Life & Career Coaching for Lawyers
Life & Career Coaching for Lawyers
These days, many of my clients are changing jobs, changing careers, experiencing downsizing, illness, death, and loss. What I have been blessed to witness is that when my clients are able to change the way they think about those experiences, it dramatically alters their course ahead and their next successes.
When it comes to practicing law, our minds and our internal conversations will be our greatest assets. It won’t be the accolades and background that make or break your practice. It all comes down to your relationship with yourself and the internal discussions no one hears but you. Given this, it seems that the greatest tool we must understand and hone is that magical mind of ours. Specifically, why is it that our mind sometimes goes rogue and makes it seemingly impossible to move forward?
When you are stuck in the grind and your passion project becomes a chore, how do you know when it’s time to course correct or stay the course?
Many of my clients describe themselves as perfectionists. They don’t want to do something unless and until it can be done properly. While that sentiment sounds noble and worthy, its impact on our lives is much more nefarious.
Once we understand the correlation between our thoughts and how those thoughts are creating our present reality, the first thing my clients want to do as professional perfectionists is FIX it. Once we understand the equation, we want to clean it up and get back to work.
The problem is that our brain is a formidable adversary and, no matter how much coaching we do, will we ever be able to build you a brain that only thinks, productive, worthy thoughts. So how do we move forward?
There are always those projects that we dread doing. We put them off and go out of our way to avoid doing them or ever thinking about them. I recently worked with a client who was tap dancing around her own version of a dreaded project and wanted to share the steps we worked through to de-escalate the dread.
Our beliefs about ourselves and our abilities bubble below the surface in everything that we do.
I can support you to identify your negative thinking patterns and shift to some prettier thinking but if the beliefs you have about yourself are toxic, none of our work will stick.
Many of my clients struggle with being wrong because of what they make that mean about themselves. If they are wrong, it must mean they are not good enough, they aren’t cut out to be lawyers. But what if defensiveness had so much more to teach us?
I rarely encounter a client that isn’t struggling in some manner to connect with her purpose. After so many years of working toward this goal of becoming a lawyer, that life isn’t often everything that we thought it would be. We are left looking for something more.
So how do we find our purpose?
The most common thing I see among associate attorneys is the fear of making mistakes.
As attorneys, we can become so paranoid about making a mistake that we put a tremendous amount of pressure on ourselves. Our minds are filled with nonstop nasty chatter that sometimes sends us down a mistake spiral.
How to dig out.