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 Tai Dixon. Tai left legal practice for the world of nonprofit leadership, and last year opened her own consulting practice where she specializes in workplace culture and laboratory leadership. I had a hard time narrowing down my pull quotes for this episode because there is just that much goodness so I'm super excited for you to hear it.

But before we get to the episode, I just want to take a minute to speak to you from the heart about the COVID-19 global pandemic that we're all experiencing right now. I know that for many of us, it has upended our lives. Most of us know and love people on the front lines in health care or people who are vulnerable to the virus. I'll be doing a special episode next week sharing some of the things that I think unhappy lawyers should keep in mind right now as we weather this pandemic. But until then, I just wanted to say that this is really hard, and if you're struggling, please be kind to yourself and reach out for help because we're all in this together. Okay, here's my conversation with Tai Dixon.

Hey, Tai. Welcome to The Former Lawyer Podcast.

Tai Dixon: Thank you so much, Sarah. I'm so excited to be a part of this.

Sarah Cottrell: I'm excited to hear your story. Let's start with you introducing yourself to the listeners.

Tai Dixon: Sure. My name is Tai Dixon. I was a lawyer for three and a half years in Biglaw defending hospitals and companies and negligence lawsuits. I didn't love my work so I made a career transition about a decade ago. I've had a wonderful experience redefining what joy means for me and work and also how to help others find that purpose in their work as well. I am really just excited about this topic and so excited that you're doing the work that you're doing because it's so valuable to our profession.

Sarah Cottrell: I really appreciate that. I think that is just super exciting because a lot of times, people come to me and they're like, “Oh, I haven't been a lawyer for that long. Is it really okay that I hate it as much as I do?” basically. So you said you left after three and a half years. I left Biglaw after a little less than three years. I did practice in other areas after that. But I tell people, “Yeah, you could know really early on this is not for you,” and it sounds like that was the case for you. Let's go back and talk about how you ended up in law school in the first place.

Tai Dixon: Sure. My father was an attorney and I am from Inner City Philadelphia. I'm an African-American woman. To have a parent that was an attorney was not very common in the circle that I grew up in and so I always really admired that my father used his strength for speaking, writing, solving problems, and persuading people in the ways that he did to be able to be as impactful as he was as an attorney, and then later as a professor teaching young education professionals.

I wanted to use those skills too. Those were definitely the areas I excelled in. I was told by so many people that if you're good at speaking, reading, thinking, and writing, you should become an attorney. That's an obvious path for you. I was not good at math and science so it was pretty obvious to me that I was not going to become a doctor. Very often, especially in minority communities, we're fed this doctor or lawyer is the way to be the maximum contributor in society and so if you want to maximize your contribution, you are going to do one of these two things.

So I really bought into that. I wanted to make sure I had choices. I wanted to make sure that I could earn the amount of money that I needed to support myself and I've been very fiercely independent since I was a child, and so the idea of having some control over my level of income was really attractive to me as well. But helping people has always been my core passion and I saw being an attorney as a vehicle to do that, being an advocate on behalf of others, being the way that I would contribute.

How I got to law school, just to answer that a little bit, was a little bit of a windy path. I went to college at Spelman College and I was recruited while in my last year at Spelman to a program called Teach For America, which is now a lot more popular than it was in 2001 when I first heard about it. It was an emerging program in its early years and people had not heard about Teach For America as an option to contribute to what was going on in our public school system by teaching for two years.

I joined the program because I saw a banner on campus that said “So you want to change things?” and I was very compelled by that. It was shortly after September 11th. My heart was dedicated towards service. Although I was in the process in college of preparing for the LSAT and following my long-term dream of going to law school, I said I'm going to put that on hold and I'm going to join this program, this teacher corps, and take a position teaching in Houston, Texas for two years, teaching English and English as a second language.

I did that, I took my placement in Houston. I had a transformational experience teaching in the public school system. My mother had also taught public school for 36 years so this was me answering this other call to service that was inside of me from being her daughter as well. I really enjoyed teaching but I was terrified. I was terrified of enjoying it. I thought to myself, I always said I was going to be a lawyer, I am afraid that I can't earn enough money as a teacher. I am afraid that I won't be able to pay off my student loans. I am afraid that I'm going to come to a point in my life where I will regret not having gone to law school.

At that time I was 24 and I thought I was getting old and I had to talk myself into going into my original career plan, otherwise, time would get away from me. At 24 years old, I rushed myself out of education, which I really was passionate about, and into this law school and then the practice of law.

Sarah Cottrell: There are so many things that you mentioned that I want to talk about because I think your experience is so common, and in particular, you mentioned this idea of doctor or lawyer being the two professions that are the paths or perceived as the paths to stability, security financially, and also maybe in terms of career being a career that people look up to. I know I've talked with several guests specifically on the financial piece about how that kind of perception is not really the reality.

