Life & Career Coaching for Lawyers
Life & Career Coaching for Lawyers
These days, many of my clients are changing jobs, changing careers, experiencing downsizing, illness, death, and loss. What I have been blessed to witness is that when my clients are able to change the way they think about those experiences, it dramatically alters their course ahead and their next successes.
Many of my clients embrace perfectionism in one way or another. Outwardly, they appear successful and confident but their inner dialogues are filled with self-judgments and whole host of “shoulds” — things they should have done better, perfectly. As we unpack those patterns of negative self-talk and begin redirecting our brains to more worthy thoughts, it opens up yet another opportunity for self-judgment. How can we leverage failures to overcome our perfectionist tendencies?
During our lives, many of get to a place where we just want to burn it all down and start over. We want out. We retreat. We want to start over and have it be better the next time around. We don’t want to do it any more. We just want to start again. Does starting over make sense for you?
In a profession where the only feedback you typically get is negative feedback, how do you keep those experiences from making you paranoid?
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?
By nature (or creation) most attorneys are notoriously terrible at asking for help. We are conditioned to do it all on our own and figure it out and so far, it has worked out well for ourselves. In the practice of law, however, this reluctance can not only be detriment to ourselves but also our clients.
As my clients learn to take more ownership over their feelings and their actions, one of the challenges they face is how to address negative experiences. Their immediate inclination is to shift to a new thoughts to try and feel better about the situation. But reality is that sometimes things will happen in our lives that we don’t want to feel good about. So what do we do?
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.
Many of my clients struggle with being wrong because of what they make that mean about themselves. If they are wrong, it must mean they are not good enough, they aren’t cut out to be lawyers. But what if defensiveness had so much more to teach us?
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.
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