Sarah Cottrell: 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.

You're listening to The After Series (It really is better than before). In this series, you'll be listening to four conversations that I have had with four different podcast guests who all left Biglaw and found a much better life on the other side. I have chosen these particular episodes because these particular guests have a really great mix of experience of things that they went on to do, and also I just think really illustrate well the reality that, as I said, not only is there life after Biglaw, but it is better than before. So let's get into this week's conversation.

Hey, it's Sarah. I want to remind you that I am now working with a very limited number of lawyers one-on-one who are trying to figure out what it is that they want to do that isn't practicing law. What we'll do when we work together one-on-one is we will meet for 12 weeks and you and I will walk through the framework that I've created to help lawyers do exactly that. On top of personalizing that and making individualized choices about which pieces of that you need to focus on, spend more time on, spend less time on, I also have the capacity to lend my brain to your situation.

When we're working together one-on-one, I'm able to look at cover letters, resumes, and other things that you may be putting together, cold outreach emails, figuring out who you might want to reach out to, figuring out, “Okay, I have all this information about who I am, values, personality, strengths, etc., from these various assessments, but how do I put that together into a picture of what it is that I actually want to be doing? How do I figure out what I actually want my life and career to look like?” all of those things.

If that sounds like something that would be helpful to you, I would love to talk with you about whether or not working with me one-on-one is the right fit for you. Go to the website, the Work With Me drop-down, there's a link to information about working with me one-on-one. You can see more details and the price as well as the button to book a free consult with me so that we can talk through whether working with me in this capacity would be the right fit for you. I onboard one new one-on-one client per month so if this is something that you're interested in, definitely schedule that call as soon as you can because I fill the spots on a first-come-first-served basis. I look forward to talking with you about whether working together one-on-one could be a good fit.

The environment that you work in, or any environment that you're in, whether it's work or some other organization, when someone leaves, you have to believe there's something morally defective about that person, something qualitatively problematic with them, that someone can't just leave because people leave jobs and go to other jobs and this is a normal part of life, if that isn't the type of environment you are existing in, which in my experience is very common, in art firms, in particular, that is a fundamentally unhealthy environment. What is it about your environment that requires you to believe that someone who leaves is a morally defective person?

Janelle Christian: I also think too, there's so much scriptwriting and so everyone has the same excuse. When you want to leave and someone's suggesting things like moving to a different market or going to a smaller firm, what does everyone say? “Oh, but I don't want to be bored.” Like what? Where did we get that? Where did that narrative start that if you don't work at firm, law firm mill, that you're going to be bored? Also, why is bored the biggest sin in the world? Bore me. I want to be bored.

Sarah Cottrell: Do you know what you get to do if you're bored? Lots of other things that are part of your life and not just your job.

Janelle Christian: Right. I remember when people would say, “Oh, so and so left, they're going to be so bored.” I would feel jealous. Like, “Yes, I want it. What does boredom feel like?” That's what Atlanta is, to be frank. When I did move to Atlanta I was using about 30% of my capacity. Part in choice, I was signing up for a law firm that I knew was not going to make me put 100% of my capacity, but in part, because the demand wasn't that high. The expectation of me was half of what the expectation was at my first job.

In that “boredom”, I found interest in hobbies for the first time. I remember my first week of work at my new job, I called my dad and I was like, “You mean to tell me that everyone else in the world has this four-hour block of time after work? Why doesn't everyone have exercising and workout routines? Why can't everyone cook? What do people use with this time?” I felt angry that I had never even known I was missing on 20 hours a week.

Sarah Cottrell: Yeah. I remember when I worked at the firm, I remember several times people outside of the firm would ask, “Oh, what hobbies do you have?” I would be like, “I literally don't have any hobbies.” I felt so boring and I was like, “How could I not have hobbies?” But all I do is work, recover from work, sleep, and make sure the basic functions of life in terms of laundry and having groceries in the house and the things that you have to do as an adult, picking up dry cleaning. I'm like, “I don't think picking up dry cleaning is a hobby but that's probably the thing that I do the most regularly,” and this is really sad.

Janelle Christian: Yeah. I think that goes back to me saying about participating in my life. I knew that work plus errands a life did not make and that's really where I felt I had gotten, that was where this degree and all this hard work had gotten me.

