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.

Today we need to talk about four myths that I find to be almost universal in terms of myths that lawyers who are wanting to explore another career are holding on to that is often keeping them from exploring their options. Listen in because there is a decent chance that at least one of these, if not more, is something that you're dealing with, and I want to talk about what they are and how to think about these myths and recognize them for what they are, which is a myth. Let's do it.

The first myth is something we've talked about a lot on this podcast, which is this idea that you have to find the perfect next career. The way that this tends to hold lawyers back is that they think, “Well, I can't leave until I have exactly what I want to do next lined up, and not just what I want to do next, but it needs to be the exact right thing. It needs to tick all the boxes, and basically, this is my one chance to get it right. I thought I was getting it right with law, I wasn't getting it right with law so this next move needs to be the move.” It's a whole spirally thing because here's the thing, you put so much pressure on yourself when you're thinking about it needing to be perfect. The reality is that there is no perfect next career. There is no perfect next career or perfect next job for you. The reality is that what you really need to be looking for is not something that's perfect but something that is a next step that makes sense.

The next step that makes sense is going to be different for everyone. It depends so much on the different factors that are driving you to make the decision to leave as well as what it is that you actually want to be doing, what you like, what you enjoy. Literally, there are as many factors to consider as there are people in the world. You don't have to be looking for the perfect next career. If you wait to leave until you found the thing that you're 100% sure is going to be “the thing”, that will keep you stuck because there will always be the possibility that something is not “the thing”. Don't fall prey to the belief that there's only one perfect job out there for you if only you can figure it out, and if you're not figuring it out, then there's something wrong with you or you're just not trying hard enough. There is no perfect next job but there are great options, you just need to figure out what those options might be and figure out what a good next step is. When you think about it as a stepping stone, you take away a lot of that pressure of perfection. That is myth number one.

Myth number two, very, very common, if you leave the law, you are throwing away all the money and time that you spent becoming a lawyer. This myth is incredibly pervasive. We've talked about the Sunk Cost Fallacy before and it's very hard when you're someone who has devoted so much time and money, years of schooling, years of practice to becoming a lawyer to not see things in this way. But I think when you find yourself running into the Sunk Cost Fallacy, you need to reframe how you're thinking, not just in the sense of, “Oh, I will carry my training and experience as a lawyer into every new career or job and each of those will just serve me in a different way.”

That's absolutely true, but I think the other thing that really can be powerful in terms of counteracting this myth is recognizing that there are costs either way. Yes, you could say, “Well, if I leave legal practice and do something else, then I'm throwing away all this time in the past that I spent all this money, etc.” Like I said, that isn't in fact true because you carry that training experience with you, but even if that were true, you also need to think about the costs that will be associated with a decision to stay going forward. We are so inclined to consider the past costs that we often negate or ignore or just don't think about the fact that continuing in a role that is not a good fit for you, that does not support your physical and mental well-being, that is not something that you enjoy, that requires you to be in a toxic work environment, all of those things bring their own costs. When you're thinking about costs, I think one of the important things to do is to make sure you're actually considering all of the costs because as lawyers, we often are trained to only look at the past costs and we tend to ignore the fact that there are many future costs associated with staying in a career that is really not well suited for us.

Myth number three that a lot of lawyers struggle with when they're thinking about leaving the law. People feel like leaving the law makes them a quitter and that being a quitter is a bad thing because a lot of us who became lawyers were raised with this idea that once you decide to do something, you do it. You've committed to it and you do it and it doesn't really matter if you like it or whether it's hard, etc. etc. You've made a decision, you've made a commitment, you follow through. That is a great way to approach many things in life, but it's not a great way to decide how you're going to spend most of your waking hours for the rest of your life. In fact, one of the essential parts of adulthood is coming to a place where you are able to recognize when it is that you are putting time and energy into something that is unwise for you to continue doing and to have the discernment to direct that time and energy elsewhere. Because of the personalities of many people who are drawn to the law, we tend to be very rule followery, type A types who are like, “Well, I'm on the path and now I need to stay on the path. Getting off the path is a bad thing.”

