So how did you celebrate your freedoms on July 4, unhappy lawyers? Did you actually take time away from the office? I hope so, but I fear that many of you BigLaw and not-so-BigLaw folks were chained either to your office, your laptop, or your Blackberry, rather than enjoying time with family and friends, or…
When you doubt you have any talent or gift, and therefore must keep doing something you hate to pay those bills, that’s lizard brain. When you think your talent is fairly worthless, or unimportant, that’s lizard brain, too.
Gifts and talents are usually the hardest single element for unhappy attorneys to grapple with when searching for meaningful work. You have other gifts. What they are, I don’t know. I know you have gifts and talents, because you’re unhappy, miserable, and looking for a way out of what you’re doing now. When you don’t use your gifts, those miserable feeling are the result.
Nascent unhappy lawyers chase accolades for grades and accomplishments. They please parents and teachers and then law firm partners, by squishing themselves into the success box rather than looking inside themselves for their truth.
Perfectionism is a really hard beast to defeat, particularly for lawyers. We’re surrounded by a culture of “no mistakes,” despite the fact that lawyers are people, people are not perfect, and people therefore make mistakes all the freaking time. It’s easy to confuse perfectionism and striving to do your best. The outward appearance often looks…
One of the hardest things about battling perfectionism as a lawyer is that you are surrounded, nay drowning, in other perfectionists. Law is about conforming, after all, and that is the heart of perfectionism: The more perfectly I conform (my thinking, my reasoning, my writing, my desires), the better I am regarded by others in…
Perfectionism is one of the reasons so many of my clients have no idea what they actually like, or what they’re actually meant to do. They have been pleasing other people for so long, and ignoring their own desires for equally long, that the pathway to feeling their true heart and desires has suffered from uncleared rockfalls and other debris.
