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.

Hello, everyone. before we do anything else, I want to remind you that if you're listening to this episode the day that it releases, September 12th, the Guided track is starting tomorrow, September 13th. If you are interested in joining the Guided Track this fall, you have one day left. There'll be some more information later in the episode about what's involved. But if you've been thinking about it, and you're listening to this on the 12th, or I guess on the 13th if there are still spots, you can go to formerlawyer.com/guidedtrack and see all the information and enroll. Yeah, we're starting tomorrow and I'm super excited.

Here's what I want to talk about today. This is a piece of advice. It's not just given to lawyers. It's given to lots of people when they're thinking about what they want to do career wise. But this particular piece of advice is, in my opinion, generally not great and it's particularly garbage advice for lawyers. That is when someone tells you, “Well, you should just do what you love.” There's like, “Do what you love and you'll never work a day in your life.”

I don't even know where to begin. There are so many things that are problematic about this. The first thing that I think is problematic about this advice “to do what you love” when you're talking to a lawyer, most lawyers who know that they don't want to practice law anymore, or at least have this sense that they probably don't, don’t actually know what it is that they want to do, so this “do what you love'” advice is given to them to try to help them figure out what it is that they should do.

The problem is, many lawyers don't actually know what it is that they love to do. They know what they're good at, they know what gets them praise from other people, a lot of times lawyers confuse being good at something and getting praise from other people as it being something that they like when in fact it's just something that they're getting positive feedback on.

Of course, who doesn't like positive feedback? There's nothing wrong with liking positive feedback, but there's a difference between you actually liking or loving to do a particular type of job or task and getting positive feedback for doing that thing. You can be really, really good at lots of things that you don't like, let alone love, you can be really, really good at lots of things that get you a lot of praise from other people and it still not be something that you even like, let alone love.

That is the first reason that I think telling a lawyer who doesn't like practicing law just do what they love is unhelpful because often as lawyers, we don't even have a good sense of what it actually is that we love to do unless we've actually done some work around the difference between liking something, disliking something, feeling neutral about it, being able to untangle like “This makes me feel positively because I'm getting positive feedback” versus “This is something that I inherently enjoy,” all this, that's the first thing.

If someone hasn't done that work, it's honestly going to be very hard for them to even figure out “Is this something I love?” But then apart from that, there's a second reason that this piece of advice is really problematic. This is true for everyone who gets this advice, but it's especially problematic for lawyers. If you tell someone “Do what you love”, often the thing that they love to do is not necessarily something that they have done as a job or career before. It's something that is either a hobby or an interest.

It's not that there's anything wrong with turning a hobby or a special interest into a career path. However, doing that does change the experience of that thing. Often people have something that they love to do. Here's an example. One of the lawyers in the Collab really enjoys baking and had thought for many years in the back of their mind about the possibility of doing some sort of small business, whether it was an actual bakery or just custom baked goods, something along those lines.

Because baking, when they had some spare time, was something that they really enjoyed, they were really good at, and people really appreciated the things that they baked. However, when that Collab member did a bit of an experiment of what it would be like to actually produce baked goods as a job, as something that is not just “Oh, you can do it when you choose to do it because it feels enjoyable,” but instead “You need to do this because it's the thing that supports your livelihood, and/or even if it's not 100% supporting your livelihood, you still have to do it on a particular schedule because you have particular orders that have to be done and you have to do what you have agreed to do,” that changes the experience of it from something that can be chill and relaxing to something very different.

Ultimately that person realize, “I do really like to bake. But changing this from something I really enjoy doing as a hobby into a job would take away a lot of what is enjoyable to me about it.” I know we've talked about this on some podcast episodes before, but that I think is so important for people to think about because it is so easy to think, “Well, I really like X or Y thing, and therefore I would love to have that be my job,” but the very nature of making that thing into your career, into your job, into the thing that supports you changes the way that you experience that thing.

That's not always bad. It may be the case that you are willing to make those trade offs, that those trade offs are worth it to you, and ultimately, that you want to make that change. But if you don't do enough experimentation to figure out whether that is going to be the case for you, you can end up in a situation where you expect your career to feel exactly like that hobby feels, then it's really a bit of a rude awakening when it's quite different.

