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.

So today I want to talk about why you're not a bad person if you care what other people think about you. This comes up all the time with my clients, with people in the Collab. The reason for that is that one of the very first things that I ask people to do when they come into the Collab or when we're working together one-on-one is to go through a series of reflection questions about why they decided to become a lawyer in the first place.

What were their reasons? Do those reasons still feel meaningful to them? Do they think they were good reasons? Almost without fail, nearly 100% of people will come back to me and one of the things that they say is, "I now recognize or maybe had already recognized that a big part of why I went to law school and became a lawyer is that I knew that it would impress people or I knew that it would make people think that I was smart or I knew it would make people think that I was accomplished. Basically, something around the fact that being a lawyer was going to be prestigious and would impress people."

Usually, when people identify this, they also are like, "And that's a really bad reason." There is frequently a lot of guilt associated with this. This sense of, "It was wrong of me to care. I shouldn't care what other people think. The entire trajectory of my life was determined by basically what I thought other people would think as opposed to what I actually thought." I understand that impulse. I understand it. It makes sense. On some level, yes, you don't want to define your life by what other people think of you.

And it's such a classic lawyer thing because for so many of us, there is this sense of, "If something's gone wrong, it's my fault and I've done something wrong and I'm bad." A big part of that is because in our profession, mistakes are very much often treated as not just human errors, but moral failings or like you would only ever make a mistake if you're not trying or you're lazy or whatever number of things. There's just a ton of morality attached to behaviors that aren't inherently moral or amoral or immoral. By which I mean, it depends, right? The lawyerly answer, it depends.

But I think a lot of us as lawyers have been conditioned to automatically be like, "Well, I did this thing incorrectly, therefore I'm bad." What I really like to remind people and what I want to remind you, because I am sure that there are people who listen, who have thought a lot about why they became a lawyer, who have concluded it is in part or largely because they knew it would carry some level of prestige and they wanted to impress people and then are having these same sorts of feelings, I just want to remind you it is normal and actually okay to care what other people think about you.

The solution in this situation is not to say, "Oh, I've realized now that I became a lawyer because I thought it would impress other people, and so what I need to do is not care at all in any way about what people think about me." I tell people, "If that were actually true about you, you would be a sociopath." We're not saying that you should have no community bonds and care not at all for anything that anyone else thinks about you. Because that also is not healthy. So it's basically going to another extreme.

The one extreme being "I'm only making decisions essentially based on what I know other people want me to do or what I think other people would approve of." Then the other extreme is, "I'm not going to take into account what anyone thinks in any way, because that's what I should be doing." The reality is that really, it needs to be somewhere in the middle. So the question is, how do you find that happy medium?

Of course, there are lots of answers there. It's one of the many reasons why I talk about therapy all the time on the podcast, because therapy is very helpful for making those kinds of determinations for yourself. But I think one of the questions that has been helpful for many of the people who I have worked with is where is that factor of what people are going to think in the constellation of factors that you're considering? And who are the people that you're thinking about? Let me talk about both of those.

Ideally, you have multiple factors that you're considering when you're thinking about what it is that you want to do next, career-wise. The reality is that if the most important factor is what other people are going to think, then all of your other decisions are falling in line behind that. That means that the goal you are aiming towards is that other people will be happy with what you've decided and not you. So it is probably true that if it is your number one factor, that ultimately that is not going to lead to a decision that is necessarily going to be the right one for you because of the amount of weight you are giving that factor.

But if it's one of many factors in the sense that you are considering what people might think and working through that and having awareness around it, then that's fine and good. Honestly, for many lawyers, the work that they have to do is the opposite. They basically have to work through this sense of, "Oh, I might be leaving law to do this other thing that a lot of people might not understand or might think was a mistake. How can I be prepared for the reality that that is something that some people are going to feel, and not have it be extraordinarily triggering to the point that it keeps me from doing the thing that is the right thing for me?"

The other piece of it, like I said, is thinking about who are those people. Because frequently, when I talk with people about this, the people that they're thinking of are not the people who are closest to them. It's the random people from law school or their previous firm or their current firm or whatever. I'm not saying that those people aren't important people or valuable people, but I am saying that if you are allowing the opinions of people who aren't particularly close to you, relatively, to have the most significant influence on your decision about what to do, then, again, you might make those people happy, but you are not actually aiming for the goal of making yourself happy or fulfilled.

I think that's a helpful way to think about it because often, especially if you're in a situation where you know people are going to be like, "Oh my goodness, what are they doing? This is blah, blah, blah," then you just have to be able to process, "Can I tolerate the fact that people will not understand this? Or can I tolerate the fact that there are people who will judge me for this? How much do I actually care about that? And do I actually want that to be a deciding factor in whether I do or don't do something that feels like a good fit for me?"

Now, there are some of you where it's not just people who are more removed. For some of you, it's someone very close to you. It's family, it's maybe your partner, and those situations are a lot harder. Because if you're in a position where you really feel like, "I need to do something different," and people who are very close to you are going to respond poorly to that, that's hard. I'm not here to be like, "Who cares? Just do whatever you want."

But I do think, and again, one of the many reasons why I think therapy is super important for lawyers, is that a lot of lawyers have learned to value other people's opinions about them more than their own for a lot of different reasons, in part because it's the way that our profession is designed. You're often inherently creating things that someone is going to judge. So there are a lot of lawyers who, if they really think about it, would say, "I don't think how I feel about this is as important as how these other people feel about that."

Sometimes that might be a sensible and reasonable conclusion, but often that's being driven out of this sense of "Basically, I shouldn't take my own preferences or thoughts or mental, physical, emotional health into consideration." It can be really difficult if you're in a position where you feel like the people closest to you don't value those things. But also, there is something really powerful in being able to get to the place where you're able to say, "I see myself and can value myself as a human and let my needs matter."

In conclusion, you're not a bad person if you care what the people close to you think about you or what other people think about you. You should care at least somewhat what the community thinks of you because otherwise you're a sociopath, and there are enough sociopaths in the law. Let's not make ourselves feel bad because we care about what other people think. But I think in the process of figuring out what it is that you want to do with your career, you do really need to get to the point where you are able to say, "Yes, I care about this."

Because realistically, you're not trying to get to the point of, "I don't care about this at all." That's not normal or healthy either. That's not a reasonable goal. To try to push yourself to that place? No. But what you do want to do is get to the place where it is a factor that is in the pantheon of factors that you consider at the appropriate level, at a level that is consistent with whatever your values are, because everyone has different values that they need to be living in alignment with in order to feel fulfilled and happy and like they are on the right path.

So the real issue is aligning your concern about what other people think with the values that you have, so that it plays the appropriate role in your decision-making and is not a major driver in the way that it was for many of us when we first made the decision to become lawyers. Thanks so much for listening today. I will talk to you next week.

Thanks so much for listening. I absolutely love getting to share this podcast with you. If you haven't yet, I invite you to download my free guide: First Steps to Leaving the Law at formerlawyer.com/first. Until next time, have a great week.