Sarah Cottrell: 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.

I'm really excited to be sharing this last conversation in this series with former lawyers turned therapists with you today. My guest today is Megan Nogasky. As you'll hear at the beginning of the interview, Megan and I actually went to law school together so this was an especially fun interview and I'm really excited to share it with you. Let's get to my conversation with Megan.

Hey, Megan, welcome to The Former Lawyer Podcast.

Megan Nogasky: Hi, Sarah. It's so nice to talk to you and to talk to everybody who's listening.

Sarah Cottrell: As I say in almost every podcast episode as was pointed out to me recently, although I also knew this, I'm super excited for this conversation for many reasons but one thing that the listeners don't know is that you and I actually went to law school together.

Megan Nogasky: We did. I know and that is very much at the forefront of my mind remembering where we live and all of that stuff.

Sarah Cottrell: Fond memories of Gilmore Girls. There's that, but you are here because I am interviewing a group of lawyers who have all become therapists and the reason for that is that it is a career option that comes up again and again and again and again both with people who I work with and even just listeners of the podcast when they email me and say, “I'm thinking about doing something else and this is one of the things I'm considering.”

Basically, I am going to be sharing conversations with a bunch of different people who have moved into this career because I know there are tons of listeners who are interested in that so we will get there. But let's start where we always start on this podcast which is what made you decide to go to law school.

Megan Nogasky: Oh, my. I would love to say that this was a lifelong dream, and it wasn't too far off from that. There was a basis for it. It wasn't that I got to the end of undergrad and was like, “What do I do?” although that was part of it. I think many of the moves I made in relation to law and staying with was extremely fear-based. I had participated in mock trial in high school and college.

It was really, really fun, both times really successful in a state-level way I guess in high school and I adored that, both of those experiences. The rational side of me knew that law as a practice and studying it in law school was not going to be anything like that, however, it was close enough that I might as well try. That's what led to it.

It does feel like I was just looking over or just making notes to myself and thinking about my history and it really is notable how many of those decision points were influenced by this just horrible combination of fear and prestige, this just gross noxious combo of those things.

Not to say that there's nothing good about law school or nothing good about the law but for me, they were not callings or a gut feeling that “This is really great and this is what I'm going to do with it.” It was like, “This matches something I liked and I don't really have any other ideas and this feels like a safe good move. Maybe it will be good.”

Sarah Cottrell: 100%. Yeah, honestly, I think for so many of us, it was this combination of “I need a plan,” so the fear of “I think I need a plan but I don't have a plan,” and this is a very clear trajectory and then also some element of “And also people think this is a good career so they will think good things about me.”

I talk a lot with my clients about how I'm not going to tell you how dare you care about what other people think about you. We're human, that's part of the deal but I think for a lot of us who decided to go to law school and then realized, “Maybe lawyer wasn't for us,” there was so much focus on the external and for a lot of us, we were told, “This is what you should care about,” and so we did that and then we end up in a position where we're like, “Huh, this actually doesn't feel like a fit,” and it's because we were looking to all of those external metrics to make our decisions.

Megan Nogasky: Right. It's so funny that you say that because that feels true. Yes, of course, it's healthy to care what other people think and to use that as input but it does feel like this awful, “Not only do I put too much importance on what other people think but I am completely neglecting whatever my own self is telling me, what my gut is telling me, what my desires are telling me.”

But of course, desire means nothing if you're someone who was pulled into the law, what you want doesn't matter, it's about what you have to do, what looks good, what everybody else is doing, and all of that stuff. That's not a great setup for success.

Sarah Cottrell: Yeah. The interesting thing with that is that I find when I talk with people who that was their trajectory into law school, some people will say they got to law school and it was just total denial. They were just like, “Of course, I love this because I chose it.” Other people will say they got into law school and pretty quickly, there was some sense of “Maybe this is not the thing.”

Can you talk a little bit about for you, what was your experience when you actually got to law school coming into it from that trajectory?

Megan Nogasky: I did not like it, I knew from very early on that this was not something I liked. But again, we could put me under a microscope for a million years and there would be so many things that played into this. I was raised Catholic and a straight-A student, like everybody who is listening or who is working with you, I'm sure, not the Catholic part, but the straight-A part, but yeah, the fact that I didn't like it wasn't a good enough reason.

