Sarah Cottrell: Hi, and welcome to The Former Lawyer Podcast. I'm your host, Sarah Cottrell. On this show, I interview former lawyers to hear their inspiring stories about how they left law behind to find careers and lives that they love. Let's get right to the show.

Hi, everyone. Thanks for bearing with my voice this week in the intro and in a couple of episodes that you're going to hear coming up. I had a bunch of recordings scheduled for this week and also came down with a killer cold. That's why I'm sounding a little bit under the weather. This conversation today is my conversation with Tasha Cochran of One Big Happy Life.

Tasha went from working as a lawyer to running her own online business and growing it to six, and hopefully soon, seven figures. I'm really excited for you to hear this conversation. Let's get right to it.

Hi, Tasha. Welcome to The Former Lawyer Podcast.

Tasha Cochran: Hi. Thank you so much for having me. I'm so excited to be here.

Sarah Cottrell: I am super excited to have you. I just posted this on Instagram Stories right before we started but I watched, well, I watched a number of your videos, but in particular the last day as a lawyer video and I was just like, “This is amazing!” So why don't you introduce yourself to the listeners and let them know a little bit about who you are?

Tasha Cochran: Okay. My name is Tasha Cochran. I am about six weeks out from being a lawyer. Six weeks ago, I left law practice behind and I now run my business One Big Happy Life full time.

Sarah Cottrell: Awesome. Why don't you tell us a little bit about that business, and then can you take us way back and talk about what got you started on the path to law school in the first place?

Tasha Cochran: Okay, sure. One Big Happy Life is all about helping people find balance in their lives and build wealth and live happy. We teach people how to enjoy life, enjoy the things that they want to have in their lives, so live full lives, and yes, spend money, but also balance enjoying life today while also building a seven or multi-seven figure nest egg. We like to say we're personal finance for people who like nice things.

In terms of, let's see, way, way back, how did I become a lawyer. When I was 18 years old, yeah, we're taking it way back, so almost 20 years ago, I became pregnant with my daughter, Alexis. At that time, I was active duty in the Marine Corps but I was faced with being a single mom. That's when I learned about how the law touches everything and also how important money was. Because when I was pregnant with my daughter, I didn't even have a driver's license.

Of course, everyone thought I was crazy, but in the span of a year, I went from not even having a driver's license, so not even owning a car, to owning a car, buying my first house, and yes, also having my daughter. During that time, I was able to do that because I just started to study personal finance and the law. That's how I was able to figure out like, “Hey, yes, I can totally buy a house even as a single teen mom.”

I decided that I would get out of the Marine Corps and pursue law and that's what I did. I went to community college first and then I got my college degree. I went to Yale and then after Yale, I went into banking regulatory law.

Sarah Cottrell: Got it. What year did you graduate from law school?

Tasha Cochran: I graduated in 2011, so we're about eight years out right now.

Sarah Cottrell: Got it. Did you go into banking because you had that interest in finance?

Tasha Cochran: It's really funny because I didn't recognize that I had an interest in finance at the time. It's always like you look back on the path that you traveled and you realize that oh, there were connections there. In undergrad, I worked in the veterans affairs office, helping veterans navigate the student loan and veterans educational benefits process.

Then when I was in law school, I was in the Mortgage Foreclosure Clinic, which I absolutely loved, but for some reason, when I went to the firms during the summers, it never occurred to me to try to be in their finance groups. I tried litigation. I tried white collar, and it was just not interesting to me so I decided not to go to a firm and decided to do a public service fellowship instead.

I ended up doing consumer finance work as part of that fellowship and that's when it really hit home that oh, obviously, that is what I should be doing. It took me about a year after law school to recognize that consumer finance and banking regulatory work is what I was interested in. Then I was able to then head my career in that direction.

Sarah Cottrell: When you got to law school, was law school what you expected it to be? Because I know a lot of people—and I include myself in this—they go to law school sometimes because they're interested in the law or they've had some particular experiences that made them interested in contracts or just whatever aspect of law there is out there that someone might be interested in and then they get to law school and it is a little bit of a different experience. How was that experience for you?

Tasha Cochran: I really enjoyed the intellectual aspect of law school. I didn't have any expectations of what law school was going to look like or what the practice of law was going to look like because maybe I'm one of the few people that did not watch Law & Order or any of those legal drama shows so I didn't have any glamorous thoughts in my head about what it would be like. I didn't even read what is it The Paper Chase, is that that law school book?

