You are listening to the Lawyer Life Podcast Episode #3, Why We are Unhappy at Work.
Welcome Lawyer Ladies, Lawyer Gents and Lawyer Humans to the Lawyer Life Podcast. I am your host Autumn Noble. I am a practicing attorney. I am also a life and career coach for lawyers. During my practice, I worked at firms of various shapes and sizes. I've built and shared my very own practice group from the ground up. I've taught in business schools and law schools and eventually transitioned my career in house with a Fortune 300 company. Now I teach all of my clients how to do the same thing. If you want to learn how to build your practice and your client base, establish some independence, find more time, get more done, or just generally find more happiness and balance in your life, you are in the right spot.
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OK everyone, if you have been following along, you know that this podcast has been a huge leap for me and here we are! We're still doing the damn thing. As we continue to move forward, I want to continue to explore topics that are really going to give you a good sense of what we do at the Collective and why you should continue to listen and click that handy little subscribe button down below.
So where did I land this week? Today we're talking about why we are not happier in law. Big topic. No?! Obviously this won't cover everything but what it will cover is what I have gleaned from years of handling the deepest and darkest secrets of lawyers and their struggles. I realized in my work that most of the attorneys I deal with, at least initially, struggle with one of three types of unhappiness. Again, there's no science behind this, and there are no studies other than my own meandering experiences working with lawyers over the years, so if that's an issue for you, we're probably not meant to be friends. For those of you that don't mind, we're gonna keep on plugging away.
So, three primary reasons that I have found that we are so unhappy in law are: fighting with reality, need for direction, and believing your own BS. We are gonna take each of these topics in turn, and today we're gonna start with fighting reality. So let's dive in, shall we?
Fighting with the realities of law. We are lawyers and we are not factory line workers. Our days are never the same from day-to-day and moment to moment. It's always hard to say what we're going to encounter in any given day or week, or even how and when our day is actually going to end, or if it's going to end at all. While every area of practice in law is different, each type of practice is going to come with its own unique little picadilloes, the goods and the bads, the positives and the negatives, yin and yang. Everything in life is going to be 50/50, each half of that yin yang symbol. For example, I love lifting weights and working out, and I try to go to the gym as often as I can, which is generally not as often as I would like. But I love lifting weights, I love taking exercise classes, and I love that jello-y kind of fatigued feeling that you get in your body. I love going home and taking a nice little bath in Epson salts after I've had a really heavy lifting day and I always know, OK, these next couple days are really gonna suck because of that workout. And I love when I'm laughing and my abs hurt because I had such a good ab workout the day before. I love all of that for the trade off that it gives me.
I love the endorphins that I get during the workout, and those feel good vibes that I get after the workout. I also love the physical and mental changes that I can see over time. Absent all of those early mornings, days of soreness, painful laughing sessions, I wouldn't have any of those benefits. So I sign up for that trade off.
I recently had a client who came to the session and she was telling me about how much she loves the majority of her work. She loves the people that she works with, and she loves the types of challenges that she's getting with her particular area of practice. But there's a portion of her work that she didn't like. Specifically, she didn't like the type of work or the type of people that she had to work with when she was working on a similar kind of ancillary subject matter within her practice. Over time, she was really starting to get frustrated with those people with that work with their clientele and she didn't wanna keep working with them. The way she felt about it was, I love my job, but these people and this work are making me absolutely miserable. So she came to me wanting to explore whether or not it's time for her to move on.
As with lifting weights and working out in general, you have to take the good with the bad. There's going to be pains that accompany your successes. It's going to be challenging and there are going to be days, projects, and humans that you don't like and that is OK. That alone is not a reason to leave without a little bit more exploration. So that sort of feeling of I like this, but not that is not the sign that there's a problem that needs to be fixed. It's a sign that we need a little bit further explanation before we make any drastic moves because again, we're sort of buying into this idea that everything is 50/50.
When we know we are signing up for a struggle, at least part of the time, the only thing we have to evaluate is whether our current position provides us the types of challenges that we WANT in our lives. The goal is not to get a job without any challenges, any jerks any terrible partners or subject matters that we don't like. It doesn't exist. The goal is to sign up for a life with the types of challenges that you want. The types of challenges you are committed to tackling because of the tradeoff. If your current battles, if the current negatives of your job are not the ones that you see as worthy, maybe it is time for a new challenge.