There was something wrong with me. It was like I'm a square peg, this is a round hole, and I have to figure out how to make myself into a round peg, not find a round hole.

Sarah Cottrell: Yes. Well, for people who I work with, and this was 100% true for me as well, having this sense of not “This is a bad fit,” this career [inaudible] very much instead having this sense of there is something wrong with me that I don't like this as much as I “should” and I need to fix myself in some way or there's something fundamentally wrong with me that I'm not super enthusiastic about this.

It's so common for people who choose to become lawyers to default to that as opposed to, “Maybe I should be doing something else,” and I tell people it just never even occurred to me in my early days of being a litigator. Some part of me knew that I hated it and yet it was like, “Well, I just need to be better than I am. I need to somehow emotionally be better.

Megan Nogasky: Yeah. “I'm not disciplined enough. I don't have the right attitude about this. I'm not working the right way. If I did, I would like it more,” all of that. Yeah. That was my experience in law school and in practice where it was, “Okay, first year, I'm not loving, maybe second year would be good, and now that I'm doing law review, maybe that'll be fun, nice, something or I'll like third year better,” or something like that. Then in practice, maybe it's the firm, maybe it's the practice area.

Then it took me all that time to think, “Okay, actually, it's the career, it's the area that I'm in, it's law, not me that's wrong.

Sarah Cottrell: Yeah. I think especially because there's such a progression, like you said, it's three years of law school and then if you go to a law firm, it's like you're a first year, you're a second year, there are so many times that you can tell yourself, “Well, this feels bad but it will feel better when [fill in the blank].”

I think that especially if you're someone who went straight through from undergrad, which I went straight through from undergrad, it can be really hard to know, “Oh, this isn't just how it is to be an adult with a job.

Megan Nogasky: Yeah. “This is something different.” If I could give people who are interested in going to law school any advice, it would be to not go straight through. But again, that almost, just thinking back to where I was in my college dorm room doing these applications thinking, “Okay, would it be a good idea to see what's out there and actually be an adult in the world first?” I remember thinking something like, “But then I'll be a year older and maybe people will be ahead of me so I need to make sure that I…” I don't even know what race I was in but I wanted to win it somehow.

That did not serve me super well. As we're talking about this, I'm remembering myself in practice and I feel really, really sad for past me being in this, I mean there are elements of practicing law that are isolating in a physical way, like you're in your office and you're doing work by yourself but being surrounded by this weird oppressive mindset or what you think people's mindset is, that's very isolating.

It does lead to this thought of yourself as being bad, wrong, and different because it's not like you see vulnerability all over the place of law firms.

Sarah Cottrell: No, definitely not. Honestly, it's all a little bit culty. I laugh because it's ridiculous but it's also true, there are those myths that are perpetuated of “Well, this is the only place you could ever do good work and if you went somewhere else, you'd just be bored,” and you really can get quickly, especially when you're in that lawyer bubble, you just have this feeling of, “Well, I guess this is what there is.”

Megan Nogasky: Yeah, and “Look at the fancy building we're in.” It is an existential problem, you're thinking, “Wait, is this one of the best jobs I could have and it feels this empty?”

It really makes you question what is it that I know about the world? Not very much if it was me coming right from college to law school and then right out the door to a law firm, but it makes you question what you think you know and you start to feel what is everyone else doing that they are all marching in time to this drum beat and I want to do anything but that?

Sarah Cottrell: Yes. Everything you're describing, it is what I hear. I get emails weekly from people who listen to the podcast talking about this exact stuff. Every person who I've worked with at this point in the Collab, we have more than 180 lawyers from the US and Canada but also other countries in Europe, Asia, and Australia, it is pervasive, this sense of, “Oh, I must just be missing it. I must be missing something that everyone else somehow has that I don't have and that's why I feel this way about the careers.”

The reality is generally speaking it’s just, “Hey, maybe it's a bad fit for you because you were handed a way of deciding what to do with your life that actually doesn't really allow you to look internally first.”

Okay, so you were in law school, you described your reasons for going, you already had this sense of “This does not seem like a good fit,” but also this sense of “Well, maybe the next piece will be a better fit,” maybe the next piece, and so you graduate from law school, you start at a law firm, can you talk to me about what that process was like, what type of work you were doing, and at what point, did you start to think, “Maybe this is more than just I just need to wait for the next thing”?

