"Let's all find our center and breathe." More shit that lawyers never say.

Time for a break from all the finding your joy stuff I usually blather on about. Let’s have some fun! What would you add to the list?

1. I’m so glad we spent a month studying Marbury v. Madison in law school. I use that case every day in my practice.
2. We do really crap work when we’re sleep deprived. Everyone on this project has to go home by 9pm, and no working at home after that!
3. My admin has really been busting her hump lately. I need to get her a spa package to let her know how much I appreciate her work and dedication.
4. Billable hours are stupid and dysfunctional, and our clients hate them. By the end of this year we are going to come up with a compensation structure that rewards efficiency, creative problem-solving, and taking the time to train and mentor. No matter what.
5. It really doesn’t matter if I make $850K or $1 million. I’d rather we partners not take more profits so we can keep associate and paralegal jobs.
6. I don’t need explanations of edits and face time to learn how to practice law. That’s what monthly emails forwarded from the senior associate are for.
7. I tell every college student I run into that they should consider law school. It’s an underrated bargain.
8. You know, opposing counsel is totally in the right here. We’ve got to tell our client to stop acting like a prick.
9. I’m going to donate my $50K bonus to the homeless.
10. Understanding the ownership rules of the feudal land system has improved my life immeasurably.
11. The important thing here is that we all did our best.
12. You’ve had this 10-year anniversary vacation booked with your wife for 6 months? I had no idea. I’ll find someone else to take on this emergency project.
13. I love my job so much I’d do it for free.

Jennifer Alvey is a recovering BigLaw lawyer who, when she’s not being a wiseass, coaches clients on finding jobs that they actually would want to do whether or not they got paid–and then figuring out how to make it pay. Find out what that’s like with a discounted sample coaching session. Email Jennifer at jalvey@jenniferalvey.com to schedule yours today.

"Barn's burnt down, now I can see the moon."--Masahide, 17th century Japanese poet

We don’t think that fighting a nasty job situation is panicking, but at base that’s what declaring an event or situation “bad” is about. It’s a kind of black-and-white thinking that limits our resiliency, and hampers our creativity in responding to life’s ups and downs.

I’ve been reflecting on how we react when “the worst” happens in our lives. There are lots of “worsts” in modern life: identity theft, bankruptcy, divorce, death, having to clean up someone’s poop, losing your job, illness, abandonment. Sometimes, it’s even stuff like coming home at 11 p.m. from a day of being chewed out, and having to clean up really mucky, nasty trash that your neighbor’s dog strewed across your yard.

A lot of times, our first instinct is to throw ourselves a huge, whopping pity party: Why can’t anything ever go right? Could this happen at a worse time? Why me?

Yes, it does absolutely, totally suck to get kicked in the teeth. It hurts. It makes you vulnerable. I’m not suggesting you should pretend otherwise.

But those Why Me? questions–They’re a form of hanging on to those hurts, and that hanging on is what gets all of us in trouble. When you get stuck in the story of just how bad life is treating you, it doesn’t help you move on, heal, and live joyfully. If you use the bad event to wallow in your story of how your life sucks, your life will continue to suck. Trust me on this. I practiced this kind of story wallowing for years and years. It didn’t help.

Tapping Into Strength

What did help, ultimately, was getting in touch with my strengths, most of which were not valued in law. One of those strengths is creativity, and I started with writing. Now, I dabble in all kinds of things, and it brings me a peace and wholeness that helps me walk through those worsts, rather than getting sucked down into despair.

In the last couple years, I’ve kept on track and in touch with my strengths with a creativity group. Finally, we are meeting again after our holiday hiatus, and oh, how I love that group! I always gets inspired, and see things in a new way. They’re my tribe. (If you don’t have a tribe, work on joining or assembling one. It’s one of the best things you can do for your alternative legal career search. A few thoughts on how, here.)

At my creativity group yesterday, we did some totally cool journaling exercises. (Thanks, P!) I’ll share some others later, but one really jumped out at me as a kind of gratitude list on steroids, and a really useful tool for pulling through tough times in better shape than when you went it.

