I don’t want to do this……I shouldn’t have to do this….this is stupid…..this is a waste of my time…

When our brain goes on this tirade it’s incredibly difficult not to jump on this whiny bandwagon, throw our hands in the air, stamp our feet on the ground and throw some middle fingers whatever grown-up obligation affronts us.

Not only is this resistance an incredible waste of our energy it ignores the essential nature of life.

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.

Whether we have set a lofty goal that requires us to show up, get out of bed early, or do things that we wouldn’t otherwise normally do, or when we find ourselves realizing that there are parts of our jobs that we simply detest (hello, fake deadlines, anyone?), they are all experiences confronting us with a very basic fact of life: there are always going to be things, parts of our jobs, people, activities, etc. that we simply don’t like or that we simply don’t want to do.

I, personally, would like to exercise my veto authority over recurring meetings that do not involve a matter of life or death.

The more we give attention to our objections, the larger and louder they grow and with that, the tension within us increases and our resistance grows stronger. All of those components combine to make it more and more difficult to simply follow through and show up for the adult parts of our lives. Never mind the mental and emotional toll this takes on our bodies and spirits.

In those moments I find it helpful to simply acknowledge the resistance and take ownership of the fact that there are things in our lives that we simply don’t want to do.

Rather than railing against ourselves and judging ourselves for not wanting to do it or making excuses to avoid doing it, what if we simply owned the fact that we don’t want to do it, that we don’t like doing it, and that we are struggling to follow through? In conjunction with that exploration what if we could simply ask ourselves to just do it despite the fact that we don’t want to?

In either case we are creating a habit — a habit of making excuses, guilting ourselves to action, showing up negatively, or giving up entirely OR a habit of following through despite our own resistance.

When we acknowledge that there are things in our lives that we simply don’t want to do but that we are willing to do them for reasons that matter to us, it calms the waters of resistance. When we acknowledge that there are things that we simply don’t want to do and that it’s okay to not want to do them, we can allow judgment to pass us by and we can stay present with our own reality.

There are always going to be things in our lives that we simply don’t want to do but we can make peace by acknowledging why it’s important for us to do them anyway and taking stock of our willingness to do things even when we don’t want to because it aligns with our higher purpose and intentions.

There is no need to judge ourselves for experiencing the normal yin and yang of life.

Rather, we can honor this human experience including all its goods and bads and recognize what we like and what we don’t like. In doing so, we can resolve to take ownership of what we are willing to do in furtherance of our larger goals and in alignment with our true intentions even when we don’t want to do those things. That is complete power and ownership over our lives and allows us to slip out of the victim mentality that often comes when we stew in those I don’t want to lines of thinking.

Set a goal and when it comes down to executing and your brain cries, I don’t want to….recognize that is not a sign that you need to stop. That is simply your biological discomfort with doing hard things. Then, do it anyway because it is in furtherance of who you want to be, accepting that we rarely want to do the hard work. The question is whether you are willing to.

Not wanting to do something is irrelevant, the question is whether you are willing to do what is needed in furtherance of your goals. That is what distinguishes your dreams from your reality.

Photo by Stephen Andrews

How am I going to get all this done?! Where do I even start?! Why is there a random meeting in the MIDDLE of my afternoon? How can I get anything done if I’m ALWAYS IN MEETINGS?!

As I was thinking through the items on my calendar, I realized that this particular meeting was one that I could potentially cancel. I realized that the issue at hand was one that had been resolved by another team over email several weeks prior. So I emailed the meeting attendees the prior correspondence and indicated that I did not believe our meeting would offer anything in addition to the items already discussed and resolved in the correspondence I re-shared with them.

Sweet relief rushed in — I have more time to actually accomplish something today! I stood up for myself and my time. Job. Well. Done!

I should note that one of the individual that called the meeting was known for being a little bit persnickety and had a reputation for being a bit of an overthinker. Regardless, I felt good about my reasoning and my plan of attack and felt strongly that the meeting was no longer necessary given that the impacted parties had already resolved the legal issue.

As most of you have probably already guessed it, shortly after my emancipation request, the meeting organizer responded confirming their desire to continue with the meeting. They felt that there were underlying business considerations they wanted to make a case for.

Immediately I felt my chest and face flush and my blood pressure rising. As legal counsel, there was no need for me to be involved in any rambling meetings about business rationale and business decisions!!

