“It teaches you things that sometimes people never quite learn in real life, and it teaches you them in a way where you almost don’t even notice that you’re learning. For example, how to be a good colleague, how to be a good team member. A good team player is someone who is just as focused on helping you be better as they are on themselves being better,” she posited.

Speaking recently on The Lawyers Weekly Show, Ms Dodd – now working as a partner at Gilbert + Tobin, who also serves as the director for the Centre for Sport and Human Rights, chair of Common Goal and a committee member for FIFA – said there is much that lawyers can learn from the approach of athletes, especially the inherent lessons from seeking self-improvement and critiques of one’s performance.

“Top athletes crave criticism. Most top footballers will come off [the field] and say, ‘I’m really glad I executed XYZ, I worked hard on that, but there are a couple of things I got wrong’, and they’re the ones that you go to sleep thinking about and working on how to solve for the next game. It’s this constant improvement,” she noted.

“That’s a theme in organisations as well. Organisations are far from perfect. But if the people in them are committed to their ongoing improvement, then those organisations become very strong and resilient. They don’t fall apart, beat themselves up and turn into a civil war like a battlefield just because something’s gone wrong because people know how to respond to those issues and setback.”

When asked how lawyers can balance the need to seek constructive criticism against predispositions towards pessimism in the workplace, Ms Dodd pointed both to athletic capacity and biology.

“Sport is the unending pursuit of excellence”, she explained, and competition – like the adversarial nature of legal practice offers opportunities to measure one’s self against the best in chosen fields. In each client matter, or in every sporting game, the landscape changes, and weaknesses identified one week may be strengths in another,” she said.

“You’re constantly looking to find solutions to those things. It’s a little bit like your skin. You have to have this constant re-growth in order to remain healthy. If you don’t grow new cells and let the old ones peel off, then your skin ...well, you’re going to die. To retain that healthy function, you need to have this constant process of renewal.

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“If criticism is healthy, then it’s often self-reflection, and if it’s made to other people, it’s made in a way that is about finding solutions to it rather than punishing you for it or telling you that you are hopeless. Such constructive conversations are very healthy in a team environment.”

To listen to the full conversation with Moya Dodd, click below: