First, expect the worst. Okay, that sounds terrible but stay with me here…think about whatever it is you fear will happen at your next family gathering–that aunt will ask you for the 10,000th time, why you can’t find a husband, your cousin will ask you a million questions about his DUI even though you have told him you are a tax attorney, your mom will gently suggest that you skip that second helping of bread pudding (we all know what that means), or your brother will peacock around the house spouting off about how he is raking in the dough. All of those things that make your skin crawl; all those things that make you say “If they do this one more time, I’m going to lose my freaking mind…” Assume they will all happen. Why?

Because that is who these people are and people will rarely morph into the people you want them to be.

They have the absolute right to be whomever they want to be and when we show up hoping they will be different, we set ourselves up for a huge disappointment and drama. Instead, we just expect them to show up as they are, doing all the little things that they always do that drive us bananas.

Second, think about all the ways that those people want YOU to be different. Perhaps your grandmother wants you and your partner to get married, maybe your mom wants you to stop working and start breeding, your dad wishes you would stop getting tattoos, or your brother wishes you would be friendlier to his wife (whom you dislike). All of the humans in your life have ideas about how they want you to change. You are not exempt from this little game. Now, think about how much it bothers you when you feel those people judging you for all those things. Think about how much you would love it if these people would just let you be who you are and love you regardless, without all the judgment.

Third, decide to be the love and compassion that you want to receive. You can have a loving and accepting relationship with all of the humans that drive you crazy. You just have to decide to live in that space instead of playing the game. When your mom tells you to skip that second helping of bread pudding, you can choose to believe She is worried about my health and she thinks I eat like this all the time. She thinks I won’t find a partner if I’m overweight.

We can theorize and maybe even empathize with why these people are doing these things.

When she was my age, finding a husband was of prime importance and all women had to offer was their looks and their pedigree. She doesn’t understand how things work for women like me and that’s okay. We can accept that people don’t understand you and allow that to be okay–they might not understand your work, your values, your relationships to your body, your interest in tattoos or people of the same sex and that is okay. You don’t understand their confusion about all those things and that is also okay.

This holiday, what would it be like if we all just committed to showing up as we are and allowing others to do the same, warts and all?! We are all judging and, at times, confused by the lives of the people we love and there is nothing wrong with that. In fact, it could be what brings us all together–just a bunch of humans trying to figure things out and navigate their own paths while observing others on divergent journeys.

Cheers, my friends, I am thankful for all of you!

Photo by RODNAE Productions from Pexels

We’ve come a long way, baby, so why is it that we often struggle recognizing our own value?

It’s easy to overlook your value in the legal world – it’s like being in junior high and everyone seems to be smarter, prettier, wealthier, and just generally BETTER than you.

So many of your colleagues will be well-traveled, highly educated at the best schools and private universities, they’re wealthy, well-dressed, well-spoken and have loads more experience than you do. When you spend your day thinking about your colleagues that way and admiring their accomplishments, eventually those “observations” of others turn inward to self-judgment. 

When we find ourselves feeling less than and comparing ourselves to those around us we must stop and recalibrate lest we run ourselves into a nervous breakdown.

Re-calibrating means, sorting our the facts from our nasty little thoughts. Are they really better educated than you? All law schools have those at the top and those at the bottom. Just because someone went to a “better” law school than you, it doesn’t necessarily follow that they are smarter or better than you.

Those are just stories you are telling yourself in your head.

Being a great attorney is so much more than the fancy degree. We all know lawyers from the greatest law schools in the nation who were terrible with people, get lost in the details, or were terrible public speakers. We all have our assets — don’t overvalue the degree and ignore the rest.

Of course they will have more experience than you!

Aside from your cohort group, nearly everyone else at the firm will have more experience than you. The secretaries and paralegals will know more about practicing law than you. Do not turn this simple fact into something negative. Do not go down the spiral of shoulds — I should have gotten a better internship last summer, I should have taken the corporate tax class, I should have done moot court, blah, blah, blah, get over it.

These are all ways to deflect what is really going on — you are thinking that they are better than you and you are jealous of their experiences. That’s it. Nothing magical here.

Very human nature-y of you.

Recognize those thoughts and emotions and instead consider how fortunate you are to be surrounded by their experience and knowledge so that you can learn from the best. You are on the same team. Do not forget that.

Need support deciphering the lies you are telling yourself? Sign up for a FREE mini-session. Get the mess out of your head and get back to work!

And then my favorite little cherry on top,

So FREAKING what?

So what?! So what if they are better dressed and look the part more than you do in your discount store suit and knockoff purse? Who cares? Why do you care?

Force yourself to ask why these little differences matter. What are you making it mean?

Then force yourself to really look at the positive aspects of your life. If you are going to beat yourself up, at least give equal air time to an examination of your positive attributes.

You did graduate law school, after all. Did you even stop to consider how that might be someone else’s dream?

And you are living it.

Don’t take someone else’s dream for granted.

As I’ve said, there is no right way to “do” life; neither one of you are doing it wrong.

The problem is simply that you are focusing on what you perceive to be the negative aspects of where you are and how you are experiencing life and you aren’t giving yourself space to examine why your approach to life is perfect for you.

Give yourself room to acknowledge and recognize that you are doing it right FOR YOURSELF. No one else. And they are doing it right for themselves. Period.

Everything else is just useless noise. 

