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 the law behind to find careers and lives that they love.

If there is one thing that I have learned running from a lawyer, it is that lawyers love a good assessment. I want to talk today about the assessments that I currently use with my clients and why I use those assessments. Specifically, I want to talk about why I use multiple different assessments. Let’s get into it.

At a high level, I use a few different assessments with my clients. I use two different values assessments. I’ve talked on the podcast before about values and how I think they’re the most important thing for you to be getting clear on when you’re thinking about what else it is that you want to do for work that isn’t legal practice. I also use a strengths assessment, and I use a personality assessment. I also have created a likes and dislikes exercise that is separate from those other things because, for many lawyers, we have a hard time distinguishing between our strengths and what we like, and also distinguishing between things that we think we should like and things that we actually like or dislike.

Today, I want to focus on the first three: values, personality, and strengths, because I think those are the most helpful and also illustrate something that I think is very important, which again is to go back to why I use multiple assessments.

So at a high level, I use multiple assessments because as lawyers, we want to believe that there is one answer, right? And it is so easy if you’re using just one assessment to be like, "Well, this is the thing. This is what’s true about me. Now I need to find the thing that matches this," and get tunnel vision. The thing that I try to always remind my clients about is that every assessment is a tool. That means it can be very valuable, it can give you lots of insight, it can be used in lots of ways. I don’t think they’re all frivolous. I don’t think they’re all useless. I think some are more useful than others. Obviously, I’ve selected ones that I find to be useful. But being useful and being the thing that you should govern your life and your career decisions or career choice on are two different things.

Let’s talk briefly about the specific assessments that I use, and then I’ll talk about how I debrief them with my clients and what I ultimately have them do. Because I think that it is really good if you are someone who’s listening to the podcast and you’re thinking about going and doing one of these assessments to think about how you can get the most out of the assessments and how you can not fall into some of the traps that lawyers sometimes fall into when it comes to these things, where it’s like, “Well, now this is exactly who I am or must be.” Even if it doesn’t necessarily feel 100% accurate, the answer is the answer.

Okay, for values, I use the Values in Action assessment from the Institute on Character. It basically breaks down into several different subgroups of values. It is designed to tell you the things that you indicate to it are the values that are most operationalized in your life. And by that, I mean, what are the values that are most likely to make you do or not do something? What are the values that, if violated, are going to feel the worst for you?

So, for example, honesty is one of the values on the VIA. If you don’t have honesty in your top five results, it doesn’t mean you’re not an honest person or that you don’t care about honesty. But if you are someone who has honesty high in your results, which I have honesty as my number one result on the VIA, it means that being in a situation where it feels like someone is being dishonest or disingenuous is going to be more difficult for you to tolerate than for someone who has other values at the top of their results. Again, it doesn’t mean that those other people are like, “Nah, who cares? Honesty isn’t a big deal.”

For example, I find that many of my clients who have honesty very high in their results on the VIA really struggle more than some other people with the sense that a legal workplace is fake, right? That people are having to put on a front. It’s not that most people don’t find that frustrating, but people with this particular value tend to find it almost intolerable. I think it’s pretty clear, if you’ve listened to the podcast and heard me talk about it, that I am one of those people.

So, okay, the VIA. Then I also have my clients do a more free-form, on-paper values assessment where they narrow down and narrow down and basically pick three. That allows for a little bit more flexibility where it’s not just confined to specific results on a specific assessment. Because, of course, some people might have values that are very significant that are really playing a big role in their career decision-making, that don’t get captured in the VIA.

So then the other two things that I have are a personality assessment and a strengths assessment. The personality assessment that I use is an Enneagram personality assessment. If you’re familiar with the Enneagram, or if you aren’t, it’s a personality typing system where there are nine personality types, and it is focused on various things. But a big part of the focus is on your motivation for your behavior.

So, in other words, you can have nine personality types who all do the same behavior. For example, nine personality types, everyone feels bad that they made a mistake at work. But the reason that a type two would feel bad that they made a mistake versus a type five versus a type seven, et cetera, is different.

