When our steps forward are harder than they should be and we find ourselves just forcing every action, we have to ask ourselves what is going on behind the scenes? Is there an opportunity to make peace and release some dead weight?
Fear
When you make the decision to head to law school the long pursuit lays itself out before you. So many steps become very clear. You take the LSAT, research law schools, prepare applications, go through the motions of law school, apply to write for journals, do on campus interviewing, get a good summer associate position, and on and on it goes. Then you land the job and 2 years into it, you come up for air and wonder what you are supposed to do next.
Excuses
Whether we admit it or not, we all make excuses from time to time. Lately, I have been seeing so many more excuses founded in the pandemic. It’s easy to blame the pandemic for our weight gain, bad habits, and not taking action. It’s easy to buy into these statements and carry them with us as our justifications for not taking action. But the pandemic is not to blame for your inaction. None of your excuses are factual. They are simply opinions; opinions that are keeping you from living the life you really want.
Are They Freezing You Out?
When it comes to employee relations, law firms are among some of the worst employers. HR is typically impotent in addressing issues amongst attorneys so the rules of the game are largely left to the players. In lieu of actual feedback, it seems that most firms opt for obstinate silence and the good ‘ol freeze out in lieu of actually providing constructive feedback. How to deal?
Dreaded Projects
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.
Managing Overwhelm
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.
The Mistake Spiral
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.
Sunday Mourning Blues
Many of my clients lose the majority of their Sundays to that Monday morning dread. “Sunday mourning.”
What can we learn from those Sunday emotions?
What Other People Think About You
How do you describe your practice to others? When you are at a mixer and someone asks what you do, is there a momentary hesitation about promoting your skills? Why is that?
Your Legal Career: Having Your Own Back
When trying to make a big decision, so many of my clients get stuck in the quagmire of indulgent emotions.
Indulgent emotions are those emotions that seem really important. They feel like we should pay attention to them. They suck us into their black hole and keep us from moving forward.
They are indulgent because we linger and stay with those emotions for far too long; we allow those emotions to take over and before we know it, we have been out of the game for weeks. We’ve been “busy” worrying.