Megan Nogasky: It took me a while to get to that point. I love that I'm thinking about how I felt because that honors my feelings a little bit more or a lot more than I did at the time where it was just, “Oh, no, stuff it, push it down, you gotta do what you gotta do,” it was intimidating, really intimidating. This is not necessarily indicative of what other people around me were acting like, I think it's more of the system writ large or how big firms operate but it definitely felt like I needed to be careful about what I said or what I shared about myself.

It felt like being surrounded by this, I'm going to call it childish because that's the word that keeps appearing in my head, this childish competitive idea that you're in it to gain all kinds of experience, good grades, or whatever it is and you need to avoid letting people know any weaknesses you might have, oddities, or anything like that. The goal is to really fit in and do a fantastic job and that's it.

Sarah Cottrell: Yeah. I was just going to say, I feel like there's this level of, especially at Biglaw firms which is what we're talking about right now, where it's almost this sense of don't let the fact that you're human and have some semblance of a life outside of this place, don't make it seem like you care too much about anything else other than this.

Megan Nogasky: Right, yeah, and especially as a woman looking ahead and going to panels during law school and as a summer associate or even as an early associate, I remember one that I went to, and you were probably there during law school where there was this just incredibly put together young associate who was talking about her experience and she was talking about having a fiance and saying basically he does everything and I just go to work and make money.

That felt, again, very empty and odd. Then going to the firm and just hearing the stories of women who were very experienced, seasoned, had been at the firm a long time and were partners and talking about how they live their lives and how you could be a practice area leader, have five kids, and what that entailed, talking about it I feel exhausted because it was always just this superhuman expectation that somehow some people were able to meet, and for what?

I think that's probably near the end of my time as a lawyer, I started to think that question a lot, “What is this for? Why am I doing this? What's the point?” Part of the reason why that came to the forefront is because I did meet some people who were in the mental health field and I connected to them so much more and I was interested in what they were talking about in a way that I never ever was about the actual practice of law.

I remember being excited about mock trial and I remember being excited about maybe pro bono cases or doing something new or interesting but never about the day-to-day work or most of what I was doing. That lit a little bit of a fire under me and I started to envision what that might be like and is that possible because I was able to imagine, “Okay, well, what will it look like if I put everything I had into this?”

I became a partner. I'm going to be doing the same work I'm doing, I'm going to be selling the firm to potential clients, and I don't believe in it, not that I don't believe in law or order in society, but not for me for this, so it'd have to be a salesman and I'd have to do the work I was already doing and then what? What has my life amounted to?

I've gotten more clients for this huge firm and they're going to battle against other big clients and they're probably going to settle and the world's going to keep on turning. What have I really added to anything?

Sarah Cottrell: Yeah, and at the same time still having that sense of “And also, I don't feel like I fit.”

Megan Nogasky: Yes, right, definitely, not feeling like I fit, and meeting people that I did fit in with. I wonder a little bit if I had maybe turned down the expectations on myself, although I don't see how that would have been possible, and met some more people outside of law if this would have happened sooner, if I had exposure to that.

Sarah Cottrell: Yeah. Can you talk a little bit about what that timeline looked like? Because it sounds like what you're describing, and maybe I'm wrong, it sounds like you met people who are working in the mental health field, which then gave you this idea that there could be something else that was better for you. It sounds like you didn't meet them because you were like, “I've decided I want to make a career change, and let me find some people who work in this field to figure out--”

Megan Nogasky: Yeah. It was just happenstance. I met them through friends. But so the timeline, and I should add as an asterisk that I was seeing a therapist not through everything, not until after law school, but it's so funny because it's definitely that lawyer instinct to say, “Oh, do I deserve this? Am I entitled to it?”

At a certain point, I did feel like I deserved to go to therapy and I'll tell you what that was. It was in 2008, we had just graduated from law school, I had taken the bar, that's when I had my wedding. My first marriage started then and then shortly after starting work as a first-year associate, my dad was in really poor health and he got the news that he was getting a liver transplant, which was exciting but very stressful.

