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You are listening to the Lawyer Life Podcast episode number five: Why we aren't happier at work - because we're so busy believing our own BS.
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Hi, everyone, welcome to the Lawyer Life Podcast. If you're wondering how to find greater success and peace in your career, how to get more things done and find more time for what's important, you are in the right spot. At the Lawyer Life Podcast, we dig into the good and the bad parts of lawyering and we provide practical tips to help you take back your power and start living the career of your dreams. I'm your host Autumn Noble. I am an author, speaker, practicing attorney as well as a life and career coach for lawyers. I have worked in firms of all sizes I've taught at universities, I've built a thriving practice group from the ground up and I've worked in house with a Fortune 300 company. Now I have created the Lawyer Life Collective to leverage my experiences and learnings to help my clients pave their own way. We are so glad that you're here.
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Okay, my friends this week, we conclude our three-part series examining why we aren't happier in law. Over the last few episodes, we've explored two common drivers of our misery: fighting the realities of practicing law or simply failing to set our own course. Today we conclude with reason number three: we are just too busy buying into our own garbage.
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Ugly beliefs - we've all got them. As we start this episode, I want you to think about something that you're wanting to be different. Maybe you want to go to another firm, maybe you want to work less, maybe you want more balance, or maybe you just don't want to be a lawyer anymore. But I want you to think about that one missing piece. And as you do, see if you can pause long enough to start hearing your thoughts about it. And specifically seeing if you can hear your brain explain to yourself why you simply cannot do that thing. It would be worse at a different firm, they'll fire you if you work less. Balance doesn't exist in the legal industry. This is just the way that it is. You can't quit lawyering, how will you pay off your student loans? And what will people think about you? All of those thoughts are what I want you to keep on the forefront of your mind as we work through today's topic.
The majority of the women that I work with want things to be a freckle different. They want to change firms, or they want to make more space in their lives and they want to believe that is possible. They want to live and act from that space of curiosity and exploration and trying to find a way to make it work. The problem is that they're not facing the reality that parts of themselves are still persuaded by all of those ugly stories telling them why what they want is an impossibility. There's a part of them that is still wondering if what they want for themselves is not available to them or that the person that they want to be is simply too far from the reality of their shortcomings.
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It's this push and pull, this desire, this dreaming, that is bogged down by our own negative thinking and these negative stories we're telling ourselves, that is the third most common reason that we're simply not happier at law. We all have those stories that we tell ourselves. They're lurking beneath the surface, keeping us from doing what we ultimately want to do. Those beliefs often drive us to procrastinate to avoid work to avoid difficult conversations that are for our own betterment. But they ultimately keep us in a place that is inconsistent with who we are and where we want to be. So unless and until we unpack that circus that's going on up there, we'll never be able to act from a genuine place of confidence and belief in our value in order to find more peace at work.
And let's be real for a minute here - we've all been there. So many of us feel stuck and hopeless carrying around thoughts that are very heavy and black and white thinking, I can't do that I have to stay in this practice. I can't set boundaries. I don't have any other options available to me. All of those thoughts they feel so oppressive and heavy and then we carry them with us day in and day out and we wonder why we're so exhausted at the end of the day. When you carry that kind of heavy and hopeless energy with you, but you push it down, and you bury it and you don't look at it, it will eventually wear you out. We don't have enough gas in our tanks to do our jobs and continue to hold off those types of emotions. It's like holding an energetic beach ball underwater while we're trying to run a marathon. It always blows up in your face, it always comes back, that energy has to go somewhere. And we all know what that burnout feeling is like and often that's because we've been kind of engaged in this push and pull energetically, for so long that eventually the wheels just fall off.
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If you're listening to this, and this resonates with you, and you think that, gosh, at the end of every day, I just feel completely exhausted, more exhausted than the day actually warranted, odds are pretty good that you're carrying around and ignoring and burying some pretty heavy and painful emotions. Because there's some negative story that you're telling yourself and it's playing in the background like elevator music. Just because you don't look at it, just because you don't take it out to play with it, it doesn't mean it's not creating that energy, those negative feelings within you and that's part of the problem that we're going to deconstruct today.
So how do we rip those up and get to a place where we believe that what we want to change what we want to be different, is actually possible for ourselves? First, we have to get to a place where we can recognize and acknowledge that these thoughts and these stories that we carry around in our heads, they're just opinions, they're not facts, they have not come to fruition, we can't tell the future, they're just words in our heads that we have given a tremendous amount of power and energy to. We have to look at those existing beliefs and get to a place where we can see them as just that: they're choices that we make and things that we're choosing to believe. Opinions that we're selecting from the universe of options available to us.