Surviving and Thriving Through the  “Worst Thing”

Here’s what you do: Think of one of those “worst things” in your life. It can be something going on now, or something that haunts you. It doesn’t have to be huge, it just has to bother you a lot. Some examples:

• divorce,
• paying taxes,
• depression,
• getting repeatedly cut off in traffic,
• sucky job,
• illness,
• constant interruptions from your control freak boss,
• dirty laundry,
• long lines,
• breakups,
• red lights,
• things in your house that break,
• death.

Now, get out a sheet of paper/open a new document, and write “I am grateful for [that thing] because . . .” Then contemplate your worst thing, and look for its silver lining. Yes, it will require some shifts in your thinking. You’ll have to change your story. That’s the point.

Let’s take a really mundane example: a knocked-over trash can with nasty, mucky contents. This happened to one woman, who, as she picked up the mushy banana, reminded herself she was grateful for having food; as she bent over to pick up more trash, was grateful that her body worked well enough that she could bend over; as she placed the cleaned-up trash can back on the curb, that she lived in a city and country where there was reliable trash pickup and clean streets. You get the idea.

I’m in the midst of one of those worsts, myself, so this ain’t no airy-fairy theory: my 99 year-old father-in-law is dying. The amazing thing is that until about 6 months ago, he was totally rocking it. He had his faculties, was able to walk to the mailbox, and only started saying he felt old just before he turned 99 in the fall. Would that we all were so fortunate.

For myself, I’ve been incredibly grateful as we have been scrambling with some logistics of getting my husband to his dad’s bedside, 1,000 miles away. I’ve realized what an incredible support network I have now as I face days or weeks of single parenthood. It warms me from the inside. It’s making this whole situation so much better, just knowing that people are a phone call or text away if I need help.

Being grateful in the midst of awfulness is a skill that gets better with practice, and infuses your whole life. You might want to start small, with “worst things” that aren’t some of the universal biggies, like death, divorce or depression. Just start somewhere. After a few weeks of practicing gratitude in the midst of trial, you’ll start to notice a shift. You bounce back more quickly from whatever life hands you. Your step becomes lighter. You’ll really get hooked, because life will feel easier.

And if you can’t find anything to be grateful about, drop me a line. I’d love to help you develop your gratitude skills, so you can change your life.

Jennifer Alvey is a recovering lawyer who helps unhappy attorneys find tools to change their lives and work. Try a discounted, sample coaching session to find out what that’s like. Email Jennifer at jalvey@jenniferalvey.com today to schedule yours.

What is your heart saying about your job and your life?

Since before Christmas, I have been longing to do absolutely, 100% nothing. When my hairdresser asked me what I wanted for Christmas, I told her I wanted to sit in front of the TV for 3 days and watch only what I wanted, which would basically be Law & Order SVU, Midsomer Murders, and House. Along with all those forensic crime shows, and of course Psychic Detectives. I kind of have a thing about what makes people tick, and especially what makes them tick in a really warped way.

But instead of watching TV, my version of doing nothing, I got ready for Christmas. In my house that means decorating and crafts, making yummy treats, vain attempts at tidying and decluttering, choir rehearsals, and of course, shopping for gifts and food. Oh, and the work thing doesn’t exactly go away. Then there’s the midnight service on Christmas Eve, which means I don’t finish with the Christmas Day prep until about 2 am. (Naturally, little man is up at 5:40 on Christmas Day.) This year, rather than journey to my in-laws in Florida the day after Christmas (yipee!!), we went to Kentucky for a few days. In other words, the usual holiday madness that most of us participate in.

Then there’s THE NEW YEAR. Time of new beginnings, reconnecting, new connections, plans for the year, blah blah blah. Yeah, summoning start-up energy during hibernation season. So even though I really wanted to do nothing but sleep once little man was back in school, I went to networking stuff. I squeezed in new clients. It was all good, mind you. I enjoyed myself and made some great new connections.

