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.

Today, I'm sharing a re-release of a conversation that I had with a client of mine, Adrian Hern, about her experience in the Collab working together and working together in the Collab Plus One-on-one program as well.

I really love this conversation. Adrian had so many helpful things to say about her own process, and I'm especially excited about resharing this episode because Adrian recently messaged me to let me know that she was able to get a job that is a much better fit for her based on our work together and also that it resulted in a 40% increase in her paycheck, which I just think is so important for people to hear because so often coming into these processes, one of the biggest concerns people have is that if they think about doing something else that they are going to definitely for sure be looking at a significant salary decrease, which sometimes is the case and sometimes is not.

So I'm really thankful that Adrian was willing to come on the podcast and share about her experience and I'm really excited for you to hear it maybe for the first time and maybe again as a refresh.

If you are someone who's interested in the Collab Plus One-on-one program after listening, you can always go to the website, go to the Work With Me drop-down, and the Collab Plus program is one of the options there, and you can read all about it, and schedule a consult if you're interested. Okay, let's get to my conversation with Adrian.

If you're trying to figure out what it is that you should do that is not practicing law, you know you want out but you're not sure what's next, the Collab Plus One-on-One Program could be a great fit for you. In the Collab Plus One-on-One Program, you get access to my program for lawyers to help them figure out what it is they should do that isn't practicing law.

In the Collab, you get access to the community of lawyers on Circle, you also get access to The Former Lawyer Framework, which is a framework that I've created that you work through to help you figure out what it is that you want to be doing next. You get access to the monthly calls in the Collab. You also get access to the replay library. At this point, we have over 40 workshops and panels on various topics that are relevant for those of you who are thinking about doing something else that isn’t practicing law.

In addition to all of that, which is what you get access to as someone who enrolls in the Collab and you get access to that for the lifetime of the program, you also in the Collab Plus One-on-One Program get to meet with me for eight weekly calls, 45 minutes each, where we go through the work that you're doing following an action plan that I've created to help you in those eight weeks move through the framework.

Each call, there are certain things that you're going to do before the call so that when we get to the call, we can talk through it and brainstorm on the things you have questions about, work through issues that have come up, and also just for that accountability, which for many people is super important.

A lot of people really like to know when I show up to this call, I'm going to be expected to talk about X and Y, I'm going to be expected to have done X and Y, so this is a super helpful option for those of you who want that kind of accountability.

In addition, in the Collab Plus, there are a couple of paid assessments that I recommend in the framework, which for someone who just joins the basic Collab, those are things that they can go and purchase separately but as someone who works with me on Collab Plus, you get those included at no extra cost.

There are definitely some perks to being part of the Collab Plus Program and also, of course, there is the addition of the eight weeks of one-on-one calls with me to help you move through the framework. If you're interested in working with me one-on-one, the next step is for you to schedule a consult. You can go to formerlawyer.com/collab-plus. On that page, you'll see a button to book your consult. You can book your consult, you can also see all the information about how the Collab Plus Program works.

Once you book your consult, we'll talk and if it's a good fit, we'll work together and you will work through the framework in those eight weeks. Once more, formerlawyer.com/collab-plus. If you're interested in working with me one-on-one in the Collab Plus Program, that's the place to go.

Hey, Adrian. Welcome to The Former Lawyer Podcast.

Adrian Hern: Hi, glad to be here. Thank you for having me.

Sarah Cottrell: Of course, as always, I'm very excited to hear your story, which is true with so many people who have been on the podcast. But you and I have worked together and so I'm especially excited for you to share your story. Can you introduce yourself to the listeners?

Adrian Hern: Yeah. My name is Adrian Hern. I have been practicing as an attorney for almost 25 years. I'm a partner in a law firm in San Francisco and I do insurance bad faith, basically general civil litigation emphasizing on insurance bad faith, personal injury, long-term disability claims, and some ERISA claims.