Sarah Cottrell: So you got to Atlanta, the situation was not as demanding in terms of your capacity. At what point in there did you start to think about building a side business?

Janelle Christian: Yeah. I think it was a culmination of I was in Atlanta for a few months before I needed to study for the bar so I had this abundance of evening time which I started exercising. I joined a class pass. I was working out. I was just loving life so much, so full. I was in the best shape of my life. I was happy. I felt a light, I just was joyful. I had this abundance of time and then the toxic part of me needed to do something with that time.

It wasn't okay after a few months for me to just watch television, read a book, or just work out, I couldn't allow myself to just be doing these things. So I started looking for other ways to invest my time just from the initial get-go. But before I could even think about it, it was like, “Okay, it's time to start studying for the bar, let's study.” I'm studying for the bar and at that time, I head off. That's part of what I had negotiated in coming to my new firm was you were going to give me a month off to just study so I can pass.

In that month, I just felt like I was living my best life. I woke up when I felt like it. I made smoothies every day. I worked out. I studied. I felt like such a badass. I was doing it. I was doing the thing. This is what life was supposed to be. I was thinking to myself, “I wish I could make a job of just living my best life.” I started to feel envious of people like Khloe Kardashian like, “Oh, yeah, she's paid to just live the best version of her life.” And mind you, I can't make any type of assumptions about Khloe Kardashian's status and quality of her life, but the concept of being paid to be yourself suddenly felt so valuable to me.

I'm studying for the bar and I'm thinking and I identified that I really don't like office culture. I felt so much lighter. My Atlanta office was not bad at all in terms of personalities or stresses but I still felt lighter and relieved to be away from everyone during the bar. Then during that time, one of my friends actually passed away in DC from an overdose. That was awful and traumatic. He was a young Black lawyer and that to me was like, “Oh, that's hard.” Then about a month later, another friend passed away from an overdose and he was another Black young lawyer.

That, paralleled with my own experience of being a young Black attorney at these Biglaw firms, I felt this resounding like we aren't well and now it's going unchecked. I felt like I could understand how quickly and how easily the pressures of this job can sweep you away. That was the moment I was like, “I want to turn back to my friends and say we don't have to do this. Let's try to make a better way.”

When I thought about sharing, I just started sharing on Instagram. My Instagram post I would post every other morning and my posts were just transformation stories of “Hey, I know we thought we needed to do this, or we needed to stay up until 2:00 A.M, or that we could only get paid this much money if someone was speaking to us in this tone and manner. But here's an example. I am an example of how we can change this. Don't feel like you have to live this way in order to get the result you want.” That's all I was doing. I was showing up online saying “Here, you don't have to do it, here's how I changed.”

With that, it started to get attention quickly and it started to get popularity quickly. I started sharing around February around when I took the bar. By the summer time I was like, “Okay, I would like to have a place on the internet where all of this lives.” I didn't think of it so much as a business but I thought of it as wanting to launch a space that I would figure out how to monetize, but I wanted it to just be this space where it was dedicated to people taking care of themselves, particularly people in these high-paid, high-stress environments.

When I was building it, I thought it was going to encompass wellness generally, it was going to be interior design, wellness for your home, wellness for your mind, and wellness for your body, there were all these different wellness facets that I wanted to pay attention to. So by the end of 2019, I was like, “Okay, I'm having some trouble figuring out how this will monetize itself.” The only thing I knew long term that I wanted to do was I wanted to coach people to get them out of the jobs they didn't like. That's what I thought in the beginning, more like career coaching. “I'm going to get you out of this one job and help you find another job,” kind of like how I had my moving from DC and finding Atlanta.

At the time I thought Atlanta was my solution and I had no intention in launching my platform and making it a full-time thing. I thought it was going to be this place that lived that I could figure out how to make money. By the end of that year, I decided I want to hire a coach because I want to be more serious about “Can I really monetize this? How can I help people? How can I grow this? What am I doing? I don't know anything about business. What am I doing?”

