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.

Hello everyone. I'm so excited to share my conversation with Simi Botic with you this week. Simi worked as an associate at a law firm for a couple of years, and during that time, she started her own business working as a health coach on the side and eventually built that business up to the point where she was able to leave her law firm job and has now been running that business full-time for almost five years.

She's a certified holistic health coach. She's an intuitive eating counselor. She wrote a book called Letting Go of Leo: How I Broke Up with Perfection. I'm excited to share this conversation with you so let's get to it.

Hi, Simi. Welcome to The Former Lawyer Podcast.

Simi Botic: Thank you so much for having me, Sarah. I'm really excited to be here with you today.

Sarah Cottrell: Yay! I'm so excited. I've really been looking forward to this conversation. Why don't we start with you introducing yourself to the listeners?

Simi Botic: Sure. My name is Simi. I am an intuitive eating counselor, a certified health coach, and the author of Letting Go of Leo. I'm also a mom of two little ones. I've got a three-year-old boy and an almost three-month-old girl. I live in Columbus, Ohio where I coach women virtually, privately, and in groups, perfectionist women, to help them heal their relationships with food and their bodies.

Sarah Cottrell: I love that. That is super interesting. I personally found intuitive eating, it was probably four or five years ago now, but have been working with intuitive eating RD for the last couple of years and it's been phenomenal. So I highly recommend that anyone out there who's like, “What are you talking about?” look into it more and we'll probably talk about it more on here. But to start, I'd like to focus more on the specifics of this is what you do now but you used to be a lawyer, hence The Former Lawyer Podcast.

Simi Botic: Exactly.

Sarah Cottrell: So let's go all the way back to before law school. Can you tell us what made you decide to go to law school?

Simi Botic: In undergrad, I majored in sociology and minored in Spanish. I loved my major of sociology. I was so into all the classes and really passionate about the coursework and I wasn't quite sure what I was going to do with that degree. There are a lot of different directions you can take it in and not one clear cut professional path.

As I was very passionate about this degree and the things I was studying, I also had a huge question mark about my future and what that would look like. Growing up, my dad had always told me that he thought I would be an amazing attorney and he brought that up often. As I was coming closer to the end of undergrad, I knew that a lot of people who had sociology degrees were going to take the LSAT and were going to apply to law school.

My dad really encouraged me to look into that path and thought it would be a great professional path for me. I had no idea really what I wanted to do or what I was going to do so I thought, “Sure, I'll take the LSAT. I'll apply to law school. We'll see what happens.” That is how I ended up going to law school.

Sarah Cottrell: I think honestly that something like that is a very common story. Already, I've talked with multiple guests on the podcast who said variations of like people told them, “You should go to law school because you're good at arguing,” for example. I'm curious to know what was it about your personality or your strengths that made your dad say you should go to law school. Was there something specific?

Simi Botic: Well, I think that it was that I was always a very strong-willed kid and very strong-willed, very driven, and very self-motivated. I think that he thought that all of those qualities would serve me well professionally. Also his dad had been an attorney. Just a little background on my dad, he was from Serbia, former Yugoslavia, and he came here, he immigrated to the US in his 30s and where he was from, there weren't really a lot of career paths so it was like you become a doctor, a lawyer, or a teacher.

He had very limited ideas of what a career would look like, could look like. I think for him, he was also seeing it through that lens. His dad was an attorney he saw a lot of similarities between me and his dad. He knew that it was a profession that I could do for the rest of my life or so he thought.

I feel like that's an important contextual piece of the story too is that he didn't necessarily see all the opportunities for careers that someone growing up in the US might see. When I picked sociology as a degree and when I minored in Spanish, he's like, “Wait a second, people just speak other languages,” he grew up speaking many different languages because he grew up in Europe and that's just part of their culture and their education, he did not understand that as an area of study. There were just some cultural differences there as well.

Sarah Cottrell: Got it. When you got to law school, at that point, were you in a headspace of, “Yes, this is what I'm doing and I definitely want to do this,” or was it more like you didn't know what to do with your sociology degree, you took the LSAT, and things just kept going? Explain a little bit more about where you were mentally going into law school and then once you got there.