Then, it finally happened: My body said “Enough of this, you idiot. You’re worn out and depleted. Here, have a cold so you’ll slow down.” And I have had to scale back. Last night, after reading with my son for a few minutes before fixing dinner, I sat on the couch and closed my eyes for a second. An hour and a half later, I finally managed to lift up my head enough to realize what time it was. Dinner from the freezer, anyone?

Listen Up, Your Body Is Shouting

All of this is a long-winded way of saying that when your body speaks, you need to listen. You would think I would have mastered this concept way before now. Mostly, I do get it. I knew that I was flirting with ill health by not listening to that longing message of rest. I guess I was hoping for a pass this time. Ha ha ha.

A lot of you are probably shrugging: A cold, so what? I’ve worked through the flu! Yes, I know you have. Sorry,  I’m not handing out a medal for that. It’s part of the insanity of law culture, thinking that you can and should ignore your body for the sake of work. Because face it, folks, most lawyers are not really making the world a better place for all humanity. Perhaps you’ll excuse me for not high-fiving that you worked while ill so that a corporation could engage in some questionable practices that let it make a few more dollars and thus pay their shareholders $.05/share more next quarter.

So let’s take it as a given that you’re not listening to the early warning signs, and landing yourself with colds or worse. Most Americans, and especially lawyers, do that all the time. What you’re also doing, I expect, is ignoring the warning signs for so long that your health is really compromised, or getting there fast. I’ve done that too, when I kept trying to find that mythical great law job, despite my soul’s loathing of law and love of creativity and nurturing. That’s why I got cancer at age 29. So, learn from my mistakes, folks, don’t repeat them.

What I’m wondering is how many of you are refusing to acknowledge the deep damage that law is inflicting on your soul and thus your body. They are not separate things, body and soul. Despite the myth in corporate America that we can separate and compartmentalize our lives and being—work and home, emotions and logic, rights and responsibilities—we can’t. Psychology types call this myth of separation “splitting.” Life coaches call it ignoring the wisdom of your body and soul. Whatever you call it, there’s not any long-term good in it.

Have You Seen This Illness?

I’m not saying that every illness is caused by disconnection from your life purpose. But a lot of chronic, stress-aggravated diseases? You better believe they’re made much worse, if not precipitated, when we ignore our heart’s longings. Things like:

• high blood pressure,
• depression,
• ulcers,
• fibromyalgia,
• migraines,
• sinus and asthma problems,
• anxiety,
• cancer,
• diverticulitis,
• insomnia,
• heart disease,
• irritable bowel syndrome, and
• chronic fatigue.

That’s just the easy starter list. They all have a stress component to them. Just about anything that doctors say “We don’t really know what causes this, and we don’t have a cure” is a candidate for inclusion. Actually, I don’t even rule out broken bones or bruises from accidents. Inattention because you’re overwhelmed by all the wrong things causes a lot of physical mayhem.

Tuning Into the Message

So what’s your body saying to you? Maybe it’s time to turn down the word chatter in your brain and tune into the wisdom of your whole being and find out. And I do mean your whole being, not just the logical, talking side of your brain. Your gut has a lot of wisdom to share, as does your heart, your back and your shoulders.

One way to tune in is to try this exercise: Sit quietly, and get as still and calm as you can. Breathe nice and slow for a minute or two. Then consider a decision or course of action you’ve been contemplating. Where do you feel that decision in your body? If you picture choosing one way, how does that feel in your body? Is there tightness, heaviness, discomfort, even pain? Or maybe lightness, release, unclenching, or a sense of energy? Then try picturing the opposite course. Does the feeling change?

When attorneys try this, they usually don’t want to hear what their body has to say, because it often tells them to completely revamp their lives. So they shut down their inner listening, and tell themselves they don’t feel anything. If you give this exercise an honest try, you will learn some things, I promise. I can’t promise you’ll want to hear that wisdom, but if you let it guide you, you’ll be glad you followed it.

After all, when is it better to revamp your life: when you have some time to plan and prepare for a big change, or when a heart attack, a stroke or cancer forces that change?

Jennifer Alvey is a recovering lawyer who helps unhappy attorneys get in touch with their body’s wisdom to find the best course of action for their whole selves. Find out what that’s like with a discounted sample coaching session. Email jalvey@jenniferalvey.com to schedule yours today!