So I hired a business coach and she really showed me, “Do you know what you want to do is coach people? You want to walk people through this process, let's identify your process, and let's figure it out.” So I released and opened this beta-coaching program. In the beginning actually, I didn't even charge people. I offered free sessions. That's how I kicked it off. Again, the story of my life is undervaluing what I'm doing, very synonymous to applying to law firms and having to interview. I think it was like 120-something people signed up for my free sessions.

I was doing free sessions for a month straight of just meeting with people, interviewing them, and life coaching them. I had no life-coaching experience. I had nothing. I just knew that I could help unhappy people redirect their energy. I did all of this, all these free sessions. I realized, “Okay, life coaching, that's what's happening here. So let me get a life coaching certification on the side while I still try to figure this out.” But after all my free sessions, I said, “Okay, guys, I think everyone's enjoyed this. Would you want to continue this conversation? I'd like to test this out for a super, super low price. Let's see what this looks like for six weeks.”

My first coaching program was six weeks at an embarrassingly low amount and people signed up. From there, people kept signing up, people kept signing up, and all along, I'm realizing this is the business, but more I'm realizing it's working rather than just like a business, and then it just exploded. I know that seems kind of “And then it just happened,” but what I really believe happened is there's a moment when I think the universe, God, whatever you want to believe in, I think when you start pointing in the direction of what you're supposed to be doing, the resources find their way to you.

The hardest part is making sure you're pointing in the right direction, which is what I work relentlessly with people to figure out, like let's make sure we're going the right way, but then once you're on the path, it's like an overflow of confirmation and overflow of fulfillment, reassurance. As soon as I announced that first coaching program, there was no question in my mind that I had figured it out.

Since then from that time, my interior design studio has fallen away, wellness generally has fallen away, it's gotten really, really clear that the first iteration was I wanted to just help people get out of their jobs, and now, I specifically want to empower and help people start their side businesses. But it was never intended that this was going to be a business, it was more “I want to turn and let people know that the way we're doing it isn't working and there is a better way.”

Sarah Cottrell: Yeah. I have so many things that I want to talk about. First, I just want to say I'm so sorry about your friends. I think that one of the reasons that it's so important to me to talk about some of these horribly toxic lies that are perpetuated in the legal profession, and in particular, in Biglaw, is because it creates environments where people feel like there's something wrong with them if it feels crushing, like they “should” be able to handle it, when the reality is that, and I know you and I have both had this experience, it is not a healthy environment.

I think it's just really important for me that people hear that because I think that people believing that it's something wrong with them as opposed to something wrong with the system leads to some really horrible outcomes.

Janelle Christian: Yeah, with my clients, I compare it to being in an abusive relationship. In order to leave, it's actually the process of breaking a trauma bond. My tactics are the same that therapists use when you are in an abusive relationship. I have to use the same tactics to quell people and help them overcome and see what their experience has been. We all have a lot of PTSD. It is by definition, you're addicted to the highs, the lows are very low. If you actually look at the traits and characteristics of abuse, law firms fit the bill exactly.

Sarah Cottrell: Yeah. I think like you said, I used to think semi-jokingly like, “Oh, I feel like I have some form of PTSD from working in Biglaw,” and then as I learned more about trauma and experienced therapy, I realized, “Oh, no, actually, yeah, there is probably some element of trauma that everyone who's in that environment experiences. Of course, it impacts you.” tell me when you started your platform when was that?

Janelle Christian: I started sharing my experience regularly on Instagram around February or March of 2019. I launched my website, which is where I thought this self-care platform would live, in the summer of 2019.

Sarah Cottrell: Okay. You said when you started this, you didn't really have this idea that it would become its own business or its own thing. Why do you think that was? Because I think there are some people, probably not someone who is a lawyer, but there are some people who might have done a similar thing and immediately had this thought of “Oh, yes, and then it will become my thing and this will be a business.”

Janelle Christian: I think it goes back to exposure. In moving to Atlanta, that was probably the first time I even met real-life entrepreneurs. I thought entrepreneurs were Jeff Bezos and Mark Zuckerberg. I thought, “If you were an entrepreneur, you either came up with this brilliant idea when you were in college, it was tech-based, and you are making a bajillion dollars in Silicon Valley.” That's what I thought an entrepreneur was. Then I also thought of entrepreneurs as that weird uncle that always came around and had a new idea but was always broke. I felt like those were the extent of people I had been exposed to.

