Sarah Cottrell: Hi, and welcome to The Former Lawyer Podcast. I'm your host, Sarah Cottrell. I've 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.

Okay, so today we are going to talk about coaching versus therapy, when you need coaching versus when you need therapy and how you can use time in therapy, if you are going to therapy, to help you with a process that you might ultimately be going through either after or in parallel with career coaching.

First of all, standard disclaimers, I am not a licensed therapist, or mental health person, who can treat mental health. So this is just my lay opinion. But it's also really important to me, because as you know, if you listen to the podcast, I think every lawyer should be in therapy. I personally have been in therapy for many years and it has been hugely helpful for me in all sorts of ways, including in all of the ways that I now sort of talk about with former lawyer, in terms of understanding nervous system and understanding trauma and understanding narcissism and understanding the ways that our mental health and our workplace experience is intertwined. And all sorts of other things, the way that our family history might inform the way that we think about our jobs and the way that we approach our jobs and literally all of the things.

So here's sort of my top line thing. When I'm doing a consult with someone, I obviously am not going to like get into their mental health, right? Because that is not my role as a coach. That would not be appropriate. However, it is very common that people come to me and they will tell me things like that they're thinking about doing coaching or therapy, for example. And obviously I don't ever tell someone what to do, but I will say if you have to choose, if you do not have the bandwidth for both, I strongly recommend therapy. And a big part of that is because for 99 percent of the lawyers who I've worked with, going to therapy and working through the things that you can work through in therapy around your own history and experience of the world and life and your career, ultimately makes people more able to identify what it is that they want to do career-wise, to have more insight, to be able to self-reflect on a deeper level and to ultimately move more quickly to identifying the things that are right for them.

It's just very important for me to make sure that people understand that therapy and coaching are not the same thing. They might both help you get to the same place, but that doesn't mean that one is a substitute for the other. And I say this because sometimes, jokingly, when I'm working with a group of lawyers and we have group calls, people will say that it feels like group therapy sometimes, because, of course, you're talking about your experience as a lawyer and people have such similar experiences and there's a lot of like, oh my gosh, me too. I thought I was the only one. And I absolutely love that that kind of peer interaction, peer bonding can happen. And also, I'm always very careful to say like, it can feel like group therapy, but it is not. It is not therapy. And the reason that it's important for me to be clear about that is because I think there is some confusion sometimes that is created by people who are coaches, suggesting that they can do anything a therapist can do, which is not true.

I think of my client's therapist as super amazing partners, in the sense that we both work with a client separately, but often the client can take things from coaching and take it to therapy, or can take insights from therapy and bring it to coaching and both are better for it. However, the things that you're going to do in coaching and therapy are very different.

So with me, in coaching, we are going to be figuring out who are you, what is it that you like, that you're good at, what are your strengths, what is your personality, what are the kinds of roles that might be a good match for that, how do you go and get more information about that, how do you make the connections that you need to ultimately position yourself for a different type of role that's not legal, et cetera, et cetera. With a therapist, you can work on all sorts of things, a lot of which will be very helpful to any coaching that you do.

So one, coaching is not therapy. Two, coaching and therapy can be very complementary, but they are doing very different things. And three, if you're in therapy, there are some things that can be really helpful to think about that can pertain to your career exploration if you're also doing career coaching or just trying to figure out, like, what the heck am I doing with my career? Some of the things that I think can be most helpful to talk about in therapy that ultimately can be brought to bear to your career search exploration are things like, where did I get my ideas about what a career should be, or what a career shouldn't be? Where did I get my ideas about what function a career has? How much do I think about what my job looks like to other people, versus how it feels like to me internally? Depending on where my focus is, why? What in my lived experience has brought me to focus on it in this way?

I think another big piece that can be very helpful to think about and talk about and work through in therapy is to the extent that you have any perfectionist tendencies, which many of us do, working through with your therapist, like, what caused me to believe that I needed to be perfect in, order to be safe, or to be good, or to be whatever, fill in the blank, can be different for different people. And I say that because often when we're talking about working, especially in a toxic workplace, there's a real challenge for someone who has perfectionist tendencies, because even if you can see that the environment is toxic, you still have that sort of internal programming of like, I need to satisfy whoever the authority figure is, even if the authority figure is like objectively unreasonable and you can see that they're objectively unreasonable.

It can be very hard to put up boundaries if you're someone who learned that performing is the thing that gets you approval. And if you don't go to therapy and work on those things, yes, you can move to a better work environment and it will make things better, right? Going from a toxic environment to one that is not and is more equitable certainly does help. But ultimately, when we're talking about your own internal experience, it will be significantly better if you've had the experience of going to therapy and working through sort of like the underlying reasons for why you feel compelled to work in a certain way, or why quitting feels unsafe, or why the disapproval of certain people in your life feels so intolerable. You know, for a lot of us, I think that we have been those, like, gold star kids who just, like, did a super great job and liked getting all the gold stars. And we're not used to people not being happy with us often. We're not used to people disapproving of choices that we've made.

And so some of it, if you're in therapy, some of what you might need to do is figure out, how can I tolerate disappointing people? How can I experience someone's disappointment and not assume that that means that I've done something wrong? These are all things that definitely come up in the work that I do with clients, in the sense of, you know, there might be something sort of presenting that's related to this kind of thing. And generally, when that happens, what I do is I just say, like, I think this is a really important question. I think it would be an awesome thing to talk about with your therapist. When people are able to do that, it makes a huge difference. It makes a huge difference in their ability to get the insight that they need about what they really need career-wise. And, you know, it also just improves things in general. So, no big surprise, I'm a huge fan of therapy. And I'm also a huge fan of coaching. And I think they can work really well together and they're not the same thing. And it's very important for me that people who are thinking about working with me know that, like, I think therapy is super important and helpful and I am not a therapist, I am a coach. And I really like being a coach.

It is incredibly fun for me to be able to help people go through this process. And it's also incredibly fun for me to be able to say, hey, person listening to this podcast, have you considered therapy? Because it really, it could change your life. And that's what I have to say. So thanks so much for joining me. 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.