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.

A few months back, I was asked to do one of the keynote talks at The Authentic Lawyer Summit. The topic of the talk and the portion of the day during which my keynote was scheduled was what I wish I knew. I wanted to share here on the podcast a variation of what I shared at the summit because I think that the things that I shared there are things that come up here on the podcast all the time and are just really important things for you to know if you're a lawyer who's thinking about doing something else.

I actually think that this particular piece of advice or wisdom is something that is really important for both people who are thinking about leaving law, but also lawyers who want to stay in law forever.

The thing that I wish I knew when I started practicing law was just because you can doesn't mean that you should. Let me share a little bit about my background so that you understand where I'm coming from and why just because I can or just because you can doesn't mean you should was such a revelation for me.

Like so many of you, I was always a smart kid. I was good at school, I was good at achieving, and I was one of the gifted kids in elementary school. I was the kid in sixth grade who, short story, was picked by the teacher to be used as a teaching example for the whole class. I was the one who won the spelling bee in eighth grade.

I was a National Merit Scholar in high school. I was valedictorian of my high school class, I went to undergrad on a Full Ride Academic Merit Scholarship. I went to a top-five law school and when I decided to relocate after law school, I got an offer from my first choice firm.

I'm not saying all of this to brag, because I know there are so many of you who are listening who have all of these achievements and many, many more, but I do say it to paint a picture of who I was. This is who I was when I started practicing law. I was the person who achieved. I was the smart kid whose academic achievements were treated as inevitable.

There wasn't anything wrong with those achievements. But I didn't know who I was outside of a smart person who achieved. I kind of felt like I was just a giant brain walking around. I know that many lawyers can relate to that. So much of who I was, was wrapped up in the fact that I was smart, the fact that I worked hard, and that I didn't quit.

I graduated from law school, I started working in Biglaw, and there were so many things that I hated. Like the red exclamation mark “emergency” emails that weren't actually emergencies. I pulled my first all-nighters ever because I had so little control over my schedule when I started working in Biglaw, seeing partners mistreat other associates with impunity, getting in objections to discover requests, and feeling super exhausted before I even started to draft the responses because I knew that it barely mattered.

One of the things that was very difficult was discovering that one of my greatest strengths, which is being an extremely fast and efficient worker actually worked against me because of billable hours and required me to take on more matters and introduced more instability into my schedule.

All of these things and so much more were things that I did not love about that experience. Even though I really detested it, I didn't have the capacity to recognize that it mattered that I hated it. Because whether I enjoyed what I was doing was never really a part of the achievement calculus for me before.

If I could do something, I did it. Mind over matter was definitely one of the guiding principles in my life. It had been instilled in me from a very young age and I see this with so many lawyers. As a smart kid, you decide what you're going to do with your brain and then you do it.

For me, for the first 25 or so years of my life, that more or less worked. But the problem with mind over matter, among other problems, was that I didn't know who I was outside of a brain that walked around. This is probably even more to the point, and it's an experience I know so many of you have, I believed that the value that I brought to the world was my brain and the fact that I could achieve things using my brain.

I didn't really have a sense of what I had to offer outside of achieving the gold stars and reaching the brass rings. Of course, the legal profession is full of gold stars and brass rings. When I started to realize, really in my very first year of practice that I wasn't happy practicing law, I truly didn't think it mattered. It barely even registered to be totally honest.

Because the mind over matter principle was so deeply woven into the fabric of my life that truly, it didn't occur to me that the fact that I was miserable, that I would sometimes cry in the car on the way to work without even really knowing why but I would have heart palpitations every time I would see the little Outlook email pop up in the lower right of my computer monitor, all of those things, it didn't occur to me that they mattered because I had been conditioned to believe that they didn't matter.

For me, ultimately, part of the reckoning that I had to experience in deciding to leave Biglaw for three years and ultimately the law after a decade was the realization that how I felt, like literally the way my body physically responded to my work environment, mattered and that I mattered beyond my ability to achieve.

As a lawyer, it's often extremely hard to believe that you matter beyond your ability to achieve. So many of us have been trained to rely upon our brain and in many cases, told that our brain is what sets us apart from other people. It's what makes it so hard for many lawyers to consider other factors when they're thinking about what they want their career to look like.

For me, it was very hard to accept that I could allow other aspects of who I was to influence a decision about my career. I felt like there was something wrong with me. I’d look at the lawyers around me and it seemed like everyone else was mostly doing fine and the fact that I didn't like it felt like it was an indication that somehow there was something deficient.

But having worked now with almost 300 lawyers over the last four years, all of whom are looking to leave the law in some capacity, “There must be something wrong with me” is one of the most common things that lawyers feel when they're thinking about leaving the law.