Sarah Cottrell: Oh, yeah. I also have not read that book but I feel like everyone else has.

Tasha Cochran: Exactly. I didn't read any of that, it's just for me it was entirely about my lived experience and recognizing the importance of being able to even understand the law, period. That's why I went to law school to understand the law because I had bought a house, I bought a car, and there were a couple of times in those transactions where as I was reading, I just happened to read the contracts and be able to put two and two together like, “This is not what we verbally agreed to. Why are these other provisions here in this contract? You need to change this.”

For me, it was just going to law school to be able to understand those things and I definitely got that from law school. Now, I will say I hear talk of law school being really competitive, and at Yale, the positive was that well, there weren't grades, so the level of competition wasn't quite as high, but I also disengaged myself from the competition. I never wanted to be part of that group that was striving for the clerkships and striving to be noticed by the professors and striving to be on law review. That just didn't fit with me and what I felt like I wanted.

Maybe if I had gotten on that super gold star track, I would feel differently about law school, but I definitely had a very laid-back approach to law school and that might be because I had a child too, so my focus has always been my family as my number one and then everything else comes second. I think it really did help keep me grounded and keep that perspective in law school.

Sarah Cottrell: Yeah. I think certainly anyone who has kids can understand how it can sometimes pretty radically shift your priorities. I have a four-year-old and a one-year-old so it's fun but it's also a totally life-altering thing.

Tasha Cochran: Yeah. I came to the United States when I was two years old. Neither one of my parents graduated from high school and so just going to law school really opened my eyes to what was possible for me, and just to be around people who had these big visions and goals, and yes, some of them, they want to be president, and that's incredible to be around a group of people where anything is possible.

Sarah Cottrell: I love that. When you graduated from law school then, did you have any inkling that you might not want to be a lawyer eventually, or at that point, were you on the path of like, “I'm going to be a lawyer and that's what I'm planning to do”?

Tasha Cochran: I graduated law school actually thinking that I was not going to be a lawyer so I did not take the bar right after I graduated from law school. The job that I took was a law degree enhanced job but not law degree required. It was a fellowship, and as part of that fellowship, I was required to do a rotation with another entity. It could be a federal agency or some non-profit, something related and that would enhance my expertise for the position that I was in and so I decided to do a rotation with DOJ.

I did criminal law. While I knew that I was not interested in being a criminal law attorney, it reinvigorated my love for the law. I really did enjoy the work and writing all the briefs and doing all of the research. I thought I hated the law. I didn't hate the law, I hated practicing law at a private law firm.

Because of my time at the DOJ, I ended up taking the bar a year after I graduated from law school because I decided I was going to practice law. But I was already in this position and I was working for HUD at the time in their Fair Housing Office and I ended up getting a branch chief position where I was in charge of a five-state region doing the intake for fair housing.

Even though I was a lawyer, licensed at that time, I continued not to practice law for a little bit because it was administrative law but I wasn't actually practicing. I really enjoyed it but then I decided to go practice law. A year after that, I left and I went to a public interest law firm and it was just amazing.

Sarah Cottrell: What sort of work did you do there?

Tasha Cochran: The same banking regulatory work but on the bank side. We were retained council for banks to help make sure that they were complying with the various consumer protection regulations.

Sarah Cottrell: Okay. Got it. Talk to me about how you got from there to where you are now. Because I think there were a couple different, or maybe at least one more move in there, and so I'd just love to know exactly how you moved through that and also at what point you started thinking, “Hey, maybe I actually don't want to practice anymore”?

Tasha Cochran: Okay. There were a couple of moves. I've just hopped from place to place just being perfectly honest. That's awesome and partially a testament to my degree, and of course, my work experience. I was at the firm and I became pregnant with my son. We had been trying to conceive for three years and we thought we were going to need to do IVF in order to have another child so we moved to the DC area and that's how I ended up working at a private firm.

I really enjoyed working at the firm. The hours were definitely better than some of the bigger firms that I worked at but they were still law firm hours. There was still a billable hour requirement and there was a certain amount of face time that was required that I really didn't like. Then I had an hour and a half commute one way, so three hour commute with an infant and I was breastfeeding. I breastfed for two years.