We limit ourselves because we carry around those small voices inside of us saying that we're not good enough, that we're going to fail, that we can have the life that we want. We are not coming to our experience with openness to the possibility for progress. Instead, we start out really expecting to fail because we treat all those stories and all those narratives as if they're just the whole truth and there is nothing else that we could possibly choose to believe. We cannot create the life that we want, a life with more happiness, a life with more peace, if we're showing up every day buying into those lines of negative thinking. Those beliefs are always going to be in the background, sucking some of our energy away from our true intended goal of building a practice that you're happy with. Those beliefs and those stories they kind of creep in and reinvest your energy in that hopelessness.
I know for me when I'm in that space, it happens at the end of the day, when I'm just totally beat in my ability to push those thoughts and push those emotions down in a way it's just not possible anymore, because I'm exhausted. That's when they come in like a tidal wave and I can just feel them second guessing everything I'm trying to do, diminishing all of these beliefs that I'm trying to invest in. But that is our work, we have to recognize that constant tug of war within us. That tug of war, where we're torn between believing in something more, or throwing up our hands in resignation to this cruel universe that we're living in.
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If we give those thoughts an inch, they will take a mile and they will bury us. So first, we have to recognize that they're there and we have to recognize that they are choices that we're making and stories that we're choosing to give energy to. Next, we have to stop buying into our own BS. And to do that, we have to realize that when we give those sentences power, they are just going to grow stronger. When we give room to those negative beliefs, because they'll come they always come, our goal is not to eradicate them completely, but we have to know that when we give room to them, our brain is going to pile on. And it's going to provide all sorts of evidence to support those nasty little narratives.
For instance, if you give power to: This is not going to work out. I'm going to fail. I can't do that. Your brain is going to offer you all sorts of evidence to tell you why that is true, to support that thinking. All of the reasons why failing is inevitable. Our brains were not designed to argue with ourselves, to argue with the thoughts and the stories that come into our head. It is designed to agree with you by providing supporting evidence. Anyone ever heard of confirmation bias, right? That's what this is. That is what is happening here in our brain. But that confirmation bias kind of weds itself to this negativity bias and we just create a firestorm. But that's why those thoughts feel so true. It's why they have such a hold over us. The brain just kind of builds this case to prove their truth and then the part of us that just wants to survive starts really believing that this all must be true and I must not do this thing because it is dangerous and doomed for failure. But let me ask you this. When was the last time that you asked your brain to provide you evidence in the opposite direction? When was the last time you forced yourself to consider:
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What if I would succeed? What if this will succeed? What if I could do it? And just see what your brain offers you and give your brain space to offer confirmation bias in that direction. Be really interesting to see what comes up when we do that kind of an exercise. When we worry that we can't do it or that it's not going to work, we don't ever really give ourselves the chance to consider whether that opposite might actually be true. Maybe there's even more evidence in favor of that reality. What if you could do it? What if not every firm is like this firm? What if it's not worse somewhere else? What if you could stop being a lawyer and find happiness success, and have a great income at the same time? What if you were meant to do something other than practice law?
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Those are the types of questions that can really start breaking the stranglehold that those negative thoughts have on us, because it finally forces us to stop and question: okay, this is one story, is there another story that's equally as persuasive to me, that alone, that observation, and that kind of taking a step back is going to make it a lot easier to dismantle some of the power those beliefs have over you. So that when they come up again, and they will, you will have an answer to them. I hear you, I might fail. But here's the reasons why I actually think I might succeed, why this actually might work. Because let's be honest, none of us have proof that we can't do it, that it's not possible. And none of us know with certainty that we will fail (whatever that even means). So before we can shift to the rosy thoughts about how we know we can do it, we first have to recognize our role in this little song and dance, and just see that sometimes we give way too much power to those crappy beliefs about ourselves. Maybe we learn them from our parents, maybe their criticisms offered by unkind friend or cruel lovers from the past, wherever they come from their existence in our minds, does not make them truthful.
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So instead, we have to ask, are those thoughts helping or hindering our lives? If the answer is they're hindering, then we have to go back to that exercise: What if the opposite were true? Is there evidence to support that?
One of the questions I get a lot about this work is, so you want me just to delude myself and go wholeheartedly into believing that I can make a gajillion dollars in a year, whatever it may be. That is not the point. The point here is not to develop all these sunshine and margarita dreams and run around pretending and believing that they're all true and that that's going to fix everything. That is not the point. The point is recognizing that we have a lot of patterned thinking in our brains, patterns that come from experiences or people in the past, or just thinking that has kept us safe historically. Whatever the reason may be, there's a lot of patterned thoughts that just roll on and on and we don't often take the time to step back and say, Okay, those are patterns based upon choices that I made 10 years ago, do I still want to live that pattern? Do I still want to let that pattern of thinking, guide my life? That's part of it.
