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.

Let's talk about simple and difficult versus complicated and easy. Often when I talk with people or people reach out to me with questions about whether they should leave law, there's often this sense that the question or the process is very complicated. I think that often this sense that something is complicated gives people the sense that, "Oh, you lawyer who's thinking about leaving law needs to find someone with special knowledge who is going to help you figure out the answer because the process is very opaque. The process you need to go through to figure out what it is that you want to do that is not practicing law is opaque."

I actually don't think that's true. I think that the process that you can go through to figure out what it is that you want to do that's not practicing law is actually very simple, but it's not easy. The steps that you take within the process are simple, they're straightforward.

As you know, if you've listened to the podcast at all, I have created a curriculum, it's inside of the Collab at this point, literally hundreds of lawyers have used it, and the steps are very clear. I even taught about the steps in the framework in a free live masterclass multiple times, which I will probably be taking another one of those soon—keep an eye out, anyway—but the steps being simple doesn't mean that the work is easy, if that makes sense.

The fact that the framework is straightforward means that it is clear what to do for each next step. But the work itself that you do within the steps that you take to figure out what it is that you want to do that is in practicing law, that work is hard. Honestly, that is part of why I talk about therapy and why I think lawyers should be in therapy so often on the podcast.

Because in almost every case, people, lawyers who are going through this process, among other things are having to work through some really complex, thorny issues, and things related to why you think what you think about work and your value as a human person and pretty much you name it, it will come up in the process of figuring out what it is that you want to do that isn't practicing law.

That's also why I created the Collab the way that I did because I really believe very strongly that even though these steps are simple, that it is not an easy process to figure out what it is that you want to do that is not practicing law.

I truly believe that lawyers are so much more likely to be successful in ultimately identifying something that's a good fit for them in leaving law if they have support, if they are in a community of people, ideally other lawyers who get it, who understand why they might want to leave or why they do want to leave and what the emotional stakes that drive that situation.

I don't think there's any magical complicated process that someone can give you to figure out what to do next. In pretty much every circumstance, I think the process itself is very simple, the steps that you should take are simple, but the work within that process is not easy.

I think often that lawyers who are thinking about leaving law actually think about it in the opposite way. By that I mean many lawyers feel like there's the path to figuring things out is obscure, but that they should be able to figure it out very easily. Then when you don't, or you just find yourself doom scrolling compliance jobs on LinkedIn, you feel like, “Oh, well, that just means like there isn't anything else for me. There aren’t any other options. I'm just doomed to be a lawyer forever.”

I think if more lawyers were able to see that figuring it out is the complex part, though, the work that you have to do to actually know what it is actually going to be a good fit for you, that is difficult, but the steps are actually pretty straightforward, I think that a lot of people would feel less hopeless because, in a lot of situations, people do feel pretty hopeless because they feel like this is so inscrutable.

I'm a person who figures things out and I'm not figuring it out so it must not be figure-outable when in fact it's actually the process for figuring out what it is that you want to do, it's very simple, it's just not easy.

I don't say that because, “Oh, lawyers aren't willing to do difficult things,” because the reality is that if you become a lawyer, your degree is in doing hard things. It's not even that lawyers aren't willing to put in the work. I think it's that if you don't know that you're on a path that is going to be productive, it is very hard to make yourself go through the deep emotional and other work that you need to do in order to figure out what it is that you want to do that isn't practicing law.

That's what I'm here to say. Basically, the steps that you should take are simple, but the process itself is not going to feel easy. That's okay. That doesn't mean you're doing anything wrong. That's just the nature of the process.

If you are wanting support with that process, of course, you are always welcome to join us inside the Former Lawyer Collab, and you can find more information about all of that and how to enroll at formerlawyer.com/collab. Okay, that's it for me this week. 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.