Simi Botic: Sure. Mentally going into law school, I didn't know at the time that I was struggling with perfectionism but perfectionism was very much a part of my personality. Because of that, whatever was in front of me, I wanted to execute it perfectly and I wanted to make people really proud. I wanted to make my teachers proud. I wanted to make my parents proud. When I got to law school, I was 100% in, I was all in, and I wanted to do it perfectly.

I can't say if when I was there, I thought, “Oh, I'm so excited to be an attorney or this is my life's calling,” or anything like that, I don't think I had any of those thoughts or feelings, but what I know for certain that I was thinking and feeling is “I want to be as good as I can be here and I want to do the best job that I can. I want to be essentially perfect at this.” I felt very driven and committed to law school.

Sarah Cottrell: I really relate to that because I think it was similar for me. I was in law school and therefore I was going to be a law student and that was what I was going to do. I think that is the story for a lot of people who end up in law school.

I was just having this conversation earlier today with another guest but basically, this idea of many people who go to law school either have some perfectionist tendencies like you were talking about, or just are very achievement-oriented and always have been, like getting the gold stars, getting the teacher’s approval, and these sorts of things, which maybe serves you sometimes.

But if you hit law school and just keep on going and that's what's driving your decision-making process, I think it can be really challenging. Because like you said, and this was my experience too, you don't even really think about “Am I supposed to be here? Do I like this?”

Simi Botic: Totally. I don't want to fast forward us ahead so I'll keep this comment really short, but also law school is completely different than practicing law. Even though you can definitely be in the mindset of “I'm driven. I'm just going to do this well. I'm going to push through this. I'm very achievement-oriented,” the actual practice of law is not an achievement-oriented practice and you get knocked down so many times every single day. It's a hard mindset to have and to be successful and to do well and to be healthy when you are practicing law ultimately if you have that mindset.

Sarah Cottrell: Yes. That's a great transition point. Let's talk about, so you're in law school and you are going along the perfectionist track of “I'm just going to do everything that I'm supposed to do in this role that I'm currently in,” and you're going to graduate from law school and you need a job. At that point, did you have a specific job in mind? What were you looking for and then how did you end up in your first job out of law school?

Simi Botic: In law school, I clerked for a judge. I worked for the attorney general crime victim services and I also worked at a law firm in basically medical malpractice. I had three very different work experiences during law school. I went to law school in Chicago. During my third year in law school, I got a job offer for a law firm back in Columbus, Ohio which is where I am originally from and where I now live.

This job offer was interesting because I had actually applied to be a summer associate at this law firm the summer between 2L and 3L year and I did not get the summer associate position. I went in for the interview and I felt like it was a great fit and they didn't end up picking me. But the person who I think they did end up picking didn't end up being the right fit or didn't accept their job offer and so they ultimately reached out to me to offer me an associate position for after-law-school full-time associate position.

I flew home. I interviewed, it ended up being a great fit and so I accepted that offer Thanksgiving during my 3L year. I didn't give too much thought to it because I graduated law school in 2011 and there were tons of people who I knew who were graduating law school and were not able to find jobs in the legal profession and were working other jobs, still applying one, two years out of law school. So the fact that I had a great job offer, I was so grateful for that and said yes instantly and there really wasn't too much to think about. I was just so grateful to have that job security.

Sarah Cottrell: Yeah. I graduated in 2008. R2L summer of that class year was the very end of the good times in the legal profession and then basically, that next year, so people graduated in ‘09 and then ‘09, ‘10, ‘11 in particular is when it really took a huge dive in terms of just job availability and people being able to get legal jobs. I’m definitely familiar with what you're talking about.

Because even for me, at the firm that I started at, there were two rounds of layoffs during that time in terms of “reduction in force”. Anyway, basically, you were in the headspace of “I'm lucky to get a legal job” so you weren't really thinking “Is this particular legal job a good fit for me?” or something like that?