Sarah Cottrell: Amazing. We're going to start where we start with everyone on the podcast and then we'll get to the point where our paths cross. Can you tell me, Adrian, what made you decide to become a lawyer?

Adrian Hern: Oh, yes, absolutely. It's a mixture of what I didn't want to do as well as what I did want to do. I grew up with some extraordinary parents who were leaders in their field and they're a tough act to follow. My dad was into aerospace sciences and my mom was in the medical profession. I just didn't want to walk in their footsteps because I feel like I would just be in their shadow for so long so I chose things that were not things that they had done.

Also, I don't like to do math and so there's a lot which we've all heard that one before. Math and I were not the best of friends and so when you look at the process of elimination, what was left over, that was in a professional field, and when I looked at what was left over, the law looked pretty darn good as a match as far as I like to be organized, I’d like to do analysis, I’d like to do legal research, and just do that cerebral exercise.

I really enjoyed that so much that I thought, “Well, law is probably going to be a good fit.” I went and did the LSAT, did all the preparatory work, and got the undergrad degree, got the grad, then went on to law school. It was a completely different story.

Sarah Cottrell: Okay. Tell me about that.

Adrian Hern: Okay. Being a lawyer or studying to be a lawyer does rework your brain. What you thought you getting yourself into is they wouldn't need to rework your brain if you knew what you're getting yourself into truly. I didn't know what I was getting myself into truly because obviously, my brain got rewired and got turned into a brain that thinks like a lawyer.

There are hours, there's aggression, there are long hours, there's this adversarial attitude, there's this toe-to-toe combativeness that sometimes it's healthy debate, sometimes it's just aggression.

This legal research and writer mindset, analysis and organization, and that kind of thing, once I started to realize, “Oh, there's more of a gladiator aspect to this role,” a gladiator aspect that wasn't quite as cerebral, it was more like lizard brain, which isn't really my nature and so I thought, “Okay, well, then that's just the way law school is. You're going to go through law school. You're going to have a little bit of Hard Knocks, and then you get to pave your way thereafter.” But, again, that wasn't true.

Once you get slotted into one aspect of law, it just becomes this bobsled ride to 25 years later, here we are. There are no brakes and no exit, it seems like, once you start doing one particular thing.

Sarah Cottrell: Yeah. It's interesting because I think for a lot of us who went to law school, plenty of people went to law school who don't like research and writing, but a lot of us who went to law school, that was a big part of the draw. I think a lot of people who went to law school for that reason end up in litigation roles because to the extent you're going to be doing research and writing, that's more so where that might happen.

But then there are so many things about trial work and litigation that are not generally compatible with the personality of many of us who are drawn to, like you used the term cerebral, so the more cerebral type of work. Does that reflect your experience as well?

Adrian Hern: Oh, absolutely. That was one of the reasons how I ended up at this firm, how I ended up in a partnership, and how I ended up in the position I was in because I liked the legal research and writing and I understood litigation. Because most litigators out there like to do the toe-to-toe, the scrappy work, the legal, mental, and verbal brawling that wasn't my nature, they were so into that the writing and research was stuff they didn't want to do.

As a result, I was paired up with a lot of these aggressive, a lot of high-octane individuals. Writing and research became my niche for them and I worked my way through the ranks with these folks who are really hardcore and amazing litigators.

My niche always stayed pretty much the same writing and research aspect. That's been a great part for me. I got lucky in that regard. But it's still litigation and litigation, for a personality type like me, it just takes its toll.

Sarah Cottrell: Yeah. It sounds like from what you're describing you knew from pretty early on that the research and writing piece was a fit but lots of other pieces weren't so much a fit.

At what point did you start to think not just like, “Oh, this doesn't feel like a great fit in certain ways,” but like, “Oh, this doesn't feel like a great fit and maybe I actually want to be doing something else”?