When you look at the statistics for people coming out of law school, yes, there are some small number of people who end up in Biglaw firms making a very large amount of money, but then there are very few people who are making a middle range amount of money, and then another large group of people making a quite small amount of money for the amount of money they put into their law degree.

I think there is more awareness growing around that but it seems that's still not something that everyone is aware of when they're considering a decision to go to law school. Has that been your experience?

Tai Dixon: That has been my experience. I mentioned earlier that I grew up in Inner City, Philadelphia. I went to Philadelphia public schools. The reality for me really was the fear of underperforming and not reaching my potential was very real for me. This idea that you are talented and you have these options and not taking the options you had felt really like I was squandering my skills and my value for me.

I think we have to unpack that for people. We have to unpack that with these ladders that we get ourselves climbing on, especially when we're trying to prove that we are going to rise above our circumstances, we find ourselves on these ladders where we're trying to get to the top so hard and so consistently that we forget to ask ourselves at every rung whether we still want the thing that's at the top as we learn each level of lesson going up.

That was very much my story. I was so consumed with having to get there, meeting my potential, and not squandering my intelligence that I stopped asking myself whether the things I was learning about the actual practice of law really appealed to me anymore. I probably, if I was listening to what was going on in my spirit a little bit earlier, wouldn't have finished law school because I knew as early as my first year of law school, when I started digging into the nightly reading and briefing cases and the style of legal writing, that I wasn't enjoying myself. But I wanted to not be a quitter.

That's another thing that I think we have to unpack as adults is this thing of you start something, you finish it. It makes sense for certain points in your life. You join the track team, you get to the end of the season. You start a project, you finish it strong even though it gets hard in the middle. But does that really apply to professional pursuits? That’s a question that I think we don't ask ourselves enough. If I start something and I don't love it and it's not what I thought it would be, is it worth my while to actually finish it? Who does it serve? I really wish I'd asked myself that question earlier.

Sarah Cottrell: Yes, I agree with you 100%. I know I've shared this on the podcast before but for me, one of the big lessons in leaving the law was realizing that just because I could do something didn't mean it was the thing that I was supposed to be doing. That was a very difficult lesson for me to learn because of exactly what you were just talking about, this idea that once you decide to do something, you don't quit. That was very cemented into my psyche, and like you said, sometimes I think that is a good principle to be making decisions based on but not so much when you're talking about your entire professional career and your life. There are other factors to consider. I think that we don't always do that.

Also something that you mentioned, and this is something that I've really wanted to talk about on the podcast and we haven't talked about it very much yet, is that there's a certain amount of privilege in being able to say, “Hey, maybe I'm not going to do the thing that is the most impressive thing out there,” I think sometimes there definitely is this move in the career counseling space and what not to say just do what you love, and certainly, I'm not opposed to that message but it seems to me like there is not very much awareness, or at least conversation, around the fact that when you're dealing with a situation where there are structural or systemic inequities, the individual decision to pursue or not pursue something that has a certain amount of social capital associated with it is much more complex. I just don't think that conversation is being had as much as it should.

Tai Dixon: Yeah, right. I think when we add to that, there's the layers of pressure, it's the pressure you put on yourself, it's the pressure that exists in your family, and then it's the pressure in society. We have all these conversations, even in the education field, about making sure that people have options and making sure that they have access to these levels of career, that there's earning potential in certain pathways, and that we should be making sure that we are educating students to be able to reach those things. It does feel like you're squandering if you take a risk that is not a surefire path to earning.

Even my family, I think they were very well-meaning but my family, my extended family was very proud of me when I was pursuing the path of a legal education. I was an English pre-law major undergrad at Spelman, and when I said I was going to law school after Teach For America, people were very satisfied with that and I had learned to find comfort in their satisfaction. The fact that was an answer that gave other people peace and joy is something that I was chasing and I was not, on the other hand, getting that response from people when I decided to become a teacher for two years.

A lot of my family and well-meaning friends ask questions, “Why are you doing that? It's just that you have so much potential. We hate to see you get caught being a teacher,” and I'm thinking, “Gosh, teachers were the reason I got here. They were the reasons that I saw so much possibility in myself and that I was able to dream big. My mother was a teacher for 36 years and so I cherished the contribution of teachers. I didn't see it as a profession that was not as valuable at all.” But I was surprised by the difference in reactions I got from other people who thought that by making that choice, I was somehow living under my full potential.

I accepted that narrative as true because they were older than me and they loved me a great deal, and for their lives maybe that was true, maybe they had lived in a very different time where being a teacher was the thing that was accessible to people like me and now that more was accessible from their perception that I had a responsibility to do and be more especially given all of the opportunities I'd had individually to be prepared to do more and so I felt a heavy weight and burden.

I'm also an only child so I felt my parents got one bite at the apple to have a really successful child and the weight was certainly on me to be what they were hoping for. Even my mother whose background was in education wanted and believed that I would not be satisfied long term in the classroom. So I took all of these pieces of input that people were giving me and it became my own narrative that this is not going to be enough for me. I'm going to somehow struggle five years from now even if I like it now and I'm going to regret it.