Simi Botic: Right. Like I mentioned, I didn't really have a vision for my legal career because I didn't really have an underlying passion of something that I wanted to do. I wanted to work hard at whatever I did and I wanted to do well but I didn't know exactly what that was going to be. So to me, the job offer was amazing because it was somewhere where I could work and I could work hard and I could hopefully do well, and what the specifics were weren't really that important because I didn't have this ideal of what my legal career would look like.

Sarah Cottrell: Yes. I think that it is really common that people go to law school and their plan is essentially, “I'm going to be a lawyer.” I know for me, I didn't even really know any practicing lawyers so I didn't necessarily have a great vision of what it even looked like to practice as a lawyer, and like you said, law school and practicing law are two very different things.

You're not a lawyer now but you were a lawyer in 2011, so that was eight years ago at the time we're recording. Talk to me about that process, you got to the firm and were things going okay in terms of you liking it at first? Did you get there and you were immediately like, “Oh, my goodness, what did I do?” Talk to me about that process.

Simi Botic: I started out in litigation. Litigation was not a good fit for my personality and that was pretty clear right off the bat. We call it turbulent. I was not good at litigation. My natural skills did not lend themselves to litigation. I was very anxious all the time. It was a really, really rough first six months. I honestly thought, “This law firm could let me go,” that's what I was thinking. It was not a good fit.

But the amazing thing in all of that was that in an effort to hit my hour requirement, I ended up going around to other practice groups and asking if they had any extra work that I could do to hit my hours. I ended up taking on a lot of work for a partner who was in the corporate healthcare department and I loved working with him.

I really enjoyed the actual work and he ultimately became my mentor who fought for me to come over to his practice group where I ended up transferring over to before the end of my first year. It was a much better fit. I loved the attorneys that I worked with. I loved the partners that I worked for. The work ended up being a way better fit for my personality and my skill set and my natural abilities. Then the next two-ish years, I worked in corporate healthcare.

Sarah Cottrell: Got it. Did you choose litigation because you thought that you would like it or was that where you were placed because that's where they had the need?

Simi Botic: I was placed there because they had the need. That was what they offered me. Also, there was part of me that was like, “Sure, litigation, that's like what all the attorneys do in the movies.” I love the firm like I love that movie. I think there's this idea that everything in the media that you see is like litigators so I thought, “Sure, this is great. I can do this. I like watching it on TV, and that could not have been further from the truth.”

If I truly believe that if it hadn't been for this amazing partner who took me under his wing and mentored me, I feel like I would not have made it to the end of my first year there, not because I would have quit but because I'm pretty sure they would have let me go. They were probably thinking, “This girl is not cut out for this at all,” which I was not. I was definitely not great at litigation.

If there are any attorneys listening to this and they're questioning if maybe a different area of law would be a better fit for them, one of the great things about practicing law is there are so many different areas that I think there are a lot of opportunities to find the right fit for you. I think that's an encouraging thing about the profession.

Sarah Cottrell: Yeah. Part of the reason that I was asking was because I know a lot of people, and I am one of those people who went into litigation because they like research and writing, but as you said, I had a similar personality I think to what you're describing of your personality and therefore I just really did not like the confrontational nature of litigation. It was just one of those things where it was like, “Oh, yeah, no, I like research and writing but that doesn't actually mean that I like litigation.” I think that happens for a lot of people.

Simi Botic: Definitely.

Sarah Cottrell: You transferred over to corporate healthcare and you said you were there for two years, so what happened at the end of those two years?

Simi Botic: I was probably closer to two and a half years, at the end of that time, I transitioned full-time into running the business that I have now. For the last six months of that time, I actually worked part-time at the law firm. I asked them if it would be possible to go to part-time where I would work at the firm three days a week and then do my coaching two days a week. I did that for six months and then ultimately left to do this full time.

Sarah Cottrell: Tell me how you found what you're doing now and how you made that decision to pursue it as a business and to make that transition. I know those are a lot of questions, so just talk about anything in that area.

Simi Botic: Sure, yeah. I found the career that I'm doing now because I worked with someone who was doing and is still doing what I am doing now. I shared a little bit about how I didn't realize it was a struggle but I was struggling with perfectionism when I started law school. I loved law school. I loved so many things about law school and if I could do it again, I would do it again.