It’s the story we attach to events that cause us the most pain, as Martha Beck reminded me in her new book, Finding Your Way in a Wild New World: Reclaim Your True Nature To Create the Life You Want. Yes, there is some pain when you aren’t getting any interviews in that new field you want to be in. It doesn’t feel great to not make the progress you want. But it’s the story you’re attaching to those lack of interviews and progress that makes you miserable and sure you are stuck in law forever.

Actually, “I’m going to be stuck in something I hate” is one of those stories you tell yourself. It’s that thought that makes it hard for you to sleep at night or get through the day without wanting to commit homicide at least 5 times.

Here are some other stories I’ll bet some of you are carting around:

• I’ll never be able to do what I love and pay the bills;
• Only really lucky people get to do that cool job, and I’m not that lucky;
• People who leave law just aren’t tough enough to cut it, but I can be tough;
• No one’s going to pay me to follow my dream of living in a cabin writing the Great American Novel;

and I’ll bet you have a few more choice ones to add.

Decide Your Truth

My favorite political science professor used to say, “Truth is contextual and consensual.” (See, Dr. D, I was paying attention!) We can debate the notion of great and ultimate truths in some other post, I suppose. I wouldn’t hold my breath if I were you.

But for my money, Dr. D nailed it. These “truths” about leaving law and finding an alternative legal career only work in the context of depressed, dysfunctional people. They’re a profession-wide form of group-think. They get reinforced constantly. That’s why they feel so deeply true.

But theses stories are not TRUTH written on high. They’re only stories you are choosing. It’s these stories that are sabotaging your efforts and making you miserable.

Maybe it’s time to start re-writing your tired, dispiriting plot lines with some new truths that make it a helluva lot easier to get out of bed and do the work you need to do:

• I am here to do something amazing; I’m still discovering what that is.
• The Universe will take care of me. No, my ego may not like that I need to go live with relatives for a while, or tap into my 401(k), but I won’t starve or become a homeless person;
• My talents are on a mission to find their niche. This particular opportunity wasn’t it;
• There is nothing noble about letting toxic people shit all over me;
• I don’t need perfect conditions to write my heart. It’s with me in chaos and in tranquility, and wants to be heard no matter what.

It might be quite helpful to write down all your sabotaging stories in one column, and then re-write them in the next column. Don’t worry yet about deeply believing the new story, just let the alternative plot emerge. Then every time you hear the original negative story in your head, repeat the new plot 5 times. (Remember, 5 times is what it takes to remember something new! Maybe a few more times than that to believe, but that’s OK.)

Before you know it, your alternative legal career could start writing itself. And while you’re waiting, it will be much easier to enjoy the life you have with better stories to keep you company.

Jennifer Alvey is a recovering lawyer who coaches unhappy attorneys on writing better stories for their lives and careers. Try out your own, personal story script-doctoring with a discounted, no-obligation sample coaching session. Email jalvey@jenniferalvey.com today to schedule yours.

Perfect and its cousins may fill a dictionary page, but it won't fulfill you in work or life.

The same principal works on what we say to ourselves, too. That’s why I’ve been working to eliminate one word from my vocabulary: perfect. I use it way too much, and I don’t like the way it makes my brain tilt.

It’s a little odd, this obsession I have about ridding myself of that word. Mostly, I use it to describe something that works really well, or that fits the circumstances quite nicely. What’s so damaging about that?

For starters, it awakens my dozing inner lizard, Guido, who first gets excited about something finally being perfect; it’s about damn time! Then, Guido starts picking out all the flaws with whatever I’ve just described as perfect. Since that only takes a second or two, and since he’s up and about anyway, Guido then looks for other things whose flaws need pointing out. At this point we often veer into topics like money, my dowdy shoes, my singing, the amount of carbs I’m consuming, the exercise I’m not doing, or other fulfilling subjects.

Also, the stickler in me tends to pipe up annoyingly about how nothing on this amazing, gorgeous, wonderful earth is perfect, and so essentially I’m lying to myself and maybe others when I say something is perfect. Yes, my head is often a place I should only venture into under strict supervision.