Even though I was very satisfied and happy with what I was doing and loved working with my students and loved working in the school I was working in, I had already accepted before I even started that role that two years was going to be it for me and then I needed to find a way to use my voice in a larger platform. For me, that larger platform was advocacy so I thought I'd become an educational advocate or policy advocate. Coming to Washington, DC was hugely important to me and that's why I chose Howard University School of Law because of its storied civil rights history and history of building leaders and social engineers.

I said, “Okay, Howard is going to be the place for me to be able to build this voice that's going to have a national impact on the state of education as a civil rights issue of our time.” That was the plan and that's how I made that decision. But you hit the nail on the head. There was a tremendous weight and responsibility, because even in saying that I wanted to be a social justice attorney and a civil rights attorney, I felt the pressure, very much from my father, if I was going to practice law to then go ahead and do it in the most lucrative way possible, and what I was talking about wanting to do wasn't the most lucrative way. Even within the law, I felt pressured in carrying the responsibilities of other's expectations on my back that I wasn't choosing the pathway that was going to earn enough.

Sarah Cottrell: It sounds like when you graduated from law school, you ended up going to a firm, is that right?

Tai Dixon: That's right.

Sarah Cottrell: Okay, so talk to me about that process. Because you went into law school thinking that you would go into educational advocacy. You left law school and ended up in a law firm. It sounds like there was a lot of pressure, family pressure for you to go into a position that would be financially lucrative, which educational advocacy is probably not the path to riches.

Talk to me about that process and what you were thinking at the time because some people, I know when they change their plan, they change their plan and also they change how they think about what their plan was. They're like, “Actually, this is a great plan,” and some people might change their plan but also be like, “But this isn't really what I want to be doing.”

Tai Dixon: Yeah. I think that's absolutely accurate about my decision. A couple of things happened during law school. One is that because I'm fiercely independent, I worked through my second and third year of law school throughout the whole year and in the summer, and so the ability to earn money consistently and to know that I was going to be able to do so was just a huge concern throughout law school.

Honestly, the people who come on campus to recruit are firms and the federal government so there wasn't a lot of the options for what I wanted to do coming to recruit people graduating from law school with no practical legal experience. The advice I received was that if I wanted to go work for an advocacy organization, work for a nonprofit as a lawyer, work in a think tank, or work for a policy shop, that what they would value is actual litigation experience and that the thing that I could do to prepare myself as a first year attorney would be to go to the place where I was going to get the maximum amount of litigation exposure.

So I went to a midsize law firm that was all litigation so every practice area was litigation, and because it was mid-sized, I knew that there I would get opportunities to argue motions, take depositions, and really do the work of litigation sooner than I would if I'd gone to a bigger law firm and had to work under layers of partners, seniors, and associates to get those leadership opportunities on cases. For me, going to all litigation firm meant I would get out there faster.

That was accurate when I made that decision. I went to a firm which I think was a wonderful firm full of great people and they did give me those opportunities, they did give me real leadership in my cases, and they really did give me the opportunity to, in my first year, argue motions that I'd written to take depositions. They taught me how to do it and they put me out there to do it and immediately trusted me with a pretty wide load of cases very early on.

Everything that I sought to do in making that decision actually did happen, and that for me, I always tell people that because I went to a really good firm and because they were really great people, that's how I knew I didn't want to practice law because it couldn't really get better than what I was doing and I still wasn't happy. I couldn't point to any way that the law firm was anything that it wasn't supposed to be, it was never going to be the thing that fully satisfied me and my desire to help people.

While I was there in the firm practicing being a defense attorney, I said to myself, “Gosh, how can I start to contribute in ways that fulfill me?” Now I should say that the backdrop of me going into this firm, I graduated from law school in 2007. If you recall right after 2007, the economy pretty much tanked for lawyers. It was a really tough time because I knew that I wasn't a long-term litigator and yet I didn't see a pathway out anytime soon because people were holding on to what they had, people were grabbing on. If you had a legal role where they weren't doing layoffs, then you were really lucky and it was to be held onto.

I also internalized that and so I started to say to myself, “Okay, well, if I'm going to end up practicing for a pretty long time, I need to start creating experiences within my practice that actually make my soul happy.” So I started running the summer associate program at my firm, running all of the hiring and the activities for our summer associates, and I started a mentorship program with another attorney at the firm where we went to a local high school and we brought lawyers to teach high school students in Baltimore, different advocacy skills and presentation skills. I was the dean of fundraising for the college-bound lawyers committee, so helping my firm give money to a nonprofit college bound.

I started teaching or co-teaching at the appellate advocacy course down at Howard University, my alma mater, because my professor had asked me to come back and do that. I was driving an hour and a half to get to DC from Baltimore to be able to co-teach the course, helping students who were on the moot court team prepare to advocate in national competitions on appellate advocacy.

