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. This week on the podcast, I'm sharing my conversation with Gaby Abrams. Gaby left legal practice five years ago and opened an online stationery shop on Etsy, Casa Confetti. She shares how she grew that business to the point that it replaced her income as a lawyer and all of the challenges and mindset issues she ran into along the way.

Before we get to the episode, I'm so thrilled to let you know that The Former Lawyer Collaborative, my support community for high-achieving women in legal practice who are interested in exploring a career outside of the law is open for enrollment for about the next week until April 1st. If you've heard me talk about it before, you know that this is the community that I wish existed when I was practicing in Biglaw.

The Collaborative consists of two main things: a community forum that isn't on Facebook where you can connect with like-minded women, and bi-weekly workshops and monthly mastermind-style hot seat calls. Our first workshop in April will be How To Create an Effective Resume, Leveraging Your Transferable Skills as a Lawyer, and Positioning Yourself for the Job You Want.

All workshops and calls will be recorded so that you can watch them at any time if you can't attend live. You can sign up at formerlawyer.com/collab. Okay, on to my conversation with Gaby.

Hi, Gaby. Welcome to The Former Lawyer Podcast.

Gaby Abrams: Hi. Thank you so much for having me.

Sarah Cottrell: I am really excited to hear your story so let's get started with you introducing yourself to the listeners.

Gaby Abrams: Sounds great. My name is Gaby Abrams and I am a creative mompreneur living in Miami, Florida. I have an online stationery business called Casa Confetti. I've been doing that now for almost five years. Now I've started branching out a little bit into doing some mindset work and business coaching. I started branching out into that over the summer. I'm excited to see where that will take me.

Sarah Cottrell: That's awesome. You also, of course, are a former lawyer so let's talk about that and start with where we always start on the podcast, which is how did you decide to go to law school?

Gaby Abrams: Great. How did I decide to go to law school? To give you an idea of how much I did not know what I wanted to do, I went to the University of Miami and I did the pre-med track. I graduated with a bachelor of science in biology with a chem minor and I had taken so many humanities courses because I loved writing and I loved reading that I also ended up with a bachelor of arts in English literature with a minor in psychology.

Basically, I took like every single class you could possibly take at the college of arts and sciences. Then when the time came to apply to med school to take the MCAT, I had realized at some point that it wasn't really what I wanted to do. I was not a super science person. I wasn't sure I wanted to go to med school. It was a huge commitment.

My dad is a lawyer. My aunt was a judge. My uncle was a lawyer. My cousins are all lawyers. It was something that people in my family just did so I found myself saying, “I'm going to apply to law school.” I applied to law school. I got into Florida State with a full ride and I figured that this was the best career path for me. Like a lot of lawyers, I think I went into it thinking, very misguidedly, that you could be a lawyer and go do anything.

Because that's for some reason they tell you that like, “Just go to law school and then you can graduate and do anything you want.” I think we'll probably go into what the misconceptions are there. But that was my trajectory to law school. I ended up going to Florida State and I graduated in 2012.

Sarah Cottrell: Okay. It's funny, I often tell people that former lawyers are doing lots of different things which is different from saying you can do anything with a law degree. A big part of that is people getting into the legal profession and then realizing, “Oh, I do not want to do this.” Which is not to say that you don't have skills that you develop as a lawyer that translate to other things. You certainly do and we've talked about that on the podcast before. But that myth of “There are so many things you can do with a law degree,” it's actually very specialized and what you can do with a law degree is be a lawyer.

Gaby Abrams: Right. If you want to do anything else, you are much better off just jumping into doing anything else.

Sarah Cottrell: Yes. It's really interesting. I think that idea that maybe that's not really accurate is starting to become more widespread but I still hear it honestly a lot just from people in my everyday life; people who get referred to me like, “Oh, you're interested in going to law school. You should talk to Sarah,” and I'm like, “I have so many thoughts. Let me tell you all of them.”

But you had family members who had been lawyers so I guess unlike someone like me who literally knew no one who was a lawyer when I went to law school and had a disturbingly incomplete picture of what it actually was to be a lawyer, it sounds like you grew up around some lawyers. What expectations did you have for what your life would look like as a lawyer or could look like based on the people in your family who were lawyers already?