From my point of view I was simply the wrong party to play audience to these requests and I was busy, GDI! Stop wasting my time!

I found myself railing against them in my head and imagining how this meeting was going to play out — them making their case, me sitting there annoyed, arguing with them in my head and anxiously awaiting my opportunity to shut down the meeting and end it as early as possible. I could see myself politely informing them that I was not the proper party to be hearing these business concerns but rather it would make more sense to have other business team members in the discussion.

This all occurred in the first 10 minutes of my day… So there I was hoping for a productive day yet boiling in frustration before anything had began.

I realized in that moment that the reason I was dreading the meeting was because I knew how frustrated I was going to be as I sat there and endured the discussion. I was making this 30 minute meeting into something monstrous and unbearable. Thirty minutes of my life! That was all they were asking. The amount of energy I was wasting fuming over this innocuous exchange was almost laughable! If I had directed that energy to my real work, I could have checked everything off my to do list already!

Furthermore, whether or not that meeting drove me crazy or not was completely within my control. As I felt my blood pressure rising and spinning about WTH I do this job, I realized that I could let this exchange sour my entire day or I could take my power back. I could decide that I would attend the meeting that had become an inevitability and I could show up with curiosity and observe what they had to say and be prepared to have an open mind. I could decide not to let a 30-minute meeting that I could not reschedule ruin my day.

If this resonates with you and you find yourself vacillating between frustration and irritation all day long, schedule some time to visit with me and let’s see if we can get some tools in place to move away from frustration and start taking control of your emotions and your career. Life is so much more fun when you do!

The power to be annoyed and irritated with the meeting and its organizer was 100% within my control. I soon realized that there was no need to be frustrated and let this simple exchange turn a day full of opportunity into a day full of irritation.

I resolved that I would stop thinking about the meeting and view it as another opportunity to learn from those around me and be open to the possibility that just maybe there was something useful to the client that would come out of this discussion. If nothing more, it would afford me the opportunity to observe myself and take control of my mind and the drama that it was offering me. And that is always time well spent.

Besides, if an annoying 30-minute meeting was as “bad” as my day was going to get, I would take it. In the grand scheme of yin and yang, if this meeting was my “darkness,” life really wasn’t so bad after all.

Photo by Yan Krukau

I remember one afternoon, we were playing “tag” on the dirt bikes. My older brother was “it” and I was riding around the backside of the farm. As usual, our farm was filled with random equipment and machinery scattered around the barns, out-buildings and grain bins. As I was running (riding?!) away from my brothers on this motorcycle, I had my head on a swivel, constantly checking behind me to see whether or not they were closing in on me. At the time, my dad was putting new tin sheet metal on one of our barns which meant that there was a flatbed trailer on the backside of the farm that had stacks of incredibly sharp sheet metal on it. As I flew around the corner to the backside of the farm, looking all around, hoping that my brothers hadn’t seen me yet, I failed to notice the flatbed trailer sitting right in front of me. When I finally turned my attention back to my path, I realized that I was quickly closing in on this sheet metal death trap sitting right at the height of my neck. I also realized in that moment that the brakes on my motorcycle were pretty much non-existent from years of idiocy by my brothers and I. Instantly, I knew I had to dump the bike to avoid the sheet metal at my neck. As I went down, the sheet metal caught me across my upper chest as I dove to the ground and left a long slice across my upper body, leaving a scar I still have to this day.

I think about this experience every time I have the urge to burn it all down –

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?

Sometimes in life we don’t pay attention to all the warning signs and everything that’s happening in front of us. Instead we’re so focused on small distractions or we’re mentally lingering in the future or the past that we overlook all the warning signs right in front of us.

Logically, we know that our difficult experiences have a lot to teach us about our own inner work. It doesn’t mean that learning those lessons and putting in the work on ourselves needs to be done in the middle of a hurricane. Sometimes it’s admirable to walk away with your head still intact, start with a clean slate, and do the work from a new vantage point. Sometimes it’s okay to recognize that the space you are in is hurting you and that you need a fresh start.

It’s perfectly acceptable to just abandon ship and pull the plug if that’s what you need to survive. There’s nothing wrong with getting out when you have gotten in too far over your head.

