Life & Career Coaching for Lawyers
Life & Career Coaching for Lawyers
At some point in your career, you may find yourself wondering if it is time for a career change. Many of my clients grapple with the notion of leaving their current career path in favor of another. When evaluating whether to make a career change, there is only one question to consider.
In a profession where the only feedback you typically get is negative feedback, how do you keep those experiences from making you paranoid?
In today’s hectic world and in our chaotic practices, it can be easy to get swept up in the action of it all. When we lose ourselves to the momentum of our lives, we often overlook the most important question we need to focus our energies: what do you want?
By nature (or creation) most attorneys are notoriously terrible at asking for help. We are conditioned to do it all on our own and figure it out and so far, it has worked out well for ourselves. In the practice of law, however, this reluctance can not only be detriment to ourselves but also our clients.
As my clients learn to take more ownership over their feelings and their actions, one of the challenges they face is how to address negative experiences. Their immediate inclination is to shift to a new thoughts to try and feel better about the situation. But reality is that sometimes things will happen in our lives that we don’t want to feel good about. So what do we do?
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.
One of the primary reasons that my clients struggle with the practice of law is that they often feel like their life is out of control. We want to believe that we don’t have any control. We want to believe that work overload just happens to us and we have no role to play in it.
But that is only true if you decide to make it true.
No matter what profession you are in, there will be times in your career where you will wonder if it’s time for a change. One of the most common phrases I hear in coaching is:
How do you know when…