Life & Career Coaching for Lawyers
Life & Career Coaching for Lawyers
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.
In any given day, many of us find ourselves in situations where we are uncomfortable. (If not, we should talk.) In those moments, a large part of the discomfort comes from our worries about what others are going to think about us and what they are going to make the conversation mean. How do you navigate those worries and fears so that you can show up authentically you?
We all have people in our lives who have challenged us but this particular exchange opened my eyes to some deeper work waiting for me to explore. What if cutting people out of our lives was the easy route? What if there was a better way (one that didn’t involve an epic showdown)?
As we approach the beginning of this holiday season, I can’t help but think about families. Whether they are family by choice or family by default, we all have groups of people in our lives that we love and are thankful for yet, despite all that, these people that know us best also know how to best push our buttons. How can we better connect with these humans that sometimes make it difficult to be kind?
When I was in private practice, I had a client that called me all the time. Constantly. How I showed up in the relationship changed everything about how I set boundaries in my relationships, personally and professionally.
As many of my clients and myself have concluded: just because we are attorneys does not mean that we are good bosses, leaders, managers, or mentors. So what do you do when you find yourself working with a boss (or any human for that matter) who is less of a leader and mostly just a jerk?
We can always choose to live with those negative perceptions and interpretations of our life. But the power there comes from our choosing to feel negatively about those experiences and to think negatively about those experiences.
As humans in this world, we all have a role to play in fostering the evolution of thought. While that might mean we have to place ourselves in uncomfortable situations and call out actions that we know are not mal-intended. Unless we’re honest with people about how their words or actions impact our abilities to show up, to stand up, to speak up, we will never make the progress that our world so desperately needs.
If I could teach my clients how to change other people, I would. You are never going to succeed in changing other people. So when it comes to other humans, coaching is largely about putting down the boxing gloves and walking out of the ring.
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