Do I regret that scar? Absolutely not. I know that if I had continued on my path I would have been hurt much more significantly. I did what I had to do to get out. No regrets, no second-guessing. I can apply that same logic to various instances in my life when I simply threw in the towel and walked away — I did it for my own safety and no one else and that was enough for me.

Are you looking to make a fresh start? There’s no better time to let in support to ensure that when you start anew, you show up differently and create a better, brighter future.

Perhaps those experiences of chaos are intended to wake you up to the work that you actually need to do on yourself and that is all the learning you need to take from that place.

The point of the experience may not be to force you to do your own inner work in the middle of the hurricane. Perhaps it’s that you need to see that the hurricane always exists, at least partly, within you as well as around you. From that realization sometimes leaving and getting space is the only way to actually start doing the work on yourself.

Beethoven never wrote a beautiful sonata while he was drowning. You don’t have to “fix” your issues while you are burning alive. Sometimes it’s just okay to leave and start again because sometimes that is the only way you can do the work.

“I hope you live a life you’re proud of. If you find that you are not, I hope you have the strength to start all over again.” – F. Scott Fitzgerald

Photo by cottonbro

What I have found in my own experience and those of my clients is that whatever failing we are trying to get away from typically has something to teach us and will follow us wherever we go until we get to the bottom of it.

When I left my first firm, I was frustrated with the micromanagement and constant oversight from the partners on the team. I felt like no one trusted me and that they were always second-guessing everything that I did. When I went to my next firm to build and chair my own practice group, I thought for sure I had finally found a place where I would no longer be under the microscope of others Hooray!

Yet, not long into the new role, I found myself in a verbal disagreement with one of the members of the board that forced me to confront the all-too-familiar discomforts of oversight.

In that particular conversation, a board member was challenging me about the schedule kept by my associate. He couldn’t comprehend why my associate was coming in to work at 9 and leaving at 4. He didn’t like them working from home and he wanted to understand why I was letting this happen. (Mind you, this was prior to the pandemic.)

I was completely floored. I didn’t understand why someone that never worked with me or the rest of my team should have any input into the hours that they kept. Furthermore, so long as my associate was getting their work done and billing their hours I didn’t care where they completed it so long as they were accessible to me and responsive when I needed them. Having explained that to him it was clear that we were at an impasse. He was fuming and I was pissed.

That was the first of many encounters I had as the leader of my team and a partner at that firm. Here I was again, feeling scrutinized and bristling at the oversight. I felt like I was always against the board challenging them to take actions…fighting for my cause…making my case. I felt like I was constantly looking over my shoulder being criticized by everyone around me. Once again I was back in that place of frustration and wishing that I could finally get to a point where I felt free and unjudged by those around me.

Years later, when I moved in-house with a large company, I thought perhaps this would be the moment when my skillset would be respected and the questioning and challenging would stop.

Yet it wasn’t too long after joining that organization that I realized that constant oversight, scrutiny, and red tape also accompanies working in-house for a large corporation. Once again, I found myself defending the choices of myself and my clients and constantly defending our actions to everyone within reach. The corporate animal came with its own oversight and challenges.

I realized that I had never escaped the discomfort of oversight and scrutiny that I so desperately wished to get out from under.

Then I realized that I had been changing the circumstances of my life, moving from job to job hoping that my life would suddenly be different.

That I would suddenly find a place that would be different. That I would suddenly find the solution to this discomfort. That’s when I realized that I was doing the exact same thing that many of my coaching clients do. Rather than doing my own inner work and getting to a space where I didn’t let it bother me, I was running away from it and trying to fix it with something outside of myself. This was my work to do.

Sounds familiar? Before you change jobs trying to “fix” workplace failings, schedule a free consultation and let’s explore your concerns. It’s possible that changing jobs might provide some momentary relief but in the end the work will be waiting for you. Join us and get some free support today!

Why did I bristle so much under oversight?

What did I make it mean when others questioned my decisions?

I realized in that moment that I always felt like I was being set up for a conclusion that I didn’t belong or that I was doing something wrong. I was always operating on edge worrying that others were thinking I was stupid and thinking that I made the wrong decisions. As a result, any challenge or question that came my way would cause me to snap and get defensive — not exactly a confident look.

I eventually learned to receive those inquiries differently. I learned to be curious and try and understand why they were asking. I learned to accept the fact that no matter where I go there will always be some form of oversight. (Even the President of the United States has oversight and restrictions!) It simply doesn’t exist in a world populated by other humans.