The reason it is so essential to ask yourself “so what” about all these nasty little comparisons you have crafted is because it forces you to really examine why you are subscribing to those thoughts. It forces you to ask — are those criticisms or observations serving you?

Sure, you might believe they are true and some of them might be based in facts (her purse IS a designer purse and yours is from Target) but how is that observation serving you? What are you gaining from carrying around that thought. What type of other lovely thoughts emerge from that one? My guess is those self-criticisms are simply spawning more loveliness in your head.

Why would you ever choose to start that chain reaction?

If it is not serving you, let it go. Even if it’s factual, who cares? Why bother dwelling on it? It’s making you feel terrible and it’s not getting you anywhere.

Release it and move on.

There is so much to learn from your legal practice and so many ways to grow. Do not sidestep that growth by treating yourself as “different” from your colleagues. Embrace your unique value, take an inventory of your accomplishments, and do not get caught up in the comparison game.

Use that energy to better your career rather than belittle it.

We cannot control the circumstances in this world.

Then we have our thoughts about those circumstances. Those thoughts are completely within our realm of control.

I can’t control COVID and how other humans respond to COVID, but I can choose how I think about it. Those thoughts will generate feelings that will fuel my actions or inactions. Those actions/inactions become a circumstance for both myself and others and the cycle continues.

Why does this matter?

When we are in an argument with another human, it’s usually a tug-of-war over whose thought about a circumstance is more “true.” 

The problem is that thoughts are not universally true or not true. They are our opinions and perceptions about a neutral circumstance. Sentences we are choosing to make “true.”

 A thought is not better than anyone else’s thought simply because I’m choosing to believe it.

I had a client who was furious with her best friend because she didn’t call her on her birthday. She is my best friend, why would she not call me on my birthday? What kind of a friend would do that?!

Whenever we are angry with another human’s behavior we have first try to imagine why they acted that way. Why would they say/do whatever they did?

I asked my client to take some guesses as to why her friend would do that. She told me that they had gone out to lunch the day before her birthday and that her friend had paid for her lunch and wished her a happy birthday.

We were able to guess that the reason her friend didn’t call  her on her birthday was because she had just seen her. She had just bought her lunch and wished her a happy birthday. In her friend’s mind, she had already celebrated with my client.

Her thought was probably something like: I celebrated my friend’s birthday by taking her to lunch and wishing her a happy birthday so I don’t need to call her and wish her happy birthday again the next day.

In contrast, my client was fuming: That doesn’t mean you shouldn’t call me on my birthday, friends should call each other on their birthdays!

Both women had thoughts they had chosen with respect the birthday and the birthday lunch. Those thoughts were mutually exclusive. Each woman believed their respective thought to be true.

But here’s the thing–neither of those thoughts are true. They are simply choices.

They are not facts. There is no universal guide on how people are supposed to regard birthdays. Each woman is free to choose how she wants to think about the experience.

Recognizing that this is simply a battle of divergent thoughts and not FACTS can be refreshing.

This is not a battle of epic proportions; this does not have to end a friendship. It is simply two humans, making different choices about a particular event.

So often, we take the thought we choose and we treat it like gospel.

Then we take that gospel and try to beat others into submission with it.

Disagreements usually happen because we want to treat our thoughts as facts. We are clinging to our thoughts and treating them as if they are a universal truth that everyone, including our current adversary, should endorse. And when they don’t, we lose it.

What if all the humans were allowed to make their own choices and select their own thoughts freely? What if we didn’t judge those choices and try to convert them to our thought model?

Furthermore, what if we didn’t make these divergent thoughts mean something negative?

Underlying all of this was my client’s thought — She’s not a good friend. She doesn’t care about me. She was letting her friend’s simple choice of a thought mean so much more about the relationship. About herself.

As humans we will experience conflict during our lives but imagine how much simpler life could be if we recognized that those conflicts often arise because we are treating our own thoughts as gospel and judging the thoughts of others as inferior?

How would your life be different if you just allowed others to choose their own thoughts and didn’t make those choices mean anything negative about the relationship? Have an extra 45-minutes lying around, let’s find out!

We all have our baggage and ugly thoughts we carry around.

Even with all the skills I can teach you, you will never EVER do away with ugly thinking.

With practice, you can get better at shifting where possible. And, where that’s not possible, carry it with you.

My ugly bag of tricks includes these gems: What am I doing? You can’t do that. You need to lose some weight. You need to grow up. Your arms are terrible. You aren’t that funny. You are not nearly as cute as you think you are.

Join the human race and embrace your imperfect brain.

This who we are. We have ugly thoughts. All of us.

The question is, what are you going to do with yours? Are you going to carry them with you and soldier on or are you going to cozy up to them and tell them how right they are?

Our nasty thoughts about ourselves and our abilities are not isolated to us. We all do it.

We all have a choice about how we handle those nasty little gems. We can bow down to them or we can acknowledge our human-ness and pursue our dreams despite them.

The next time you see that person that seems to have it all together, I promise you they have their very own bag of garbage they are hauling around. Her brain is a dumpster fire sometimes too,  just like yours.

Stop beating yourself up when you realize your brain is causing all your problems. Get to work cleaning it up and being more present.

Recognize the ugly thoughts you are believing.

Stop running on auto-pilot.

Work through them, shift them, or acknowledge their presence and carry them with you to your success. Don’t allow them to be more important than they are.

They are just words in your head. Words you choose. Words you allow to be there.

You didn’t get the one faulty brain that was wired wrong. You got a human brain.

Welcome to the race.