Gaby Abrams: Honestly, I knew exactly what I was getting myself into. I remember being young and my dad would be up all night—he was a litigator so he would be up all night with dozens and stacks and stacks of paper back when we had one computer centralized in the middle of our living room. He'd be just up all night prepping for trial.

Just the stress that I saw and he always advised me, “Don't be a lawyer whatever you do.” I think part of it was rebellion and “I'm going to do this and I'm going to do it differently. I'm going to carve out a different career path for myself,” which I did because I did a lot of public interest stuff while I was in law school. I really wanted to keep on that trajectory.

When I moved to New York, I ended up doing immigration law. It was different from anything that I had seen my dad doing. It was a different lifestyle but it still wasn't completely me and it wasn't totally fulfilling.

Sarah Cottrell: You got to law school, you had some idea of what you would do, and then you moved to New York, and you were practicing immigration law. Talk to me about how long you did that and what it was like and then what you ended up doing next.

Gaby Abrams: When I first moved to New York, I actually had already decided that I didn't want to be a lawyer. I ended up in New York. I met my husband at law school so he ended up getting a Biglaw job in New York City so I moved with him. I never really had that idea in my head that I wanted to be a New York lawyer. I feel like it's a certain kind of law practice. It's something that people have wanted to be their whole lives when you say, “I want to move to New York City. I want to be a practicing attorney there.”

That was never really where I saw myself really. Moving there, I had already made the decision that being a lawyer was not necessarily for me. I started out, I got a job in finance recruiting. I did that for a couple of years and then I realized that I needed to give being a lawyer a shot.

Even if I felt like it wasn't for me, in my heart maybe it was and I just needed to know that for sure, practice for a little while just to say to myself that I had done it so that I would never live with that doubt of giving up or feeling like I had kept myself from doing something that I could have really loved. I ended up getting a job at a small law firm doing immigration law. I did that until I had my son Levi in 2015.

Sarah Cottrell: Got it. I'm interested to know, you said by the time you're moving to New York, you pretty much knew, “Hey, this isn't for me,” does that mean basically you were in law school and you had this realization, “Oh, I'm going to be graduating and I don't really want to do the job that this degree is geared towards”? How did that realization come about? I think that would be helpful for people to hear just because, of course, there are a lot of listeners who are in the “I don't want to be a lawyer” and maybe have felt that way for a very long time even since law school situation.

Gaby Abrams: Yeah, absolutely. While I was in law school, I had worked at small firms. I knew Biglaw wasn't for me from the get-go and I had worked at small firms that weren't really necessarily for me either. What I really enjoyed was that public interest stuff. I had built a network in Florida for myself for that and then when I moved to New York, I didn't have that anymore and it's hard to start over in that sense.

I think that for me, it was more like I already knew going into law school that being a Biglaw attorney wasn't going to be for me or that being a litigator wasn't necessarily going to be for me. I remember in law school, I did hearings as a public interest attorney and even that, I just remember the anxiety that I felt before my hearings.

They say hearings but it's really like a small trial because it's administrative so it's an administrative hearing. I remember just feeling so sick to my stomach for the entire week leading up to it and I had another attorney that was mentoring us, she said, “I remember when I was an administrative law judge and we had a stressful hearing, I would be sick to my stomach the whole week,” and I said, “But that's what you did every week,” and she said, “Yes, exactly.”

I just knew that that wasn't something for me. Literally, my gut was telling me that this wasn't for me, that I wasn't enjoying that level of stress, I wasn't enjoying that level of anxiety. I felt like my body was giving me a really, really visceral reaction to it because I had a lot of stomach issues and a lot of ailments all throughout law school even though I would say that I enjoyed law school. That gives you some idea about what was going on.

There are people that hate law school, I think a lot of people. I actually liked it and still my body was just like, “This is stressful. This is wrong.” I felt that anxiety on a very, very physical level. I think I knew that wasn't going to be for me. Actually, immigration law was not a bad fit because I really didn't have hearings.