All of these things, when strung together, allowed me to start to build this narrative of “If I'm ever going to leave the law, I need to be able to say that I can do the things that I say that I want to do, that I can lead nonprofit programs, that I can raise money, that I can train young professionals and manage teams, and that I have some knowledge outside of just how to run cases and argue motions.” For me, the things I was doing outside of my work became the narrative that actually helped my transition.

Sarah Cottrell: I think that's really helpful and insightful. I think that a lot of people, when they realize they're unhappy with their legal job get—and I speak from experience here. I'm not like, “Those people who have this issue”—this was also something that I struggled with of just feeling a little bit paralyzed. I don't even know what to do to start moving in the direction that could be a better direction for me.

I graduated in 2008 so I am super familiar with the downturn and we've talked about it several times in the podcast. The firm that I was at did two rounds of layoffs, which I survived both rounds, but it was definitely a time that was not super fun to be a lawyer. I know that people who are graduating in those couple of years after I did, there were a lot of struggles related to even finding work. I know we've talked in the podcast with some other people who graduated in 09, 10, 11 about being in this position where they felt grateful to even have a legal job.

Even if they were doing that job and really didn't like it, there was also the sense of, “Well, at least I got a job that requires a JD.” I think that certainly plays into how people look at what they're doing and whether they're willing to leave. At what point in the process for you did you start to actually actively look for something else or figure out what else you were going to do versus just building your skills toward the types of work that you ultimately wanted to do?

Tai Dixon: Yeah. There's actually a couple of personal things that started to happen when I was at the law firm that really nudged me along and they all were related to my happiness. One thing was that I noticed when I was driving to work in the morning, I would look at people on the bus stop and I would think, “Gosh, everyone looks so solemn and somber going to work standing on that bus stop,” and I would sit in my car and think, “But I paid all this money for access to this opportunity to practice law and I went through passing the bar exam and getting these opportunities, and I am solemn and somber going to work too? It's not free to get here. It took a lot of work to get to a place where I feel stuck and that shouldn't be.”

So I started to think about, on those rides to work, what is it that I was actually aiming for when I was studying in law school, getting my bar exam preparation together, and getting all of these permissions to walk through this door, what was I hoping would happen and what is actually happening? That question going on the way to work led to a lot of soul searching. Sometimes by the time I arrived to work, there'd be tears in my eyes because of the distance between where I thought I would be and where I was.

Another thing that was particularly profound is during a performance review with one of the partners at my firm. He gave me a pretty normal review going through the things that I did well, in the areas I could improve. I wouldn't say it was a particularly bad conversation, but the question he asked, he said, “So that's your review, so just generally, how are you doing here? Are you happy?” After I'd held myself together throughout the whole review, when he said “Are you happy?” I immediately burst into tears in a partner's office. It was the hardest question for me to answer at that point in my life, “Am I happy?”

I could answer all the questions about how I could perform better. I could answer all the questions about what I wanted more opportunities to do. I could sit through the review with a very professional face the whole time until he said to me the unexpected question which I had no answer for, “Are you happy?” That was a really pivotal moment for me because when I started crying after a relatively good review, I realized that no amount of good work and checking the boxes was going to make me happy doing what I was doing.

After that point, obviously, we proceeded to have the conversation about why I was crying, and after that point, I realized that for me, I had to start making some decisions because this was no longer about satisfying other people, this was about whether or not I was well, this about whether or not I was going to continue to do something that if someone asked me this one simple question of am I happy, that I would burst into pieces, that wasn't healthy to me.

After a while, it became less of a career transition decision and more around soul searching about what would actually make the answer to that question not so painful. What is it that I really want to do? What is it I really want to spend my time doing? At that point, probably shortly after that performance review, I started asking for informational conversations with people who were working in nonprofits in the area. I started to try to explore whether those might be the pathways that I would take.

Sarah Cottrell: I think it's really remarkable that you are asked that question in your review because, in my experience, that is not a question that many law firms think of or really care to know the answer to. But it is a really important question, like you said. I actually just did an interview last night for another podcast talking about my experience leaving the law and one of the things that I shared was for me at the point that I left Biglaw, it really was a similar situation where it was like, “This is just not working for me. The weight of the lifestyle of that work was just not working.” It wasn't really a question, what did you say? You said it was more a question of wellness than it was maybe anything else. I identified with that a lot because it was very similar for me.

Tai Dixon: Yeah. I think that makes me think of another experience that was also pivotal during that time. I remember at five o'clock, I was trying to understand why five o'clock was such a significant time for people as the end of the day because I realized at that point I was 30 years old or just about to turn 30 and I had never, because I've been a teacher going to get my masters at night in my early 20s, then I've been in law school and working at night and so now I'm in a law firm but I would leave that law firm after eight o'clock at night on an early night, and then sometimes after one o'clock on a bad night.