People will always be questioning, judging, and appraising our work. That is part of the gig.

In coming to that realization I was able to find greater happiness in a world that included the oversight I had been so desperately seeking to evade. I learned that my work rested in my getting to be comfortable with the decisions I made and trusting my own judgments. Just because someone is questioning and watching doesn’t necessarily mean that they are judging me or thinking that I am doing it wrong. Perhaps they simply want to understand. Perhaps they just want to know how I do things.

From that point forward I resolved to stop running from place to place hoping to find this elusive freedom from oversight that would allow me to make all the decisions without question. It simply doesn’t exist and the discomfort of it was a signpost that I had some work to do.

Photo by Andrea Piacquadio

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

My client had been charged with managing a particularly large project that was not within her traditional practice area. The initiative required input and contributions from various practices across the firm and ongoing strategy sessions with the team. In addition to the strategy sessions, my client had regular one-on-one meetings with her supervisor. During a recent meeting with her supervisor, he indicated that he expected her to take the lead on the upcoming team discussion and that she would be managing the project from there on out. He wanted her to use this to get project management experience. When she attended the first team meeting to present the project plan, her supervisor took over and did not offer any opportunity for her to make contributions. As the meeting progressed, it became clear to my client that her supervisor and his team had not read any of the materials relating to the scope of the project and had grossly misunderstood the intent of the client. The meeting was largely unproductive, confusing for all members, and my client was pissed.

When we met, she relayed this story and went on to explain how her supervisor is a jerk, a terrible leader, incredibly disorganized, spiteful, arrogant, and childish. She said she hates working with him and that having to continually interact with someone who was such a poor supervisor was making her consider leaving her job entirely. How does someone like that get into a position of leadership!?

This kind of scenario and feedback is something that we all have to deal with at some point in time simply by being members of the human race. Although I like to think that we in the legal industry have an abnormal amount of individuals who are poor leaders and managers, the ultimate truth remains the same: sometimes people just suck.

But the problem with this scenario is that so many of my clients are driven to leave or consider leaving their place of employment due to this type of interaction. In attempts to remedy these situations, many of us vacillate between confronting the individual and outright avoiding them. We all know that feeling when you’re sitting in a meeting and you’re swimming in angry thoughts about the individual in front of you. They have no idea what they’re doing….I wish they would just shut up….why do they keep doing that….how can they be so oblivious….you’re such a terrible leader…. and on and on it goes. We feel our skin start to crawl and we actually start to believe that if we don’t get out of this place and get away from this person ASAP we’re going to lose our minds!

I get it. I have completely been there and so many of my clients have as well. So how do you dig out when every part of your body and every thought in your head is screaming to get away from this person?!

(Sound familiar? Sign up for a free consult, and let’s sort it out.)

First, we have to recognize that when we confront this person or simply avoid them, we are either trying to get the other person to change or we are trying to remove them from our orbit so we don’t have to do any work. We dream of confronting them and seeing them take our comments to heart so they can change for the better and then everything will be OK. In the alternative, we think that if we can just escape this person and not have to deal with them then everything will be OK in that scenario too. In either case, we’re trying to change or eliminate the problem person so that we don’t have to feel angry and frustrated anymore. Therein lies the problem:

Wanting someone or something else to change so that WE can feel better is a futile endeavor that rarely works. Instead, our work rests solely with us and how we handle the situation.

In my client’s scenario, she truly believed that her boss was a jerk, a terrible leader, disorganized, spiteful, arrogant, and childish. She provided those details to me as if they were well-documented facts. What she didn’t see was that none of that was true. These were all optional things she was choosing to believe about her boss. All of these thoughts and judgments about this person were making her completely miserable. She wanted me to help her learn how to navigate dealing with her jerk boss but she didn’t see that her beliefs and judgments about him were actually what was making her miserable. What she didn’t see was that in order to move forward she would have to at least open herself up to the possibility that her opinion about this person may not be accurate. That she was choosing to believe day-in and day-out that her boss was a jerk. Regardless of whether or not any of these thoughts could be proven factually accurate, it was clear that by living in these judgments of this other human, she was making herself crazy. The work wasn’t in learning how to deal with her “jerk” boss, the work was in seeing that she didn’t have to believe that he was a jerk.