There was a lot of paperwork, working in an office, doing forms, and that kind of stuff, meeting with clients which I did enjoy. I just knew that there was something else out there that I would really, really enjoy. I think that I also knew that I had the courage to go after that.

Sarah Cottrell: Yeah. Your observation about how you felt about hearings or standing up in court or whatever, I think that is really important. Of course, this is partially because my own experience, I graduated from law school, I went into a Biglaw litigation job, and I just never was excited about the idea of being in court, going to a hearing, doing a deposition, and I saw other people who loved that stuff. That was the stuff they lived for, that was the stuff that made all of the other stuff that you had to do in the job worthwhile.

I think for a long time I felt like, “Oh, well, there's something wrong with me. There's something wrong with me because I don't like this and feel sick to my stomach at the prospect of this.” I do think there is this idea in the legal practice of like, “Well, you shouldn't listen to yourself and what your body, what your emotions, or your mind are telling you about how you feel about the job. You should just figure out a way to be good at it because it's completely mind over matter.”

I think we're really encouraged as lawyers to discount our own intuition. That actually is not very healthy. Certainly, you can push yourself in certain areas but it wasn't until I was willing to accept like, “Hey, there are just some people who like this and I'm not one of those people, and that's okay. That doesn't mean anything. It's not some moral judgment. It's just it is what it is.”

It doesn't need to be this big thing that I was able to actually feel the freedom to figure out, “Hey, what do I want to do? Because it's clearly not this thing that makes me feel ill.”

Gaby Abrams: Yeah. It was the thing where everybody that I talked to had, “Well, that's how we all feel. We all feel sick to our stomach for a week.” I was like, “Okay, that's great but that's not really how I want to live my life.”

Sarah Cottrell: Yeah. I think it's very normalized in a way that is unfortunate because you end up with people basically telling themselves like, “Okay, I'm feeling this isn't right but I must be wrong and I just need to keep going.” But that wasn't what you ended up doing, so talk to me about how you went from practicing at the immigration law firm to what you're doing in your business today.

Gaby Abrams: I went into immigration law probably with the same mentality that a lot of people do that it was going to be really helpful, really fulfilling, that I was going to wake up every day happy about the change that I was making in people's lives. I went in really idealistic and I found that it wasn't really that. It was a lot of forms. Even when I met with clients, there was a lot that you can't do. It was a lot of turning people away and saying, “There's nothing really that we can do.”

Even when you are really successful, it's only like one aspect of this whole situation that you're fixing. I just found that I didn't make as much of a connection with people as I was hoping to have. I'm someone that really thrives on connections, thrives on meeting new people, helping people, and talking to people. I didn't necessarily get that from my immigration law job.

Sarah Cottrell: Got it. You mentioned your oldest was born in 2015. Is that the point that you ended up leaving that job? Where in the process did you end up leaving and then when was it that you started your business?

Gaby Abrams: A lot of it was lifestyle. My husband is a Biglaw attorney and he was working when we were in New York City, we moved to Miami since, but when we were in New York City, he would work until 9:30 at night, that was a normal day. Sometimes he would be working till 2:00 AM, 3:00 AM so I knew that I couldn't be doing the same thing.

Even just financially like having a 24-hour nanny situation just wasn't going to work. We didn't have family up there. We didn't have that kind of support system. I knew that it wasn't going to work for us, that dynamic. At the same time, working, let's say scaling back to part-time or even doing full-time at the firm where I was, financially it just didn't make a lot of sense.

People are always talking about part-time and how you can scale back. But the truth is that it's just not particularly fulfilling. I gave it a shot and it just wasn't right for me because I felt like I wasn't achieving on the level that I wanted to achieve, and then at the same time, you're also not making the money that you want to be making to justify this kind of thing.

I knew that I wanted to have a lifestyle that let me be really flexible and let me be at home with my son. Like I said we didn't have family up there so that was something that was important to me. Also, that just let me make the kind of money that I want to make and achieve the things that I wanted to achieve for myself.

Starting a business just made sense from that perspective because even though I started out and I had no idea where I was going to take this and if it was going to work, I knew that it was something that was going to tide me over for a year, a year and a half until I could figure out whether I wanted to go back to immigration law, do another kind of law, or what I wanted to do.