Adrian Hern: It's like a frog in a pot I think. It just became a slow boil at some point. I think the slow boil started midcareer when you reach a certain level in your career or your experience level that they start to rely on you more and more and then you get things dumped on you.

At the beginning of my career, they paid attention to you, they kept an eye on you, and then they gave you little bits of things to do in order to see that you were trained up or that you weren't going to do something that was going to crash and burn the case because they didn't know what you didn't know.

After you reach a certain level of trust, then they start just giving you things and then they pile on. I ended up doing that and I ended up working probably 9 months in one year working 12-hour days, 6 days a week. I wasn’t healthy and I didn't like it. Obviously, it's nothing that I would have wanted to have happen to myself or anyone else. It's just too much.

But I did that for nine months and everybody's like, “Well, look at what she can do,” and then it became normalized to my life and to the firm’s life. Somehow backing away from that precedent became harder and harder. I was just noticing things that my life wasn't holding together as well. I wasn't seeing my family as much. I wasn't visiting with my friends as much. I wasn't doing any traveling or anything on my life's wish list or bucket list, I wasn't doing for a decade or a decade and a half.

All I've done was just earn a paycheck at this extraordinary pace that I was putting myself through. I wasn't enjoying it. Like I said, that nine-month immersion made way into my career and then it just became, again, the norm and that became just this again another bobsled ride fast forward into, “Okay, I have zero time in my life.” That's just super unbalanced, super unhealthy, and I wanted to make a change. How did I end up in that? It just was a slow boil. It crept up on me and then it just stayed boiling until I realized I was boiling to death.

Sarah Cottrell: Yeah. I think that's so common, especially the lawyers who I work with who are around that 20-year mark, it's very common that even from early on, they had some sense of like, “This is probably not a great fit for me,” but like you said, there's the conveyor belt and you get on it.

Then I think another big piece of it that I heard you underlining what you were just talking about is a lot of people who become lawyers are very responsible people who feel a high degree of personal responsibility to make sure that things get done well.

I think that as a result, especially if you're some someone who has a personality like that, it's very easy, especially the way that we structure law firms, one, to get taken advantage of and/or two, to just have your boundaries with work eroded, not because you're not thinking, “Oh, I don't want to have any boundaries,” you're thinking, “I want to be responsible and do what needs to be done,” and the problem becomes that there's such a deluge of work and the way that work is structured that you end up in a situation where you realize, “Oh, this is not good for me on any level.” But it can also feel really hard to get out of it because of that deep sense of personal responsibility.

Adrian Hern: 100%. Yeah. As a lawyer, you do have this ooze of loyalty and just this zealous advocacy to your client. If I drop the ball, then this person's life that I've got, sometimes it's a traumatic brain injury, sometimes it's loss of limb, sometimes it's permanent loss of use of limb, permanent disability, my job is to get them back on track.

What I do is to get not necessarily their whole body back but to get them something that they can live off of so that they could start to put the rest of their lives, their new life going forward back together. If you've got a bunch of those types of cases, you can't let any one of them fall because you've got this responsibility to this individual and the firm knows that.

You all have this legal obligation, this zealous advocacy obligation and responsibility and I take that very seriously. Then they're like, “Well, since she's a very responsible person,” the firm's like, “Take on one more file, just take on one more assignment, just one more assignment.”

Or, “You know what, I know you can handle it and you're very, very good at it and I know you're very responsible so here's your assignment. We know you can handle it because you've proven yourself over nine months that you can just go at this pace. But we're really busy over here,” so one partner who likes to create a harem around them starts taking your staff away so then you're all alone with all of this work.

It's because, you're right, it's the nature of the way the industry is set up, the way that you practice law, your name is on that file, it's yours. You got to take care of it. Then the way the firm operates around it knowing that you don't want to lose your bar license, you don't want to injure clients, you want the best result you can for your clients so you just take one for the team.