Hey, it's Sarah. I'm popping in here to remind you that I have created a free guide, First Steps to Leaving the Law for anyone out there who is just like, “Ugh! This job is the worst. I need out. Where do I start?” Which is exactly where I was when I realized that I didn't want to be a lawyer. You can go to formerlawyer.com/guide, sign up, and get the guide in your inbox today. When you grab that guide, you get on my email list, which is the way I keep everyone the most up-to-date about everything that's happening with Former Lawyer. It's also the best way to get in contact with me because I read and respond to every email. If you are ready to figure out what's next for you, go to formerlawyer.com/guide, download the free guide, First Steps to Leaving the Law, and get started today.

Here's the third reason why it's really problematic to give lawyers advice when they're trying to figure out what it is that they want you to do that isn't practicing law, of just like “Do what you love.” Lawyers tend to put a ton of pressure on themselves to find something that they love that is essentially like a hobby that they enjoy and often miss to try to make that into their job if they're going to leave the law.

Because many lawyers have the experience of not being able to engage in hobbies that they enjoy in the way that they want to because of the schedule that they're required to keep in their job as a lawyer, whether that's reading or writing, playing golf, or whatever, often when lawyers are thinking about moving to a different career, there's this underlying subconscious thought process of, “Well, I need to essentially pick something that involves this thing that I enjoy, because if I don't, I'm never going to get to do that thing.”

That's an assumption that is embedded in their thinking based on the experience that they've had working as a lawyer and how that career has affected their ability to engage in other things that they enjoy.

One of the things that people who I work with often end up realizing is that they aren't necessarily interested in converting some hobby into a job. They're really just looking for a job that gives them more time and space in their life to do things like engage in hobbies more regularly, to be able to read regularly, write, play golf, or whatever.

A big question that you need to answer if you're a lawyer and you're thinking about doing something else is “Do I actually need that other career to be wrapped around this thing that I enjoy, this hobby or interest of mine? Or am I just assuming that in my current career as a lawyer, I'm not going to get to do those things unless it's basically part of my new career?” If that's an assumption that you're making, you want to be able to recognize that and notice when it might be influencing your thinking, because that's not, generally speaking, an accurate assumption, but it is an assumption that we develop because of our experience as lawyers.

Then there's a fourth reason why “Do what you love” is just really unhelpful advice for lawyers as they're thinking about doing something else other than practice law, and this is something that is true for anyone I think, who gets this advice, which is, you can love something, you can really enjoy a job or a career path and that doesn't mean that every moment is going to feel like bliss.

When lawyers are given this advice to do what they love, and they follow it without dealing with some of these questions that we've talked about here, then as soon as they have an experience of like, “Well, this actually doesn't feel that great”, “This actually isn't that pleasant”, or “This feels difficult or this feels a lot like work,” it tends to initiate an existential spiral of like, “I didn't make the right choice. I'll never be able to find any sort of job that works for me,” etc. Because it sets up this unrealistic expectation that if you do what you love, you'll never work a day in your life.

The reality is that if you do what you love, or if you are able to find a job that was a really good match for you, for what you want your life to look like, for your values, your skills, your strengths, your personality, all of those things, it's true that a lot of it is going to feel really fulfilling, and in many cases, will feel very different from what it felt like to work as a lawyer, but it's still a job. Whether you're working for yourself, whether you're working for someone else, it's still going to have moments that don't feel great.

The problem is that if you go into a career shift as a lawyer, thinking, “Shifting this is going to fix everything, and I'm never going to have a negative experience related to my career,” not only are you setting yourself up for disappointment, but you're putting an extremely heavy burden on that new job, that new career to be more than that thing can be.

It is absolutely possible to identify something that you love to do that ultimately is a good career fit for you. But what you don't want to do is be in a position where the first time that you have an experience or a moment where it doesn't feel like you're loving every second, you don't want that to end up sending you into some existential doom spiral about how you made the wrong choice, there are no good options for you, etc.

These are just a couple of reasons that I think giving lawyers the advice of “Do what you love” when they're thinking about leaving the law without a lot more context, a lot more introspection, a lot more self inquiry, examination, and experimentation around what the potential new career path might look like can really set up lawyers to have problems, both in figuring out what it is that they really want to do and crafting a realistic and successful plan to transition out of practicing law.

I love working with lawyers to help them do this, whether it's in one of my group programs or working with them one-on-one, this is something that is so fun. I've learned I'm also very good at it. If you've thought about working with me in any capacity, I would love to hear from you. Please check out the website. All the information about the different ways that you can work with me are right there. Again, if you're listening and it's the day this podcast releases, which is September 12th, 2022, and you're wanting to join us in the Guided Track, go to formerlawyer.com/guidedtrack and I will see you tomorrow. Thanks so much for listening. Have a great 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.