The Ugly Side of Perfect

Using “perfect” all the time telegraphs a message to your subconscious, that perfection is the goal. Perfection can be massively demotivating, particularly for lawyers who see with excruciating clarity the gap between where they are and where perfect is. The perfect job that turns out to be fine, but with some flaws, can become an indictment of the decision to leave law.

Perfect also narrows your focus too much. It focuses on what already is, not what could be. Great advances in thinking, science, product development, heck just being, often start out as “imperfect.” Post-it notes, anyone?

Perfect focuses you on being someone else’s ideal, rather than your own wild and wonderful creation. That’s the highest cost of all to pursuing perfection. And when you’re looking for the “perfect” job to leave law for, your options will be limited to the known, the trodden (and societally approved) path, which may not actually suit you at all. The one which earns you money and respect, and comes with a Celexa prescription and Xanax chaser. But damn, it will be perfect, right?

So change your perfectionist ways. Instead of describing a job or anything else as “perfect” this week, substitute something more accurate and more genuine. I use words like:

• super
• wondrous
• amazing
• brilliant
• superb
• fabulous
• stunning
• excellent
• gorgeous
• beautiful
• lovely
• fantastic
• splendid
• enchanting

Sure, it doesn’t sound like much. Until you try it and get your mind blown by how often you actually do use “perfect” as a default description.

And if by chance you really use “perfect” less than once daily, you could always adapt the idea: Track how much those around you use it. Especially the people who drive you battiest. Kind of like gunner bingo in law school.

I’d love to hear how your experiment goes, and the changes you see in your life and job search when you give up your perfect addiction.

Jennifer Alvey is a recovering lawyer who helps unhappy attorneys break out of perfect and into wonderful—in career and in life. Find out what that’s like by scheduling a discounted sample coaching session with Jennifer. Email jalvey@jenniferalvey.com today to get started on your amazing new life and work.

It might be a good idea to seek your potential outside of a legal document, if you want that alternative legal career.

Of course, my hat is off to Mr. Johnson. Welcome to the ranks of lawyer-writers, sir.

For the rest of you who want to leave law, let’s talk amongst ourselves about that “untapped potential” Johnson references in his email. I have no way of knowing what he means by that, nor do I need to (it’s damn funny regardless). What I’m wondering is why you are deciding to live with your untapped potential, instead of taking steps to realize it.

The reality is, if you’re reading a blog about leaving law, law is not doing it for you. Your soul longs for its potential to be realized, and it isn’t going to be realized while being a lawyer. That’s what your unhappiness is all about.

Here’s what wanting to leave law isn’t about:

• being irresponsible,
• being a flake,
• being a hopeless dreamer,
• being selfish,
• being impractical in this awful economy,

or whatever other adjective your inner critic has been lobbing at those longings.

Your deep longings are your truth. Staying in a miserable job is caving to someone else’s wacko rules. It’s time to go sane. That’s what David Johnson did, and you can too.

So maybe your question for the year should be: What can I let go of to embrace my potential? or, What does my soul want me to hear?

Whatever your question is, I’m betting the answer isn’t staying in a job that you loathe on a good day.

Jennifer Alvey is a recovering lawyer who helps unhappy attorneys reconnect with their potential and do something about it. To find out what that’s like, schedule a discounted sample career coaching session. Email Jennifer at jalvey@jenniferalvey.com today to discover your potential and get going.

Asking the right question can lead to the best answers, in your alternative legal career search and your life.

It’s not that I have anything against resolving to find a new career that makes you happy; far from it. (I kind of have a WHOLE FREAKING BLOG and coaching practice about that.)

But too often, New Year’s resolutions focus you on the wrong thing, on only the goal. So yes, you might use all that fresh-start energy of the new year to find a new job. But if you haven’t figured out the reasons behind where you are now, and more importantly what your purpose in life is, the chances are good you’ll find yourself a lipstick-on-a-pig new job. I would hate that for you.

