Breathing New Life Into Law

Settle in on a comfortable floor mat, close your eyes, and relax to calming ambient music selected personally for you. Take in the sweet scent of burning palo santo wood as it clears the energy in the room. Breathe deeply. Focus.

This process is how one client described her HypnoBreathwork sessions with Whitney Harvey, Esq. (BS Accountancy ’07, JD ’10), an attorney and entrepreneur who founded The Self Coached Lawyer, a coaching and consulting practice that provides career guidance and support to professionals in the legal field. A certified HypnoBreathwork facilitator, Harvey says she incorporates the experiential therapeutic approach—a combination of breathwork exercises, hypnosis, and visioning—into her coaching plans to help clients “release accumulated emotions, overcome limiting beliefs, and pursue their personal and professional goals.”

In this case, Jennifer Lovato, an executive director at a Phoenix law firm, engaged Harvey to help her navigate new changes and challenges at her workplace. After six months of coaching and a handful of HypnoBreathwork sessions, she decided to make a career move.

“Whitney helped me reframe the discomfort I felt into a growth opportunity,” Lovato explains. “I realized I had fulfilled my time and purpose with that firm. We pivoted our sessions to identify what I wanted and needed professionally, which created the foundation for the next step in my career.”

In March, Lovato began her new role as executive director at a law firm that she says “hits every note” for her in terms of its culture and leadership. “My professional goal has been realized through professional coaching and HypnoBreathwork. I feel passionate about my work and have a purpose, resulting in a sense of accomplishment and fulfillment,” she says.

By the time Harvey enrolled at ASU, she already had her sights set on law school, but she never imagined an entrepreneurial venture in her future. She said her education at the W. P. Carey School of Business not only provided the foundations to earn her Juris Doctorate at ASU’s Sandra Day O’Connor College of Law and successfully practice law for more than 13 years, but it also gave her the skills essential to launch her business in 2022.

“They tell you that to get into law school, you should try to differentiate yourself. There’s a lot of English and political science majors,” Harvey recalls. “I started thinking, ‘How can I set myself apart?’ ” An accounting internship at Arizona Public Service locked the decision for her undergraduate major. “I thought accounting would be a natural fit. It was grueling.”

However, the challenge was well worth it for the honors student. Harvey said the business school’s emphasis on teamwork honed skills she uses every day.

“The business education was invaluable, and ultimately, the work I’m doing right now revolves around teams, leadership development, training, and things of that nature. It benefited me to work with different personalities early on in my journey.”

Two of Harvey’s most memorable courses in business school were marketing, which encouraged her to explore her creativity, and microeconomics, which she took from a professor who made a tough subject fun and relatable.

“I remember my professor always saying, ‘There’s no such thing as free lunch.’ Every time we say something’s free, there’s no such thing. There’s a cost somewhere along the way. That always stuck with me. It helped me think about the cost and expense of things—not necessarily in a monetary exchange, but it can be a societal or personal cost.”

The notion of personal cost resurfaced throughout Harvey’s career as she and her colleagues navigated the demands and fast pace of the legal profession, in which 12-hour days and seven-day work weeks are the norm. Observing—and experiencing for herself—the toll it takes on one’s well-being planted the seed for what would later become a thriving consultancy to promote employee wellness and work-life balance.

When Harvey graduated from law school in 2010, the job market was competitive, and positions were challenging to get, so when she had the opportunity to work in litigation in insurance defense, she enthusiastically accepted.

“I got to be at one of the top firms in litigation in the Phoenix area,” she says. “I got an incredible amount of experience doing depositions and trying cases right at the forefront of my career, which was pretty unusual.”

Harvey later moved to the in-house side at American Family Mutual Insurance, where she gained a wealth of experience at the corporate level. Her other roles included government work with cities and towns, in which she drafted policies and ordinances. Ultimately, her many work experiences helped her realize that she enjoyed a “mixed bag” of courtroom and transactional work rather than a straight diet of litigation.

“We’re fighting all the time, and that wears you down,” Harvey says. “That’s how I knew there’s no longevity for me to purely do litigation for my entire career. I just didn’t have it within me to be so combative daily, and I didn’t want to practice that way.”

For a time, Harvey worked on the plaintiff side of personal injury, which was fulfilling because she could bring compassion to her role. When the COVID-19 pandemic hit, she had just started a position with a new law firm. While working remotely was somewhat isolating, Harvey enjoyed the autonomy. What’s more, the shutdown gave her time and space to reflect on her career and purpose.

“I always wanted to help people, and my legal work was one avenue, but I felt there was more. I wasn’t at the full potential of the work I wanted. I thought, ‘This is the time.’ At this point, I had been in many different environments and realized I wanted to do more around workplace wellness,” she explains. “I felt this call to action. I wanted to do more change management and culture work within legal organizations.”

Harvey is completing a PhD in industrial and organizational psychology at Grand Canyon University. She is running her consultancy, coaching administrators and attorneys in the legal profession on workplace wellness, diversity, equity, and inclusion, and “redefining what success looks like.” She also has her law practice. Becoming an entrepreneur has been an enlightening learning experience, and Harvey has sought the guidance and support of business coaches.

No day looks the same, and Harvey is grateful for the work life she has shaped for herself. She shares her experiences in speaking engagements and in the classroom, where she teaches Legal Aspects of Diversity in the Workplace as a faculty associate at the W. P. Carey School of Business. True to her convictions, she devotes her downtime to relaxing and refueling activities: meditating, attending concerts, and traveling.

Rick Lopez (BS Management ’07, JD ’10), a corporate and securities attorney and faculty associate at ASU, has known Harvey since their first year of law school. She inspired Lopez to maintain perspective and be more intentional about seeking fulfillment in his personal and professional pursuits.

“Whitney’s friends and colleagues admire her because she prioritizes kindness and positivity,” he says. “She is universally respected because she’s an authentic blend of intelligence and approachability. In a world that prompts us to craft a personal brand, Whitney’s exceptional because she’s determined to be her genuine self.”