Sarah Cottrell: Oh my goodness. You’re that girl and a superstar is what you're saying.

Tasha Cochran: But I was committed and part of it was with my daughter, I only breastfed for six weeks because I couldn't afford a breast pump that was high quality and the military didn't facilitate pumping and storage of milk. With my next child, which I had also waited so long to conceive and then struggled so long to conceive, I definitely wanted to do this so I was like just so focused on breastfeeding for a year, at least.

Being at the firm, I didn't like the hours. I was barely home. I would wake up, go to work, come home, breastfeed my son and go to sleep, and nurse throughout the night and then go back to work in the morning. I'm like, “This is no way to live,” so I decided to change jobs. But I wanted to stay in the same field and so I was able to get a job at the FDIC doing regulatory work but as a bank examiner, not as an attorney.

To me that was like a step off onto the mommy track, but it was still valuable work experience that would benefit me when I switched back over to doing legal work. It turned out that job was horrendous. They downplayed the travel because it was supposed to be the Maryland Regional Office which was not too far away from my house, but then they had me traveling all the way up to Northern New Jersey past the New Jersey Regional Office. I'm like, “But there are people in the New Jersey Office, why am I in New Jersey?”

That is what led me to make my next and final jump in the legal field which is I went to the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau as an attorney. My experience at the FDIC definitely helped me make that jump because now I had experience working in private practice for entities and then also working at several different agencies at a high capacity so it all worked out.

Sarah Cottrell: What kind of work did you do at the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau?

Tasha Cochran: Same thing, banking regulatory work, so doing a lot of the supervision work but I was officially policy council but I also did supervisory work. In terms of okay, how did I decide to leave, when I was working at that FDIC job that I was traveling so much for, I was absolutely miserable, my partner Joseph says to me, “You've got to do something to take your mind off of being unhappy,” because I was just grumpy all the time.

I ended up getting a random check from YouTube because three years before, I had done a big chop where I cut off all of my chemically relaxed hair and went natural to grow out my curly hair. I just threw the video up on YouTube because I watched YouTube videos of people doing the same thing. I'm like, “Well, I just want to pay it forward. If anyone else comes behind me, they can watch my big chop video.” That video just sat on YouTube for three years and then suddenly, I got $100 check right when I was at a super low point in that travel job so I started making YouTube videos.

I ended up documenting my journey to get a new job which is the CFPB job. When I got there, I had to tell the ethics department like, “Hey, I'm doing this little YouTube thing. I get like four dollars a month for it but I'm not going to stop doing it because I like doing it.” They said, “Yep, that's fine. Cool with us.”

Then fast forward two and a half years later and it's a multi-six-figure business and I had no time whatsoever between running my business and working full-time as a lawyer. Something had to go and I had to make the decision, “Well, what do I want next in my career?” and I chose my business.

Sarah Cottrell: That is so awesome and exciting. I have like a million questions I'm going to try to be semi-organized. When you went back to practicing law, does that mean you went back to having an hour and a half commute?

Tasha Cochran: I did, but the great thing about the CFPB is that their hours were extremely flexible. Whereas when I was working at the firm, I was working at a minimum 9:00 AM to 6:00 PM, with the CFPB, I could choose to come in as early as 6:00 AM so then I could leave at 2:30 PM and be home by 4:15 PM. For me, that was the perfect balance.

We had a nanny, so the nanny would just come here early in the morning so that I could commute in and have a full normal evening with my family because everyone's home by 4:00 PM approximately. Then I also worked from home two to three days a week so I was only doing that commute two or three days a week. For me, that balance worked out really well.

Sarah Cottrell: Oh, yeah. That is definitely better than an hour and a half each way every day. You said you got this check from YouTube at a particularly low point, and I take it from when you said that it was like this moment of like, “Oh, maybe this is a sign that there's something here.” You said when you started out, you were doing videos of looking for a job and whatnot, did you narrow your focus where you all now are focusing more specifically on the personal finance piece?

Was it three years ago that you first started making additional videos? Talk a little bit more about the timeline of growing that business.

Tasha Cochran: Okay. Yeah. I got the check in November of 2016. In December, I started making a couple of videos here and there. I was just thinking that it was something really fun that I could do that would also eventually, this was our goal, within five years—because that's how long we would have before our daughter went to college—like, “Oh, well, if in five years from now it's grown to the point where it can pay for college for her, that would be awesome.” Because realistically, I spent most of her childhood just trying to get to the point where I was making a good salary.