There are so many awesome things about that experience for me when I look back on it and also personally, I was struggling a lot during that time in my relationship with food and really just a lot of very excessive, obsessive, and extreme behaviors around exercising and dieting. When I started working at the law firm, I also simultaneously got married at that same time and it was this turning point where I realized that I needed to get help with my relationship with food and exercise.

So I started working with a health coach and a therapist in my personal life, so totally separate from the practice of law. I was seeking this personal support for my own mental, emotional, and physical health. Through doing that and through doing my own personal healing work, I discovered that “Oh, my gosh, I'm really passionate about this and these messages. I am really interested in helping women who are struggling in similar ways to how I was struggling.”

While I was practicing law full-time, I went back and first, originally I did a year-long coaching certification program and then another six-month certification program after that and started seeing clients at 7:00 AM or 7:00 PM before and after I would go to the law firm and just absolutely fell in love with coaching.

For the first time in my life, I felt really passionate about something professionally and it was really this interesting aha moment because like I mentioned before, I really, really liked the partners that I worked for in the corporate health care department. They were amazing, they were and are amazing people and awesome mentors.

I can remember sitting in their office and talking to them about their careers and them sharing that they just loved to do this work and they felt like they were on fire when they were doing this work. They were so excited about it. I can remember sitting there thinking, “I don't know what that feels like. I'm sure I'll get there maybe when I do this for 10 years or 15 years, or maybe when I make partner, I'll finally have that feeling.” But I hadn't had it at that point and I didn't know what that felt like.

I can remember specific instances of having those conversations and thinking, “That's so strange. I've never had that feeling.” Then when I started coaching on the side, the first coaching session I ever had with a client, I felt like I was on fire in the most wonderful way possible. I realized, “Oh my gosh, I'm not having that feeling because I don't have the passion for that work that my mentors have for that work, there's a disconnect there and that disconnect is present when I'm practicing law. But when I'm doing this coaching work, I feel so connected and so passionate about it.”

I don't think your career has to be something that you're super, super passionate about. I don't think that's a requirement or a necessity, but once I had that feeling for something, it was really, really, really hard to go back and not have that feeling. There was this huge contrast where I was working really hard at the law firm, putting in all these hours, and giving it so much focus and attention and I wasn't feeling like it was lighting me up, then I would coach and I was feeling that. It made it hard to go to work and I had this realization of “Whatever I do, I'm going to work really hard at it.” I think that's always going to be an ingrained part of my personality. I would rather work really hard at something that I feel passionately about.

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Sarah Cottrell: That makes total sense. For people who are listening and hear you talking about coaching or saying, “You're a health coach. I don't know what that is,” could you just talk a little bit about the specifics of what that is and what you do?

Simi Botic: Sure. At its most basic level, if you're working with a coach, basically you are setting goals with this person and that person is helping you get closer to those goals. The women that I work with are setting goals typically in their relationships with themselves around food, body image, exercise, perfectionism and I am supporting them and helping them to achieve those goals and to experience those things in their lives. The women that I work with around intuitive eating typically have histories of chronic dieting and are looking to let go of a lot of the rules, rigidity, shame, and guilt in their relationships with food to experience food freedom.

Sarah Cottrell: Tell me a little bit more about what your thinking was at the time that you decided to transition to doing this full-time and specifically, I'm thinking about the fact that there are a lot of people who want to leave their legal job and do something else, something that they enjoy more. But one of the things that really holds them back is concern about what other people will think, either loved ones or other people at the firm or law school classmates, basically people being like, “What are you doing?” Talk to me about that. Was that something that you experienced? If not, why not and how do you think people should approach that issue?

Simi Botic: Sure, yes. I definitely experienced it. I experienced it from co-workers. My dad definitely did not understand what I was doing and it was really hard for him. He passed away two years ago so he's no longer with us but at the time when I made the job transition, when I started my business over five years ago, he did not understand what I was doing.

Again, going back to the context that I gave earlier, he was like, “A health coach? I've never heard of this career in my life. This isn't even like a thing. This doesn't even sound like a thing.” I had plenty of people who didn't understand and either questioned it or were very audibly not supportive. Yes, definitely experienced that.

