, I didn't leave because I was burnt out or stressed out. I left because I wanted to have a greater impact in the world, and that's what I'm doing now. I coach elite attorneys all over the planet. So let's talk about mastering your energy. Seven out of ten clients who call me tell me that they have a problem with time. Raise your hand if you think you have a problem with time. Oh my goodness, the lights are bright, but I see a bunch of hands. Stop blaming time. It's not the problem. Time just isn't the problem. And time is the excuse. Time. Blaming time is a powerless place to be. Busy all day and nothing meaningful done. Sometimes that's me. Sometimes that's you. A client, I'll call him.
John Kormanik 00:02:28 Ben called me up and he said, John, you know, I really want to work with you. And my onboarding process is quite long. I am deeply committed to ensuring that when I work with someone, it is the right fit. And he said, you know, I have a problem with time. And I'm like, Ben, time is not your problem. Yeah. I don't believe you, John. Time is my problem. I said, okay, Ben, you have 168 hours in a week. What are you doing with your 168 hours? Well, this that is that. So. Okay. Ben and I wound up working together, and he came to understand that time indeed wasn't his problem. His issue was energy. And before your eyes glaze over and you think I'm talking about, you know, the the vibration and the universe will give you things. Talking about that a little bit, but not a lot. Energy is nothing in this context is nothing but your attitudes, perceptions and beliefs.
John Kormanik 00:03:37 It is how you view the thing. On the one hand, on the other hand, it is your biology. So there's two types of energy that we're going to talk about here today. The problem with time is that it can't be managed okay. There's a multibillion dollar industry around time management. And I'm in a room full of lawyers who know that words matter. Our words matter. Heck, it matters where we put a semicolon or a comma when we're drafting things. And we have this whole multibillion dollar industry about time management and time can't be managed. That is not a thing. There's no pause button on the clock of life. There's no pause button on your day. Time is agnostic to your goals and your dreams and your desires. It's not that it's against you. It doesn't give a shit. Look, three more seconds pass by on my clock. Time doesn't care where I am in my presentation. It just doesn't care. At the end of life, people often talk about I wish I had more time.
John Kormanik 00:04:58 You don't get to decide that. That's not a thing. So time isn't the problem. Time can't be managed. Time is exhausted. So let's talk about energy. There are two types of energy that I want to talk about with you today. One is attitudinal and one is biological. I'm going to pull my phone out because I want to get this right. This is really important. Tillie, his first wife, died at BergenBelsen concentration camp. Gabriel? His father died in the ghetto of Czechoslovakia. Elsa, his mother and Walter, his brother, were both murdered in Auschwitz. Does anyone know who I'm talking about? No. That's a good guess, though. Viktor Frankl, the psychiatrist Viktor Frankl. One member of his family survived, and she had fled to Austria before the Nazis came. So that guy with that loss and. Oh. Oh, and by the way, he's a concentration camp survivor as well. That guy with that loss, everything can be taken from a man or woman or person.
John Kormanik 00:06:34 But one thing, the last of the human freedoms to choose one's attitude in any given circumstance, to choose one's own way. When we talk about attitudinal energy, that is exactly what we're talking about. It's a gift. So. This is a slide that breaks all the rules. It's two text heavy. The text is too small. You can't read it from the back, I get it. If you understand, if you take a nugget with you today, and I hope you take this, a nugget from my talk with you is that there are two types of energy. There are catabolic energy and there's anabolic energy. Catabolic energy is when you're under stress. Understand that when you're under stress there are biological things that are going on in your body. Your prefrontal cortex disengages. Catabolic catabolic hormones are released. You are in fight or flight and your biology hasn't evolved. And internally your biology believes that you are going to die. The brief is due at 5:00. I'm going to die. I have to talk to this client about my rates.
John Kormanik 00:08:01 I'm going to die, right? Your biology hasn't evolved. It truly does think that you're going to be eaten by a tiger. That's how you're reacting. When you have catabolic energy, your executive functions go out the window and you are under stress. Anabolic energy is strategic energy. It's the 30. The ability to have the 30 zero zero zero foot view, to stand back, to step back, to think logically, to to be strategic, to take your time. Those are the two types generally of anabolic and catabolic energy. Just remember catabolic drains and anabolic builds. That's it. Think of a time when you. Were under stress and reacted instead of responded. You know like My daughter is going to be. I know this is hard to believe, but my daughter is going to be 32 years old. in two weeks. Actually, she's a fantastic human being. I wish that I was the person that she is at 32. She's wonderful. but I, I can remember, right? I was in a, I was frequently in a catabolic space when she was growing up, both because of the stress of the law firm and just because that's kind of that's how I was raised, right? That's how we did things.
John Kormanik 00:09:37 But now I'm in a much more anabolic space with her, and our relationship is all that much better. If you're at work or at home, consider where you are on the scale, catabolic or anabolic. This really came home for me when one winter day. Winter's day. It was in February of 2009, actually at the time, I was training for an Ironman District triathlon 2.4 mile swim, 112 mile bike, 26.2 mile run, all on your own, all within 17 hours. If you finish in 17 hours and one second you did not finish. It doesn't count. I was out, it was dark. It was just. I live in Boise, Idaho. It was just on the cusp of rain and snow. It was absolutely, positively miserable. The conditions were terrible and I was griping in my head. I said, oh, this is terrible. I'm getting wet and this is no fun. And I got home and I thought to myself, you know, why would you think that way? You have the opportunity to do this.