That was our goal. This was supposed to be this really low-key fun thing that we were doing. I wasn't making videos regularly but I quickly realized that I had zero interest in making hair videos. I just don't spend that much time on my hair. It's just not fun for me. I started thinking about, “Well, what am I interested in talking about?” It happens to be personal finance. I really, really love personal finance.

As a lawyer who works in consumer finance, I could see just how much misinformation was being spread by “financial gurus”. I won't even call them financial experts because they don't even call themselves financial experts, they're financial entertainers. It was frustrating for me working on the legal side where we're gathering all of these experts from all across the country, all across the world, all of these statisticians sitting there trying to figure out how do we enhance consumer access to credit, how do we increase consumer education where we're having symposia about the importance of building a strong credit report, and then we see the financial entertainers giving out all of this misinformation. It was so frustrating for me.

I decided, “Well, it's time for someone else, someone with an actual legal background who has spent years working in this industry with financial institutions, for financial institutions, and also regulating financial institutions to come out and educate consumers on how they can make better financial choices.” That's how we started to do more and more personal finance work.

But I also recognize that there was a dearth of information for people who aren't interested in being uber frugal, people who want to live the normal life where, yes, they may work for 30, 35 years but in a job that they love, they want to travel, they want the house, they want the kids. How do you do all those things and also still build wealth? There wasn't information for those people. I said, “Well, I'll fit in that niche as well.”

Sarah Cottrell: Yeah. One of the things that I love about the perspective that you bring is my husband and I both went to law school, we had law school loans, that's a lot of debt. I feel like a lot of the personal finance advice out there is like, “Just never buy coffee and you'll pay off all your debt super quickly and everything will be fine.”

I'm like, “Well, we did have over $400,000 in debt and that's going to take a long time to pay off. I'm not going to never buy a cup of coffee in that period of time.” Realistically, there just was not a lot, and I think this is part of what you're speaking to, there's not a lot of financial advice out there for people who are in a position like we were in where it wasn't like, “Oh, well, if you just tighten your belt for three months, then you can pay off your debt and everything will be perfect and wonderful.”

There's almost this sense of like, “Well, if you are buying a coffee, or I don't know, whatever, something like that, going out to dinner, you basically deserve to be in a horrible financial position.” Does that resonate with you? Do you understand what I'm trying to say? I don't know if I'm the only one who's had that feeling but it was very frustrating for me.

Tasha Cochran: Oh, you are absolutely not the only one. Money shame is real. It's funny because when you look at the dominant narratives in personal finance, they come from two primary places, one is the FIRE movement and one is the Dave Ramsey camp. Both of them, the way that they have structured their business, it's a cult-ture where, oh no, seriously, they otherwise anyone who doesn't believe what they believe and they do it by allowing the people who believe what they believe to get a feeling of superiority over the people who don't believe. The people who aren't one of us are less than us.

In particular, like Mr. Money Mustache will say, “Well, they're sheeple,” people who don't know what they want. Or Dave Ramsey will say, “Well, they're a mess, or they're dumb,” or he'll say things like, “Live like no one else.” That's great from a business perspective but it's actually horrible from just being a good person perspective. Frankly, it makes people look at debt and feel bad about their debt. That's all wrong.

Debt, all it is, is a contract, it's just a financial instrument. You just have to look at it as this debt is a thing, it's here, what can I do to service this debt and meet my financial obligations but also enjoy my life and plan for my financial future? It's all about optimizing your finances, it's not about feeling bad about it, it's doing your absolute best with what you have right now. That's what we teach.

Sarah Cottrell: This episode of The Former Lawyer Podcast is sponsored by my free guide: First Steps to Leaving the Law. Look, I know that there are a lot of unhappy lawyers out there who are overwhelmed at the thought of leaving the law and literally don't know where to start. You can grab this guide and take the guesswork out of it. Go to formerlawyer.com/guide and start your journey out of the law today. Seriously, you can get it and start today.

Sarah Cottrell: Yeah. I think that's so good. In fact, just last week, I did a workshop for the members of Former Lawyer which is just like a free membership for anyone out there who is wanting to leave the law but isn't sure where to start, talking about the facts. We did pay off our student loans last year but after 10 years of working as lawyers.