Our judgments of other people are founded on the belief that those around us are supposed to act a certain way.

My client’s boss was supposed to be a good mentor, a good cheerleader for her, and supportive. She had this whole perception of who he was supposed to be. Her conclusion that he was a jerk was at odds with how she wanted things to be. That tug of war with reality was causing a tremendous amount of discomfort and frustration for her. So much so that she just wanted to get away from it. But as many of you know, anytime you leave one experience for another we often encounter the same types of humans who elicit the same types of challenges all over again.

We end up creating for ourselves a pattern of moving from place to place, identifying a new jerk in each situation, and moving on again and again.

Rather than showing up to work believing that her boss was a jerk, she had myriad options available to her as to how she could potentially think of the situation. She could instead recognize that he was showing up exactly how he was meant to. He was being everything that is uniquely him. And that is completely OK. In fact, that is the beauty of this world. We all have the ultimate right to show up and be whomever and however we want to be. So rather than showing up in judgment and stewing in anger and frustration, my client could instead look at this person as an opportunity for her to experiment with compassion and unconditional love. She wasn’t frustrated because of him or the things that he was doing. The reason she was frustrated was that she was focusing on who she wanted him to be and was marinating her brain in all of these negative judgments about him when he didn’t fit her mold. So instead I asked her, how do you want to think about this person? How do you want to show up in this experience?

She revealed that she wanted to be calm and collected. She wanted to advocate for herself. To step in and LEAD just like he had asked her to. She wanted to focus on the fact that she knew he never wanted to be a manager and that he seemed to be trying to do the best he could with the position that he never sought out.

This didn’t make her feel warm and fuzzy. It didn’t make her want to stay at the firm forever. But it did allow her some neutral emotions and some space to look at this person from a different perspective. It allowed the judgment to subside and along with that came a reduction in her frustration and anger and her desire to flee. Instead, we developed a plan for her to have an honest and curious conversation with him about the project. A conversation that was not intended to CHANGE him but one rooted in compassion and a desire to better UNDERSTAND him.

After all, it’s so much easier to speak your truth from a place of neutrality than when you are fueled by pent-up anger and frustration.

Imagine how much happier we all could be if instead of judging everyone around us and believing that things should be different we chose to believe that everything was happening as it should and just tried to love those around us? It’s not easy but it certainly feels a lot better than the alternative.

I truly believe that the only thing preventing us from loving everyone around us is our thoughts about them. If you could change that, imagine how much happier you would be.

Photo by Startup Stock Photos from Pexels

Logically, this makes sense to us but in the heat of the moment, it is often incredibly challenging to remove ourselves from the experience and examine our role. I remember one instance many years ago when I was just starting this work. At the time my partner had just moved into my home with his dog and my 2 dogs to create The Brady Bunch of dog families. I had lovingly decorated my home with beautiful blinds and floor-to-ceiling curtains that accentuated the high ceilings and 100-year-old architecture of my home. One morning, I was enjoying a leisurely breakfast and looked over to my white linen curtains and realized that the bottom half of one of the curtains was yellow. I quickly began investigating and realized that my boyfriend’s male dog had been consistently marking this particular curtain in the dining room…and when I say “marking” that is my eloquent attempt to say that the dog had been pissing all over the nice things in my home. I was livid.

Later that day, I was talking to my coach about it and I explained to her how frustrated I was that this dog was ruining all the nice things in my home! She very simply asked me, “Do you want to feel frustrated about this?” Emphatically, my answer was NO.

Then she asked, “So why are you frustrated about it?” Naturally, I once again launched into my rant about the horrible dog destroying the house (because clearly, she wasn’t getting it) and she started to laugh.

She was laughing because it was pretty clear that I believed the dog was what was making me feel terrible rather than my thoughts about this dog peeing in my house. From there I went on to realize that while I can certainly choose frustration about this experience in my life, I didn’t want to be frustrated about it. Truly, I wanted to not be frustrated and show up more proactively in my life. I didn’t want to let this dog get the best of me and cause friction in my relationship. That was the crux of the issue.

