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.

Hi. Okay, today we're going to talk about something that I actually talked about pretty recently on the podcast, but I wanted to talk about it again because it has come up so much recently in so many different situations with so many of my clients. You know, we talk on the podcast all the time, guests share their experiences, I've talked about my own experience and things that I've observed, things that I've worked with clients or seen with clients as we’re working through things.

We know that there are so many mental hurdles that many people need to overcome in order to leave the law because it’s so easy for people who become lawyers, for all kinds of reasons, have wrapped up their identity and many other things in their achievements, the fact that they're a lawyer, etc.

So often, I am having a conversation with a client and the underlying struggle—and this is something I relate to so much, this was absolutely true for me as I was thinking about leaving the law firm—the underlying struggle is this sense of feeling like you need permission to leave.

This manifests in a lot of different ways. It's part of why I think a lot of people have so much anxiety around convincing family and friends, in particular family or a partner, that leaving the law is the right thing for you. But at the end of the day, so much of that anxiety is related to this sense that you need that other person to agree that your decision is the right decision.

Listen, especially when we're talking about your partner, there is a degree to which you need some level of agreement as you are making general life plans. But often the kind of permission that someone is looking for is almost this emotional sense, permission to decide that you want to leave and feel okay about it or feel like it's the right decision.

I just want to remind you that the person that you need permission from is you. So often when we're looking for permission from someone else, we're actually using that other person as a proxy for ourselves because either we don't feel like our permission is enough or we actually feel like someone else who is important to us needs to give us permission in order for us to be able to give ourselves permission.

The challenge there is that if what you are ultimately looking for is the ability to give yourself permission, for you to give yourself permission, but you're using someone else's permission as a proxy, it gets really complicated really fast. It honestly complicates things in part because that other person, they are not designed to be the person that gives you permission.

They have their own thoughts and feelings. Again, I'm not saying, especially when it comes to a partner, that you should just make decisions and who cares what they think, that is in no way what I'm trying to say.

But what I am trying to say is even if you have an incredibly supportive partner, family member, whoever, who hears what you're saying about your experience in the law and agrees with everything that you're saying and that you should leave, if ultimately your sense of permission is coming from outside of yourself, is coming from the other person, if that's the way you are unlocking your ability to give yourself permission to leave, to say, “This is not right for me and I need to go,” then that can create not some tension, sort of in that relationship, but also it makes your sense of permission extremely flimsy because it’s dependent on an external factor that is not you.

So even if everyone in your life who's important to you, is incredibly supportive and gets it and is like, "Yes, get out," ultimately the permission that you need to have, the permission that you need to be able to give to yourself is from you.

Many times when I find a client is struggling with the opinion of a particular person in their life, whether it's a partner or a family member or whoever, many times when a person is struggling to allow themselves to really think about leaving the law, to actually make the decision to leave and trying to figure out like, “How do I handle this person's reaction, response,” whatever, I find that the thing that is underlying that struggle, the fact that that person, whoever they are, doesn't see things the same way as my client is ultimately because for various reasons my client doesn't feel like they are entitled to give themselves permission.

Again, I use “client” here because this is something that comes up for many, many, many lawyers in the Collab and whatnot, but this was also my experience. If you've listened to the podcast, at some point you've probably heard me interview my husband, Ed, who was a lawyer and is no longer a lawyer and you can probably tell from the conversations that we've had, I think he's been on more than once, that he is incredibly supportive. If you've heard me talk about my story, you know that part of what enabled me to actually make the decision, for example, to walk away from the law firm was the fact that he was advocating for me to make the decision that was right for me.

But nonetheless, the thing that I ultimately needed to learn is that what I'm talking about here, which is trusting myself to know what was the right thing, what what felt correct, and that honestly won't just change your life with respect to whether you should leave the law.

That will also change your life with respect to figuring out what it is that you want to do that isn't the law because it ultimately is tied to your sense of self and your intuitive, instinctual knowing. It is very hard to identify the thing that is the right path for you if you are not connected to yourself, if you do not know yourself, and if you are not the one who ultimately is giving yourself permission.

If you're struggling with the opinions of other people and what other people might think about you leaving and in particular someone who's close to you, a family member or a partner, I really, really strongly recommend that you reflect on to what extent do I feel like I am or I'm not giving myself permission to make this decision to make this move.

If I am not, or if that is permission that is also lacking, what do I need in order to be able to do that for myself? Because the person that you need permission from ultimately is you. Thanks so much for listening. I'll 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.