One of the things that I think is so important, and it's exactly the thing that you're talking about, is to get to that point, you need to be able to make decisions that work for you in your life. You're not just like a widget who produces money and then puts it in the “optimal place”, you actually have to see yourself as a whole person and have some vision for what your life should look like, and I really love that. That's part of what you guys are talking about.

Because I think that's really important, and it's not really out there. Either there's like just don't care about anything and being somewhat irresponsible, which is not a great approach, or there's the if you buy a cup of coffee when you have a dollar of debt, you are the worst person ever.

Tasha Cochran: Yeah. What's really fun and one of the things that I love about our approach is that we actually show our numbers. We've been doing net worth updates on One Big Happy Life for the past two years because we like to give people something concrete, we like to show what a real life, real family, what these principles look like in their lives which would be our lives, and so we often don't fast pay our debts.

We spent a whole year last year slow paying our debts and we still paid off like $40,000 worth of debt. One of the misconceptions people have is that if you just pay your debt as agreed, you'll always be in debt. That's not true at all. Debts are structured to be paid off in X amount of time. But during that time, so over the past two years that we've been doing these net worth updates, we've paid off over $150,000 worth of debt, but we've also increased our assets by over $200,000.

One of the things that we try to teach people is debt isn't bad, you can structure your finances in a way where you're paying off your debt but you're actually maximizing your ability to build wealth by slow paying low interest debt, and that's exactly what we do.

Sarah Cottrell: Yeah. The other thing that I was going to mention, I know on your channel, you have a video, I think it released pretty recently where you talked about the growth of the business from your first year until now and the exponential growth that occurred year over year, I will definitely put a link to that and also to the net worth stuff in the show notes so people can check that out if they're interested.

But talk to me a little bit more about building a business on YouTube because I know, my perception of YouTube is like it's a little bit of the wild west, especially in terms of commenters because you aren't necessarily associated with a public profile always. Talk to me about that. I think I got the impression from some of your recent videos that in certain ways, y'all are moving away from YouTube as your primary revenue generator so I would just love to know more about that and how that fits in with your transition to working in the business full-time as opposed to working as a lawyer.

Tasha Cochran: Sure. When I first started, I had no idea how businesses work or how online businesses work because I haven't taken a single business class. Yes, I took economics but nothing specifically about entrepreneurship or starting a business. We were just looking at it as this fun little side hustle.

As the revenue started to grow and it started to take up more time, I realized that even if we didn't have a business model in mind, our business still had a business model and so the question is are we happy with the type of business that we are building? Is the ROI there?

By year two, after honestly busting our butts over that second year, and we made $76,000 the second year which seems awesome but not from a lawyer's perspective, I'm like, “I'm working way too hard to just make $76,000 a year. If I wanted to work this many hours between my day job and my business, I would just go work at a firm and make four times, five times this.”

I'm like, “Something's got to change.” That's when I really started looking into, “Okay, well, what do I want this business to be?” Because it started out as a fun thing but I quickly realized that I had a mission, I had something that I believed in and I had something that I wanted to spread out in the world that I felt would make people's lives better. But I also recognize that I can't share that message if I'm not making money.

That meant I needed to structure the business in a way that would allow me to both make the income that I want to make for my own personal life goals and also be able to spread that message to people, and so that's how the business has increased exponentially because we've looked at creating our own products. We offer our own products and that has really helped the business revenue grow a lot.

Now, in terms of building a business on YouTube, this is what I will say, we started out primarily as YouTubers because there was nothing else. YouTube was our first platform. We didn't even have a website. Over time though, we've definitely started shifting away from that because we recognize that YouTube is not our business, we don't own YouTube, and at any point, the YouTube algorithm can say, “Hey, One Big Happy Life, I don't like you anymore so I'm not going to show your videos to any of your subscribers,” and then our business would just disappear like a flash in the pan and we didn't want that.

Instead now, One Big Happy Life is its own business and YouTube is one arm of that business. It's one way of us getting our message out to people and it's the very beginning of our value ladder. That's where we offer our free and valuable advice to people, to spread that message out there, and then it also enables us to invite the people who want to work deeper with us in our programs with our products to come and buy from our business.

Sarah Cottrell: Got it. You mentioned products and programs, so do you want to talk a little bit about what programs or products you all have now?