So instead of a grand list of New Year’s resolutions that are almost guaranteed to make you feel like a failure by Feb. 14 (when most resolutions have become history), I would suggest something different. Something that can focus your attention where it will cause wonderful, sustainable, long-term change. The kind of change that makes your life more fulfilled and happy. Instead of a resolution, spend your year answering a deep question.

I found my question this year when a client sent me a fantastic quote from Pulitzer-winning poet Mary Oliver (thank you!):

Tell me, what is it you plan to do

With your one wild and precious life?

This question resonates deeply for me. It reminds me that when we get in touch with our wild sides, the sides we want to organize and plan away, we get in touch with our power. And that power will lead us where we need to go, if we just let it.

Plus, there’s the reminder that each life is precious, unique and sacred. And that we need to take action, to do something, rather than sit and ruminate about life’s mysteries or inequities.

So rather than spending time making a long list of your faults you think need remedying, spend time instead on creating or finding your own question. Let it be deep, probing, and without an easy or known answer.

Using Your Question

Your question should remind you of what’s important to your life, and remind you of your purpose. Poetry is always a good place for questions. I like sites like Brainy Quote for online quote searching. You could meditate on the essence of something important to you, like “purpose of creativity,” “path to happiness,” “wisdom” or something similar. Or use a search engine. Inspiration has come from stranger places.

When you discover your question, post it in a couple places. I’d suggest places where you tend to feel stressed and overwhelmed (your desk, your screensaver, the bathroom mirror), and also where you spend time recharging.

In times of stress, focus on your question, and try to connect to its wisdom to lead you through turbulence. Make time at least weekly to reflect on your question, and how you can better incorporate its teaching into your life in ways small and large. Indeed, the more “small” ways you can find, the better. Looking for “big” ways to change your life too often triggers that inner perfectionist most lawyers harbor.

You might even spend time regularly journaling, drawing, or walking and contemplating your question.

I’d love to know what questions surface. If you’re feeling brave, post them in the comments, or email me.

Here’s to a year filled with surprising and enlightening answers.

Jennifer Alvey is a recovering lawyer who helps unhappy attorneys find their questions, and answers, to create a better career and life. She offers discounted sample career coaching sessions so you can find out how coaching can help you. Email jalvey@jenniferalvey.com to schedule your life-altering appointment today!

You'll spend less time splashing about in your alternative legal career search if you aim toward the big rocks. Photo courtesy Cheryl Bowes via Stockvault.net.

Here’s the thing: Don’t squeeze it in. Make it one of your top priorities. Give it the energy it deserves.

Now I know that some of you are looking at your Blackberries and your triple-booked calendars and are having heart palpitations. You already don’t have enough time! How can you add in yet another thing?

Here’s how: By letting things go–the unimportant things.

Make Your Life Rocky 

Franklin-Covey makes a lot of money using this bedrock principle in its planners and time-management classes. I don’t much care for the their calendars and time management system—it’s way too tedious and checkbox-oriented for a go-with-the-flow-and-improvise P like me (P of the Myers-Briggs Type Indicator persuasion). But I did take away one really important concept from the Franklin-Covey class I once took: Put the important things, the “big rocks” of your life, first. They are the things that if you look back on your week, you will be deeply satisfied that you spent time on them.

Another way to look at Big Rocks is as the stones you need to have in the stream that is your life. If you have them, you can get across using those stepping stones and your feet/legs/body won’t get soaked. They stabilize you and make your path through life easier and infinitely better to walk.

It’s true, you might be able to build up enough stream bed with the pebbles of meetings, useless busyness that produces nothing, satisfying others’ agendas, and going to the dry-cleaners—but one good storm can wash that illusory support away.

Big rocks aren’t one particular thing. They differ by what truly matters to you–what gives your life meaning and purpose. But just to get you thinking, I’ll share my big rocks:

• Family: listening, guiding, and cooking. Occasionally cleaning;
• Creativity: not letting the novel or other creative endeavors get shoved into “when I have the time” limbo;
• Making the world a better place: one client and blog post at a time;
• Nurturing self: getting enough sleep, good nutrition, beating back that persistent jackass of perfectionism;
• Community: my creativity group, my choir, my church, my son’s school, my town;
• Spirituality and values: living in alignment with my bedrock beliefs;
• Learning: reading, taking classes, talking with others and paying attention to the world around me.

