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.

We're in the middle of a miniseries where I'm talking about some of the characteristics that tend to keep lawyers stuck in the law. We've already talked about perfectionism, and we've talked about high achievement.

Today, I want to talk about something that I've already mentioned in those other episodes, but I want to focus on it because I see this all the time. It is something that I think is often underestimated in terms of how much of an impact it's having on someone in terms of keeping them stuck. What I want to talk about today is responsibility.

Now, most lawyers are highly responsible people. It's a combination of the profession and what you're expected to do and be as a lawyer, and also the fact that a huge number of people who decided to become lawyers just naturally tend to have being responsible as one of their strengths. I see this a lot with my clients because, as you know if you listen to the podcast, I use a number of assessments with people.

One of them is the CliftonStrengths assessment, and one of the CliftonStrengths strengths is responsibility. Many, many, many people who I work with have responsibility in the top 10 of their CliftonStrengths, many people even in the top 5. To be clear, I'm not like, oh, be irresponsible because being responsible is terrible. Obviously not. Unsurprising, I'm sure, to anyone who listens to the podcast. Responsibility is very high in my own CliftonStrengths report. But here's the thing.

I see over and over with people who have responsibility high in their results, especially if it comes up. So for example, someone might have it come up in their CliftonStrengths, and it might also come up in their VIA, which is Values in Action, like a values assessment. And they also may test for an Enneagram type that one of the things that is true about that Enneagram type is that they are highly responsible.

This is especially true for people who type as Enneagram 6s, and many, many lawyers type as 6s. Many, many of the people who I work with type as 6s. What I'm saying is for a lot of lawyers, they are more focused on being responsible and like, quote unquote, better at being responsible naturally than someone else. And again, it's not that that's bad, but here's what I see. I see a lot of lawyers who are in positions where their job is really not good for them. In some cases, of course, it's like a truly toxic environment.

We all know what those are like. We all know how bad those are. We talk about that on the podcast all the time. But it's also often true that they're in environments that aren't so bad, but that are maybe very busy. People might be very overworked. This is especially true if they are in a nonprofit or in some sort of like government work, public defender, district attorney, these sorts of things.

And the challenge that people run into when they are highly responsible is that they look around at the people who they work with or who work for them, depending on like where they are in the hierarchy, and they feel like they can't leave because they focus a lot on what the other people around them, what those people will have to take on if they leave. And anyone who leaves the job is going to be leaving behind work that someone else needs to take on, especially in a very busy job or job where there's a lot of work. And people know that on a rational level.

It's not like anyone thinks that that's not the case, right? But for a lot of people, a lot of lawyers who I work with, they struggle to even allow themselves permission to think about leaving because they associate leaving with like letting people down or even like being disloyal. Even if it's a toxic environment and they're not, they don't have, no love is lost for the organization as a whole. The individual people they're working with, many lawyers often feel a high degree of responsibility for them, especially if they're peers or they're junior people who they've been mentoring.

And there's nothing wrong, obviously, with feeling that responsibility. The problem is that many lawyers have an overdeveloped sense of responsibility. What does that mean? Many lawyers don't just hold themselves to like a standard of responsibility. They hold themselves to an unreasonable standard of responsibility that is not good or healthy for them. And that values the hypothetical impacts on other people more than the actual impacts on themselves. I talked about this some last week.

Perfectionism, high achievement, and responsibility tend to often run together and sort of the effects are similar. But there are many lawyers who have such a deep sense of responsibility that they find it hard to think about leaving because they think of it as letting other people down. And by the way, if you work in a toxic environment, they absolutely will exploit people who feel this way because there's a lot of lip service paid to this idea of like we're all in this together.

And so it is very much a situation where if you are highly responsible, you often become the best sort of target for these sorts of toxic environments, right? Because you are the person who's going to be responsible regardless. And in my experience, people who are highly responsible are often the most likely to ignore things that are harming them in favor of sort of like more communal concerns or the communal good, which again, makes it very difficult for lawyers who have a high level of responsibility for whom high responsibility comes up in these assessments as one of their top characteristics. It becomes very challenging.

And it is very easy if you're someone who is highly responsible. Again, I would argue for many of us, we have an overdeveloped sense of responsibility. It is very easy to take that to such an extreme that you are essentially sacrificing yourself, your mental, emotional, physical well-being for other people with the idea that it is like for the common good, but it's sort of the concept of the common good has gotten a little bit twisted, right? Here's part of the logic.

It's I could cut myself some slack if that's the way many of us who are highly responsible think about it. I could cut myself some slack or like, I could let myself say like, this is too much. But if everyone did that, then everything would fall apart.

So I can't ever do that because if everyone followed this logic, then like society would grind to a halt and degenerate even more than it already has. The problem with that is it's a faulty type of thinking. It is a faulty type of thinking that is only looking at certain factors and not looking at other factors. And as I talked about last week and the week before, it generally involves you putting a very low value on your own well-being, your own mental, physical, and emotional well-being.

So there's a degree to which for people who are highly responsible, we often think of responsibility in a very, not necessarily a narrow way, but in a way that can conveniently omit the things that go to whether something is actually a good decision for us versus what often happens, which is that people who are highly responsible are taking their responsibility to such an extreme that they're sacrificing themselves needlessly and to their great detriment. If you're listening, you probably know whether you're someone who's highly responsible.

You know, I talked about last week, are you the person who always made sure that the group project was getting done? Are you an eldest child? Or are you not an eldest child, but you have eldest child energy? There are lots of other ways to identify that you are someone who is highly responsible, but those are just some examples. And I think it's really important for you to be aware, am I someone who has a high degree of responsibility? Because if you are, if you're someone who really values responsibility and potentially has an overdeveloped sense of responsibility, that can prevent you from even thinking about whether you should do something else because your brain says like, oh, it's not safe to think about that because if I did that, I'd be letting people down. I'd be not being a team player, et cetera, et cetera.

And if those kinds of things are cropping up for you, it's going to be really hard to think about actually leaving, actually doing something else. And if you're someone who does actually want to leave and does actually want to do something else, that is something that you want to deal with and focus on in order to be able to do that. Shout out to all my highly responsible people out there because I am with you.

I understand it. I too experience this sense of needing to be highly responsible and it can be great. But as we've talked about today, there are some ways that it can be not so great for you.

So I hope that you're able to think about how that's playing out for you. If there's something that you might want to change and to make sure that you're putting your own wellbeing in the mix with everything else, when you're thinking about what it is that you want to do next or whether you should think about leaving. 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.