John Kormanik 00:10:54 You're making a choice. You're choosing to do the thing that you're doing and you're complaining about it. If you're going to complain, stop. If you're not going to stop, then change how you think about it. Think about it more from an anabolic space. This is a gift that I'm able to move my body in, the way that I'm able to move my body, that I have the freedom to be able to get up in the morning and do my thing before I go and do the really hard work of representing people who are accused of murder or have been convicted in our on death row. That's the that's the work that I did as a lawyer. So it changed for me in February of 2009. And it can change for you as long as you understand what's going on. So now I'm going to R&D from Daniel Pink. I have a client in the MidAtlantic states, and he explained to me that R&D is rip off and duplicate. John. That's all it is. Rip off and duplicate.
John Kormanik 00:11:59 So with with all credit to Dan Pink, who's a fantastic guy. let's talk about your biological energy. Are you a lark? Are you an owl or are you a third bird? Those are dans categories. Are you a morning person or are you an evening person, or are you something in the middle? I am a an extreme lark. I am up at 430 in the morning without an alarm, and my day begins. And the first two hours of the day are mine and mine alone. Nobody gets to intrude except my dog, Olive. She'll stick her nose on my lap as I'm journaling in the morning. So I'm a lark. There are many of you who are owls, right? Think when I think owl. I think rock and roller. Those folks don't go to bed until well after I do. I go to bed at 9:00. Y'all haven't seen me out here. You saw me running away if you saw me. What was that Wednesday night at the dinner? Like I have got to go because it is my bedtime.
John Kormanik 00:13:13 that's. That's me. Owls or late night people? If you want a quick and handy way to figure out who you are and the midpoint of your sleep on a day when no alarm is set and you have no obligations in the morning. So I recommend doing it about halfway through a vacation. Y'all know what a vacation is, right? You take vacations? halfway through a vacation, just figure out what the midpoint is. The midpoint of your sleep is before 3 a.m.. You are a lark. If it's after 5:30 a.m., you are an owl. If it's somewhere in the middle, you're a third bird, John. So what? Well. Larks are. They have a higher executive function in the morning. They can do deep intellectual work in the morning. Owls are worthless in the morning for executive work. They don't do it very well. Right? Owls are more executive functioning later in the day. So look at your calendar. Are you doing the work that you ought to be doing during the time of day? That you ought to be doing it? Or are you fighting your biology? If you're fighting your biology, you're going to lose.
John Kormanik 00:14:48 You're going to lose. Can you change the type of your chronotype? You can. Does it take a lot of work? It does. Can you do it in a week? You cannot. Right. So think about when you do your best work. The other gift that Tyson gave me, and I was talking to the guys in the back about this is, well, it's the afternoon. So my prefrontal cortex is kind of offline. There's not a whole lot of executive functioning going on. I am in a creative space in the afternoons. That's when I do my creative work. It's when I it's most of my book, which is called Break the Law, was written in the afternoon because in the morning I would get in my own way and I would stop and I would question and I would be selfcritical. In the afternoons. I just let it flow. So when you're looking at your calendar and you're structuring your days, think about, are you a lark or are you an owl or are you a third bird? Just think about it.
John Kormanik 00:16:01 You may as well leverage your biology to be the best you can be instead of fighting against it. So stop trying to manage your time. You can't. There's no pause button on the clock. Look, I'm down to three minutes and 44 seconds. There's just no pause button. Right. And I'm here, I believe, and I'm here to share with you that blaming time for things is disempowering. It takes your autonomy away. And you are powerful people. Each and every one of you does hard things. I mean, you went to law school, you graduated from law school, and you made the decision to be entrepreneurs and lawyers. Maybe it wasn't a purposeful decision, right? Maybe it was thrust on you. you know, you got canned from work and you didn't feel like going out and working for somebody else, or you're like me. And look, I can never work for anybody else. I I've been there, done that. I did it with the attorney general's office. I did it as a partner in a law firm of ten other ten other partners.
John Kormanik 00:17:28 And you couldn't decide on what to have for lunch. And it was just infuriating. But you you made those decisions and you represent clients at a really high level. You give a darn about your the people that you employ in the communities that you live in. You're not passive folks. So don't. Use time as a crutch. It's not it. It's your energy. How are you viewing the situation? It's the one thing that Victor Frankel tells us no one could ever take away from you. So look at it a little bit differently. So there's catabolic energy, which is fight, flight or freeze. Don't make important decisions when you're in that space. You have tunnel vision. You see the option in front of you as the only option. And 82% of the 82.7% of the time that that sounds like a real stat, doesn't it? It's not. I just made it up, but most of the time you will not make the best long term decision when you're under stress. So catabolic energy anabolic energy strategic be in that strategic space as much as you possibly can be.
John Kormanik 00:18:58 And it all depends on the story that you tell yourself. All of it. That catabolic anabolic. It's just the story in your head. It's nothing more than that. Your biologic energy, your chronotype. Lean into it. Think about it. Structure your days around it. Play with it. It's not going to be something that's set in stone, but it is something that you can control this. If you have questions. Email me. You know, I, I had a law firm, so of course my coaching business is named after me. Very original. Right. John McCormick. That's my middle initial. That's what my you know, my mother, when I was late for dinner, would say John, Robert. And then there was a whole bunch of not suitable for work stuff that she said. so I've always used my middle initial. Go to my website, look me up if you have questions. Let's have a conversation. I am thrilled to have been here. I am thrilled to have spoken at this time of day, and I am thrilled to be here for the next 17 speakers that are up next to bring us home.
John Kormanik 00:20:12 Thank you all very much.