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 I want to talk to you briefly about why I love the Guided Track specifically, and in particular, I want to talk to you about some of the things that I have seen watching past participants of the Guided Track go through the CliftonStrengths Workshop that is included as part of the Guided Track experience.

If you're not familiar, typically when I run a Guided Track, I bring in a friend of mine, her name is Vanessa Kuljis. She's been on the podcast and you can go listen to her episode where she talks a lot about her own experience leaving the law and also becoming a certified Gallup CliftonStrengths Coach.

Vanessa has come in and done this workshop for multiple rounds of the Guided Track over multiple years now and it is always a huge favorite. The reason I want to talk about it is that I know it's something that I mentioned when I talked to you about the Guided Track that's coming up. I know that it's something that you can read about on the sales page about the Guided Track, but I think often people overlook it in terms of its value just because there's so much information and people are focused on all sorts of different things.

I wanted to specifically talk to you about why I love this workshop so much, what it is about it that is so powerful, and why you might want to consider joining the Guided Track because the Guided Track is the only place that you can get access to this particular workshop as part of one of my offers with Former Lawyer.

You probably are familiar with CliftonStrengths. If you're not, a super high-level overview is that the Gallup organization has this assessment called the CliftonStrengths Assessment. It assesses for 34 different talent themes that, when cultivated, turn into strengths.

Everyone has a different order of these various CliftonStrengths. In particular, the top five are generally the most significant for you. The thing about strength assessments like CliftonStrengths is that I think for a lot of us, it's like, “Well, I know what my strengths are,” but often what we think of as strengths are actually more skills.

By that I mean skills are things that you're able to do, whereas strengths are the way in which you do those things. In some cases, the why or the how you do those things. Why that's really important for lawyers in particular is we know that one of the big struggles is being able to articulate your transferable skills.

Well, one of the ways to do that to take the legalese out of the descriptions of your work is to be able to describe more clearly the strengths that you bring to the table as an employee, as a worker, as a leader and CliftonStrengths helps you do that.

But not only that, which of course, that's super helpful, and one of the things that you get as part of the workshop that's included in the Guided Track is you get these analytics that Vanessa prepares, which has different words that can be used to describe you and the type of work you do or the things that you need in the workplace, the things that you really can't stand in the workplace, these analytics that give you some additional language about that, but also, one of the things that has come up over and over is people saying like, “I took this assessment and then I looked at this information and I feel seen. I feel seen in a way that I haven't felt seen in my legal career. In fact, I feel seen in the sense that it feels like I actually am bringing things to the table that I didn't even realize were strengths and that in some cases, I have convinced myself weren’t strengths because they aren't the things that are valued by the legal profession,” which is such a narrow range of strengths and skills.

Not only is getting these results and then going through this workshop helpful in terms of being able to articulate your strengths, I have seen it help people see the strengths that they have for what they are, see that they actually do bring unique things to the table. It has helped so many of my clients break through that sense that we often have as lawyers who don't like our jobs, that there's something wrong with us, or that we're broken because we don't like it.

If you're thinking about joining the Guided Track, I highly recommend it for many reasons, but one of them is this CliftonStrengths Workshop, which is truly so wonderful and I can't say enough good things about it and about Vanessa. I will drop her link to her website in the show notes if you're interested in reaching out to her directly.

But if you think that you'd like to go through this process with other people in The Former Lawyer Collaborative and in the Guided Track, head to formerlawyer.com/guidedtrack and you can see all the information and enroll there. We're going to get started with the Fall Guided Track in three weeks and I would love to have you join us. Again, formerlawyer.com/Guided Track.

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.