If I wanted to not be frustrated about the situation I was going to have to accept the possibility that there was more than one way of thinking about it. It didn’t mean that there wasn’t validity to my thoughts that were making me frustrated but what it meant was that there were also alternative truths about my experience. It meant that I was going to have to gravitate toward another line of thinking that didn’t make me want to scream at the damn dog. I needed to find another “truth” about the situation that I could throw my emotional weight behind.

Having realized that the dog was not, in fact, implanting frustration and anger into me, I took ownership of my role in those feelings. From there I found an alternative truth: I shifted to believing that if this was the worst thing that would happen when cohabitating with my boyfriend, then life was pretty damn good. I also shifted to believing that this was just another obstacle that we are going to have to figure out as a couple. Neither one of those thoughts were pretty or flowery or made the situation OK. Rather, those thoughts allowed me to live in a space other than frustration. They allowed me to see the bigger picture, ditch the anger, and start strategizing. It allowed me to foreclose an angry blowup with my boyfriend and an unnecessary battle with his poor dog.

This situation sound familiar? Get support with your frustrating situation by signing up for a free consultation now.

That’s really the heart of the work that we do. I could certainly have chosen to live in those thoughts that I felt so strongly about. I could continue to believe that the dog was ruining everything and that he was a horrible monster destroying all of my nice things. But that would have to be my conscious choice. When asked how I wanted to feel about it the situation, I truly didn’t want to feel frustrated. I didn’t want to be happy about it but I didn’t want to live in a dark pit of annoyance and bitterness toward this dog that I actually loved and that was loved by the man that I loved. That meant that if I wanted to feel something other than frustrated, I was going to have to work at it.

When we find ourselves living in frustration over the circumstances of our lives we must take a step back and acknowledge that what is making us frustrated is not the events around us but rather our thinking about them. From there we can truthfully ask and consider do I want to be frustrated and if so I will continue with these thoughts. If not, I am going to have to do the work and find some alternative truths. We must shift from seeing our perspective as the only truth and invest in believing that every situation can have multiple truths available to us.

The next time you find yourself frustrated, consider whether that is your conscious choice or whether there is another way to show up in the situation.

Photo by Matthew Henry on Unsplash

Every time she heard a knock at her door, she inwardly seethed: I swear to god if this is her again, I am going to lose my freaking mind! Can she not tell that this is irritating and disruptive for me?! Why can’t she just schedule a 30-minute meeting and address all of this at once!? Does she think I have nothing better to do?!

When she was relating this story to me, she was visibly irritated by the whole situation. She was angry at the intern and she repeatedly grumbled She is making me so irritated!

One of the things I am often charged with as a coach is teaching my clients to own their feelings. When we blame another person or the actions of another person for our feelings, we are living in emotional childhood. We are not taking ownership for how we feel. We are giving these other people and circumstances all of the power. We are believing that these other people have the ability to control how we feel. Like children, we are throwing (emotional) tantrums because we aren’t getting our way: these people aren’t acting the way we want them to act. We are allowing their actions toward us to dictate how we show up. We are not taking ownership of our power over ourselves. That is emotional childhood.

The reason my client felt irritated every time the intern darkened her door was because she was thinking thoughts that made her pissed! She was swimming in negative thoughts that created anger – Can’t she see that I’m busy? She was just her 10 minutes ago, why didn’t she ask me this then!? I cannot believe she isn’t getting this! Can’t she tell I’m frustrated?! I’m a partner, why isn’t she bothering associates these questions!?

The first step to addressing this situation was to get my client to recognize the true source of her feelings. The intern was not “making” my client crazy. She was making herself crazy. Her thoughts were making her crazy.

She first had to recognize all of the thoughts fueling her anger and frustrations. Once she recognized those patterns, she was able to evaluate whether those thoughts were serving her in the relationship. Clearly, showing up angry and frustrated and fuming about the intern all day long was not helping anyone and it wasn’t changing the situation!

Furthermore, it was not helping her demonstrate leadership. She was not acting like the leader and partner she wanted to be for that young law student. She was not showing up authentically and that was fueling her frustration.

YOU are the only human capable of making yourself crazy.

It’s a hard pill to swallow but once we can recognize that we are the source of our consternation through our thoughts, we can take a clearer look at how we are truly showing up in our lives. In this case, my client was not showing up how she wanted to; she wanted to be a good leader and example but she was letting her anger sidetrack her.

