Healing Lawyer Burnout Through Boundaries and Self-Advocacy

Lora Cheadle is a former insurance defense attorney who traded burnout for a career built on wellness, boundaries, and helping high achievers navigate betrayal in both personal and professional life. In this episode, she explains why many lawyers mislabel their exhaustion as burnout when it is actually the rupture of unmet expectations, unmanaged stress, and years of self-neglect. Lora shares how fitness, neuroplasticity, and coaching transformed her life and fuel the work she does today.

Lawyer Side Hustles

Long before she transitioned out of traditional practice, Lora taught step aerobics as a creative outlet and source of joy. That passion evolved into a broader commitment to wellness, somatic health, and stress reduction. As she explored posture, breathing, and body-based healing, she recognised how deeply physical habits affect emotional and cognitive performance. This curiosity led her to study nutrition and later become a clinical hypnotherapist so she could support the neuroplasticity work her clients needed.

“Fitness was my respite. People need to somatically process stress. Good posture makes a difference in the way we can breathe and in our brain functioning,” Lora Cheadle expresses in Episode 224 of You Are a Lawyer.

She eventually built Life Choreography Coaching and Advocacy, a business inspired by the idea that life, like dance, requires both choreography and improvisation. Lora also wrote It’s Not Burnout, It’s Betrayal, a book explaining how professionals can use her Fuel Up framework to identify ruptured expectations, process emotional overwhelm, and rebuild their sense of identity after chronic stress.

This episode is produced by Skip the Boring Stuff, a podcast strategy company for business owners and creatives.