At five o'clock, I would look out the window and everybody would be flooding towards the train and towards the parking lots and going home. It would still be light outside and I remember sitting at my desk in a high-rise downtown thinking, “I wondered what people do when they get home at 5:30.” That was also a really weird question for me because I'm like, “How are you on this path where for the first decade of your adulthood, you have no idea what people do when they get home at 5:30 because you never have?”

So I started to sit in my office at five and watch all the people flooding to the streets going home and all the traffic outside and think, “Wow, all those people know what it's like to do something between 5:30 and 10:30 when they go to bed, they have that time and I don't. I go in the house and I'm spent. I fall into the bed and I get back up and early in the morning I'm sitting back in the seat.” I am living to do this, which means that at 30 years old when I did not have children and I did not have a partner at home, where I did not have any other people depending on me, the only way practicing law worked is if there was no one waiting for me.

That got really problematic for me quickly because if someone was waiting for me, I would have really been sad that I could never get home between 5:30 and 10:30 if I had those things. So I started to also ask myself some really personal questions about whether you can start your whole career around where you are now without thinking about where you actually want to be and what you want to be a part of your life, and even if you don't have a partner and children, there are plenty of reasons why going home, cooking your own dinner, having a hobby, and having time to exercise are valuable things to be doing just for yourself if it's only you.

I started to become obsessed with the hours between 5:30 and 10:30. What I would do if I weren't sitting here? And that was probably the final really clear indicator that was important to me. Even without children at that point, it was really important to me that I started to develop, as an adult at 30, a life that had something going on between 5:30 and 10:30.

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Yes. Oh my goodness. One of the ways I will describe it to people is that when I worked in Biglaw, I was a lawyer and that's all that I was. A lot of it is for the exact reason that you describe, 5:00, 5:30 doesn't really have a lot of meaning, weekends don't really have a lot of meaning, holidays don't necessarily have a lot of meaning because you could be working through any or all of those.

I think that your point is a good one which is oftentimes, we talk about this idea of “Oh, having a life outside of work,” and typically the conversation can run towards family or a partner but there's still this failure I think to recognize we are all human people, we're not just little widgets in a machine who just can function without anything, and all people, regardless of whether they have kids or not, regardless of whether they're partnered or not, need to have a life that is, I don't want to say well-rounded, but just multi-faceted.

Expecting anyone to only be a lawyer all the time is a recipe for disaster. I think that's one of the reasons that you see some of the problems that we see in the legal profession in terms of the disproportionate struggle with mental health issues. Of course we've talked about on the podcast before about substance abuse problems, these are the kinds of things that result when you expect people to behave as though they aren't human beings.

Tai Dixon: Absolutely, and it was impacting my ability to build relationships if I'm being honest. Not only did I not have those things at that time but I couldn't imagine actually beginning them because having someone require something else of me was just too hard at that point in my life. People would come into my life and ask of me for time and for energy towards things that I would just be shocked that they thought I had time or energy for. That was a hard way to build a relationship with someone and so I was shutting down my own ability to build healthy relationships because I was trying to figure out how to preserve every bit of energy I had to just get through this work thing.

Sarah Cottrell: Yeah. I think that there are so many people who have that experience. You had this experience in the review and then you had this experience of looking at people leaving work at 5:00 or 5:30 and realizing, “I don't know what it's like to have a life during 5:30 to 10:30.” From that point, how long was it until you left and what did you leave to go do?

Tai Dixon: It's probably about six months and I left to actually go work for Teach For America. I worked for Teach For America Baltimore as their head of fundraising. It was managing director of development for the Baltimore office, managing a team of three, raising the money to operate the Baltimore region of Teach For America.

Sarah Cottrell: How was that for you as your first post-law job?

Tai Dixon: At first, the most interesting part of it was trying to explain to the folks at the law firm what I was going through. Because it was really shocking for people. I will say, and I will never name those people, but some people did pull me aside and say, “How did you get an opportunity like that?” Other people said, “I can't believe you're going to do this. I can't believe after all this work to go through law school you're just going to go off and do something else. Don't you feel like that's a waste?” I had other people say, also well-meaning, that if you decide you've made a mistake, you can come back.

Those three different types of responses all had a different impact on me. If you decide you made a mistake, you could come back was actually quite an endorsement. To have someone think enough of you to say that you can return to this place you're leaving if you find that you've done this in error, it spoke to the fact that we've worked together with integrity and that I felt really valued in that moment. It gave me some strength stepping into my next opportunity. This idea that other people wanted to know how I'd done, it just gave me a little bit of a peek behind the curtain that I needed to know that some people are also inside these experiences feeling like they don't know what the next step is, really smart people with tons of options who do really well don't know how to make the next step into what they would actually be happier doing.

Then there's also people who can't support what it is you're doing because accepting your narrative somehow invalidates theirs. That was really telling and I ran into a lot of that. The strongest criticism I got for leaving the law was from lawyers who did not leave the law. It took a while to not let that poke holes in my confidence about the decisions that were best for me. I definitely ran into someone at a cocktail party months later after making the transition and she looked at me and said, “I heard you made a transition to the nonprofit world. That's so great you're doing work you care about. You must not have any money though.”

