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 about a problem that a lot of people find themselves in. We've talked about it on the podcast many times, and that is the cycle of things are really crazy at your job, they're really bad for whatever reason, whether it's who you're working for, the case you're on, the deal you're on, the person you're working for, all those things. You're like, "Oh, my goodness, I need to get out." Then things calm down, and that sense of like, "Oh my goodness, I need to get out," calms as well. Then you're like, "Well, maybe it's not so bad. Maybe I was exaggerating. Maybe it's blah, blah, blah."

That's how you feel until the next time that something picks up or is crazy or someone does something inappropriate or abusive or whatever. Then you end up in this cycle of "I need to get out, but I don't have time to think about getting out. Then maybe I have time to think about getting out, but maybe I've convinced myself that it actually is unnecessary." Repeat and repeat and repeat.

Annie Little, who's one of my good friends who's been on the podcast many times, calls this the outrage-complacency cycle, which I think is a really good way of describing it. You're outraged by your treatment or by the quality of life that you don't have in some of these more terrible periods. But then when things are better, there can be this sense of complacency of like, maybe it's not so bad. Then it is actually that bad. So here is the question that you are probably asking yourself, or should ask yourself if you found yourself in the cycle, which is how do you stop the cycle and actually make a move?

If you've listened to the podcast for a while, you'll know that often when people tell their stories about why they left or what made them decide, "Okay, no, I'm really going to do this," often it's some big life event. So it's a medical diagnosis. It's a death of a loved one. It's a move across country or having a kid or losing a friend or some sort of external thing that makes people reevaluate what they're doing and why. That's very real. I'm certainly not saying like, "And that's bad."

But if you're someone who's stuck in the cycle and knows that you want to get out, but you feel like, some people on the podcast have said they basically feel like they had to be forced out of it by some circumstance in their life, so the question for you, if you're in the cycle, is how can you have the insight that someone gets when they have some sort of life-changing event occur, how can you access that perspective?

First of all, I think it's really important that you recognize you're in this cycle. I think most people who are in the cycle have some sense of this, but you sitting there today listening to this episode, just think about your experience over the last several years in your job or jobs. Do you see this kind of cycle playing out where you're like, "Oh, my goodness, it's so bad. I need to leave, but I can't because I don't have time," then it calms down and you're like, "Maybe it's not so bad. I'm just going to see how it goes," then it gets bad again. You're like, "Oh my goodness, what was I thinking?" Repeat and repeat. So recognizing you're in the cycle is a very important first step.

But the other thing that I think is important, and we talk about this on the podcast all the time, burnout is a real thing. We just had a conversation on the group call in the Collab a couple of days before I recorded this episode. One of the topics that we talked about quite a bit was burnout, because often we don't realize how much burnout is impacting our ability to do things like break out of the cycle, the complacency outrage cycle.

I realize this sounds like a ridiculous statement, but burnout is real. Burnout is not just a mental thing. Burnout is something that impacts your nervous system. It's basically your nervous system has operated in fight or flight mode for so long that the nervous system has been degraded such that you're not able to respond to things in the way that you did previously.

That means, among other things, that when you're in a period of high stress and you're burnt out, your body is working overtime to create the cortisol and adrenaline that you need to function. Then when you hit a downtime, you hit that downtime, and your body's like, "Oh my gosh, all I want to do is recover." With burnout, there are certain things that you need to recover, but one of those things is typically time.

I say this because I think it's important to recognize that if you're in this cycle of being like, "Oh, my goodness, I need to get out," when it's crazed, and then maybe it's not so bad when it's not. Yes, that maybe it's not so bad feeling is real, but also it's likely if you're burnt out, in part, that sense is being generated by your nervous system because all your nervous system wants you to do is rest because it knows that it's been overtaxed. It's been overtaxed for a long time.

The thing about the nervous system is that you cannot think yourself out of a nervous system response. You can do certain things to help manage the way your nervous system responds sometimes, but overall, you don't have control over when you go into sympathetic versus parasympathetic. Again, on the margins, you can have some control, but your body, when you are not in a more stressful period, if you are burnt out, is going to be telling you to just rest.

So a lot of times what happens is people are in this cycle of, "Oh my goodness, it's terrible. I need to get out. Things are crazy," then it calms down. They're like, "Maybe it's not that bad." Then they feel bad. They think they don't care about leaving. They think they're not that serious about leaving. They think blah, blah, blah, all the things lawyers do when they don't do something that they think they're supposed to do.

Here's the thing. It's not because you're a bad person, and it's not really because you don't want to leave. It's because your nervous system is doing what it needs to do to try to get you to rest. Now, you might be listening and thinking, "Okay, Sarah, well, that's great. But what is the alternative? Is the alternative to just be like, 'Well, I'm not going to rest and I'm going to keep going. So I'm just going to burn out even more.'?" That is not the answer.