Even if you don't have that type of personality as a lawyer, working with other lawyers, you're in an environment where most other people have a personality like that and so the environment just carries with it all of these messages. I think one of the most important things that you can do when you have this feeling of “Leaving, doing something else makes me a quitter in some bad way where it's like I've given up or I haven't followed through,” recognize where those messages are coming from and think about “Is this really true? Is the principle that I'm applying to myself here actually true? Do I actually think that changing my mind based on new information, based on additional experience, is somehow a bad thing?” I think most lawyers would recognize that it isn't because we're trained to say, “Okay, we're in this situation. Let me do this analysis based on all the facts,” and like, “Wow, there's new information. I should probably incorporate that and see if it changes anything in terms of my analysis.” The same thing is true for us when we are thinking about leaving the law. That is what I want you to think about if you're experiencing thoughts like, “Well, if I leave, then I'm a quitter and I'm not following through.”

This leads us into the fourth myth that so many lawyers struggle with and is one of the reasons why so much of what I do involves either talking about the realities, the emotional realities, the mental realities, the mental health realities of being a lawyer, but also why the programs that I run involve a community component. So many lawyers believe this fourth myth, which is that there's something wrong with them. There's something wrong with them because they don't want to continue as a lawyer. There's something wrong with them because working in a toxic work environment with narcissists who are making your life miserable feels intolerable to you. People feel like I should be able to hack it and everyone else is able to hack it, and why can't I? What's wrong with me? Am I the only one? All of these things that truly are such a common experience. So many lawyers feel like I am the only one. There is something wrong with me. I don't like this job. I don't like the way this is going. I don't want to continue doing it but that must mean that I'm somehow deficient or defective in some way.

That is not true. It actually just means you're a normal person and that's a good thing. You're not weak. You're not morally bad. You're not less than for not liking being a lawyer. It just means that is not the role that is best suited for you. There can be this moralizing in the legal profession, especially when you're talking about “elite institutions” where there's this idea of like, “Anyone who's not working here and doing this kind of work is doing subpar work that is clearly somehow inferior, and anyone who goes to work anywhere other than here couldn't possibly be interested in what they're doing or have interesting work or it's madness.” That is not true, and yet there is this pervasive lie that continues to be perpetuated that if you do not like what you're doing, especially if you're in a place like a Biglaw firm, truly if you feel like, “This is so bad that I need to get out,” which news flash, most people there do, that somehow that means there's something wrong with you, and it does not, it does not. It means that you are a normal person who does not like your job, which is in fact, a very normal thing to experience.

If you feel like there's something wrong with you because you don't like what you're doing as a lawyer, please know there is nothing wrong with you. All four of these myths are myths that come up very often in the conversations that I have with people who write to me because they listen to the podcast with my clients inside the Collaborative. If you are struggling with these myths, I really want to encourage you to find other lawyers who understand what it is to feel these things. I guarantee you that there are others because yes, so many lawyers both struggle with these myths and also want to get out. Of course, I've shared about the Collaborative before, the program that I have that allows you to work through a process of figuring out what it is that you want to do in a community of like-minded lawyers. If you're interested in something like that, you can always feel free to check out the website formerlawyer.com/collab.

But even if you don't feel like the Collab is the right thing for you, I hope that you are able to look at these myths, see where you're believing them, and see why these myths are in fact not true. I hope that you can prevent these myths from keeping you from finding the career, the job, and the life that you really need, want, and deserve. Thank you so much for listening. Have a great week.

Have you watched my free masterclass, The Simple 5-Step Framework To Identify An Alternative Career (That You Actually Like!)? In this master class, you'll learn the proven framework that I use with all of my clients to help them identify an alternative career. You can watch the masterclass right now, just go to formerlawyer.com/masterclass, sign up, and get the link to watch. Once you've watched, message me or email me and let me know what your biggest takeaway was from the class. I would love to know.