Rock Your Calendar

I’m gonna go out on a limb here and guess that many of you are feeling like your daily life and your Big Rocks only meet about once a month for a 5-minute quickie. That’s not enough, if you want a life and a career that sustains and feeds your soul.

So how do you get from where you are to where you want to be? To start, make it a point to include one Big Rock daily. Schedule it like an appointment with a doctor that you had to wait 6 weeks to see. Make it that unbreakable.

Now I know you’re thinking Big Rock=big time commitment, but it ain’t necessarily so. I spend maybe half and hour on my novel most days. But it’s a huge rock, and by 7 a.m. most days, I’ve accomplished something incredibly important to me.

Go ahead, spend the next few days figuring out your Big Rocks. Then start scheduling them in, relentlessly and ferociously. And if you get a couple weeks into the process and aren’t making progress, drop me a line.

Jennifer Alvey is a recovering lawyer who coaches unhappy attorneys on making what matters a priority. Find out what it’s like to have a life aligned with things that are truly important to your happiness—try a discounted sample coaching session. Email jalvey@jenniferalvey.com to schedule yours today. It’s an hour that can work amazing changes in your life!

Line up your power from your heart, not other people's heads. Photo courtesy stockvault.net.

You might be nodding your head. But then you look at your calendar and your brain freezes up. When are you going to have time to fit in a career search when you aren’t even getting enough sleep? You’ve got a brief due, a meeting to prepare for, Christmas is coming and you aren’t done shopping or cleaning or traveling–and on and on it goes. You don’t have the time! You feel powerless and not in control of your fate, let alone your career search.

Most of our education and life experiences teach us to bow down to others’ power. Whether it’s society’s rules, school rules, family or cultural expectations, or actual laws, we’re taught that being the cog in the wheel is necessary, indeed required for a successful life in modern post-industrial society. We’re talking rules like:

• Doing work you love is a luxury you can’t afford in this economy;
• Don’t rock the boat;
• You must work insanely hard to deserve even a miniscule success;
• You must do a lot of tedious, boring shit that you hate to earn money–that’s why it’s called work;
• Don’t question my judgment, I’ve been doing this longer;
• The purpose of work is to make money, first and foremost. Fulfillment and happiness is for self-indulgent wusses;
• If you don’t work 80 hours a week, you’re not working hard enough; and
• You must have a perfect, rational, detailed plan before taking any action to change jobs,

It’s that kind of thinking that keeps you from deciding that your alternative legal career search deserves a high priority in your life. Following those rules sucks up a lot of your time. It’s one of the choices keeping your alternative legal career search a wish, or a longing, instead of an emerging reality.

Yes, we do need societal rules to keep things from becoming utter chaos. Otherwise we have a life that looks like driving in Manhattan or Bangalore. A lot of adrenaline that a few people thrive on, but exhausts the rest of us pretty quickly. But the kind of rules above aren’t the kind of societal rules that help you, or anyone else, live out their purpose and build a better society. True, these rules may keep some institutions that have outlived their usefulness from crumbling. Oh, there’s a worthy goal.

Choose Your Beliefs, Choose Your Power

Choosing to believing these rules is one of the ways you give up your power over your own life. Or, as the quote on my wall says, “We get into trouble by ignoring our instincts.” When you ignore your instinct that you want to do a certain kind of work, and the instinct that the work you’re doing now crushes your soul, guess what? You might just get a soul-sucking job as a result.

What if instead you decided to spend at least one hour of every day based on how it helped you be more connected–

• to your inner wisdom,
• to your life purpose, and
• to your chosen community of family, friends and neighbors?

Your life might just look radically different in a mere three months.

What if you pushed “making nasty idiots happy” to the very bottom of your priority list? What if “being perfect” got pushed off your list entirely, and got replaced with “being pretty darn good under the circumstances”? With those pointless time-sucks gone, what space would open up in your life?