What do you do if you decide to quietly quit or not do the work? It's obvious, the case suffers, the client suffers, the reputation of the firm suffers. It's nothing you can sweep under the rug and pretend you can't do. That document has to get filed on time with the court. If it's not, it’s quite obvious to everybody inside and outside at the posing council's firm that you didn't do it. I'm naturally accountable and responsible but the system itself won't let you drop the ball in that regard. If they keep putting it up, piling it on, you're on the hook for it.

Sarah Cottrell: Yeah. You talked about the whole frog in a pot of boiling water experience, you realized, “I'm in this place. This is not balanced. This is not the way that I want to be living and it's not good for me.” Can you tell me what happened next?

Adrian Hern: Well, I have a life coach in addition that I've been working with too and they've been working with me for a couple of years. They had pointed out to me what I hadn't seen for myself was that you're who you are as a person and how you're living your life and how you're living your personality and just living who you are in your full experience in this life is getting smaller. It's getting smaller and smaller. You're just losing yourself as a person in this position in this job.

The more I started to look around, I was like, “Oh, yeah. I was the only one at the firm that didn't have a significant other. I was the only one at the firm that hadn't taken a vacation. Okay, I gotta take a step back and start looking at what's really important to me. What do I really, really want?” I was like, “Well, I want breathing room.”

That's pretty much what it boiled down to was I really want breathing room and that was exactly what I've been shooting for ever since is that what can I do to create boundaries at this firm or set myself up in a position somewhere else to give me this kind of breathing room?

I tried at my firm to create some boundaries and to communicate what I did and didn't need, setting up structure, setting up infrastructure, setting up file sharing systems, different things that would cut the time out of my practice and make it more efficient and then get everybody on board with “I don't want to work more than this number of hours. I don't want to take on more than this number of projects.”

Of course, the law firm is its own machine and its own bobsled ride so it doesn't change course. The individuals that worked immediately around me likewise didn't change their course so it all became just back to normal.

I started casting about, here's the typical experience I've heard other people in your program have and here's me with the exact same experience, I just started looking at jobs, looking on Indeed and LinkedIn and just applying to all the jobs that I would have rather had with my current resume of being a lawyer and a partner in a law firm doing exactly this particular thing that I've been doing for 25 years.

My marketing materials were something that were prime for what I was doing that I wanted to leave but I didn't know how to fix it so I kept applying and applying and applying and finding either (a) a job that my research showed that I was not finding jobs with exactly what I was interested in and (b) what I was applying for when I was trying to shoehorn myself into something else, I was using old marketing materials and I didn't know how to make the jump.

That was my experience with “Okay, I need a transition. What does this look like?” I'm not figuring it out on my own and so I started casting about and asking quietly on the side, friends and colleagues. I'm like, “How do I shift from that? What do I do about this?” Someone recommended you and that's how I reached out and decided after talking with you and exchanging a few emails with you that working with you would be a good fit for where I was trying to go next.

Sarah Cottrell: Okay. Tell me in terms of us working together, what would you say are the most significant things that happened for you?

Adrian Hern: Oh, yeah. Oh, my gosh. First off, it was just talking to somebody who had been through a similar situation to mine and then basically talked me out of “I'm not crazy.” You are in an echo chamber when you are in a law firm or you're with a bunch of other attorneys just in the same situation that you're in where everybody's like, “Well, we're all in this together. This must be the way it is.”

No one wants to poke a hole in the ship they're sitting in because it makes them look bad, makes everybody else look bad. There's, like I said, an echo chamber involved with these folks that no one wants to look behind the curtain where they're at and see how maybe unhappy they are or they're so blissfully happy there that I'm the outlier for feeling like I just don't fit in here.

That was the experience with that and coming to talk to you, I was like, “Okay,” and I started reading through The Collab and reading through the postings of others in The Collab. They were saying things that I had felt but I hadn't been able to articulate or they actually said what I was experiencing was inhumane and that was the first time somebody had said inhumane.