I also had a lot of people both in the law firm and not who were incredibly supportive and who expressed that, “Hey, I've had a dream of doing this other thing and I never went after it and I really regret not doing that.” I also heard those kinds of stories as well. I think for me, it came down to the fact that it was my life and I was the one who was going to have to work another however many years, like 40 more years of a career, and I was the only one who was going to have to do that and so I needed to feel okay about the choice that I was making.

I knew very clearly what the right choice for me was and so it just came back over and over and over again to trusting in that and to surround myself with people who believed in me and encouraged me even when there were people who maybe didn't understand, and to remind myself that someone not understanding my choice isn't really about me, that's more about them and that's okay. Not everyone has to understand my decisions, not everyone has to support them, but at the end of the day, I need to feel okay about the decisions that I'm making and I need to believe in the decisions that I'm making even if everybody else doesn't.

Something that encouraged me was that I still have my law degree, I still have that experience, it doesn't mean that I can never go back to that. If I started my business and it wasn't what I thought it was going to be or it wasn't the right fit, there's no shame in going back to practicing law. I always felt that to be very true.

Even to this day, I still tell myself, I'm like, “If you ever change your mind and you want to go back to practicing as an attorney or you want to do something that's more of a traditional path with your law degree, you can do that.” I think that also helped me as well. I am very much of the mindset that nothing has to be permanent, nothing's permanent and so just remembering that was very encouraging to me and helpful in those times where I would start to second-guess myself a little bit.

Then the other thing is at the at the time, I was our primary income in my family and I needed to provide a certain level of income. I very much took my time with the transition. I built up my business on the side. It was very exhausting to work full-time at a law firm and be building up a business on the side but like I said, I was passionate about it. I knew I was playing the long game in terms of my business and I wanted to make it happen. I very much believed in that.

I took my time to build up my business until it got to the point where I could provide the level of income for my business that I needed to before I left the law firm. I think oftentimes, there's this narrative around leaving a more traditional career to do something different that you just jump right into it. It's like one day you just go in and quit your job or throw your laptop out the window or whatever, whatever visual we have of this like this is a big grandiose moment.

If that's what's right for someone, great, more power to you. That was not my experience at all and that was not my journey or my transition. It was slow, it was very calculated. I took my time. There were times where I wanted to just quit because I was so exhausted and overwhelmed, but that wasn't an option. The transition was slow and very calculated.

At the end of the day, I really cared about the people that I worked with at the law firm so I wanted the transition to be respectful and I wanted to be very, very professional and thoughtful about it because I cared about them and I cared about the work that I was doing and the team that I was a part of.

Sarah Cottrell: I think that's all really helpful insight and in particular, I agree with you that there sometimes tends to be this narrative of either you stay in your legal job forever or you quit today with no safety net, which again, I'm not saying that no one should do that because I've had guests on the podcast who essentially did that and have gone on to do amazing things and it's been very good for them and it was what they needed to do.

But for people who haven't listened, because I talked about my story on the first episode of the podcast, so I graduated in '08 and I just left the law last summer, so that's 10 years. I knew within the first three years that I didn't want to be a lawyer forever, but there were various things that needed to happen in particular, especially because both my husband and I went to law school, we had a lot of law school loans and we wanted to pay those off. I think that you can not be happy in your legal job and want to make a change and have it be, like you said, an incremental plan and not just the options of “I'm going to stay here forever or I'm going to quit immediately.”

Simi Botic: Definitely. Like you said, there's nothing wrong with being the person whose story is like “I went in and quit and I had no safety net and I figured it out,” if that's what's right for someone, that's what's right for someone, but it's also okay if that is not what's right for you. One thing that helped me a lot during the time where I was doing both and I was ready to leave but it wasn't time to leave yet, which I feel like you just touched upon is that there were benefits that were coming from working at the law firm.

I had the financial benefit to start my business while I had a full-time job and there were things that I was able to do in my business because of the law firm that I would not have been able to do otherwise if I had not had that income. I do think that if you're in that position where you're straddling two worlds or you need to stay longer than you want to, it does help mentally to think about what are the benefits of being there if you have to be there.

