Life & Career Coaching for Lawyers
Life & Career Coaching for Lawyers
All things are yin and yang and there are always going to be things that we simply don’t want to do. It is during those moments when we can rise up as fully grown humans and accept that even when there are things we don’t want to do, we must simply accept that part of life and proceed anyway.
As lawyers we often sign up for chaos. Many of us thrive in it. But here’s the thing about chaos: chaos, like all parts of life, provides us an opportunity to learn and evolve and do the chaos better next time. Unfortunately, many of us just want to enjoy the end of the chaos and be thankful we survived. We regroup and brace for the next round. But in that regrouping there is also an opportunity to debrief and make the next round of chaos much less painful.
As women and as attorneys we are really good at following instructions. We received a guidebook on how to become a successful attorney and we executed all of the steps. The LSAT, law school, the bar exam, the clerkships, the summer associate programs, the first big job. The next ingredient in this perceived recipe for success is a big one: to make partner or not to make partner?
As a coach and practicing attorney, I am no stranger to being annoyed by other humans. Recently, I found myself dreading a particular meeting that was planted right in the middle of my afternoon. Through a series of events, I learned to appreciate small irritations and approach them in a way that not only gave me peace but freedom and a greater understanding of myself.
Recently, I have been inundated with clients overwhelmed with the idea that they are “running out of time” for one thing or another. While I fully understand the importance of setting goals and having something to work for, what does it mean when we say that we are running out of time? Does that fear drive us to soar even higher or are the results more nefarious?
In a world where everyone is so connected and the lines between our home and our professional lives have become so blurred, the need to set boundaries and start paying attention to our automatic impulses to constantly check our email and be available are critically important.
One of the most common recurring themes I encounter when working with new clients is the question: is it me or is it the job? Today I want to explore a simple exploration you can undertake to get to the bottom of this critical and terrifying question.
When is time to change course and abandon ship? How do you know if you should stay and work it out or just wipe the slate clean and start again?
Lately, I have been thinking a lot about this notion of cutting people out of our lives. It’s not difficult to find books and self-help gurus who champion this notion of decisively cutting people out of your life–removing chronically negative and toxic people from your orbit. I’ve been struggling to reconcile this idea with my belief in compassion. Where is the line between self-protection and compassion in our relationships?
People pleasing tendencies. We’ve all got them. It may seem like simple Midwest Nice but at it’s core, people-pleasing is rooted in deception. When we put the needs and feelings of others before our own, we relegate our truth. We relegate our voices and we implicitly acknowledge that we are less important that those we are desperately trying to please.