At my job, it's like, “Well, that's just the way it goes.” I'm the crazy person or the non-team player for not wanting to do my “fair share” of the workload. When I started to see that, I was like, “No, you're right.” The Collab, talking to you, and reading through the other postings, I was like, “Okay, working those many days and those many hours in a row for that stretch of time is inhumane. It's unfair. There are boundaries. Your life should not be put on hold for your job.” I used your program to embody that feeling more and more and to really get invested in finding a better future for myself.

Sarah Cottrell: Yeah. I think it's so true that there is this normalization of just a pace of work, a way of being treated at work, whatever you want to describe it for lawyers that it can feel as though thinking there's something wrong with that or feeling like this is not a good situation means there's something somehow wrong with you.

I know that's something that people in The Collab talk about a lot just in terms of being able to interact with other people who also recognize that this might be typical but it's not normal and it's not good for you as a human. Like you described, the experience of seeing someone else who also knows your experience talk about that can be really powerful.

I'm wondering in terms of the things that you were struggling with related to figuring out what's next etc., before we work together, what are the things that you were struggling with that you were able to work through?

Adrian Hern: When I started working, what I struggled with in the past was my identity has been as a lawyer in a law firm doing litigation practice, I’m like, “If I'm not a litigator, what am I?”

There's a little bit of an existential experience about that who am I? Then there's also like, “Okay, if I need to get a paycheck not at this job but I need to get a paycheck at a different job, what job title is that and how does that fit with me?” It's a little bit of a two-pronged analysis or two-pronged issue was like, “Okay, can I walk away? Can I distance my identity from this? What exists out in the world that I clearly have a match for?”

I was built for something, right? So we all are. You just got to find whatever your match is and what does that look like? So for the first part of it, you and I talked quite a bit about wrapping your identity up in things and what does it look like to change identities. It took me a while to go, “Yeah, but my identity is to live my life to my best potential to who I am and live in alignment with who I am as a person and with my own integrity.”

That became clear. I was super out of alignment and out of integrity with who I was when it came to working at the job. I was just stuffing who I was and stuffing myself down in my job and then letting the job be the job. I was giving the job more credibility or more power than I was actually giving my own needs.

I had to switch that around. That was the first part of it was to talk through that and come to that awareness and just hold to it, write a note out, and look at it every day on a post-it. Then the second part that really helped with this program was what is out there? What are the positions out there? What am I technically built for that actually exists as part of a legal community or legal adjacent position?

I didn't even know about some of these positions because actually some of them were just re-created as of 5 years ago or even 10 years ago because of this merging of business and legal as a thing and it's turning into these liaisons between the business and the legal. I was like, “Okay, I've worked as a partner in a law firm. I see the back side of the law firm. I work on the front side of the law firm. I have a background in business administration. So there's a thing out there.”

You talked me through what that thing looks like and then I was like, “Okay, that looks great.” Then we started going through the assessments. We did, I believe, a transferable skills audit, then you and I did an Enneagram analysis, and then you and I did a CliftonStrengths test on me. Those were such gifts. Then we talked through those quite a bit, what those meant about me, what skills do I bring to the table that are unique to this world, and how I can parlay those into a position elsewhere.

Then the resume writing workshops, the presentation of yourself on LinkedIn, and all of these aspects, I started to go, “Okay, I can actually see myself, I can visualize myself doing something more aligned with what I am and who I am.” That was the biggest gift, the biggest shift.

I'll back up a little bit and talk about the Enneagram, the CliftonStrengths, and the transferable skills audit was that those things put into concrete words who I am, my talents, my nature, my personal strengths, the aspects of myself, all of my individual facets and told me what they looked like on paper. There were so many things that I was like, “Okay, I knew this about myself but I was never able to articulate it.”

Here I had pages and pages of basically resume fodder about who I was on the inside as a person like what motivated me, what demotivated me, what I strive for, what environments I work best in, the people I work best with, how I work best with others and bring out the best in others. What employer doesn't want to know what kind of thing I can bring to their business or to their firm? They all want to know what I can bring.