But then it ended up really taking off. Then pretty soon, I was making more money from home than I was making going into an office every day as an immigration lawyer. Financially, it made a lot of sense. Money was a big driver in my decision because I knew that I wanted to have a career for myself. I had student loan payments so I knew that I had to do something. That's what ended up making the most sense for me at the time.

Sarah Cottrell: Talk to me about what type of business you started and just some of the specifics of how you started, what you were selling, and those sorts of things.

Gaby Abrams: Initially, I started out just offering birthday digital invitations on Etsy. I had noticed that there was a market for this thing and it's something that I had always enjoyed doing when I had my own baby shower, I had my wedding, that kind of stuff. Stationary was always something that I really enjoyed.

I started doing that and at first, I obviously did not think that I was going to be making a significant amount of money doing this because I always thought of Etsy as a crafting kind of thing and people selling their crafts online. I thought you could make a couple of hundred dollars a month, which when you're on maternity leave is fine. I just wanted to keep myself busy and I wanted to be bringing in some money because I didn't have paid maternity leave.

But then what I noticed is that there actually was a huge market for this. Then pretty soon, I was making a lot of money. I would say by the time that six months had passed and it was time to really start thinking seriously about what I was going to do as far as going back to work, getting another job, or what my plan was, it was starting to make financial sense to be doing this.

So I branched out into printed invitations and offering more wedding stuff, baby showers, bridal showers. It really took off. I think by my second year, I had already made over $150,000 for the year, which was crazy to me. I found that obviously, the more seriously I took it and the more I saw it as a viable career option to be an entrepreneur and to be a creative entrepreneur, the more I opened up my mind to actually making a lot of money from it.

Because I think at first, it was hard, especially for me, I grew up in an immigrant family and everybody was either a doctor or a lawyer and it was very much like if you want to make money, you have to be one of the two. There's this misconception, or not, that to make money, you really have to be in one of these two professions.

For me, I had a big block around that because I felt like I didn't want to do that but I still wanted to be successful and I still wanted to live the kind of life that I would have lived otherwise. It was, I would say, mostly a lot of work to get myself mentally to that point where I had really accepted that this was something that could make me successful.

Sarah Cottrell: Hey there. It's me again all by myself in the middle of the podcast here to share a little more about The Former Lawyer Collaborative. I wanted to talk about a few more features of the Collaborative that I think are really important. Number one, it's private and confidential. To join, you must complete a short three-question application. The application is not intended to be daunting or stressful and is solely intended to make sure that this community is a fit for you and that you're committed to the confidentiality, needed to develop a thriving community.

Number two: it's affordable. I know there are plenty of women who need help with a long-term plan to leave the law with support that is flexible and available on their schedule without being a strain. Founding members who joined during its beta launch lock in the founding member rate of $19 a month or $190 annually.

Number three: as a founding member, you'll have the opportunity to shape exactly what the Collaborative offers. If you're ready to join you can go to formerlawyer.com/collab. Okay, back to the conversation.

Sarah Cottrell: Tell me a little bit about selling on Etsy. Because I have a couple of friends who have Etsy shops and I've bought, I think probably most people at this point have bought things on Etsy, but it is a huge marketplace. I'd love to know just a little bit about how you build a business on Etsy and get noticed in the noise.

Gaby Abrams: I think I was lucky because I started in 2015. I think there is a little bit more competition now but it's also grown a lot more because when I started out, I think that there were way fewer sellers and there were also way fewer buyers. I think it was just starting to be seen as the go-to place for weddings and parties.

I followed that natural evolution with the marketplace and as the marketplace grew, I saw that my sales and my revenue grew as well because more people were going to Etsy as their go-to for this kind of thing. I always tell everybody, if you want to start a business, starting one on an online marketplace is really easy because you have that built-in traffic.

I didn't have to do a lot of promotion. I was able to really get in and hit the ground running just making money right from the beginning. I didn't have to worry about marketing myself. I didn't have to worry about investing in my business. I was able to start with I think 20 cents to list an item. I started with a three-dollar pack of clip art that I had purchased and free fonts.