Sarah Cottrell: Yes. I think that's so true. This touches on another topic that I wanted to talk about a little bit which is that very often, I hear from people—and this was the case for me as well—that one of the main things that's holding them back from leaving is student loan debt. There are a lot of different narratives around that, but there are certainly some people who basically say, “Well, I have a lot of student loans so I could never leave or I could never make another choice.” Can you talk a little bit about your thinking around that issue and how you approached it?

Simi Botic: I think everyone is in a unique financial situation and the demands that they have on them, whether it's mortgage, loans, both, whatever it might be. What I did is I sat down with an accountant and my husband and we talked about realistically, what did we need to have every month coming in, what did we need to do to be responsible to be making the payments that we needed to be making. I waited until my business got to the place that it needed to get to be able to do that.

Sarah Cottrell: Got it, yeah. I think sometimes, like you were saying, we were just talking about the whole black and white approach of either you stay in the law forever or you quit today. I think also with student loans, there tends to be a little bit of black and white thinking where people think either “I have to pay off every single penny before I leave or I'm just never going to pay it off and there's no hope.” Again, like you said, everyone's financial situation is different so I'm not trying to say one of those things is true and one of those things is not true. But I think if you're someone listening who has student loans and that is factoring into your decision, I think it is important, like Simi was saying, to think about what will work for you in your situation.

Simi, in your situation, you sat down and figured out what did you need to be bringing in order to be making the payments that you needed to make. For us, we sat down and ultimately decided we want to pay these off before we make particularly big transitions, although we did make career moves in those 10 years to jobs that were a better fit than the first Biglaw jobs that we were in. Both of those are totally viable, good options and there are tons of other ones that other people have done that are not at all like what we did or what you did. But I think it's important to not let yourself get trapped in that black and white thinking of it's all or nothing.

Simi Botic: Absolutely. I think this is true any time there's financial concerns, don't be afraid to look at numbers, don't be afraid to just really look at the numbers and figure out what the different options are. I love that you said that you went to jobs that were better fits. That's getting out of that black and white thinking. It's not like, “I have to stay at this job forever until I pay these off.”

Maybe there's a job that would feel better to go to every day or maybe there's a job that would allow you to pay your loans off more quickly or would allow you to make whatever other payments that you have or other financial obligations that you have on you to do that more quickly. I think there are so many ways that people can approach things like these and the first step is just being willing to look at the numbers.

Sarah Cottrell: I agree. Simi, if you were talking to someone and they either were saying, “I'm thinking about leaving the law but I'm not sure,” or they were saying, “I definitely know that I want to leave but I'm not sure what I want to do,” they haven't yet found the thing that they want to do in the way that you did, what advice would you give them?

Simi Botic: I don't know if this is advice, but I would say start to be really, really, really curious with yourself about what is it that you appreciated about your job, what do you like about your job because most people can find at least something that they appreciate or like about their job or their career, what is it that you don't, what is it that you're craving or that you want to be different and really would be curious about what are your values in your life right now that you want your career to be helping you to experience more of.

Is it that you want more work-life balance? Is it that you want to be using a different skill set? Is it that you want more flexibility? Really, really thinking about what is it that you want because what I wouldn't want someone to experience is to say, “I don't want to do this career,” and then without thinking through it at all jump into something where they're like, “Well, wait, I don't want to do this either or this isn't any better and I would rather go back to my old job.”

I think in any situation that we're in, it's just so good to be curious about ourselves like, “What do I like about this, what don't I like about this, and what would I ideally like to be different?” I think sometimes when we're uncomfortable or when something isn't going well, we are so distracted by that discomfort that we aren't asking ourselves really, really important questions.

Sarah Cottrell: Yes. I think that's so true. I think curiosity and then also honesty, which I think is what you were getting at with the last thing that you said, because I think especially if you're in a situation where you are feeling some distress, sometimes you don't even realize that you're not being fully honest with yourself.

