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.

Hey everyone. Today on the podcast, I want to talk about something that comes up for pretty much every lawyer that I've ever worked with or known who has decided to leave the law to do something else, especially people who started out in Biglaw. That is the experience of having to work through and process of grief around your career.

Now, I know that sounds sad, don't pause, don't move on, because I promise it's not going to be a super sad heavy episode. I just think we really need to talk about this because grief is something that a lot of us have not really been taught how to sit with, how to process, and how to move through. In fact, if you want to hear more about a discussion about grief specifically, I interviewed Heather Horton, had to be at least a year ago now from when I'm recording this. We talked a lot about grief because she works as a grief recovery coach.

Let's talk about this. Why am I talking about this topic? Well, I was talking with a friend and they started out in Biglaw, and they were telling me how they've moved on, they've left Biglaw, they are no longer practicing and they're extremely happy with the choice to leave the law. But when they see or interact with friends of theirs, either from law school or from their Biglaw firm who are still in the system, they experience a lot of mixed emotions.

One of the emotions that they experience is this sense of being behind. In particular, around essentially, income, money, those sorts of things. Seeing friends who are still in Biglaw, who are buying the “dream houses”, taking fancy vacations, or these sorts of things, which, yes, that can sound materialistic, but the reality is there are lots of things that money can buy that can make life a lot easier.

My friend that was reflecting to me that one of the times that they struggled the most with their decision to leave the law, not like, “Oh, I should go back,” but just have that sense of like, “But did I make the right choice?” is when they feel like they're looking at someone who is “doing better” than they are or is “where they should have been”, and trying to process that.

The conversation we were having was that one of the things that comes up in that processing is this issue of grief. I've seen it over and over. I've experienced it myself. I wanted to talk about a couple of ways in which grief could show up for you as a lawyer if you're thinking about leaving and I want you to know that it's normal that there's nothing wrong with you. It's not necessarily a sign that you should be doing anything different. It's just a natural part of the process when you're letting go of one thing and holding on to another.

The first thing, and I touched on this a bit already, is that as lawyers, we often have to process through some grief around the fact that we are seeing other people do things that we once thought we wanted or wanting to do and aren't doing, and this feeling of being either left behind, missing out, or even just not being where we think we should be or where some past version of ourself thought we should ultimately end up.

There's a lot of grief there. There's a lot of essentially past dreams to be mourned, and also, sometimes depending on where we end up, there's some present realities that can be more difficult. It is possible that certain things will be more difficult, because either we've taken a substantial pay cut or something like that, and we're having to deal with different issues than we might have dealt with if we stayed in our role as a lawyer.

Now the flip side of that, of course, is that for most of us, for all of us, essentially, that trade off is completely worth it. But the thing is, even though the trade off is worth it to us, that doesn't mean that the trade off can't be difficult or can't have difficulties or there can't be something around it that you might have to grieve because you have let go of one thing for another.

Again, I think this is so important for you to hear, because as lawyers, I think when we experience this grief, it often causes anxiety for us because we think, “Oh, I'm feeling some negative emotion. That must mean the thing that I've done is the wrong thing.” We just, both as lawyers and just as a society in general, have not really been taught well how to hold multiple things at once, how to be able to experience ambivalence, which is to say, both positive and negative feelings about a choice or a scenario at the same time.

The first area where you may have to do some grieving is in this feeling of being left behind. The other type of grief is related to this, and it's grieving the loss of the prospect of the you that you once imagined you would be. You develop this sense of who you are and yourself around your career. You even develop these kinds of dreams or ideas of what you ultimately want to do. Anytime you make a change, whether it's leaving the law for a different type of career or something else, you let go of some of those dreams.

Often some of those dreams were things that kept you going for many years. It's important, I think, for lawyers to be able to acknowledge that that's a real loss. I think for many of us that can be like, “Well, that wasn't real, it was just something I thought about. Why would I need to feel anything about it? I decided this other thing, I should just move on.” It's because you're a human being, and you have feelings.

Especially as lawyers, often, our aspirations and our hopes for our future are a big part of what has kept us moving in many areas of our life so letting go of ideas about what that's going to look like is going to involve some grief. It's going to involve some amount of recognizing that what I once thought would be is not going to be. Again, that isn't to say, “And therefore that's bad,” because that's something you're consciously choosing in order to be in a better place for yourself. But there still is grief there.

The other type of grief that comes up a lot but I think is often something that people cover over unintentionally with anxiety or frustration is this feeling of having grief over lost years. What do I mean by that? Many people who I work with come to the realization that one of the big things that drove their decision to become a lawyer was that they thought it would look good to other people.

It's completely understandable that we would want to be perceived well as human beings. That's a human need. But for many people, they come to this realization that that was this overriding thing that was driving all of their decisions to the point that they didn't really incorporate their own wants or needs in deciding what to do, they simply did what they thought would be the most prestigious thing.

Realizing that and coming to a place where you can make different decisions that are more in line with your current values is really significant, and is essentially the path to figuring out what it is that you really want to do. But there is a lot of grief there for many people when they look back and realize how much of their life was being dictated by what they thought others would think of them.

Again, I'm not saying this to be shamy or judgy because, welcome to the club, I certainly do not consider myself exempt from this. But the reality is that even though we can look back and know we were doing the best with what we had at the time, there can still be a lot of grief there of feeling like we have spent years of our life making decisions that weren't truly ours, making decisions that were based on something that we no longer think is a good basis for life choices.

It takes a lot of processing to be able to both grieve those years or decades where you were making choices that weren't fully in alignment with your values maybe from an unconscious place of wanting to please other people, to be able to grieve that and at the same time not condemn yourself who was making those decisions.

Because I think as lawyers, we often think that we can't feel badly or feel sad about something that happened in the past or a choice that we made without condemning our past self. I think it's really important in this process to recognize that you don't have to condemn your past self, you can have so much compassion for the person for you now today and for the person who made all of those decisions, and yet at the same time, as you hold all of that compassion, you can also feel a lot of grief; deep grief for the ways in which your career choices didn't really align with what your values are, or were influenced by things that you wish had not influenced them as much.

The reason I wanted to talk about this is that grief is an experience that we all have; whether we're talking about a career change or something else. It's also a difficult experience to walk through. Also, like I said earlier, it's something that tends to make lawyers think they're doing something wrong. We have been conditioned to believe that if something we're doing is generating negative emotions, it feels to us like that must be the wrong choice.

It's been my experience through working with so many people now who are going through this process, that grief is just a part of it. Grief is a necessary part and it's going to come up and it's important to be able to meet yourself in that grief with compassion, and also to be able to work through that grief and not push it away.

Because often when we experience grief, and it comes up, we feel like we need to push it away because it's going to be never ending. The reality is that the most important thing that you can do in terms of moving through grief is allow yourself to move through it, which brings me to my basically weekly plug for therapy.

If you are not in therapy yet, I highly recommend that you find a therapist, preferably one who is trauma informed, because working through things like grief can always benefit from working with a professional who has that ability to support you through that process.

If you're in the thick of grief over some aspect of your career, I just want you to know that you are not alone. You deserve compassion, and I'm so grateful that you're here. Thank you so much for joining me today. 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.