It was at that point that I was like, “You know what, I'm not having a great time as a first-year even a couple of months in and all of these things have happened,” so it was like I had evidence to justify my need for a therapist. I had that experience too for myself, not just meeting people in the field later who were my age and who were doing maybe different things but I started to see a therapist myself pretty early in that process.

Sarah Cottrell: It's so interesting because people who listen to the podcast know that pretty much every episode at some point I'm going to say, “Hey, you should go to therapy. Do you not have a therapist? You should get a therapist. Are you a lawyer? You should be in therapy.”

For me, I didn't actually get into therapy until after I left Biglaw so I didn't start seeing a therapist until 2013. A lot of people will write me, because it's one of the things I talk about a lot, they'll be like, “I know you say I should see a therapist but, essentially like what you're saying, “I don't know what I would say to them” or “I'm not sure that the suffering I'm experiencing is sufficiently bad to warrant needing therapy,” so I really appreciate you sharing that story because I think it's a very common struggle.

Megan Nogasky: Yeah. I wish that I had been in therapy from the age of 12. But yes, if you're a lawyer, please go to therapy, it's bad enough. If it's not a fit, if it doesn't work, then you tried it and there's really no harm there but you probably need it.

I'm happy that I worked with a therapist while I was in practice. But from there, from 2008, I ended up getting divorced around 2012. I switched firms and practice areas around 2013, 2014 I want to say and that was a big period of personal upheaval and change.

The circumstances were right, there were all of these other changes happening, and there was a freedom in leaving that firm, being imperfect, and not staying there and making partner, and getting divorced, and not having a perfect marriage experience. It was like I was allowed to start testing around and making mistakes whereas before, it had been more of a hold-your-breath-and-stay-perfect type of mentality.

Sarah Cottrell: Yeah. It's so interesting, I think a lot of people will relate to that, and I definitely relate to that. I left Biglaw for a job at a legal publishing company which pretty much everyone who wasn't very close to me thought was just a totally deranged move.

I think in a certain way, it also created this freedom of if you have made your career decisions on what other people are going to think and how do you optimize everyone for whatever is the “best,” and then you end up in a position either by choice or by circumstance where you make a decision that is not the optimal one, at least for me, and it sounds like it was true for you too, it breaks the illusion that your whole life can just be this series of optimal choices and it does create so much more freedom.

Megan Nogasky: It gives you permission. Big pieces of advice, go to therapy, make mistakes, do something weird.

Sarah Cottrell: Yeah. Every lawyer listening is like, “I'm sorry, make mistakes? What are you saying?” It is sacrilege.

Megan Nogasky: It is sacrilege. I remember a partner while I was doing a project. Literally, it was a huge binder of documents, maybe multiple binders and he asked me, “Is it perfect?” and I just remember thinking, “God, I don't know. I don't know how to answer this question because it's as perfect as I could get it and wow, that's a high bar.”

Sarah Cottrell: Well, let's talk about a recipe for anxiety, basically telling people we're human so they literally cannot be perfect, it does not matter how much money you pay someone, they are still a human being saying, “Oh, have you done this thing that is literally impossible for you to do? Although all of us tried very, very hard,” if you were talking to me 15, 20 years ago, I would have been like, “Of course, it's totally reasonable.”

Megan Nogasky: Oh, yeah. Exactly. It's for the SCC, it has to be perfect. That was a partner I liked too.

Sarah Cottrell: Yes. Even the positive experiences have so many negative repercussions.

Megan Nogasky: I'm just thinking about other assignments and one of the very first things I worked on as a new associate, and it was the most bizarre thing to help someone with, was I was helping a partner with a presentation on the Foreign Corrupt Practices Act and great, I was formatting things and doing some research, all of that was fine but this partner wanted me to find good illustrations for it from New Yorker Cartoons. First of all, I don't love New Yorker Cartoons so I'm like, “I don't find anything funny.”

Sarah Cottrell: They were like, “I'm whimsical and smart.

Megan Nogasky: Right, I know. Not only do I have to look through these cartoons that I don't find personally funny but I'm trying to guess what she would like.

Sarah Cottrell: Oh my gosh. It’s like a nightmare.

Megan Nogasky: Yeah, and I'm like, “How do I know what is going to be relevant and that you will like for this presentation?” That's just a funny little aside.