The number one thing that you can do is recognize that that is the dynamic that's happening and figure out "What can I do when I have these periods that aren't as stressful and aren't as crazy? What can I do to move myself forward in a way that is not itself all-consuming and disruptive and stressful for your nervous system," which can include things like doing things as you're able.

It can include things like just starting on the process, doing the first step of the process. If you are someone who would find the Collab helpful, you can join the Collab, and then you can pop in and out as your schedule allows. It's part of why it's set up the way it is. But that's one of the ways to think about how to get out of the cycle. It's recognized when you're burned out and make decisions about how to use your calmer times in a way that works with your burned-out self instead of expecting you to function as though you're not burned-out, because that is not possible because you're human and your nervous system is a real thing and you need to work with it. You could try to work against it, but that's just not going to work.

Okay, so the other thing that I think is often in place when people are struggling to break out of this cycle. Again, the first is recognizing the impact of burnout and making plans that are supportive of you while you're in burnout to move forward. The other one is that I think many people get stuck in this cycle because ultimately, one of their biggest fears is making a change that other people won't approve of.

Here's the thing about that. You're not alone. That's a huge consideration for many, many people when they're thinking about leaving law. As you know, if you listen to the podcast at all, I talk about therapy all the time. I talk about lawyers going to therapy all the time. I think that every lawyer should be in therapy, but especially if you're someone who's thinking about leaving law, please go to therapy. Even if you're doing nothing else to think about what's next, move yourself forward, just getting into therapy, just that can be so helpful and really is a step in the process.

Because I guarantee you that your concern about what other people might think if you leave the law, about what your colleagues are going to think of you, about what your family might think, and your friends and your law school classmates and people from undergrad and your neighbors and I don't know who else, wherever else you hang out, whatever other social groups you're in, whatever you think about the stress that you feel thinking about what people might think about that decision comes from somewhere. It is a real thing.

As we've talked about on the podcast before, I am not someone who's like, "You just shouldn't care what people think at all," because that would mean you're a sociopath. I actually don't think you should be a sociopath.

We have plenty of sociopaths in law. We do not need more. You should care about other people, other people's opinions, the community. Those things are important. But when that is the most important thing to you or when it is having an outsized impact on your decision-making, that tells me that there is something about other people's opinions that feels like either safe or unsafe for you.

That either having their good opinion makes you feel safe or not having it makes you feel unsafe, or both. Newsflash, that did not arise in a vacuum. That did not just come up the day that you started at your law firm. That comes from somewhere. So going into therapy, even just to talk about, "Hey, I'm thinking about doing this thing, but I feel like whenever I think about it, I constantly run into this idea of, but what will other people think? I feel like it's limiting my willingness to actually think about or take actions toward doing something different," is something that you could talk about with a therapist.

A therapist is trained to help you figure out, "Well, where is that coming from?" How might you address it? Are there ways to diminish the control that has over your decisions and behavior and on what you ultimately do? So again, basically, these are the things that I think that you should be thinking about if you're someone who's like, "I don't know what I want to do, but I really don't think it's this. But I keep getting stuck in this cycle where things are terrible and I want to get out, but I can't. Then things aren't so bad, but I convince myself that it's not so bad and I don't need to actually take action towards getting out."

If you're in that cycle, recognizing that you're in the cycle is really important. Then, one, basically getting yourself into therapy so that you are able to address anything that's keeping you from making a move, which for many people is often the fear of what other people will think, then recognizing the impact that burnout has on your ability to do things when you're in calmer periods at work and making plans for how to move forward in those periods in a way that is reasonable and respectful of the reality that you are probably in burnout and your nervous system is probably very overtaxed and is wanting and needing to rest.

Those are some things that you can do if you are right at the front end of thinking about doing other things that are not practicing law. Those things will really set you up well as you're thinking about what it is that you want to do next.

Another great next step, if you're listening to this when the episode first goes live, is that I'm going to be teaching my live masterclass, Five Simple Steps to Identify a Career That You Actually Like, on Friday, October 10th, at noon Eastern. It's free. I am teaching through the framework, which is the backbone of the curriculum inside the Collab. It's also the framework that I use with all of my one-on-one clients.

Did I say it's free? It's free. It's a free class. You come, I teach, there's a Q&A, I answer your questions. It's a fun time. You can get the link to watch by going to formerlawyer.com/masterclass. Even if you can't come live on Friday the 10th, if you sign up at that link, you will get a link to the recording after the class is over, which will be good to watch for probably a week. Formerlawyer.com/masterclass. Sign up if you would like to learn all of the things about the Former Lawyer Framework and the way that many lawyers now have gone from, "I have no idea what it is that I want to do. It's just not this," to actually identifying something that's a better fit for them. Thanks so much for joining. 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.