Life & Career Coaching for Lawyers
Life & Career Coaching for Lawyers
In my practice, I spent many a dark night wondering if I had made the right choice in going to law school. I cried in my office more times than I probably remember. I missed important events, skipped parties, and used work as an excuse more times than I care to admit.
Fancy degree, fancy office, fancy car, fat paycheck and miserable.
So, what do you do?
One of the biggest challenges in any career is how to stay focused, motivated, and avoid frazzle, or even worse burnout.
Over the next few weeks, I will tackle each of these challenges separately. Today, I want to focus on burnout.
When you approach your present state through the lens of your future dream, taking action isn’t scary, it is simply the next logical step.
When I was teaching in a law school, the students often asked me how to know if a firm was a good fit.
How do you get
your interviewer to pull back the curtain and tell you how things really work
without all the sales-ey pitching?
Here are few suggestions from my own experience and from those candidates who successfully got me to “spill the beans”, so to speak.
I’m bored. There is something about that statement that drives me nuts. Kids say it all the time and that’s not necessarily what I’m talking about here – although, yes, that makes me crazy too. I had a client come to me recently complaining that she was bored with her job. She was bored with her job but when I challenged her to consider why she was bored or to develop ways that she could become more engaged in her work, she immediately went on the defensive.
Here’s what we learned.
So many of my clients come to me telling me that they are confused. They feel lost. They don’t know what they are supposed to do with their life. They come to me looking for answers and my response is always the same: I offer them a mirror.
Have you ever considered why you aren’t taking action? You want to write that book you always imagined, you want to break out and start your own practice or change practice areas, you want to tell your spouse that you aren’t happy.
Why is it that we don’t do those things? The real reason might surprise you.
Do you want to be happier in your life? Do you want to find your purpose?
We all do. Let’s be honest, no one has ever declined the possibility for more happiness. The problem is that most of the people I work with are looking for something to make themselves happier, something to bring “purpose” to their life. Usually this search is tied to something concrete and measurable…a job or relationship that will finally make them happy.