I remember thinking, “Wow, when did that become a polite cocktail conversation about how much money I have?” I realized that people couldn't engage with me on this because the freedom and joy I was experiencing was somehow threatening to the choices they've made. Then there was also probably, and I don't want to take this away from people, a good number of people who wanted to be lawyers more than they wanted to be anything else and truly didn't understand. They were born to do this.

The competition, the hours, and all that feels really right to them because if they're going to spend their time grinding away doing anything, it's this, and they don't understand why I've made the decision. But there was also this group of people who I could sense in the way they were saying what they were saying that they have to poke holes in my narrative so that they can continue to uphold their own.

I began to be compassionate in those conversations instead of offended because I realized that when I was in that place of not knowing what the answers were for me, of not feeling free to make choices, that I had the opposite of what I hoped to get by becoming an attorney. When I'd said I would become an attorney, I wanted to do it because I wanted choices, I wanted control over what I was doing, I wanted to do the things I loved, I wanted the freedom to say no, and that by actually practicing, I had lost some of my freedom to make choices about how I spent my time.

I remembered when I was in that space how defensive I felt and how hard it was for me to accept other things. Also, I realized that my fears about money came from being on this narrative in the law practice where the only thing that we had to look forward to was more money. We were in this game where winning the game meant that you spent more hours at work and that the more hours you spent at work, the more rewarded you were with the best cases so that you could spend more hours at work, and that the reward for spending those hours would be a bonus and perhaps promotion. That meant you could spend more hours doing more cases and bring more people in to bring more hours in.

The whole structure around us had to do with monetary reward. If that's what you're operating in, it's going to be hard for you to understand why people are chasing a different carrot because the entire structure you're in, the carrot is more money, more time, more reward, more money, more time. I couldn't expect the affirmation that I needed from people who were still in the game because that game required a certain amount of thinking in that way that helped them survive. I'm not criticizing them, that's survival in that game.

To let the other thoughts in is dangerous for them and it's going to interrupt their ability and their momentum to do what they've got to do to get through tomorrow. So I don't expect that from other people. But what I had to know for myself was that the carrot for me was not more money, more hours, more accolades. The carrot for me was this 5:30 to 10:30 thing. I needed that.

Sarah Cottrell: Yes, 100%. Everything you just said, the range of responses, exactly my experience. The reasons for those responses, I completely agree. The fact that I could have compassion for people who feel differently, just all of it, yes, 100%, I totally agree. I think it's really important, especially to highlight what you were talking about which is the idea that if you feel insecure in your decisions, you're much more likely to be overly affected by what other people think about your decisions. The more confident you are in your own choices, the less it matters what other people think about those choices. That's been my experience.

Tai Dixon: Yeah. I think that's right. I also, though, want to name that money is a thing. It's not insignificant. I understand why people are concerned about it. The fact is at the cocktail party when the woman asked me if I had no money, well, that wasn't true. I had a salary that I could live on and I made a decision about what that number was. When I accepted a role in a nonprofit, I had to make sure it was a role at the management level where I was responsible for a significant contribution to that nonprofit leadership team. I had to prove myself in that new arena very quickly.

In doing so, I will say that money was something that I was concerned about because even though I was getting fulfilled by what I was doing, I had realities as a lawyer. I had law school and undergraduate loans. I had to figure out for myself, in crafting a nonprofit career over the past decade, how to make decisions that put me in a position to gain more skills and to continually ascend in my practice. That was important, not just because I was ambitious, but it was important because I had some financial realities that my colleagues did not in the nonprofit world.

I would never say to people that I went in there unconcerned about my financial outcomes because I had to be somewhat concerned because I had constraints other people didn't have. But I also was able to earn the salary that I needed to earn to feel comfortable by making sure that I took on the level of responsibility at a nonprofit that paid that salary. That's the plainest I can put it. There are opportunities that lawyers have unique sets of skills that will make it very competitive for in other industries. I think that's what people don't always know.

They have this narrative, especially I speak to my own industry in the nonprofit world, that no one in the nonprofit world has any earning potential, and that's just not true anymore. People just need to hear that. You can do things that contribute to the social good and earn a very good living doing so by doing those things in increasing levels of impact and management over time. What it does mean is that transitioning into an entry-level role is going to be difficult, and that certainly, there may need to be a pay cut from what you're paid as an associate in a law firm or a partner in a law firm. There likely will be a pay cut.

But to endure that pay cut for x amount of years and be able to get on the path to prove your skills and abilities in a new arena means that you can recover that amount of money by learning to lead in a new space and using the skills of the practice of law gave you to make you successful in this new space. You have something that really gives you a competitive edge. If you harness it correctly, you can really be a leader.