Tasha Cochran: Sure. Our primary program with One Big Happy Life is Wealth Builders Academy. That is our monthly membership program where we support our members on their wealth building journey. Every month, we release a brand new master class and we have live implementation sessions to help people actually implement these things in their lives.

One of them would be the retirement master class where we teach people the concept that we call the minimum savings rate. This is the minimum amount that you need to save every single month if you want to make sure that you can retire when you want to at the kind of a lifestyle that you want to live.

Basically, if all that you do in your life is make sure that you're hitting your minimum savings rate, you're good because yes, you can be financially independent and still have debt. As long as your nest egg is big enough to cover your debts, you're good. We teach people how to do that.

Then, of course, I also have a business coaching program and a course on how to start a YouTube channel. Those are our two primary revenue sources. I'm also in the midst of creating a planner that goes along with Wealth Builders Academy and it's called the Wealth Planner.

Sarah Cottrell: Is that going to be like a printed thing or electronic?

Tasha Cochran: Yeah, it's going to be a physical planner so that people can have something tangible to track their progress throughout the year.

Sarah Cottrell: I love that. Who doesn't love planners? Okay, maybe that's just me.

Tasha Cochran: Exactly.

Sarah Cottrell: Okay. You've now been doing the not practicing as a lawyer, working in the business full-time thing for I think you said six weeks? I know it hasn't been very long but I would love to know what, if anything, do you miss from practicing as a lawyer and what are the things that you have gained from walking away from that to build this business?

Tasha Cochran: Okay. Oh my gosh. There are actually so many things that I miss. Number one, I miss leaving the house. I used to complain about my commute but after six weeks of basically sitting in the house, I'm like, “I think I need to go work in Starbucks or something.” I need to just see people because I could go for weeks with only seeing Joseph and my kids. I love them but I need to see other people. Now I have to proactively go out of my way to try to find other people to talk to. That's really challenging.

Secondly, I really miss the ease of the paycheck. I have to say this, being a lawyer was easy compared to this. I've done some really complicated stuff, like written the first agency determination where we included LGBT status under The Fair Housing Act. I wrote that. That was easier than what I am doing right now.

I want people to know like when you are going out to start your own business, there is so much mindset work and so many things to figure out so many moving pieces to really keep your business going and you don't feel it until you're doing your business full-time. Because when your lawyer job is supporting your business, well, it doesn't matter what your business is doing. If it's making money, great, and most of us will end up just pouring all of that money right back into the business.

But now, I need to actually take money out of that business. There's a lot more pressure involved too. Also, this idea that, “Well, I left the law for this thing so I've got to do well at it,” all of that pressure is really challenging.

Third, did I mention the structure? I thought that somehow when I started working for myself, that I would just be so much more productive, get so much more done in my business, but the reality is for the first few weeks the whole day would go by and I'm like, “I did nothing.” Now, oh, it's so bad and so now I have to get really structured about, “Okay, here are my big three.” I'm actually using, speaking of planners, Michael Hyatt's Full Focus Planner to really plot out my big three for the day, identify what's going on in my calendar.

Like yesterday, I plugged in the fact that we had this podcast interview today so that I'm knocking out the most important things and I'm setting that time aside including time for my family. Because at first, I was just working all day, working into the evening and everything even though I didn't have a “job” anymore.

Sarah Cottrell: Yeah. I identify with so many things that you just said. I'm an introvert so I don't necessarily gain a lot of energy from being around people but for sure, and I know I've talked about this with some other guests, but leaving my lawyer job and then being in a position where I am not leaving the house very much, you realize like, “Oh, I actually do miss just those little daily interactions that you don't get when you're working for yourself at home.”

I was going to ask, can you talk a little bit more about, you said it's easier to work as a lawyer than it is to be working in your own business. I think that I know exactly what you mean but can you explain a little bit more about just what that is in terms of mindset? Because I think, not just with working for yourself but also people who are thinking about leaving the law, there are so many mindset issues that need to be overcome and so I would love to hear you talk about that a little bit more.

Tasha Cochran: Sure. With the law, one of the things is you're working with a body of information that came before you. Even if you're trying to create a different interpretation, you're still going to rely on some sort of other precedent and then you can form your arguments off of that precedent, why that should be applied to this current circumstance.