There was no universe in my mind. I didn't know people who could function making six figures, not even making six figures, making five figures, whatever amount of money it was, I did not personally know people who thrived outside of the corporate America structure that never crossed my mind. There were people like the Kardashians. You would see people on television but for some reason, they all seemed like characters, they didn't seem realistic to me.

But then seeing people in Atlanta, moving to Atlanta, was now the first time after I launched my website, now I'm meeting people left and right, people who started very cool skincare lines and this is their full-time job, people who are starting real-estate companies and they're making six figures a month, people who are blowing me away with what they're now able to do.

Representation is so real. I've always thought of representation in terms of “Oh, cool, Barack Obama's president. Black people can do whatever they want,” but moving to Atlanta blew my mind of “Oh, Janelle, representation is a lot deeper than that, and spans a lot more.” The importance of being able to see yourself and believe for yourself that you can replicate, that's what made it possible for me. Sharing on Instagram, growing, now being around more people who aren't entrepreneurs, introducing me to more people, that led me to this space in Atlanta, it's a club called The Gathering Spot.

That is a private membership club for particularly Black entrepreneurs who are starting businesses. I'm now surrounded by people who are doing this. It's common ground that everyone can do this. There is no question I will do this and the questions are now elevating to “Oh, when are you going to be a million-dollar business?” Being able to impute myself there and start to see myself in the future, it happened quickly but that's when I was like, “Okay, now I want to take this more seriously,” and that's what led me to get a coach myself in December of 2019.

Sarah Cottrell: At that point when you got your coach, were you thinking specifically “I want to build this business so that I can leave the legal profession”? I realized there were other reasons obviously, other motivations in building the company, but was that the point at which you had realized that was your goal?

Janelle Christian: Yeah. I hired her. I remember the discovery call, my question to her was, “What's the probability that I can build this to be able to sustain my lifestyle a year from now?” That was the intent that hiring her was. That makes sense to me too, because I had never made an investment like that in myself, like “law school” was the biggest investment I had made until that point in that date, and so this now pretty large reoccurring payment, I needed to feel some type of confidence that I was working towards something a lot more concrete, so yeah, hiring a coach, my intention was to put this into overdrive.

Sarah Cottrell: That's really interesting because I think there are a lot of lawyers who would think like starting a business and growing it to the point where I can leave this job within a year, it would basically be unimaginable to them. Clearly, at that point, you had done enough work that not only could you imagine it, but you were like, “This is a goal that I have.” Can you explain a little bit what the process was of going from not thinking about it as a business opportunity really at all to “This will be the thing that I can move to full time”? Was it just that experience of being around other people who were already doing something similar or were there other components?

Janelle Christian: No. For me, 100% it was seeing other people do it. My discipline is very strong. I think I have superhuman discipline and I firmly believe that when I put my mind to something, I can achieve it. I need to be careful and use discretion to what I put my mind towards, but I believe I can achieve things. Being able to see even a handful of people, and then as soon as I started to see one person, it was coming a lot. Everyone I was meeting was suddenly an entrepreneur, running a seven-figure business, and living these awesome, autonomous, free, peaceful boss lives.

I do have to give credit, the guy I was dating at the time, he had built two businesses. One of which he built from zero. He quit his job at the time, the month after I took the bar, so in March, and by the end of 2019, he was a business that was making six figures a month. Watching that firsthand had been so like, “Oh, yeah, people do this, Janelle. There's science here. It's not so much a wish and a hope. It's add value relentlessly to people and provided you were adding value, the money can come. You just have to figure out that sciency part.”

Honestly, it was seeing enough people do it. Even now, I've now been able to see enough women coaching in the space I want to be who are making five million dollars a year. Now I believe that's possible and the goals just keep getting bigger. I just have to see for me, I just have to see someone doing the thing I want to do. That's a trait I'm trying to outgrow. I want to be able to dream up what I want to achieve and go for it, but for me, unfortunately, I need to see someone doing it first. But thankfully, I was able to see so many.