Most lawyers who are considering that decision feel like the fact that they want to leave means there's something wrong with them. They feel like the fact that they can't cope with a job in the same way as other people must be proof that they're in some way deficient and it's especially true if those lawyers are objectively doing well.

This was one of the things that kept me from recognizing that working as a lawyer was such a bad fit for me because I was objectively doing well. I was getting good reviews. I was getting my hours, which is, of course, very important in Biglaw. I was getting to work on progressively more challenging matters. I was getting praise. I was getting more responsibility.

I had no framework for walking away from something that I was excelling at. There was no category for walking away from achievement in my mind, and I find that's true for so many lawyers. So many of us have been conditioned to pursue achievement and we receive positive feedback for that our whole lives. We've experienced that cycle over and over and over so we're not able to see why we might walk away from something, even if it's destroying us, even if it's so crushing if we can do it and we're getting positive feedback.

I didn't know that just because I could be a lawyer and just because I could white knuckle it didn't mean that I should be a lawyer. I also didn't know that there was nothing wrong with me because excelling as a lawyer required so much white-knuckling on my part.

There's a much broader conversation we could have there about lawyering and mental health, the ways in which many of us who have chosen to become lawyers hold ourselves to inhuman standards, the way the profession holds us to inhuman standards, but I'll just set that aside for now. Of course, that’s something we talked about on the podcast a lot.

I have this very distinct memory of sitting on the old IKEA leather couch in the living room of the house that I shared with my husband. This was a couple of years into practice. I was so sick that I had lost my voice. I was at the end of a long holiday weekend where I'd worked all day every day on a series of reply briefs and gotten back and forth with the co-counsel and the client over and over.

I got another email about who knows what and I just immediately started crying. I didn't even really know why I was crying. I look back now and I recognize my nervous system was so overloaded by the unhealthy environment of Biglaw that my body was literally screaming at me, “Get out! Get out!” I can remember sitting there and thinking, “Yeah, I'm super miserable, but if this particular case wasn't this way, et cetera, et cetera, then I wouldn't be so miserable. So this misery is somehow not real, it doesn't matter, or it's something,” but basically that it didn't matter, but I was wrong.

It did matter. My misery mattered and your misery matters. I think that's a really important thing for lawyers to hear. There's a difference between being an adult with a job and being miserable at your job. There are a lot of lawyers who feel like, “Well, I don't really like this, but doesn't everyone dislike their job?” The reality is no, not everyone dislikes their job with the soul-deep misery that many lawyers dislike their jobs.

Very often, that soul-deep misery shows itself in your body, in your nervous system, and in the way you respond to your environment. If you believe that you're just a brain walking around that cuts you off from the wisdom of your body, which is quite often telling you that something is not right, the myth of mind over matter is dangerous because it ultimately cuts you off from yourself.

If you have listened to the podcast for a long time, you know the trajectory of my story, where am I now. I ended up staying in law for 10 years, though I left Biglaw after three. In those 10 years, I had to learn how to figure out what I wanted to do with my career.

One of the most valuable things that I developed was the ability to actually listen to myself and to distinguish between whether I could do something and whether I wanted to do it. The question that you need to ask yourself is what do you want?

A lot of us who became lawyers never really have considered what we want to do. We've made a lot of decisions about what we should do, what we think will make people happy, or will make people see us in a certain way. There's nothing wrong with caring about what other people think about you but for many of us who are lawyers, we've been conditioned to do so to the exclusion of actually considering what we want, what we feel, what our nervous system and body is telling us is right for us.

It goes so far beyond just figuring out how you can get someone to hire you for a different type of job, which is one of the many reasons, of course, that I strongly recommend therapy for all lawyers, but particularly lawyers who are thinking about leaving to do something else.

For me, just because I could continue as a lawyer didn't mean that was the right path for me. I don't think I could have come to that decision ultimately and actually broken away from the law without the experience of going to therapy.

After I left Biglaw, I ended up getting into therapy and was diagnosed with an anxiety disorder and a panic disorder. I can now look back on my time in Biglaw and even before that and see that many things about working in the Biglaw environment were extremely activating for my nervous system and therefore exacerbated the symptoms of my anxiety and panic disorders.

That is my story. It is the story of so many lawyers. If you've ever felt any of the things that I've talked about, it's so normal. It's so common, you're not alone. You deserve to consider what is really right for you. Because just because you can doesn't mean that you should.

Whether you continue to practice as a lawyer because it is the right thing for you or ultimately decide that something other than the law is the right thing for you, either way, it's so, so important to cultivate the ability to really understand yourself, to see the things that have brought you to where you are, to understand what might be influencing your decisions, to make the right decisions for you that take into account all of who you are, you as a whole person, not just your big brain, because it all matters. Thanks so much for joining me this week. I'll talk to you next week.

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.