When you are in business for yourself, there are no rails, you're just floating out in the ether trying to make something out of absolutely nothing. You think that yes, it's awesome to be able to do anything you want but when you can do anything you want, now you need to decide, “Oh, my gosh, what should I actually do?” and then create a system from absolutely nothing. Then you don't know if it's going to work but you also need the money.

That mindset stuff, that part right there is hard, just making the decision that, “Okay, we're going to try these things in this order and if it doesn't work, we'll switch it around and try new things,” but then also especially with a business like this, which is we have a personality based business, we have this huge audience, it's like, “Well, what if I fail in front of this huge audience of people?”

That's really challenging, and yes, you also have to deal with the trolls, the people who are sitting behind the safety of their keyboard who have never risked anything whose lives are super safe but they want to throw rocks at you and tear you down every single day. It's a small percentage of the comments for sure, but every time it comes, it still hurts.

We're three years in, I'm definitely better at dealing with those comments than I was three years ago, but every single time, it's just devastating because you're pouring your heart and soul into this thing and this random person comes and just rips up your painting. Imagine you're in kindergarten, you just made your perfect little house and a little kid comes and rips your painting up, how that feels is like you just lost everything from that one person's comment.

That's really challenging that you just don't really have to deal with in the law. Yeah, you have setbacks but there's always this idea that you can come back from most things. With business, it's like you're just never sure that you will.

Sarah Cottrell: Yeah. I talked with several people on the podcast already about some of the ways that they have worked through mindset issues, either through coaching or therapy. I'm a big fan of therapy. What are some tools that you have used and some things that you might recommend for listeners who are either thinking about leaving the law or maybe they have some side hustle going on and they're trying to work through some of the mindset things that you're talking about?

Tasha Cochran: Definitely having a coach and a therapist. I have both. I have those all over the place because my daughter Alexis is now 17 and she is involved in the business and also Joseph's in the business too so I take it the hardest because I'm the visionary in the business. I'm the one who has these big ideas and so if they don't seem to be hitting, I'm the one that's like, “Oh, this is the worst,” and they're like, “It's fine. Just try something else.”

I love that I have my family that can cheer me on but I also love my business coach who is several steps ahead of me. She's already made multi-millions in her business and so having her to give me that perspective, to teach me what I'm not seeing because we don't know what we don't know and I thought, so I'm in the middle of a launch right now and I did this webinar like an online master class and I did not see the kind of conversion rates that I was expecting.

I was feeling devastated because I'm like, “I gave them everything,” and I talked to my coach and she's like, “Oh, well, what about you try this, this, this, and this?” and ten other things that I didn't even think of and I'm like, “Oh, my god, I did nothing. There's so much more that I can try.” So just knowing that there are other things that I could try, I wouldn't have known that without her because if I had thought about those things, I would have done them in the first place.

Then, of course, my therapist who I can talk to, and he gives me also that perspective of like, “You're being too hard on yourself. You're doing this because you want to, you don't have to push yourself this hard.” That's the other thing. I set this super ambitious goal to hit seven figures next year and in perspective, three years ago, just about two years ago, we made $5,000 so to go from a $5,000 year to a seven figure year in four years is stupidly aggressive but maybe it's the drive.

What I need to learn now is how to turn that drive off and to let things unfold. Yes, work, but not feel so compelled to be a super achiever anymore. I don't have anything to prove. I can just let my business grow. I can just nurture it. I don't have to feed it super growth-fueled.

Sarah Cottrell: Yes. Oh my goodness. I think that is super wise, especially because I think a lot of people who go to law school have this internal drive where they feel like, not even like they feel like they need to be the best but they just feel like they need to be working as hard as possible and doing as much as possible.

Often, and again, I'm totally speaking from my own experience here, often I think that part of that turns into not really thinking about yourself as a whole person, mind, body, soul, spirit, and just thinking of yourself as like how much work can I do? How many things can I achieve? It's really good to be able to take a step back from that and get a perspective on your life holistically.

Tasha Cochran: Absolutely. Honestly, that's why I love the Full Focus Planner. I've tried a lot of other planners but I really like this one because it's really about being a whole person, like yes, you're going to be planning out your work day but it reminds you like you should have a morning routine, you should have something healthy that you're doing for yourself every day, like make time for personal time.