Sarah Cottrell: Oh my gosh. It's so classic. Okay, you said you moved firms in 2013, 2014, and also changed practice areas, but it sounds like at that point, you for sure knew, “This doesn't feel like a great fit,” but I'm guessing part of the thinking was, “But maybe if I do this other thing, it'll be better.” Was that part of the thought process that you had?

Megan Nogasky: Correct. Fresh start, new people, let's see does this work better, and it didn't.

Sarah Cottrell: I was going to say how soon after you started at the new firm were you like, “Oh, this was a mistake,” or not a mistake, but like, “Oh, this isn't a good fit?”

Megan Nogasky: Like it's still not helping?

Sarah Cottrell: Yeah.

Megan Nogasky: It was probably pretty quick. I want to say within a few months. This did not solve the problems. But in typical me fashion, I was like, “You didn't give it enough time, keep going.”

Sarah Cottrell: Yeah. I hear from a lot of people, they'll write me and they will have moved firms or jobs, firmed in-house at least once, sometimes twice and they're typically maybe three to six months into the new job and they're basically like, “And now I realize actually, it's not the type of job, it's being a lawyer.”

Megan Nogasky: Exactly, yep.

Sarah Cottrell: Talk to me about that whole process of realizing that at the new job, then the possibility of moving into the mental health field coming up, and how you actually made the decision to do that.

Megan Nogasky: That is a great question. I was at the new firm, I actually made a friend there and I had started to, and this sounds so small but it felt like a big deal at the time and I'm going to give myself that win in retrospect, so at my former firm, in addition to all of the things about practicing law, that piece of “I need to fit in” was so strong because it was like everybody's outside interests were, it felt to me and this is probably not fair, but it felt to me that they were the same.

Everybody liked sports, everybody liked working out. Most people had kids or were moving in that direction, and generally, people were huge fans of the Cubs. None of that spoke to me super strongly, but of course, I was thinking, “Well, maybe your hobbies are wrong. Maybe your interests are bad. This is a shameful thing to keep quiet.”

But then when I got to the new firm, they asked for a blurb about you. I think I said something like, “I like going to museums and I've volunteered for these places.” Truly, it felt risky and a win and it's such a tiny thing in the grand scheme of things where I was like, “No, I'm not going to pretend to be somebody I'm not, at least in this small way.” That was a nice little moment of very tiny courage.

Then I did meet someone at the firm who I did befriend and I really liked. That was helpful too to talk to someone, not just my therapist or my friends and loved ones but somebody who worked at the firm who knew a little bit more about it and was very open herself about her likes and dislikes. That was really helpful and supportive.

Then like I said, I met some friends who were in the mental health field. I met my now husband around 2015. Again, a period of big change and just a period of looking toward my future, what I wanted, I was with a really great partner, I had met people that I really got along with, and I was thinking, “Why should, in my professional life, I not be fulfilled like this as well?”

Researching programs and one of my big considerations was, “This needs to be cost-effective because my loans are not repaid and I need to take that into consideration. Where can I go that will be a good program that won't break the bank, that will give me the credentials I need to do this thing that I really think that I would like and that would give me so much more freedom and be so much more humane?” Then I ended up applying to school and I started in August of 2016 getting my masters of social work.

Sarah Cottrell: Did you go full-time?

Megan Nogasky: I did, yeah. I stopped, which is not a position that a lot of people are in. I was very fortunate to have the financial support of my then partner, now husband, and that was extremely advantageous and helped me a ton. I'm sure there are folks who are not in that position for whom this will be more difficult.

That being said, I both do and don't wish that I had gone through a more thorough financial accounting reckoning, what have you. I do because that would have been helpful in some ways to have a plan, maybe a stronger plan moving forward. But again, that seems a little perfectionistic because I knew enough about what I needed to do.

I agree with the decision to not focus on that too much because that was one of the main things keeping me where I was was the salary and the financial part of it. If I had gone into over-analyzing mode about it, that may have kept me stuck for longer. I did go to a financial advisor at one point and he had said, “Yeah, basically just stay at your job right now with this income and here's where you could get out,” and it was not in 2016. It was later.

Sarah Cottrell: Yeah. It's interesting, this is a conversation that I've had with multiple clients. They'll go to a financial advisor and talk to them about potentially making a move. The thing is, generally speaking, if you go to a financial advisor or a CPA, what they're going to tell you is what is the financially optimal decision.