But don't leave simply because the challenge exists. Leave because it's not the kind of challenge you want in your life. When we start believing that there's something wrong with the challenges in our workspace, the type of work, the type of people, the type of projects, we start believing that that's the problem. It makes us miserable. It makes us think that there's something wrong here. But if all of those things are the type of bad that you are willing to sign up for then nothing has gone wrong here, and there's no reason to be unhappy with where you are.
For instance, going back to my initial analogy, I know that in order to be fit and healthy and relatively sane, I have to workout a couple times a week. I know it's not always going to be fun. I know I'm not always going to look forward to it. I really don't like getting up super early to do it most of the time. But I choose the types of challenges I'm willing to endure. Those early morning classes when I don't want to get out of bed, or having to go to bed early the night before and stop doing the Netflix binge because I know I'm going to the gym early, I know that I'm going to feel really terrible the next day, all of those are challenges I am willing to endure. I don't want to have to do those things, but I'm willing to subscribe to them as the 50/50 associated with the health and fitness that I want. I accept that it will be dreadful at times, but it will be my kind of dreadful. From that headspace, there's nothing to be frustrated about, it's just sort of business as usual. Oh, I hate getting up at 5:00 in the morning, yeah, that's my 50/50. I picked this, right. Like nothing has to change here. Everything is OK. So for my client, the most important question that I asked her was what if nothing is wrong here? What if it's OK that you don't love every aspect of your job that you don't love, every person that you work with. If that's OK, then what? When we stop seeing the 50/50 as a problem that needs to be fixed, we can focus instead on accepting those aspects of our reality and stop fighting with them. We can take that energy back and reallocate it to doing something different in that 50/50 that we are now signed up for. It's only when we stop fighting reality can we allow the dust to settle and really take stock of our lives and authentically decide, OK, what's next? If this is my world, if this is my 50/50, who do I want to be in this space? We're not trying to fix it. Instead, we're taking the focus back on us, not external, and asking who do I want to be in this space?
The answer to that question is obviously going to be very different once you choose to accept the bad parts of your job and stop focusing all of your energy on those things and people and aspects that are beyond your control to change. At the foundation of this premise is this notion that people rarely change and there are circumstances in our lives that we are unable to change. It's unlikely that my client was able to dramatically change the type of work her practice group did or that they assigned to associates at her level. Maybe, and we certainly dove into exploring that, but likely not right. When we sort of accept that there are just certain parts of our job that are what they are…People are jerks…clients are jerks, They gonna act however they want to…. The work is what it is. When we can let that go and stop railing against it, it gives us freedom and it gives us power. It gives us power to accept our role in this space. Because prior to that realization, our role has been just being angry and pissed about a million things that we can't control. When we let that all go, we can instead say, OK, my power resides in me and how do I want to show up and who do I want to be in this job, knowing that there are certain aspects of this 50/50 that I don't like. Instead we take that power back and ask ourselves, who do I wanna be in this 50/50 that I have signed up for that's not always going to be perfect because that's life. How can I show up differently so those aspects of my job don't fester and upset me and suck me back into that drama triangle, essentially, where the client and the partners and the job, they're the villain, and I'm the victim, right? How do I step out of that and sort of take those things as they come, show up differently so that I can learn from these parts of my job that are quote UN-quote driving me mad.
Living with and handling problems is part of what it means for life to be 50/50. It's truly what it means to be human. The choice then, is to decide what types of problems are you willing to deal with in your career. If a man splaining boss isn't the type of challenge you are invested in working through, then by all means, move along knowing that there will be other similar challenges wherever you go. If you think a mansplaining boss is something that you can just handle and like that's part of your 50/50, then we can absolutely craft strategies around dealing with that and explore why it is that that bothers you so much and how can we show up differently when someone does that to us. There is no unicorn job out there waiting for you. They all have their own unique challenges. We have to take back our authority and decide what types of challenges do we want to sign up for and stop fighting with the way things are.
While it might seem relatively straightforward and simple, what I often find is attorneys who are struggling to overcome certain negative realities that accompany their practice. For instance, if you're the type of person who wants to have a very clear cut schedule, who doesn't want to have unpredictability pop up on a Friday night when they're heading out of the office, and who doesn't ever want to work on weekends, you always want to be able to show up to those PTA meetings or to your kids soccer games, being a litigator or a deal lawyer is probably not going to give you that flexibility. And that's not to say that other types of practices don't have their own unpredictability and things that come up on the weekends. That's not what I'm saying at all. What I am saying, however, is that choosing to be a deal lawyer choosing to be a litigator, comes with it unpredictability. Being sort of beholden to the schedule of the courts or the plans of the opposing parties in the deal, whatever it may be. But there is a certain surrendering of your schedule to parties outside of yourself. That is the nature of the job. So if you take one of those jobs and that's you primary frustration you are fighting with the reality of that type of work and you're gonna lose every single time, because the only way you get happy in that scenario is if the courts play ball with your schedule or if the parties to the deal abide by your schedule. And it just never happens. And so you have to go into that knowing that that's the 50/50 of those types of practices and asking yourself honestly, am I willing to sign up for that? There's no right or wrong answer, but we have to at least ask. And if we choose, I'm willing to sign up for that, then we have to let it go and stop being angry about it, because it's a battle that you're just never going to win.