Through working with my client, we were able to set aside the anger and emotional blame and imagine how she could show up as the best version of herself. She took ownership of her emotions and thoughts and decided to create a different result. She shifted her thinking to I can use this as an opportunity to mentor this intern. I can set her up for future success by discussing some professional boundaries with her and helping her see a better way of interacting with her partners and supervisors.

My client was able to access positive mentorship experiences from her past and approach the situation with empathy and compassion and the willingness to support this intern on her professional path. All of this was possible because she was able to stop blaming the intern for her anger and frustration and identify the true cause – herself and her thoughts.

She evolved from emotional childhood and took ownership of how she wanted to show up and how she wanted to feel about the relationship. When her anger and frustration were quashed, she was in a much better space to address the situation in a professional and loving manner. She showed up as the leader she truly envisioned for herself to be.

The next time you catch yourself claiming that XYZ is “making you crazy/angry/frustrated/want to jump out of a tall building” ask yourself how that is even possible. If we had the ability to create emotions in others around us, how different this world would be!

I am a life and career coach for successful female attorneys. I help high-performing professional women take their careers and their relationships to the next level.

These skills are priceless and life changing. I have navigated the challenges of legal practice—from the mundane day-to-day challenges to career-molding discussions. Let me provide you with perspective and support to become the leader you were meant to be. You have nothing to lose and so much to gain; schedule a free consultation now.

Over the next few weeks, I will tackle each of these challenges separately. Today, I want to focus on burnout.

I’m starting with burnout because unless we are able to recognize burnout and its symptoms and separate them from emotional and mental stress, things get a bit fuzzy.

So, what is burnout? The Google box tells me that “burnout” is a “state of emotional, physical, and mental exhaustion caused by excessive and prolonged stress. It occurs when you feel overwhelmed, emotionally drained, and unable to meet constant demands.”

For me, and in my opinion, burnout is not about stress. When you experience stress, you can feel it in your body, you can observe the thoughts associated with the stress or stressors, and often times stress heightens productivity and ignites the biological fight or flight responses. Many of my clients are attorneys and stress heightens their productivity and senses. They thrive on it. Burnout is beyond that stress.

Burnout is characterized by a general apathy about life. It mimics many of the symptoms of mild depression. It’s like a car that is nearly out of gas and running on fumes – it’s moving but more out of inertia than choice and nothing that comes along will create a heightened response. It is seemingly immune to outside stimuli. Similarly, when someone is in burn out, they respond less readily to normal stressors. They just don’t care because they are just out of gas.

When I see clients who are experiencing burnout, the approach is entirely different than the approach I use when someone is stressed. Burnout is characterized by a general disengagement in life and inability to sense emotions properly or develop long-term plans or goals. When someone is in burnout, as a coach, my work is to help them engage in the bigger picture. See life for more than whatever is causing their burnout.

The burnout spiral is not conducive to examining one’s thoughts, goals, motivations, and dreams. There is a general lack of emotion and interest in life. A pervasive numbness. (To be clear, burnout can sometimes be more properly classified as clinical depression, in which case, it is essential to see the support of a licensed medical provider for support.)

The only solution to burnout is to reconnect with life. Take an inventory of your life and recognize which areas you have been neglecting and steer your course in that direction. Call in sick. Take a spa day. Go to the gym and get to the office late. Take a vacation. Take whatever time you can away from the primary stressor driving the burnout. Spend time with friends and family. Talk with those closest to you about your situation. Connect with your community through volunteer work or environmental endeavors. Whatever can help you see that life is so much more than the job, relationship, money, or person associated with your fatigue. Take space. That is the first step to curing burnout.

If you are burnt out, you suffer from tunnel vision. You have difficulty seeing the big picture and, as a coach, I can’t bridge that gap for you. You must rebalance and refocus your vision before we can start coaching toward a brighter future.

I have experienced burnout numerous times throughout the course of my career. When I experienced burnout, work was like a dream. I was floating through the motions. I hated being there but also didn’t really care one way or the other. I didn’t care about any deadlines, I wasn’t concerned with any office drama or chaos, I was just beyond the ability to care. I had accepted that this was my life and I was just going to get through each day as simply and easily as possible and just. keep. moving.