When I was plotting out my day last night, which is seriously this is the first day I've used it, so this is me gushing about a thing I've used for all of one day, but I was looking at it and I'm like, “Okay, I have all these things that I want to do because I started with my big three,” and then I started plugging them in I'm like, “But I need to work out.” I heard my therapist’s voice say, “You don't need to do anything, you want to do this so you can choose to do this.”

So then I made sure I put in my workout time, I put in my time with my family because those are the things that I absolutely want to do every single day. I put in time for writing and then I'm like, “Whatever time is left, that's the time that I can a lot to work. Once I put in my big rocks, then work can fit in after that.” It was really empowering to make that switch because I wasn't doing that at first. I was just like, “These are all the things that I've got accomplished, work-work-work.” I really like this new approach like what you're talking about, considering myself as a whole person and not just the work that I need to do.

Sarah Cottrell: I think that is something that is really important for lawyers and non-lawyers and pretty much everyone in between. I have a couple questions about what advice you would give to people and the first is just generically what advice do you have for people who are looking to leave the law?

Then more specifically, I'm wondering if you have any advice for lawyers out there who do have some side business and are hoping to grow it to the point where they also could leave the law. Any advice that you would have for either of those groups of people, I'm sure, would be super helpful for our listeners.

Tasha Cochran: Sure. Oh my gosh, I have so much advice. I would say maybe one of the first things is to understand that you're not locked in to any particular course of action because of your finances. Because I know a lot of people say, “Well, I can't take a pay cut or I have all of these bills or my mortgage is this much,” and so I want people to recognize that everything about your life is a choice. You don't have to choose to continue to live in that house.

Your children, their lives are going to be okay if they need to downside. Even if they need to switch schools, they will be okay. Don't tell yourself a story that's going to keep you stuck in a box that you don't want to be in. You only get one life. Then secondly, I would say that the people, if you're wishing and hoping, there's this quote by Eleanor Roosevelt, I think, don't quote me on that, but that it takes as much effort to hope as it does to take action.

Don't just stop at wishing and hoping, actually create your business plan, actually have your profit plan. Understand what it's going to take to get your business from where it is right now to where you need to go and look realistically if your job is stopping you from doing that, then you need to make a choice, like start cutting back on your hours so that you can grow your business. Make your business approach a priority. Treat it as a priority.

Then third, I would say to hire a coach because trying to figure it out on your own, no one has time for that. Don't be afraid to invest in yourself. You're a lawyer, you've already invested in yourself, so continue to invest in yourself, hire a coach that is doing what you want to do. Someone who has maybe not necessarily left the law, but it is helpful if they had a career and had to make that kind of a transition.

It's also helpful if that coach has experience doing, if you want to do B2C work, so business to consumer where you're serving people, then I recommend hiring a coach that has a business to consumer business. Because when you're just learning from marketers who are B2B, well, it doesn't always translate as well when you're trying to use the same tactics on people, like regular people who have to use their regular dollars to pay for things. Hire a coach, it will turbo charge your trip to success.

Sarah Cottrell: I love that advice. I'm so glad you were able to come on the podcast today, Tasha. Do you have anything else that you would like to share with our listeners before we go? Then also just let everyone know where they can find you online if they want to follow you or know more about the things that you're doing.

Tasha Cochran: Okay, yeah, definitely. The one thing, my favorite thing that I love to teach people about, is having a one-year spending plan. This is especially great if you're going to be making a transition but it's good no matter what. I just want to encourage people to stop looking at their lives paycheck to paycheck or month to month, and start planning out your expenses for the entire year.

We have a free budget template that you can download, it's super easy to use. You can get it at onebighappylife.com/budget. Just start budgeting your entire year at a time. It's incredible how that can help empower you to take charge of your finances. Of course, you can find me at One Big Happy Life everywhere, onebighappylife.com and One Big Happy Life on YouTube and Instagram. We'd love for you to come visit us over there.

Sarah Cottrell: Awesome. Thank you so much for joining me today, Tasha.

Tasha Cochran: Oh, thank you for having me, Sarah. This has been such a fun conversation.

Sarah Cottrell: Thanks so much for listening today. I absolutely love getting to share these stories with you. If you haven't yet, subscribe to the show, and come on over to formerlawyer.com and join our community to get even more support and resources in your journey out of the law. Until next time. Have a great week.