Simi Botic: Yes, and with that honesty, I just love that you brought that up because it made me think of something which is that sometimes people think they need a different career when really what they need is something totally different. If you're talking about how you really don't like your job and you don't like being an attorney and maybe the reasons that come out are that you actually like the work but you have a boundary problem at work, so maybe you really do like your career but what you need to do is work on putting up better boundaries, and if you had those boundaries in place, you would actually really like your job. I think when we're able to be curious and be really honest, sometimes we discover that the problem that we thought we had isn't even the actual problem.

Sarah Cottrell: I'm really glad you brought that up because this is something I mentioned on an earlier episode but I'd been thinking recently that I should probably mention it more frequently which is clearly this podcast is geared towards the idea that you can leave the law and do other things and if you want to leave the law, you should, and let's figure out a way for you to do that.

But I think it can be easy for unhappy lawyers to drop into this mindset of “Everything that's wrong in my life is wrong because my job sucks and if I have a different job, then everything will magically be better,” and that I think—and this is what you are getting at—is really dangerous thinking because I'm not saying you shouldn't leave your lawyer job, obviously, I am pro that, but if your thinking is essentially, even if you're not actually telling yourself this exact phrase, but if you think that leaving your law job for a different type of job is going to fix all the problems in your life, it's not. Ultimately, leaving the law is not actually going to help you if you haven't also figured out what are the other things that you need to be working on that have nothing to do, in many cases, with being a lawyer.

Simi Botic: Totally. If people pleasing is making your life miserable at a law firm, it's going to make your life miserable at any job you get after that. If it's a boundaries issue, if you're struggling with perfectionism, all of these things, those are deeper-rooted things that can be addressed and can be fixed, and whether or not you decide to leave the law, that's completely up to you but those things that we struggle with at the law firm, we typically still struggle with when we leave and have to deal with them.

Sarah Cottrell: Yes, which sometimes you need to leave in order to have the head space to deal with them. Again, I'm not trying to say if your job is terrible, don't leave because if your job is terrible and you don't like being a lawyer, I think you totally should leave, but I do think it is important. I don't want it to ever come across as though I'm advocating for like “If you just weren't a lawyer, then everything in your life would be perfect” because that is not accurate.

Simi Botic: Totally.

Sarah Cottrell: Yeah. Simi, is there anything else about your story or anything else that you would want to tell people who are listening to the podcast and thinking about leaving the law?

Simi Botic: I think for me the biggest thing that I come back to a lot is that my time in law school and my time practicing law were not a waste of my time. Often when I'm having conversations with someone, and now I've been doing the job that I have now and have had this business and this career for so long that a lot of people now don't know that I was ever an attorney, it's been so many years that it's not necessarily part of the current narrative, and if they find out they'll say, “Oh, my gosh, do you feel like that was such a waste or do you wish you hadn't wasted that time, energy, investment, or any of those things?”

For me, it really was not a waste. I learned so much. I gained so many valuable skills. I feel like there are so many things that I learned and skills that I developed and parts of myself that I got to know during that time, not to mention people that I met, relationships that I cultivated, and all of those things that it doesn't feel like a waste at all. I say that only because people ask me that question probably more often than anything else when they find out about my career transition and so I'm sure anybody who is making a career transition out of the law is going to be asked that question.

I just want to share that hopefully as encouragement that just because you choose to go in a non-traditional direction or you change course a little bit doesn't mean that the time that you spent in law school or practicing law was a waste. If anything, I feel like every step of our journey brings us to the next step and so I see it as a necessary and important part of my professional and personal development.

Sarah Cottrell: I love that. I think that is so true and that's a really good and helpful insight. Before we wrap up, do you want to let everyone know where they can find you and connect with you online?

Simi Botic: Sure. Everything basically is my name, so simibotic.com. I'm on instagram at @simibotic.

Sarah Cottrell: Perfect. Okay, well, thank you so much, Simi, for joining me today on the podcast.

Simi Botic: Thank you so much for having me, Sarah. I really appreciate it and I really appreciate the work that you're doing with this podcast. I feel like it's such an important resource and honestly, I wish it had been around years ago when I would have soaked up every single episode, so thank you for everything that you're doing.

Sarah Cottrell: Oh, thank you so much.

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.