One of the ways that I like to think about this 5050 concept is kind of like when you're dating and you meet somebody and you get to know them, and over the course of time you start to notice little things about them that you don't really love. And thinking about those things, I always tell my friends when they start dating someone seriously, I say, That little thing that kind of bothers you right now is going to fester for the rest of your lives and like 10 years from now is gonna make you wanna murder them. And so you kind of wanna look at those little things that bug you and ask, am I willing to put up with that for the next 10 years? Can I deal with loud chewing for 10 years? And and like, have it make me absolutely insane? Can I deal for 10 years with someone who treats their mother terribly? I don't know. But we have to ask those questions and just recognize, like those little annoyances, they're probably not gonna go away. We have to instead ask ourselves, are we willing to accept that kind of 50/50 in that relationship, knowing that no person is perfect, knowing that there's never going to be someone who is always 100% perfection and never annoys us. Instead we have to say like, what's the negative aspects of this person, because we all have them, and are they going to make me want to murder them 10 years from now, or can I just be annoyed 10 years from now and really having that honest inquiry.
It's no different with the job. One thing that's gonna bother you now is gonna make you wanna jump off the top of the building 10 years from now. You have to know going into it whether or not the goods and the bads are the kind that you're willing to sign up for forever, because they're not likely going to change. The question is, are you going to break yourself over these rocks, or are you going to learn to anticipate them, navigate around them, accept their existence and stop fighting and railing against that reality of your world.
So having accepted the 50/50. How do you know when it's OK to accept the 50% that sucks, or when it's time to move on? You simply just decide. You simply just decide. Based upon reasons that are honest and authentic to you, and for reasoning that makes sense to you, that's it. If you don't like the types of challenges in in your current job and your rationale for disliking them resonates with you. By all means, move along. But don't move along because you think the next job won't have any warts. Move along in search of a job that has a different balance of yin and yang, one that is more aligned with the types of challenges that you do want. But staying and fighting with that reality, fighting with the aspects of your job that just are what they are, is making you miserable. We have to either accept them as they are or decide they're not for us and move along. It's a very no drama type of assessment.
Again, accepting that the perfect job simply does not exist is really only part of the battle. The other part requires us to consider the types of types of challenges that we do want in life. Once you make that decision, once you choose your mansplaining boss over a firm that maybe will never advance you, it becomes a lot easier for you just to roll with that person and to accept that 50/50 because you chose it and it because it's your kind of 50/50. It feels so much less like a victim perspective. It takes all the power back and really owns that negative negative aspect, that negative circumstance as a choice that you were making. You're choosing to accept that and that's power. And it's very freeing.
From that space we are able to access greater happiness alone. Simply showing up, recognizing I'm choosing this job with this boss that talks to me like I'm an idiot, drives me nuts, makes me crazy, but there's all these other aspects of my job that I like, I'm willing to accept him. That space alone allows you to start making different decisions like, OK, how do I want to spend that energy? How do I want to navigate that relationship with him, knowing that he triggers me? That's power, and that can get you motivated and that can help you find more happiness almost instantaneously.
So if you find yourself at work frustrating, having those sort of mental jujitsu matches in your head with the people that you don't like, or ranting and raving about the project on your desk, it's all happening in your head. If you find yourself doing that, I really implore you to ask yourself, Is this that I'm upset with something that I can control? And if the answer is no, the next question is, is this thing something that happens again and again is potentially part of my practice in this firm, for this employer, is this just part of that reality and am I just fighting it? And if that's the case, now we have a choice to make. Am I willing to let go of that fight and start accepting the negative pieces? And if so, what does that mean for me?
All right my friends, that is all for this week. Please let me know if you are enjoying this content by leaving me a review or rating this content. I would really appreciate it. Next week we jump into the second part of this unhappiness equation, lack of direction, and I promise you it's not what you're thinking. We will see you there, and until then, thanks for listening and thanks for telling your friends.
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