My burnout was the product of emotional fatigue that reached a pinnacle. I felt helpless and lost and unwilling to “fight the good fight” any more. I felt empty and uninterested in the battle. I was just going to “do my job” and forget about the rest – no emotional or personal investment, life was simply a transaction. I did my time at the office, completed the assigned tasks, received my paycheck. Nothing more, nothing less. My work became the least enjoyable aspect of my life, just a means to an end.

It was a miserable existence.

It wasn’t until I got some space from the office that I realized how unhappy I was. I realized that the current work environment was a toxic relationship and I was ready to break up.

Spending some time meditating by the ocean and enjoying time with my family, I realized how much I had to be thankful for and how much I had felt disconnected from the goodness of life. I was able to address my burnout and rejuvenate myself.

With a clearer head and a renewed focus, I started drafting my new life. I had something to look forward to.

To be clear, stress and burnout are not the same. Working hard and hustling are not burnout and do not create burnout. Burnout, as I use the term, is a general lack of connection and engagement in your life/profession/relationships, etc. It is disengagement and apathy often preceded by stress and a disorganized brain.

If you are experiencing burnout, I so relate to you. I spend my time working with professional women to address and remedy burnout and stress. That is not the way we were meant to life! We all deserve better. Schedule a free consult with me and let’s get a plan in place to make space, release the burnout, and refocus on your future. You deserve a life you can be invested in and excited about. Don’t sell yourself short any longer.

As humans we often spend a significant amount of our time frustrated with those around us. We rant and rave at them in our heads. We boil beneath forced smiles. For so many of my clients, their most common emotions are anger and frustration.

I once had a client whose best friend was not a fan of her significant other. At one point, her friend had told her that she “could do so much better.” My client was furious. She was indignant that her friend would decide not to be supportive of her new relationship. She felt that her friend was being judgmental of her and her boyfriend. She was so angry with her friend that when we first met, she told me that she wanted support to determine whether this friendship was something she should continue to invest in. She was thinking she might not want this person in her life any more: “If she can’t be supportive my life and my choices, I don’t want her in my life at all.”

Any time we approach an issue from anger, our first objective is to shift away from the anger and move to a more neutral space. For most people, this neutral place is curiosity. Curiosity has a way of side-stepping anger, dulling its edge and allowing us to examine the situation from an alien-perspective.

Have you ever stopped to ask yourself why people do the ****** things they do or say?

Believe me, as a fellow human, I thoroughly enjoy a good rant and rave occasionally. While ranting and raving can be a good way to release some stuck energy, it is not on the same plane as rational behavior. Any time you are about to take some action out of anger, I recommend starting with a curious breath before deciding your next course of action.

In this case, I asked my client, Why do you think your friend said that? Why do you think she doesn’t like him? Why does she care who you date? What’s going on with her that would make her say something like that?

All of these questions de-escalated my client and carried her to a space of compassion. She believed that her friend was protective of her because she had been in some rotten past relationships and her friend carried her through. She knew that ultimately her friend was coming from a place of wanting the best for her. She knew that her friend had a hard time letting people in and needed time to get to know people. She wasn’t being malicious. Truly, she was acting from a place of love for her friend. It was just love dressed in a crappy outfit.

By the end of the session, my client was feeling badly for harshly judging her friend who was simply trying to love her and protect her.

It’s not always easy to love the humans in our lives but if you can take a break, make room for a curious breath, can you come back to these relationships from a better place. A place of compassion.

That’s not to say that relationships can’t eventually run their course, that can certainly be the case. People grow apart and need different things from those around them. However, you will never be able to discern whether a relationship has reached its expiration date if you make that decision from a place of anger or indignation. To make decisions you can trust and feel good about, you must do so from a place of love for others as well as yourself.

When relationships come to an end there should be peace and clarity that comes with that climax. Relationships that end in a blaze of glory are likely far from over. Those types of endings simply create baggage that will inevitable resurface. Lingering, strong emotions will only serve to draw that relationship (or another one just like it) back to you again in the future.

Evaluate the people in your life from a neutral space of curiosity and compassion. From there you can truly consider whether this relationship is something you want to continue to invest in.

“Curiosity is making the choice to look deeper into everyday things and seeing their true significance. Realizing that there is much to learn from everyone and everything you can encounter is the first step to living a fulfilling and happy life.”

I am a certified life and career coach and I support my clients in working through relationship challenges to find happier and more fulfilling lives. Take a leap into something new and see how we can create more happiness in your life.

What are you waiting for?