That's why I think it's important for me, I’m starting a podcast, it’s launching in January, that's aimed specifically for this. I am interviewing entrepreneurs who started in corporate America and transitioned to be successful, not living in their parent’s basement, not that living in your parent’s basement is not successful but I know that people don't want to leave because of the money, and so I'm interviewing people who were able to financially keep the ship on track and make that transition successfully because I want to bring this piece of Atlanta that I got to experience to as many people as possible.

Sarah Cottrell: I think that is so amazing. I love it so much. Okay, so it's December 2020, so it's a year after you hired your coach and said “Can I leave within a year?” Tell me where you are now and what you are doing.

Janelle Christian: Now, I am full-time running my business, I left my job in July. I run Hey J. Nicole full-time now. Now the business is shifting evermore. Like I said, I started out just wanting people to leave bad jobs, then that morphed into I want you to leave the law if that's what's on your heart, and now it's “No, no, no, boo-boo, we're going to leave the law, we're going to start these businesses for ourselves, we're going to create lives of autonomy, freedom, and wealth, and we're going to be happy.”

Now my primary goal is to get to show people, empower people, exemplify for people that getting this law degree was a degree in excellence, skill, and ability, and you can take this and do with it whatever you want. I want to empower people and give them examples and inspire them that if you want to build a business, if you don't want to go to an office anymore, if you don't like having co-workers, or if you want to build a business with 10,000 co-workers, you can do that. Your law degree enabled you, certified you to do whatever the heck you want.

That's what my work is now. It's such a baby business but I'm trying to play with all the levers and make sure I'm impacting people appropriately, I'm pouring into people correctly, but also I can make money and not work a thousand hours a week. I'm still playing with all of that but coaching people in the transition from leaving corporate America to building their own business is by far my favorite thing that I wake up and love to do.

Sarah Cottrell: I love it. Let's talk a little bit about something we touched on much earlier that I wanted to circle back to after you had shared that you've left and you're running this business full-time. We talked about very early on how you felt this pressure to achieve because people were watching this was the message that you received in law school and you felt like you needed to go to a big firm, make partner, and all of these things. Tell me a little bit about how your mindset around that has shifted because, obviously, it had to shift in order for you to get to the place where you were able to pivot and do this very different thing.

Janelle Christian: Yeah. I know exactly what changed my mindset and it was the book Rich Dad Poor Dad by Robert Kiyosaki. I know there's a lot of unlovely press about Robert Kiyosaki in the last few months, but if I'm being honest, that book is transformational, it was transformational for me, and showing me really on paper that the idea and the path that I had for wealth may be flawed. That I thought the way to accumulate massive wealth and in reality, I wasn't chasing wealth, I was chasing stability, security, and autonomy, that's what I thought being a law firm partner was, was “Okay, I don't have to do the grunt work anymore. I'll be at a position where I can outsource and I'm just floating up here schmoozing with clients and making all the money.”

That's what I thought I was chasing. In reading that book and also assessing realistically, taking a step back like we talked about of what do I want my life to look like, I realized that pursuing partnership would not yield that outcome. Even at the firm in Atlanta where I will 100% say that was much more people living a life closer to what I wanted, those partners are still not people that I aspire to want to emulate my life to look like.

When I thought about that book does a really great job of presenting working for a company versus building something yourself, how those numbers work out more in your favor, and how this could become reality, I think that really drilled home for me that my goal was never partner, it was autonomy and freedom. If those are my goals, then actually, partnership is not even the right pathway to get there.

Sarah Cottrell: I think that is such an important insight. The last thing that I want to talk about is something that I know you've shared about on Instagram before and I know we've talked about it before, and you touched on it earlier in our conversation, which is the reality that you know that when someone leaves Biglaw, there's all of this people saying things about why the person left. I know a lot of lawyers, especially who are in Biglaw, firms, or just environments like that who struggle to think about making a change because they know that people are going to do to them what they've seen them do to other people who have left.

I know you've talked on Instagram before about how you have clients who struggle with that and so I was wondering if you could talk a little bit about whether that was ever a factor for you, and if you have any advice for people who are finding themselves in that position. Because I'm confident there are people listening who feel that way.