These evaluations told me in writing, I was copying and pasting like crazy from these things because now I was writing a document that was going to go into the world looking for a position that was exactly in alignment with exactly who I am now. I was like, “Okay, that's very exciting.”

Then what the modern resume looks like, what the modern resume application process looks like, where are the online portal systems, all of those, I'm trying to match soft skills and hard skills from the job opening listing into the resume, the resume building, the cover letter, and so on. I was just getting a leg up on how to apply for jobs out there in the world in the current marketplace.

I've been at the current firm for half my career so I haven't had to do this in the real world in so long. It's a completely different ball game. It just made it so much easier to go through this transition period without guessing, second-guessing, and making blind guesses because that's all it was before I got into this program was I'm just taking shots in the dark and maybe I'll get it right. That's how you do it, you just keep putting out resume after resume.

But if I keep doing the same thing over and over again with the same result, there's a level of insanity that becomes part of that. That old adage, the definition of insanity is doing the same thing over and over again and expecting the same result. That's what I had been doing until I spent time with you. I realized where I can improve my chances of a better result or actually get a good result.

That's why I was thrilled to work with you and thrilled to work with this program because it basically gave me hope and it helped me start making choices and putting things into the world that actually I felt like I had confidence in. When I respond to a job application or sent off a resume, I was like, “Okay, I feel like I'm on the same page now with what the marketplace is looking for and I've targeted what I want,” and then the next part of it is, “Now I've targeted what I'm interested in and what I'm looking for.”

You even gave me a job title for it and we went on LinkedIn. It turns out because the niche I'm looking at, the position I'm looking at is so relatively new, there's actually no term of art for it. It has 10 different names so you have to search under LinkedIn under 10 different types of job titles in order to find the position that I'm interested on LinkedIn and all the definitions of that job were all different according to which firm or business you're applying to because you and I worked that way.

We worked together and you were showing me, “This is probably what's going on because you're having a hard time finding the number of places to apply to that you would like to apply to. Let's try this.” We just kept practicing over and over in Linkedin and techniques and I was like, “Okay, got it. Now I understand. I'm a researcher, I should be able to figure this out,” and yet it wasn't as intuitive as it should have been which is why having somebody like you to work with to mentor me through the process, I'm like, “Okay, I didn't even know what I didn't know and I was getting in my own way in so many ways that this program disabuse me of that.”

Sarah Cottrell: First of all, that makes me so happy. Second of all, I think that was such a helpful description because so many people come to me, the vast majority of lawyers who I work with know they don't want to be doing what they're doing but have no idea, I think you said not even knowing what the options might be.

In fact, I'll have people contact me who are like, “I'm interested in working together but I have no idea what I want to do. Do I need to figure that out first?” I'm like, “No, actually, the people who I like to work with the most are people who are lawyers who want to be doing something else and have no idea what that might look like.”

Because to your point, I think one, as lawyers, it becomes hard to see ourselves for who we are, what our unique traits and skills are but then also the translation of all of that information into what does that look like practically in terms of what types of roles I might want to pursue and then how do I position myself for them, it's a multi-step process and if you leave out any of the steps, then it does feel like, “Oh, I'm just flailing around. What is going on?”

Adrian Hern: Oh, there was a lot of flailing, that's for sure.

Sarah Cottrell: There's always some flailing and there's always at least one existential crisis, which is it's better to have an existential crisis with other people who understand the existential crisis.

First, just for people who are listening, The Collab is the group program that I offer and then you can do The Collab Plus One-on-One which is what Adrian did, which is where you come into The Collab, and then also we work together, you work through an action plan and we meet weekly for eight weeks as you're working through the framework.

What do you think, for someone who's thinking about either joining The Collab or doing The Collab Plus One-on-One, what do you think they need to know or what would you tell someone who's thinking about doing that?