I used to use an assessment from the Enneagram Institute. It is a good assessment. If you’re interested, it’s a pretty easy way to take one. I think it’s like a $10 or $12 assessment, and you get a pretty helpful report. But the assessment is not responsive in that it doesn’t narrow down based on your questions. You just answer a set of questions, and then it gives you your result.

The assessment that I use with my clients is called, the full name is the Chestnut Paes Sullivan Enneagram Compass, which is CPS Enneagram Compass for short. We will put these links in the show notes and on the blog post and everything. But that assessment is adaptive. That means that when you’re taking the assessment, it adapts to the answers that you’re giving to have you answer specific questions to try to give you a more specific and accurate result.

I have found that the results that people get on this assessment are sometimes very different from the results that they got if they took a random free Enneagram assessment or even the Enneagram Institute. It generates a report that is quite extensive and includes, for example, an entire page of information about your personality type in the workplace, things that really work for your personality type, things that don’t work, things that motivate you, things that you often might be praised for versus things that might be more blind spots. People I’ve worked with have found that to be very helpful.

It’s even helpful, I have found, for people to be able to go back to that report and use language in it when they’re doing revisions of their résumé. Because, of course, one of the big things as lawyers that we’re always trying to do is make our résumés less legalese-y. That’s the Enneagram assessment.

Then the other one is a fairly well-known assessment. It used to be called StrengthsFinder. It’s now called the Gallup CliftonStrengths Assessment. They have various reports. Typically, when I’m working with clients, they get the full 34 report because there are 34 talent themes in Gallup CliftonStrengths. That is focused on the things that you are naturally good at. That is different from your personality, and it’s different from your values.

At a first pass, what I always have people do when we’re sitting down with any of these assessments, and this is also how I have it set up in the curriculum in the Collab so people can do this on their own, self-paced, is go through the report, look at the results, and ask yourself, “Does this feel true?” And I know that sounds ridiculous, but especially for those of us who are lawyers, it is so easy to be like, "Well, the results are this, so this must be true."

For many people, if you look at it, it’s like, "Well, this is mostly true, but I wouldn’t necessarily put this one at number one, or I wouldn’t necessarily put this one in the top five. Or this one that’s at number nine, I actually would have put closer to the top because I think it’s a very significant one for me." As lawyers, we sometimes feel like we can’t do that, right? Like, "Well, but they gave me the results."

This is part of why I like to use multiple assessments, because I think it helps our brains remember that none of these are set in stone, right? If something in a report feels wrong to you and doesn’t feel true to you, and if you have some reason to think that maybe it is true and you’re resisting it, then talk to your therapist about it. But otherwise, if it doesn’t feel true to you, it’s probably not accurate. These tests are imperfect. To the extent that the result is not useful, you can throw that result out and ignore it.

So one, assessing within each report is very helpful. But the other thing that I think is even more helpful, and that I’ve seen really be illuminating for a lot of people, is to look across the reports and look for the threads that run all the way through. Because each individual assessment, obviously, has the possibility for error or inaccuracies, whatever. But as you take more and then look for themes, you can feel more confident that the themes that keep bubbling up are probably pretty accurate.

Sometimes those themes are not the themes that you would have expected or are things that you have not valued because they aren’t valued in the legal profession. An example that comes to mind is humor. Humor shows up in the VIA as a value. It also shows up in CliftonStrengths. While it’s not a personality type, there are certain personality types that care more about humor. That is an example of something that people often, as lawyers, have seen as not just not an asset, but sometimes a liability. Because depending on the legal environment you work in, humor can be highly devalued/possibly looked down on/not safe because humor often requires, true humor requires, honesty.

All of this is to say, this is why I use multiple assessments. I have shifted the assessments that I use over the years based on what I personally find to be the most compelling. I’m sure in the future I will probably shift, maybe add something or switch something out again. Again, I tell you that because I think it’s really important to remember that all of these assessments are tools. They’re not mandates. The more you can think of them as tools that you can work with, play around with, and look at from different angles, the more helpful they will be to the ultimate goal.

The ultimate goal is that you understand yourself better and are able to identify something that is a better fit for you in terms of a career. If you have any questions about the assessments and how I use them, please shoot me an email because I would be happy to do another episode where I talk more about it if it would be interesting to people or helpful.

Okay. 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.