Hi, and welcome to The Former Lawyer Podcast. I'm your host, Sarah Cottrell. I practiced law for 10 years, and now I help unhappy lawyers ditch their soul-sucking jobs. On this show, I share advice and strategies for aspiring former lawyers, and interviews with former lawyers who have left the law behind to find careers and lives that they love.

Today I want to talk about what you do if you've taken all of the tests and you still don't have a clear answer.

What do I mean by that? So often I will get emails from people who listen to the podcast or just lawyers who find Former Lawyer on the internet, and they will tell me that they have—they've taken the CliftonStrengths, for example, which is one of the assessments that I recommend inside the framework.

They’ve taken the MBTI or other personality assessments and various other assessments that exist out there to help people figure out what is a good fit for them work-wise. Basically, the question or the thing that they’re telling me—some variation of this—is, “I know all these things about myself, and I’m still not clear about what I’m supposed to do. What should I do?”

And I actually have a two-pronged answer to that. The first one is that sometimes you think that you know yourself better than you actually do.

What do I mean by that? When you're taking assessments—this is going to sound really obvious—but you have to actually be honest with yourself about who you are. For a lot of lawyers who aren’t happy being lawyers, it takes them some time to get to the point where they’re able to say, “Oh, I might be good at X or Y, but I don’t like it, or I don’t enjoy it, or it’s not something that comes naturally to me, or it’s not the way that I would react outside of the way that I have taught myself to react for my job.”

So sometimes there can be a disconnect in terms of someone having a clear idea about what they should be doing after taking some assessments because they are inadvertently weighing the scales by trying to get results that they think they "should" get.

It depends on the assessment that you’re using. Some assessments I think are better than others at sort of capturing the things that are truly true about you, even if you’re not necessarily able to be as honest with yourself as would be ideal. But the reality is that any assessment is only as good as your ability to answer the questions honestly and to see yourself.

And a lot of that, especially in certain circumstances, requires things like emotional safety and having done enough therapy to be able to do that. It’s one of the many, many, many reasons why I am always talking about therapy and why I think lawyers should go to therapy.

So that’s the first bucket, and honestly, that is, I would say, a relatively small number of people overall.

Most of the time, when someone reaches out—or even someone who’s in the Collab or someone who I’m working with one-on-one—if we've gone through the process, they’ve done the assessments that I recommend, we've talked through them and done various other things. If someone is in my inbox or someone who I work with has a sense of, “I’ve taken these assessments, but I don’t know what the answer is,” then that generally speaking tells me one thing.

And it’s actually a topic or a theme that came up in the interviews that are airing the week before this episode that I’m currently recording, and the interview that’s going to air next week, and that is: clarity follows action.

Clarity follows action. And as lawyers—and the personality of the lawyers that I typically end up working with—none of us like that. We all find that to just be incredibly annoying, and we’d actually prefer that not be true.

Because what we want to do is we want to be able to take all the assessments, get the exact answers, map out our 132-point plan, and then go forth and execute. That is never actually how it works.

And it’s endlessly frustrating for all of us who, by personality, really want to think through everything before we do.

The reality is that if you are someone who has taken a bunch of assessments, if you’re someone who’s a listener to the podcast and you’ve taken CliftonStrengths and you’ve taken personality assessments, and you’ve gotten all these answers, and you feel like you have a pretty good sense of what the results are and what the themes are and how they all relate and what they might be saying about you, but you don’t know what that means for you next, that tells me that it is very unlikely that you have done anything other than thought about those results.

Does that make sense? And I’m not saying thinking about things is bad, obviously. I mean, I think it’s probably pretty clear if you’ve listened to the podcast for any period of time that I am someone who likes to think about things a lot.

Thinking about things is definitely my safe space. Thinking about things is the safe space for most of the people who are listening. But you have to basically start to do something.

And that probably sounds a little bit crazy, because it sounds like, “Are you serious, Sarah? Are you literally saying I should just do anything?” And to a certain extent, I am.

Once you have some clarity about who you are and you have anything that you might possibly be interested in doing that is not what you’re currently doing, the next thing you need to do is go out and get information about those things that you think you might be interested in.

And it’s going to feel random. This happens all the time, I mean, this is part of what people do in the framework, right? Inside the Collab and when I’m working with them one-on-one. And it feels random, and lawyers generally don’t like that.

It feels like, “I’m picking one of seven different options that I could be looking into, but what if that’s not the best one? What if it’s a different one?” And I’m here to tell you: it literally doesn’t matter. Just pick one and do something with it.

And the “something with it” is typically: here’s something that I’m interested in, I’m going to go find one to three people who do this type of work, and ask them to tell me about what their day-to-day is like.

I know that sounds very simplistic. And again, it can feel very scattershot, right? Because if you have several things you might be interested in, most of what you've probably decided are probably not good options, because you're lawyering yourself but you're trying not to completely lawyer yourself.

I cannot tell you how important it is to take action that feels messy because it is inherently going to feel messy. It’s inherently going to feel like, “I’m just picking one of these potential options to look into, but what if it’s not the right one? What if it’s blah blah blah whatever?” That is just part of the process.

And honestly, that is one of the parts of the process that, in the Collab, I see people get the most help with when they’re in that place of, “I was just supposed to be doing things? Like what? Talking to people? This feels weird,” and having other people say, “Yes, this is what I did. This is how it worked for me.”

Just knowing that the fact that it feels messy doesn’t mean that you’re doing something wrong or that there’s no answer.

If you’re sitting and looking at a bunch of assessment results and you’re like, “Where’s my answer?” and there is no answer, first of all, you’re not doing anything wrong. There actually is no answer. There is no one right answer.

But also, the next thing to do is to take some sort of action. And it can be different for each person, but like I said, typically it’s some kind of going and getting more information about something, some option that could in theory be real.

And here’s the thing, you might be thinking, “But Sarah, I’m going to go talk to people and then they’re going to tell me this and it’s not going to work and blah blah blah.” Maybe. Maybe even probably, right?

But the thing is, as people do go through that process, they get more information that gives them potentially other ideas, that creates some additional connections, that allows them to see like, “Oh, this thing might not work, but this other thing might,” or, “I’d never thought about that type of option before,” or whatever.

In all of these situations: clarity follows action. And again, I fully grok how unpleasant that feels as a lawyer, as a person who decided to become a lawyer because you'd probably really like to have that clear path. I get it.

And it feels scary. People worry about it being inefficient, especially if you're in a place that's really toxic and you're super drained, you don't have a lot of emotional or physical or mental energy, that idea of "I'm going to do this thing and it might 'result in nothing'" feels like lie.

I just want to remind you that it's actually not resulting in nothing. It feels that way on the front end, potentially. But literally, that is the work. That is the work that will get you where you want to go, and where you want to go is figuring out what is actually going to be a good fit for you and moving yourself in that direction, and not staying stuck where you are, which is a place that you don’t want to be.

So, clarity follows action. If you have taken all the assessments and you’re still not clear on what you’re supposed to be doing, it’s not because there’s a perfect answer that someone else might have for you. It’s because you need to start taking some action based on the information that you have, and there are lots of different ways to do that.

If you want support in doing that, of course, you are always welcome to join us in the Collab—formerlawyer.com/collab—or you can reach out to me if you’re interested in working with me one-on-one. The link for that is on the website.

Okay, sending all of the good vibes out to all of you as you try to figure out what it is that is the right thing for you. You’re not doing it wrong. If it feels messy, it actually probably means you’re doing it right. Thanks so much for listening. I hope you have a great 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.