What If You Were Accountable?

But maybe that’s some of the problem–if you didn’t give away your power away all the time to others who misuse it, only you will be accountable for the state of your life. And while many of use like to say that we understand the concept of personal responsibility quite well, thankyouverymuch, the truth is we don’t act that way. We keep creating circumstances that suck us dry—like choosing mindless TV and video games, or better yet trying to please impossible tyrants—so we don’t have the energy to make decisions that will create the life we deserve. And then we keep hating our lives and wondering why it all feels so pointless and unfair.

There are different choices to be made. Next time, I’ll talk about ways to implement those choices in your life.

Jennifer Alvey is a recovering lawyer who coaches unhappy attorneys on making what matters a priority. Find out what it’s like to have a life aligned with things that are truly important to your happiness—try a discounted sample coaching session. Email jalvey@jenniferalvey.com to schedule yours today. It’s an hour that can work amazing changes in your life!

How is all that busy working for you? Got that brilliant new alternative legal career lined up?

For example, I once had a client who was working at a BigLaw firm on a deal that was in the papers. Naturally (well really it’s insane, but not in BigLaw-think), he was working frequent 20-hour days. Yet in the midst of that madness and sleep deprivation, he managed to find the time to get some coaching, send in a resume and interview for a clerkship. Which, incidentally, is working out as a wonderful bridge job for him. So really, you do have the time.

What Are You Afraid Of?

The reason you think you don’t have the time is fairly simple: You’re not making your job search your priority.

Sometimes the truth sounds a little harsh, but truly I’m not saying that to judge. I know it’s not exactly easy to solve this little time conundrum. If it were, you would already have that alternative legal career and perfect life, right?

Rather than give you time management tips that likely won’t work, I’m going to talk about why you’re not making the job search a priority.

The number one reason for not making the time for an alternative legal career job search boils down to one thing: fear. You don’t know what you’re doing, exactly, along this uncharted path. There’s not a cut-and-dried path out of law like there is for getting in and staying in.

Many, many (did I mention many?) people go into law because they don’t know quite what they want to do with their lives, and hell at least there’s a nice, obvious career path with law. (And there’s money. And societal approval.) You don’t have to figure out the kind of work you like, really, since often you get shoved into a group because you’re a warm body and then end up staying there. You might have some small say in whether you do litigation or transactional, especially if you have some relevant background. But really, there’s no expectation that you will be choosing your work as an associate or even as a partner, oftentimes.

After a few years of the cog-in-the-wheel treatment, that muscle you used to use for deciding

• what really interests and excites you,
• what people to socialize with,
• how to spend your leisure time, and
• what life purpose you wanted to chase

is atrophied indeed. Or stomped on and shredded. The thought that you might need to tone it up again and exercise your ship-steering skills is intimidating, at the very least. I suspect for many of you, it’s downright terrifying. You would need to step up and reclaim some serious power over your own life. You would have to stop blaming law firm culture, too many hours, other people’s expectations, or whatever else. You would have to make different decisions than you’re making now–maybe really different from how you’ve been steering your life-ship up until now.

Put On Your Detective Hat

So here’s your detective work: Figure out 3 things that you’re giving your power to, rather than giving it to your search for an alternative legal career. Maybe it’s TV. Maybe it’s surfing online to relieve the crushing awfulness of your current job. Maybe it’s shopping. Maybe it’s letting other people set your life priorities. Whatever your particular flavor is, you’ll know it because the activity doesn’t actually bring you relief or satisfaction beyond the moment you’re doing it in. It’s something designed to numb you to the sucky state of your life, or to appease someone else.

Next time, I’ll talk about other reasons why you give up power over your time and your alternative legal career search. Just in time to question all the holiday frenzy!

Jennifer Alvey is a recovering lawyer who coaches unhappy attorneys on making what matters a priority. Find out what it’s like to have a life aligned with things that are truly important to your happiness—try a discounted sample coaching session. Email jalvey@jenniferalvey.com to schedule yours today. It’s an hour that can work amazing changes in your life!