It wasn't a huge investment on my end. It also wasn't a huge time investment because I was able to just make a design, post it on my website, and then I waited a little while. I researched, of course, that's the part where being a lawyer is really beneficial because you go in and even if you don't have a business plan, you have that research angle with you.

I researched what keywords were selling. I researched what trends were selling. Then I also went in with the idea that I really wanted to grow this business. I wanted it to be something that I could scale and that I could turn into something a little bit bigger. I knew that I didn't want to do something that was handmade. I started out also doing banners and that kind of thing.

I quickly realized that there was a huge ceiling on that because I only had x amount of time, especially with a baby at home. He was crawling, walking, and getting into everything so it needed to be something that I could do on my computer that made it a lot easier. I settled on digital invitation files and printed invitations.

I just researched what was selling. I looked at what the popular sellers were doing, people that were selling a lot, what were they doing, how were they marketing themselves, how are they positioning themselves in that online marketplace.

I think that having that lawyer angle really, really was beneficial and helped me a lot in that sense because I read all the Etsy guidelines, I read about what they listed as going into SEO, and then I thought of that creatively and I thought, “If I was a business like Etsy, how would I rank people in search?” I made my decisions based on that.

Sarah Cottrell: It's so interesting. I'd love to know a little bit more about the logistics of building a business that brings in, I think you said $150,000 in revenue in two years with the added, I don't want to say complication, but we talked before we started recording, we have kids who are the same age and it sounds like you started building the business around the time that your oldest was born, talk to me a little bit about the logistics there, especially I think that you were still in New York so you said you didn't have family around and so I'd love to know a little bit about that.

Gaby Abrams: Initially, I really needed something that was going to let me work in the margins of motherhood. I needed something that had finite tasks that I could complete during a nap time. I could get a certain amount of work done. I wasn't going to be writing briefs because I just didn't have the mental bandwidth for that kind of thing.

This was something that really fit in well into the margins of motherhood because I was able to work nights after my son fell asleep. Like I said, my husband would work late a lot of nights. Some nights he would get home at 10:30 and I really had three or four hours from when my son fell asleep until my husband was home that I was just sitting, watching Bravo, working on my store, working on my business, and then I had nap times as well.

It was something that really fit in nicely and then I had that built-in traffic from Etsy so all I had to do was work on my SEO and Etsy would bring me the buyers. There's also a misconception that Etsy takes a huge amount of money from you but I think at the time it was only like 3.5% of your sales, which is nothing for the amount of traffic and buyers that they were sending me.

It was the best decision that I ever made because five years later, I have this business, by the time that I was pregnant with my second son and by the time I had him, I don't even think I had to go on maternity leave my second time, I took like two weeks off just for while I was in the hospital and everything and then two weeks in I was like, “Alright, he is napping, he's sleeping, and I'm bored. I've caught up on every single show that I possibly could. I think I am going to open my store back up, take it off vacation mode.”

I did and I just jumped right back in. It's something that's given me a level of flexibility that I don't think I could have envisioned when I was younger trying to decide what I wanted to do.

Sarah Cottrell: You mentioned that in your family growing up, there was very much this, “Well, you're a lawyer or a doctor and that's how you make money.” One of the things that we talk about often on the podcast, just because it comes up for so many people and it's an issue for a lot of listeners, is the family reaction to the decision to not practice as a lawyer.

I'd love for you to talk about that a little bit, about how you worked through that issue and what advice you might have for people who are in a position coming from a family with a similar thought process about what you should be doing as a career.

Gaby Abrams: Absolutely, yes. I think it's so important because I think a lot of people stay stuck in something that they don't love because they're so worried about what the expectations are and what their family is going to think. For a lot of people, your parents have invested in your education or you've invested in your education and there's this huge fear of the backlash when you turn away from that.

I think for me, I was lucky, I had parents that were really supportive of pretty much everything that I did, every decision that I made. I think both my parents are the same way and have always done their own thing. I was really, really fortunate in that sense and my parents were really supportive of everything that I did from the very beginning.

My husband's family, it was the same, and I don't think I would have been here without them because they were probably the most supportive people when it came to starting my business. They're writers and they're also lawyers. My father-in-law is in the government.