Janelle Christian: Yeah. I felt that more in leaving my first firm than leaving my second. I think by the time I left my second firm, I felt very rooted in this being the right decision. But in leaving my first firm to even move to Atlanta, I found unfortunately solace in the fact that I could give an excuse that they didn't have an office in Atlanta. I could say something like, “Oh, I just want to go home,” and it didn't have to be about them and it didn't have to be about the work or the hours, it was just this other reason I could give.

But when I look back, and even when I'm counseling my clients, the truth is I know that still, people had things to say about me when I left. A lot of that even made its way back to me. The deciding factor for me when I was weighing “Was I capable emotionally to handle that so-and-so is going to think I'm not smart, I'm lazy, or I never was going to cut it anyway?” I decided it was more important for me to be a happy failure than to be proving these people I didn't even like.

Sarah Cottrell: I think that is so important. I think the reality is, and I'm sure you can speak to this as well, when you're in that environment, you really care what those people think. Then you leave and you realize you don't care what those people think, like who cares?

Janelle Christian: Some full circle moments like when I left the law to now launch my business full-time, there are so many people, partners at my first job, people who actually made my life miserable. When I think back to my conversations with my therapist, it was like people who brought so much anxiety to my life that I had to practice managing how to handle their emails, those people were reaching out to me, sending me messages like, “I admire your courage and what I find you doing is so inspirational. I really think about doing something similar but in this different lane. I just really respect what you're doing.” When I say I cried, got on my floor, and cried when I got those messages because it felt like closure I never thought I would ever receive.

Sarah Cottrell: Yeah. Because I think you and I know that one of the reasons there's this defensive posture towards people who leave is because there's some insecurity in the people who are staying. So to have that experience of closure is rare.

Janelle Christian: Yeah. But I think centering that on knowing you're the center of your life, and so if you are happy pursuing whatever it is you want to pursue, whether that looks like going to another firm, going to in-house, leaving the law completely, whatever that looks like, make those choices based on what you want and you being happy because you probably don't like those people anyway. Why do we care what they think?

Sarah Cottrell: Oh, such a good note to be ending on. Okay, so Janelle, is there anything else that you would like to share that we have not talked about yet?

Janelle Christian: I don't think so. I think if I could leave people with one thing, it's that something I ask most of my clients is “Can you give me an example of any time you've ever put your mind to something and failed?” and it's pretty rare. Most of my clients can't even think of an opportunity, but sometimes people can, they can think of one, they can think of two. But the point that I like to draw them to is that it's either rare or none, in your experience, so why would you think that leaving this job you hate to do something else would be any different? The issue is not leaving or finding the courage, the issue is finding the thing we want to focus our attention on. You have a track record of excellence, and you have proven that you can execute when given an end goal. The hardest part is figuring out the end goal, the next step, or whatever out of this bad situation is.

But once you decide, you can do it and you're good at it. You're really good at it. Stop worrying about if you can do it or if it's going to be hard, just spend more time picking what the next thing is going to be and what the exit strategy is, and I can almost guarantee, you'll do it and you'll do it well.

Sarah Cottrell: Yes, I agree so much. Where can people find you online?

Janelle Christian: I think the best place to find me is Instagram. I have a community over at Instagram where I'm hopefully giving encouragement and inspiration that you can do whatever it is you want, and that's @heyjnicole. Like I said, I'm starting a podcast that's specifically for people who want to start side businesses, and that's called Sunset Provisions. That's going to be launching on January 4th, and it's going to be lots of interviews of people who have left corporate jobs and are now doing the entrepreneurship thing successfully. It's also tips, my own little musings, and things like that. Then if you're interested in working with me, any of my services, any of my offerings, you can find that at heyjnicole.com.

Sarah Cottrell: Awesome. Janelle, thank you so much for sharing today. I loved hearing your story. I am such a huge fan of everything that you're doing and I am so happy to see all of the success that you're having. I know there's going to be so much more.

Janelle Christian: I appreciate it, Sarah. I want to thank you because I wouldn't have quit my job if it wasn't for this podcast for seeing myself and other people who were able to make that transition. I remember messaging you on the day I quit because this podcast is, in large part, to thank for me finding that courage. So as much as you thank me for being here, I thank you for creating this space for us.

Sarah Cottrell: Thank you so much. Oh, my heart is warmed. It was great to talk to you. Thank you.

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.