Once I understood that, I was no longer concerned with the financial access. I was concerned with the experiences that I needed to lead at the level that I wanted to lead in. The financial doors opened up along with that exploration for me. It shouldn't be looked at with the fear that people have. I think we should talk about salary more. I think we should talk about earnability more. I think we should demystify the fear. When lawyers have this number in mind, sometimes they think that they're the only people who are accessing those numbers and they would be shocked to see in other industries that people are getting paid the same amount of money doing work in a very different way.

Sarah Cottrell: Yeah. I think that all of that is so right. I think that sometimes, the legal profession in particular becomes very insular, and somehow, this collective thought of, “Well, no one could possibly do any better than what we're doing here and if you leave, you're throwing it all away.”

One of the questions that I wanted to ask you is you mentioned that you were single when you were at the law firm. I get a lot of questions from people who are unhappy and are wanting to leave the law but they're either single and so they don't have a financial partner or they're the primary breadwinner and they have children, they have specific questions around that and how realistic is it for them to think of making a transition to something else. I was wondering if you could talk a little bit about that.

Tai Dixon: Sure, I can. I was single at the time I left the law firm. For me, I left the law firm at 30 and I was single until I was 37. There were seven years of certainly figuring this out without a partner. I never had someone saying, “I'll pay the bills while you take this pay cut.” For me, what I had to understand was what is my number. To take that law firm hat off of what the salary scale is for people inside the firm and having that be the holy grail for what I had to earn and actually put on the hat of somebody who budgets and says, “Okay, this is what I need to pay on my loans. This is what I need to pay for my car. Here are my bills. Here's what I paid for where I live,” and all of these things, and really answer before I took on a new salary, if I have to take a pay cut, what can I bear for what I have to pay for?

I don't want to be under what I need and certainly could not afford to do that. So I took a pay cut that reflected that number that I needed to see more than I expected to take to get started. But what I did in that time was start to collect the skills that were going to make me ever more valuable inside the nonprofit space. I will say in the first seven years of my transition, I doubled that initial salary. That's important for people to know because you work to build a set of skills and make yourself increasingly valuable and your salary can increase because of that increased contribution.

I didn't start in the place that I wanted to end but I started in a place that gave me a valuable set of skills. I moved on from fundraising into national talent acquisition and thinking about leadership, which was very valuable to nonprofits. I moved on to the Children's Defense Fund after doing that national talent acquisition role at TFA. At Children's Defense Fund, I was the national director of state offices and field operations managing programs and executive directors in their teams across the country, so I learned about national operations of nonprofits through that and being on a national leadership team.

Most recently, I was the chief talent diversity and equity officer at E.L. Haynes Public Charter School Network in DC learning about diversity, equity, and inclusion strategy and managing the people continuum inside an organization from end to end. I mentioned that at 37, I started a relationship with my now partner and we've been together for three years.

We have a little boy and I had him last year and made the decision to step away from my full-time role working for someone else and start my work as an executive coach and as a consultant working with nonprofits and corporations on workplace culture, diversity, and inclusion strategy and then also on individual executive coaching with their leader.

In doing that at this point, I had a child to consider, I had my partner, William, to consider, and I decided these things based on the type of mother I wanted to be and the type of control I wanted over my time at this point, and also looking at this set of skills that I built over the past decade. I mentioned I left the law firm when I was newly 30, this year I'll be newly 40, and in that 10 years, I have really built a set of skills that is valuable to the point where people now ask me to support their organizations individually with the skills that I come and bring on my own.

To see my own value and what I can contribute over time has been a real important key to being able to confidently career pivot. Then to make this shift for working independently and having my own company doing this work comes from what I now know to be true, which is we do all of this because we want control over what our lives are doing. When we lose that control, then all of these boxes we checked and all of the suffering that we did to get to a certain place becomes irrelevant.

We're supposed to have the lives that we want. When everybody was telling us to go to college and go to law school, I have a master's in education with someone, everybody told me to do all of those things, what I was gunning towards was feeling in control of my life and of my time. Now I see that I have that. When I had a child, I said to myself, “What do I want to be true for my time now and how do I get there?” So that's what I've done.

I work with individuals to help make these transitions on their own too. I call it the Underground Railroad for Lawyers, and I also work with other professionals trying to make career transitions or breakthroughs in their leadership, and then work with teams on team building, trust building, and learning how to really communicate and make workplaces a little bit better so that people don't have some of the experiences I had looking out the window wondering what people do between 5:30 and 10:30, looking at people on bus stops wondering why are we all so sad going to work. I really want to change that for people and have them understand their own power and agency in making that narrative different.

Sarah Cottrell: I love that so much. I think it illustrates something that we've talked about a lot here on the podcast, which is I often hear from lawyers, and I said the same thing myself early on of, “Well, I don't know what else I would do if I'm not a lawyer or I’m not qualified to do anything else essentially.”