Adrian Hern: I'd say do it. That would be the first recommendation. Why I would suggest that is that if you're thinking about it, it's probably because you're stuck somewhere, and being stuck somewhere doesn't feel good and being stuck somewhere is such an emotionally exhausting place to be in and it's also a time waster because time is going by and you're not getting the results you want.

I'm pretty sure that's the exact opposite of what the potential client would want. They want progress. They want to move ahead. You hold me accountable. For those eight weeks, you spend time and work with me with modules, tasks, and homework assignments I guess, for lack of a better word, very doable, challenging. I had to look at a bunch of stuff as far as I had to look at my own internal swarm of emotions, feelings, history, and so on, and make sense of a lot of it.

I recommend the program simply because you don't want to be wasting time or emotional energy. I think just trying to do it on your own if you haven't gotten the results you wanted is probably because you're stuck somewhere and you don't know where. That's what Sarah is really good at.

Sarah, you're really good at looking at where people are stuck or just putting people on a path which is what you and I did with these modules in our eight weeks where you just put everything else aside, stop looking at what you think you need to do, and then you just do what Sarah's recommendations are, and then you start building from there.

Then you start realizing, “Oh, okay, this is where my roadblocks were. This is either where I was getting in my own way or this is where I didn't know what I didn't know and now I'm informed,” and you go from there. It works out that at the end of the program, you've got a greater understanding of yourself, a greater understanding of the job market, a greater understanding of how to go for what you want. There's a lot of hope built into that. Then you feel less crazy.

Sarah Cottrell: Yeah. I also love that.

Adrian Hern: It turns off the crazy-making, at least it did for me.

Sarah Cottrell: Yeah. I relate. I'm curious if you could go back in time to before we started working together and tell yourself something, what would you tell yourself?

Adrian Hern: Oh, that's a very good question. I think I just couldn't hear it. If I was to go back and tell myself, “Take a look at your life and don't buy into this law firm or this rat race experience that you're on, don't buy into it. Get off this treadmill,” I'm not sure if I could have heard it back then.

I think I was just so like, “This is what I'm supposed to do,” but if I could have talked to that person, talk to me back then, I would have said, “Get off the treadmill, make a change now, reach out for help. Get coaching, get guidance, get off this treadmill, and turn it around because life is precious and so is your time.”

I want that time back. I want some more of that for myself. Now is the beginning of my new journey and it's never too late to turn things around and make a difference. That's the whole point I'm trying to make now. But if you have the opportunity to do it sooner rather than later and I could have told myself that, I would have definitely done the best I could to have told myself that.

I recommend to everybody else, if you really want to change, start now. Just make the change. Just do something. One small step in that direction and then tomorrow, do another small step in that direction, which by the way, Sarah, is great at helping you with.

Sarah Cottrell: Wow, thank you. Okay, Adrian, is there anything else that you'd like to share either about your experience with us working together or just about your experience in life as a lawyer, anything that you think the listener should know?

Adrian Hern: I think I talked all the things out but I just wish all the listeners the best of luck in their life journey. I wish that they end up finding what makes them happy and that works with them and works with their temperament that's an alignment with who they are.

I wish that for them and I wish them the best of luck in what their endeavors are. And you're not crazy, no. If you're here and listening, it's because you feel like something's not exactly 100% kosher with you and you're right, and you're not crazy for thinking that.

Sarah Cottrell: Yeah. I think that's so important for people to hear here. Adrian, I really appreciate you coming on today sharing your story. I know that it's going to be really helpful for a lot of people. If you're someone who has thought about joining The Collab or doing The Collab Plus One-on-One, hopefully, this is some information that helps you make a decision about whether it would be the best thing for you. Thank you, Adrian. I really appreciate it.

Adrian Hern: Oh, you're welcome, and thank you for all your help in my journey. I really appreciate it.

Sarah Cottrell: 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.