Hi, and welcome to The Former Lawyer Podcast. I'm your host, Sarah Cottrell. I practiced law for 10 years and now I help unhappy lawyers ditch their soul-sucking jobs. On this show, I share advice and strategies for aspiring former lawyers, and interviews with former lawyers who have left the law behind to find careers and lives that they love.

I originally recorded the episode Your Job Should Not Make You Cry back in the very early days of lockdown when I was still editing the podcast myself and needed to be able to edit some shorter episodes, which ultimately I discovered was a happy accident because this episode is one of the most popular episodes of the podcast.

It is one of the most downloaded. It comes up all the time. I hear all the time from people who have sent it to friends and coworkers because apparently there are a lot of us who need to be reminded that your job should not make you cry. If that doesn't tell you something about our profession, I don't know what will. Here is the next episode in our summer re-release series, Your Job Should Not Make You Cry.

Hello, everyone. This week on the podcast, we’re going to talk about something that I have very strong feelings about, and that is that if you cry regularly because of your job, that means something, something is wrong.

I feel like this sounds super obvious but I cannot tell you the number of people who I know who have experienced crying in the office, crying on the way to the office, this was back before Coronavirus days when we were still commuting to offices.

It's so normalized in the legal profession that people almost think that it doesn't mean anything. I know for me when I was working at a law firm, I definitely would cry somewhat regularly. I didn't really realize that maybe that shouldn't indicate something to me.

In fact, if anything, I thought, “Oh, there's something wrong with me because I'm not liking this enough that I'm crying.” This is touching on what we talked about last week. I'm here to say that if you are in that position, if you are regularly crying because of your job, that means something and that probably means that is not the job for you.

That's not a judgment. That's not like, “Oh, you can't hack it.” That's just like, “That job sucks.” Any job that's making you cry regularly is crap and you should get out of that job.

Look, I get it, sometimes that's not a thing that you can do right away, totally been there. But I really want to encourage you that if you are someone who is having this experience of crying in the office, because of your job outside of the office, etc., you don't have to live like that.

You have so many options and you're allowed to want a job that doesn't make you cry. You are allowed to decide that your job is the problem, that you are not the problem. You are not the problem because your job causes you to cry. Your job is the problem because what kind of job is that?

Anyway, I see a lot of lawyers, and I've been there myself, who don't take these really obvious signs from their body, from their nervous system, from their experience that's telling them “This is not right for me” because they think it doesn't matter, and it does matter.

Your feelings matter. The way your environment makes you feel matters and you should not be crying because of your job. That's all for me for this week. I will talk to you next week.

Thanks so much for listening. I absolutely love getting to share this podcast with you. If you haven't yet, I invite you to download my free guide: First Steps to Leaving the Law at formerlawyer.com/first. Until next time, have a great week.