I'm like, “You went to law school, you graduated law school, you took the bar, you practiced law. You have an almost infinite number of possibilities of things that you could do if you decide that that's the path that you want to go on.” For you, in your experience, leaving, getting into the nonprofit world, and then expanding your skills in that area, this is what is possible for anyone who decides that it's something that they want. But so often, we allow ourselves to be defined by just where we are.

Certainly, that's not to say that there aren't financial and other factors that affect how quickly people can make a transition or whatever, but one of my missions is for lawyers to stop thinking like, “Well, there's nothing else I can do because I don't have the skills or abilities.” Because one, you have a lot of skills and abilities that apply in all different arenas and fields, and two, you can go get them if you know what they are and you figure out what you want. That's one of the things that you mentioned that I just really wanted to highlight.

The other one is a really practical one, which is the need to know your number. I've talked with several people about this recently, the idea that often, people find themselves defaulting to this idea of, “Well, I can't afford to leave the law.” But there are so many assumptions underlying that, like, “I can't make the exact amount of money that I'm currently making now as a lawyer in my very first position after I leave the law. I'm going to keep the exact same lifestyle and not change anything. I'm not willing to change any of those things without examining to see if that's actually true for you.”

I think for anyone out there who's listening and thinking, “I can't afford to leave the law,” if you haven't really done the work that Tai is talking about in terms of really knowing what your number is, I feel like you're disempowering yourself because you don't really know until you've done that work.

Tai Dixon: I will attest to the fact that one thing I frequently said to people during that initial transition and pay cut was that I was surprised that I didn't need as much money when I was happier. I was spending so much money when I was in the law firm trying to create counter experiences to what my life was, spending a ton of money buying food out, spending a ton of money on these experiences for thrills that I didn't really need to have but I was so busy trying to counter this unhappy narrative in my work that I was doubling down on buying myself whatever I wanted.

The moment that my life got more imbalanced and I started doing more things I wanted to be doing, I got my fulfillment there instead of in buying things. I truly didn't need the same amount of money after I left the practice of law. I also do want to address the thing that you said about the skills because I think that is so important. A lot of the things I've described that I've done, this would sound pretty disjointed to people, but I always correct that and say that vulnerability, connection, and understanding people are my superpowers.

I have always been able to connect with a group of people. I have always been able to understand how people work. It hasn't been disjointed because when you're a lawyer, you learn about the power of language, you learn about persuasion, you learn about vulnerability, connection, understanding how to read a room, and have that room go your way. You learn about what it is to bring yourself to what you're doing so that people connect with you. Then everything I've done after that has used that superpower.

I've gone into fundraising where I had to connect with individual funders. I've gone into managing teams where I had to connect and motivate people. I've gone into leadership development where I had to help people vision something different for themselves. I've gone into coaching and solving problems where I've had to help people to be able to share vulnerable moments in their own leadership journeys with me and help them to craft the solution and be a problem solver, which is essentially, at its core, what the law teaches us to do, to be really educated problem solvers.

There are so many ways that problem-solving and power of understanding people and vulnerability and connection can be valuable in so many Industries. We just have to see ourselves as agents of that, or whatever it is that you bring to the law that's your special superpower, and how do then I use that to be really effective at what it is I choose to do.

Sarah Cottrell: I think that is so good and I agree 100%. Tai, as we're getting to the end of our conversation, is there anything else that you would like to share that we haven't talked about yet?

Tai Dixon: Yes. I just want to share that it’s a pretty significant thing to be doing this exactly 10 years after I made the decision because there were a lot of questions that were unanswered at the time when I made these decisions and a lot of fear. I don't want to make this sound easy. A lot of fear that maybe I am not doing the right thing. My father died when I was 32, so he didn't get to see me get to the other side of my full success and actualization in this work. That was hard because he was concerned that maybe I was making the wrong decision.

But I know this, that there is always something inside of you telling you whether what you're doing is right or whether it's wrong, whether this path is taking you closer to who you want to be or further away. When you quiet that and try to stuff it into a place that it doesn't have space and voice, it explodes. Why not, before you get to a place of crisis, really listen to what your body, mind, and your experiences are telling you and get to a place where you really focus in on why you started this journey in the first place? And that's to create your own happiness and enjoy your life. What gets you there? Don't be afraid of the answer.

Sarah Cottrell: I think that is so incredibly wise and I really appreciate you sharing that. If people want to connect with you, Tai, where can they find you online?

Tai Dixon: The best place is on LinkedIn. My business is a year in but I've survived entirely on referrals up to this point, which is quite a blessing. But on LinkedIn, I Am Tai Dixon, Esq., and people can connect with me and send me any questions there.

Sarah Cottrell: Perfect. I will put that link in the show notes when the episode releases so listeners can go there if they want to connect with you. Thank you so much for sharing your story, Tai. I feel like I could ask you a million more things and we could talk for hours and hours but our time is up so thank you for joining me today.

Tai Dixon: Thank you. It's been a pleasure and I appreciate the opportunity.

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.