Unless they are very specialized and understand what you're looking for, they're not accounting for any other factors that might go into a decision about why you would do one thing over another. Sometimes people will get financial advice and unsurprisingly, in many cases, it's like, “Well, you should just keep doing the thing you're doing,” which makes this x amount of money.

Which is not to say that getting financial advice isn't a good idea, I think it's very important for people to recognize and this is something that your story shows, we are not just financial optimization machines, you aren't only making decisions about your career based on what is financially optimal.

Now for most of us who live in the real world, you do have to consider finances. It is a significant part of the equation, but there are lots of other reasons why you might make a decision that is many things but not the absolute pinnacle of financial optimization.

Can you talk a little bit more about, because a lot of people will tell me, “I'm interested in potentially going back to school,” or even if they're not thinking about going back to school, just making a change into something that's going to pay them less and they feel this obligation to stay where they are and not necessarily obligation because of a particular reason that the money needs to be going in certain directions, but just almost this sense of “Who am I if I'm not this person with this type of job, making this type of salary?”

Megan Nogasky: Yeah, I think there's really honest with yourself and you have to do a lot of work dismantling all of those comparing to other people, the primacy of prestige, all of that stuff. You really need to get down in the dirt with on a regular basis and think about where your biases are, where your prejudices are.

Even for me, knowing that it was the financially prudent decision to go to a less expensive school, there were times where I was like, “Yeah, but I could apply and go to UFC SSA, which is right next to the law school that I went to but why?”

You really start to get to the root of things. Why would you do that? When you're getting to that point where you're really thinking about making the decision, going back to school, and thinking about taking a lower salary, you've gotta think about your values, think about what is it that I want for me out of my life and my limited time on this earth. I knew that it wasn't being a partner at a law firm. That wasn't me.

I knew that very strongly. There were also times during my time as a lawyer where I thought about, “Oh, should I do something different? Should I try to apply for different jobs where I could maybe be doing more good?” I had the very strong thought, “I dislike this enough that I will not do it for below a certain salary.”

Even if I'm changing the world, the elements of the work itself, I couldn't do for less than what I was making, which was something else. As we're talking about it, it's reflective and I see how things fit together to get me to make this decision but emotionally, when I was in the situation, it felt like I had no other choice, not in a negative way but this had to happen. I couldn't keep being this unhappy. This was no good for me.

If my goal is to help people in any way, I can't help people if I'm that depleted and that unhappy. I'm not doing any good where I am. I don't have anything left when I come home so I need to make a change. I don't want to say something trite like money will work itself out because that sounds so incredibly privileged and when it really comes down to I'm taking a lower salary, I don't know how healthy I'm going to be able to remain if I stay in this job from a physical perspective, from a mental perspective. It was getting to that point that finally pushed me where it was like, “I can't do this.”

Sarah Cottrell: Yeah. This is a conversation that I have with people quite frequently. I actually just got an email about it this week from someone who was saying, “My issue is that I don't really like what I'm doing but it's like okay, it's not intolerable.” I find that often lawyers in that situation have an even harder time than what you experienced or what I experienced. It was like, “Something has to change. I cannot do this. I cannot be this person.” It's scary but also very motivating in a certain way.

Megan Nogasky: It is. It's really motivating. My thought hearing that from someone, truly, it may not be intolerable to them but if you would ask me way back in the first couple of years of law school or practice, I would probably have said, “Well, I can do it, it's not awful,” and I think differently about it now because there was so much denial in “it's me, not the work,” going into that and saying it's not intolerable.

Whereas, I feel like there are many, many people on the earth who would sit down with it and be like, “Yeah, this isn't tolerable, it's bad. I don't like it so I'm walking out the door.”

Sarah Cottrell: And you're like, “It's literally not the worst thing ever that could possibly happen to a human being, therefore, I need to be okay with it and I need to continue to do it.” That sounds over the top except this is how so many of us, I think, are approaching our jobs as lawyers for so long.

Can you tell the listeners just a little bit about once you graduated with your master's in social work, what type of counseling work you have done, and what you're doing now?