The other part of it, then is asking yourself, what do I want to believe? What feels true to me? It's not about deluding ourselves. It's about finding opposing beliefs that we can believe with the same type of energy. Because if you can challenge yourself to say, what if I could do it? What if I could go to another firm and it won't be as bad maybe it will be great, I don't know. But if you can come up with reasons and support, why that makes sense for you and why you're going to be okay, despite it, that is going to propel you in a very different direction, as long as you have belief behind it. As long as those thoughts truly resonate for you, that is why the delusion argument, it just doesn't float. Because if we don't have feelings behind, it is never going to dictate how we act and how we show up.
So we have to identify the choices that we're making in our head with our thinking, and explore alternate options, alternate options that resonate with us and feel true for us, and see if those propel us on a different direction towards creating whatever that thing is that we want.
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The other question that I often get about this topic is, Well, I'm hard on myself, because it's created a lot of success for me in the past, can't some of those negative thoughts push us to try harder and do better? I get asked this a lot. And intellectually, we know that it's not okay to talk to ourselves the way that we often do, and to carry around these types of worries about inadequacy and failure. However, a lot of us look to our past success as evidence that maybe being hard on ourselves is why we have succeeded. Maybe being hard on ourselves is how we're able to get where we are. And while I agree that for many of us, being hard on ourselves, and pushing ourselves certainly contributed to our early successes in life. But when women come to me for coaching support, they're typically out of gas, because that approach ultimately runs out of juice. It destroys you from the inside out.
The people that I work with have often pushed so hard, that they end up pushing themselves right out the door of the success that they've created for themselves. While being hard on ourselves, it might have served us in those early years, we eventually get to a point where it no longer serves us. We start to see the negative effects of treating ourselves so poorly. We have the successes, and we have the accolades, but we have no boundaries, we have no balance in our relationship with ourselves and often others is completely broken. You shouldn't have to beat yourself into submission to achieve success. That pattern will only leave you worse off than when you started. Besides, what's the point of all of that success, if you don't love who you are on the journey and if you don't love yourself enough to allow yourself to enjoy the journey a little bit.
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So what I offer is what if instead of using negative self talk to motivate ourselves, we chose instead to believe that we're inherently good enough, and that we can be whoever we want to be and we appreciate ourselves along the process of this whole journey. Motivation and accomplishment are certainly going to come from either mindset but one is going to require an investment in our abilities, and belief in ourselves, while the other requires an investment in self-judgment and self-criticism. Is that a pattern that you want to create for yourself, because how we do one thing is often how we do all things. And when we allow that negative self talk to be the sole creator of our success, there are drawbacks and repercussions in the other aspects of our life that are not ultimately what most of us want for ourselves.
And what's more, one is much more sustainable than the other. The choice is always yours. But here's the bottom line, if you're truly seeking more happiness in your practice, we have to look at our role in the misery. We have to closely examine the stories that we tell ourselves and start thinking about our life and the options available to us differently. Because what's the downside of believing wholeheartedly, that you could create the life that you want, you could have that thing that you want to be different? Is the downside of that you'll be disappointed? Would that be more painful than spending the whole journey, expecting that you're going to fail? And believing that it's never going to work? Again, the choice is yours.
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I believe that we have to be open to the possibility that what we have been believing all along is not the only truth out there. It's just our opinions. Opinions that we have learned, opinions that we've adopted, opinions that we have let run loose like maniacs in our brains for years. Those stories are often not factual and they are rarely serving us. In other words, we cannot take different actions in our lives to create different results, if we don't start thinking differently about our lives and what's available to us. Everything that we do is driven by our thinking and the emotions that that thinking creates. In order to change our actions and the fruits of those actions, we have to change the way we think about ourselves. From there, we can get to a place where we can see the old beliefs as just what they are - those bad choices that we're no longer going to make. We can see them as not factual and clearly not places that we choose to spend our energy. Only from there, can we shift our energy to something new and start creating something new. To do otherwise, is just to divide our efforts and divide our energy and handicap yourself from the very beginning.
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So there it is, my friends, get to work, looking at your ugly thinking and work on yourself from a place where you can see that all of your beliefs about what you are wanting are optional perceptions and ask yourself Is what I'm believing about that thing that I want, is it true? Is it beneficial? Is it factual? Is it helping me seek that one thing? And if the answer is no, you can choose something else, you can be open to the possibility that your perceptions are not the only truth available to you. To do otherwise, is to set the goal and pursue it while carrying this energetic ball and chain. This secret little whispering that it's not possible, that you can't do it. That tug of war is always going to delay your road to success.
Cheers, everyone. Thank you so much for listening. And thanks for telling your friends.
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