It was unexpected that they would be so supportive of my decision I think and they really were. I think that a lot of the time, I think there's a lot of fear for parents about what other people will think. It's not so much disappointment from their end but they're worried that people are going to be judging them. Does that make sense?

Sarah Cottrell: Yes, totally.

Gaby Abrams: And talking about them and I feel like it, and maybe in certain communities more than others, if anybody was talking about my decision behind my back, I'm sure that they were and I got a lot of weird looks and just puzzled basically, but my sister-in-law's mother at the very beginning, when I told her, “Oh, I started the store and I started an Etsy store,” she looked at me a little bit confused because I think she didn't really know anything about what this was.

I remember she told me, “You will be so successful because you are so smart.” Nobody had ever framed it to me like that. It was always like something that was instead, “You're so smart, how are you going to turn your back on that and do this thing?” I always thought of intelligence as something to live up to instead of thinking of it as an asset for whatever I decided to do.

I think that reframe really got me through my decision to do this and really gave me a lot of confidence in myself and in what I was doing because I thought, “You know, I am very smart and that intelligence and that background that I have is really going to give me an advantage in terms of starting my business because I had that legal background.”

I had taken tax laws so as far as bookkeeping, I had a pretty good idea of what I needed to do from a business and I had a pretty good idea of what I could deduct. I had taken corporate law so as far as structuring, I had some idea of how to structure my business and the implications of it.

I was really at a significant advantage starting a business. It helped me reframe everything. Instead of feeling guilt and shame over leaving an intellectual career, I learned to see my intelligence as an asset that was going to help me in whatever I decided to do from that point on.

Sarah Cottrell: I think that's so important and honestly, it's one of the most common things that I hear from lawyers who aren't happy and want to leave. It's this like, “I don't even know what else I could do,” or “I think this is the only thing I'm qualified for.” Certainly, there is an aspect of needing to figure out what do you want to do.

I'm not saying that there isn't some work that needs to be done. But I know even from my own experience that was where I was at first like, “What else could I even do if I'm not a lawyer?” It's like you went to law school, you passed the bar, you're a smart, driven, ambitious person, you could almost do anything.

Gaby Abrams: Right, which it goes back to that thing that we were talking about before. I think people always think that you can do anything as a lawyer and you do see lawyers in a ton of different careers having a lot of other really successful career paths that aren't necessarily practicing law. But there's a misconception that what gets you there is your law degree. That's not it, it's just the kind of person that you are, the kind of work that you've put into getting this degree, and the intelligence that you have for the most part.

Sarah Cottrell: Yeah. I think what you and I would both say is don't be discouraged if you're working as a lawyer and you're like, “Well, this is terrible but what else could I do?” Don't let yourself fall into that trap because the reality is you could do so many other things.

As a lawyer honestly, again, I am speaking 100% based on my own experience but the biggest thing for me was being able to develop an imagination for what was possible because you're almost trained into not having that imagination. I love what you said and I love what your sister-in-law's mother said because I think that is just one of the most important things for people to hear.

I know Shinah Chang is someone who I had in the podcast, she now runs a calligraphy business mostly at this point teaching calligraphy. But one of the things that she says is that there are a lot of ways to make money.

Gaby Abrams: That is my motto.

Sarah Cottrell: Yeah, not that it's like all about making money but the point of that is if you're working as a lawyer and that is not working for you and you're like, “I want to do something else,” there are so many ways for you to make a living and you are a capable person who can achieve in one of many areas. Don't let yourself be stuck in this idea, again speaking from my own experience, of, “Well, what else could I even do? This is the only thing I'm good at.” That's not true.

Gaby Abrams: Right. Especially when you're talking about six figures, $100,000, $200,000, there's a lot that you can do to bring in that kind of money. Even as an entrepreneur, it's entirely possible to be making that kind of money. Even when we're talking about, I know entrepreneurs making, who you would never ever guess, making upwards of $500,000 a year.

It definitely is possible and I think that so much of it is just learning to see that and opening up your mind to that possibility because we're not really taught that. I think a lot of people also don't realize how specialized law practice is because even if you've been doing, let's say corporate litigation, that's pretty general but it's all about what your specific practice area is.