Megan Nogasky: I knew I wanted to work with adults and I had done a couple of different internships when I was in graduate school for social work. One of them was at a day program for adults, a partial hospitalization program, intensive outpatient program at a hospital. Just a day program and those names, PHP, IOP, and what they stand for are incredibly intimidating names, I find, for what amounts to just really intensive therapy for a portion of the day.

I really liked that level of care because you can think about it as there are folks who go to see outpatient therapists maybe once a week or on a different schedule. There is inpatient which is its own kettle of fish and people have their own stigmas and thoughts about that. There're very enduring cultural images and messages associated with being in-patient for psychiatric reasons.

But staying overnight at a hospital and not medically admitted but getting programming, seeing a psychiatrist, getting your meds adjusted, seeing therapists, and in between those two things is a day program. I like the level of care. I liked the acuity of the patients. I honestly like the performative aspect of it because I was able to draw on the things I liked about mock trial way back in the day to do group therapy because you're teaching, and in a way, you're performing.

But any skills I had in terms of communicating information, public speaking, performing, all that stuff, really scratched an itch doing group therapy in that setting. Before I graduated, I applied to programs like that both at hospitals and freestanding. I ended up getting a job at a PHP, IOP facility called Compass Health Center in Illinois. I work at their Northbrook location and I have since I graduated.

It has been really, really fun working here and doing this work. My prediction about having greater freedom has come true and I don't know that I would ever—I'm trying to think at various points in my life—would have said that I valued freedom so highly and now I know that it's up there in my top values.

But I was a group therapist for a while, I've been able to work with adults individually. I recently did a continuing education training. I was able to develop and start a program here that I'm directing now for individuals who struggle with pain and illness as well as their mental health. The amount of different things I've been able to do here is fantastic and it's the polar opposite of that lock-step march from associate to partner, to what? To partner emeritus, then you’re done?

Sarah Cottrell: You've retired but still come in on the weekends because you don't know where else to go.

Megan Nogasky: Right, yeah.

Sarah Cottrell: Gosh, yeah, it’s sad. Okay, well, Megan, this has been amazing. As we're getting to the end of the conversation, is there anything else that you'd like to share that we haven't touched on yet?

Megan Nogasky: I will say after so much time talking about what didn't go well in my legal career, something that I really, really enjoyed and was another marker that maybe this was not the right field but this pointed me in a direction of helping professions was that the pro bono work that I did, I really valued and enjoyed.

That involved so much more of connecting with someone and helping someone directly because I did all kinds of mental gymnastics to tell myself I was helping people like, “Oh, okay, we're representing this bank, people work at this bank. They need their jobs,” and at the same time, this bank's going to face so much litigation, just settle these cases, and no one's going to be the wiser.

I don't know how much you're saving the world there no matter how you try to phrase it. But otherwise, I would reiterate what we said earlier in the podcast, go to therapy and make mistakes. Take the leap if you can. Even if you have a pile of reasons not to, trust yourself in what you want because you only get the one life.

Sarah Cottrell: I think that's so good. I think especially the piece about trusting yourself is a skill that a lot of us were not taught how to cultivate. It can feel really weird in your 30s, 40s, 50s, or 60s to be basically learning how to do that but I think that is a huge part of this process.

Megan Nogasky: I completely agree.

Sarah Cottrell: Okay, Megan, where can people find you and connect with you online if they want to reach out or have questions for you?

Megan Nogasky: You can find me on LinkedIn. That's probably the best place to find me. I'd love to talk to folks if you have questions or if I can be helpful in any way.

Sarah Cottrell: I love that and we'll link your LinkedIn in the show notes so that people can find you. Thank you so much. This was such a fun conversation and I'm just so glad that you found this path that is such a good path for you. It makes me really happy.

Megan Nogasky: Me too, ditto. I'm overjoyed because when you find something that is not sucking your soul out of your body, there's so much more out there, there's so much hope, there's so much fun, there's looking forward to the future instead of dreading every day, there's more world out there for you.

Sarah Cottrell: Yes, 100%.

Thank you so much for listening today. If these stories are making you go, “I think the Collab is something that would be a good fit for me or would be helpful for me,” we would love to have you join us. You can go to formerlawyer.com/collab and see all the information and the enrollment information, and you can enroll there and join us in the Collab today. I'll see you there and I hope you have a great week.