Talks, masterclasses and short sessions
for firms, forums and functions
An hour or two that people talk about afterwards.
Firms ask us for an hour at a quarterly meeting, a morning at a women’s forum, a session at the year-end function, or a start-of-year morning on direction. Maryke Swarts delivers it; Sonja Cilliers adapts it for the room. It is a training session with the science in it and a tool to take away, pitched so that a partner, a candidate attorney and the office manager all get something they can use on Monday. Where it fits the occasion, every attendee leaves with a short printed booklet written for that audience.
In legal practice, responding immediately means I am perceived as competent. Availability means value.
Maryke Swarts, PMRI
Themes we are asked for
Each one is a session in its own right. Tell us the occasion and the room, and we will suggest which fits.
Finding me in the noise
For women’s forums and women’s month events. Why a capable mind that carries a practice and a household feels full, what working memory can actually hold, how to clear it, and the question worth taking home: who do I want to become?
Burnout and the year-end stretch
For the last quarter, when everyone is tired and the deadlines are not. What burnout is in the brain, how to tell which stage you are at, and how to get to December with your concentration and your temper intact. Also available as a recorded two-hour reset with a 96-page workbook for individuals and teams.
Productivity and focus in an interrupt-driven office
Why an interruption costs far more than the minutes it takes, what it does to drafting quality by four in the afternoon, and how to protect real thinking time without becoming unavailable.
Direction for the year ahead
A start-of-year morning on goal setting that survives a legal diary: why plans collapse under other people’s urgency, and a one-page plan the brain can hold.
Decisions under pressure
How the mind keeps time across a day, why late decisions are drawn from faster and older circuitry, and the four-step protocol for the moment before a decision that matters.
Why manage energy, not just time
For year-end functions and start-of-year mornings, and the session people quote back to us most. Time is fixed and energy is not: why the prefrontal cortex runs on fuel, why the afternoon draft is weaker than the morning one, why energy is contagious in a team, and the four kinds of energy a legal professional can actually manage. Everyone leaves with their own energy map for the week.
Your brain is not broken
The inspirational session for a tired room at the end of a hard year. What the profession does to a mind that spends years anticipating risk, why the tiredness, the short temper and the 3 am wakefulness are the brain doing exactly what it was trained to do, and what the science says about getting it back. People tell us this is the first time they have felt understood at work.
Motivation when the work never ends
For AGMs and partner meetings. Where motivation actually comes from in the brain, why it runs out in a profession with no finish line, why money and pressure stop working as motivators after the first few years, and the three things that keep people in practice and performing for decades. Practical, and warmer than it sounds.
Nobody performs well exhausted
For any room that treats sleep as optional. What chronic sleep restriction does to concentration, memory and decision quality in the functions legal work depends on, why the profession cannot self-assess its own tiredness, and the small, unglamorous changes that give a practitioner back an hour of useful thinking a day.
Confidence and the imposter in the room
For candidate attorneys, young professionals and women in law, and popular with senior people who admit to it afterwards. Why capable people in law feel like frauds, what the brain is doing when it discounts your own competence, and how to build confidence that is based on evidence rather than mood. Includes the eight beliefs that decide how a legal career feels from the inside.
Finding your flow
For the start of the year or a firm away day. Peak performance has its own rhythm: what flow is in the brain, why legal work interrupts it constantly, when in the day each person is most capable of deep work, and how to protect two hours of it in a week that does not want to give you any.
Leading people in a firm
Why strong practitioners struggle when they are put in charge of people, and the few habits that make the difference: delegation that develops, feedback without fallout, steadiness under load.
Working across difference
For firms working on inclusion: what the brain does with unfamiliarity and status, why good intentions do not change behaviour on their own, and the practices that do.
Something else on your mind? Every theme on this site can be delivered as a session. Ask.
A quarterly or annual general meeting. A partners’ or practice-group forum. A women’s forum, a candidate attorneys’ induction, a professional body’s regional event. A year-end function that should leave people with something more than a hangover. The first morning back in January.
What it costs
A session of one to two hours for a room of any size is quoted on the occasion, and the fee includes preparation written for your event and the tools we leave behind. Travel and accommodation outside Gauteng are added at cost. A half day or a morning masterclass is quoted on the format. If the session leads to something more, time at the firm and the continuing work are described on the training for firms and leadership pages.
Who delivers it
Maryke Swarts, Neuro-Coach · Behavioural Specialist · Co-Founder, presents. Sonja Cilliers, Advocate of the High Court of South Africa in legal practice since 1999, writes each session for the room it is going into, so the examples are legal examples and the tools survive contact with a real week.
Book a session
Tell us the occasion, the date, roughly how many people and what you would like them to leave with. We reply within one business day with a suggested theme and a quotation; acceptance by return email reserves the date.