I think it's hard even for people to move laterally as a lawyer. It's hard for people to open up their mind and even be open-minded about how many actual law-related things they can do as a lawyer because you really do get stuck in that one career path.

Sarah Cottrell: Yeah. I think that is really true. If there are people who are listening and they are realizing, “Oh, I have fallen prey to this idea of what else could I do or I'm smart so leaving my job as a lawyer would somehow be abandoning my smartness,” what advice would you have for them in terms of how to move forward?

Gaby Abrams: First of all, I got some great advice and it was go back to what you wanted to do as a child that you thought was not possible. Because we are living in a world that is totally, totally different from what our parents had, from what our grandparents had. The internet has opened up really just a universe of possibilities.

Now you can make money doing things that would have seemed like a joke a couple of years ago, like a dog walking business. Now you can actually make millions from that. There are people that have dog Airbnbs and people who are starting a dog Airbnb business and are making a ton of money, things that seemed crazy as a child now are actually viable career options.

I think starting there is a great position because I always really loved stationary and I really always loved paper products. It's funny because I think it's one of those things that I think anybody that knew me would have said the same thing about me. My husband would always say, “Well, when you start your store someday,” but it was always this idea that I was going to have a career for 45 years and then eventually retire and do what I loved because that's just the way that people did things. There was that expectation.

I think I just surprised myself by taking that plunge a little bit earlier and saying, “If I want to start a store and I want to have a stationary business and I want to be doing this, why am I not doing it?” There's some sense that you have to punish yourself for a long time first until you can actually do what you really enjoy. Then it gets harder and harder to do as more time goes on because you build a career, then you get to a certain income level, and then it gets harder and scarier to take that plunge because you have a lot more at stake.

I would say once you figure out what you want to do and once you're really honest with yourself and you say, “This is what I enjoy doing,” get creative about ways that you can actually build a business around that. I know you had Stacy on here too, and I have a lot of conversations with her about how, she has Grace and Hudson which is a jewelry business and she also left the law. She's the person that put us in touch.

We have a lot of conversations about also how much your lifestyle changes once you're no longer doing what you don't love. What you think is your salary that you need and the money that you need to make this work oftentimes ends up being not really true because you find yourself happier and more fulfilled and you don't need all these trappings and you don't need these kinds of stuff to make you feel better.

I think when you go in a little bit more open-minded about what you want to do and with the idea that you can make this work as a lifestyle and that your life will be so much better for it, I think that helps.

Sarah Cottrell: I think that is so true and such good advice. Okay, Gaby, as we're getting to the end of our conversation, is there anything else that you would like to share that we just haven't had a chance to get to yet?

Gaby Abrams: I have. My thing is, like you were talking about, you can make money doing anything. I think people get stuck in unfulfilling law careers, and I say unfulfilling because I think that there are people that really enjoy being a lawyer and enjoy that practice, and if so, that's amazing, but it's a career where I think 90% of people that you talk to really dislike their jobs. It's a scary statistic and there's this belief that you're supposed to dislike it, that that's just the way that things are, and nobody likes this job. We're all in this together because none of us like it. That's really not a way to live.

There is the possibility of being really, really happy and being really, really fulfilled and sometimes it's by doing something that you don't really even expect to be doing and a career that you don't really expect to be successful or fulfilling. It's worth it.

Sarah Cottrell: I agree 100%. I love it so much. Oh my goodness. Okay, Gaby, if people want to connect with you, where can they find you online?

Gaby Abrams: They can find me, I have my Instagram, @casaconfettishop and @gaby.abrams. They can also visit my website at gabyabrams.com or casaconfettishop.com. One is my e-commerce site and then the other one is just general information about me, what I'm up to, and that kind of stuff.

Sarah Cottrell: Awesome. I will put all of those links in the show notes so if anybody wants to check them out, they can just go there and all the links will be there. Okay, thank you so much for joining me today, Gaby, and sharing your story. I love getting to talk to you.

Gaby Abrams: Awesome. Thank you. Likewise, it was great.

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.