SUMMARY: No matter what profession you are in, there will be times in your career where you will wonder if it’s time for a change. In this episode, we continue our discussion regarding important decisions and how to move through them. This week we dig into - how do you know when it's time for a change and I break it down into a few simple steps.
Watch the full episode on our YouTube Channel: https://youtu.be/rsp3wyHuEAc
New episodes every other Wednesday.
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Free coaching consult: https://autumnnoble.as.me/freeconsult
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SUMMARY: No matter what profession you are in, there will be times in your career where you will wonder if it’s time for a change. In this episode, we continue our discussion regarding important decisions and how to move through them. This week we dig into - how do you know when it's time for a change and I break it down into a few simple steps.
Watch the full episode on our YouTube Channel: https://youtu.be/rsp3wyHuEAc
New episodes every other Wednesday.
RELATED TO THIS EPISODE:
Free coaching consult: https://autumnnoble.as.me/freeconsult
WHERE YOU CAN FIND ME:
SHOP THE LAWYER LIFE COLLECTION on Etsy
ADDITIONAL RESOURCES:
0:02
You are listening to The Lawyer Life Podcast episode number eight: How to know when it's time for a change.
Hey everyone, and welcome back to the Lawyer Life Podcast. I'm your host Autumn Noble. I am a practicing attorney and the founder of The Lawyer Life Collective: Life And Career Coaching For Attorneys. Throughout my career, I've worked at boutique and regional and national firms, and I've built and chaired my own practice group from the ground up. I've taught in business schools and law schools and eventually transitioned my practice in house with a Fortune 300 company, before leaving to build my own firm. Now I teach all of my clients how to do the same thing. If you want to learn how to build your practice and 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, and I am so glad that you're here.
1:05
If you are new to the podcast, welcome, and thanks for joining us, be sure to check out the show notes to get access to additional information on the Collective sign up for some free coaching and to learn more about this episode and get some additional resources. If you've been here all along, I appreciate you and welcome back.
Today, we are continuing our discussion from last week around some important decisions and how to move through them. This week, we continue to dive into a similar topic: how do you know when it's time for a change? And I break it down into a few simple steps.
1:41
No matter where you are in your life, there are always going to be times when you'll start to wonder if it's time for a change. Some of the most common phrases that I hear in coaching are: How do you know when it's time to quit your job? How do you know when it's time to find a new firm? How do you know when it's time to get a divorce? Or how do you know when it's time to leave my profession altogether and start something new?
When faced with these questions from clients, we work through a three-step process where we explore the myths, the justifications, and the so whats. We start with the myths.
Whenever we contemplate a big life change, we have to get really honest with ourselves about the stories and the myths that we are carrying around. In my experience, big decisions are often complicated by myths around timing. Myths about the right time to act or the need to maximize results before we run out of time. In a future episode, we're going to dig deeper into this idea of running out of time but today we're going to really focus on knowing when it's the right time to make a move. And we're just going to cut to the chase: there is no right time that must be known before we can make big decisions. And we're gonna unpack this, I promise. But let me start off by just asking simply, what is the benefit of believing that there is some right time that we have to figure out before we can make changes in alignment with some nagging need or something that's troubling us that we want to change.
3:23
I have worked with clients who have committed years of their lives to jobs that they hated because they thought it was too soon to pursue the life that they really wanted. And after years of waiting for that right time to present itself, they come to me really disappointed and regretful and frustrated that they just didn't honor those desires sooner when they first manifested.
3:49
In contrast, I have seen women completely blow through these myths and leave lucrative big firm jobs after one or two years of practice to start their own firm. They didn't have a tremendous amount of knowledge. They didn't have a ton of clients of their own. They didn't have a lot of experience getting clients on their own. But you know what, they have found incredible amounts of success because they believed that they could do it. They acted in a way that everyone else judged and everyone else criticized but they did it anyway because it felt authentic and right for them. Because they felt that nagging want and they answered it and they paid attention to it. And it panned out for them. Living authentically is never going to lead you down the wrong path and I have so many clients that have answered that call and lived in alignment with those calls and it has proven incredibly lucrative for them in more ways than just monetarily.
4:51
When I left my first big firm job I was a fourth year associate. I didn't know enough I had never gotten my own clients before, I had no concept of the overhead and budgetary needs of running a team. I had a lot of myths that I was believing: that I needed to make partner first that I needed to at least understand how to get clients first, that I needed to understand all of the aspects of my practice area before I could leave, and build my own practice group in that specialty elsewhere. And I was presented with the opportunity to do that. And as I was contemplating that decision, I had all these thoughts and worries going through my head, it telling me that it wasn't the right time that I needed to do all of these other things first.
5:43
But I did it anyway, because I felt like it was something that I could figure out. And I felt like I needed to do something else, then run that hamster wheel of doing everything in sequence the way that I had been told. And I did it. And within one year, I was teaching in a law school and I was teaching in a business school and I hadn't even made partner yet. And then I was hiring people to come work underneath me that were 20 and 30 years, my senior. And I was presenting a budget and costs and forecasts to a board full of men that were significantly older than me and I was the only woman in the room. My success in doing that had nothing to do with my ability, or my need to get more time to grow as a lawyer. All of those thoughts, all of those stories I was telling myself, were just fear in a cute, responsible looking outfit.
Years later, when I left that job to go in house, it also did not comport with my idea of how that schedule was supposed to work. I had this notion of when is it “right” to go in house and what does that mean for the trajectory of your career to go in house. And I had never planned that I would go in house that early. But the opportunity presented itself and it felt right at the time and I left and I did it. And I never looked back.
7:08
Doing that set the foundation for everything that came after that and everything that I'm doing now. I share all of this with you to say that sometimes we just have to trust the process and trust the opportunities that place themselves at our feet and let go of this myth around timing and right timing. I have seen time and time again in coaching women who have tried to appease the needs of this all knowing Father Time, only to feel completely frustrated and disappointed.
7:41
When we refuse to honor our truest intentions in favor of some story we're telling ourselves, it creates a tremendous amount of personal turmoil. Living inauthentically, it may be safe, but it's also really painful. When you feel that nudge to make a change, it is something that must be honored and explored. Regardless of whether that nudge fits perfectly into your life plan and timeline.
When we do otherwise, it's kind of like handing our life over to some like unknown scheduler hoping that they'll let you know when it's time to move on from one thing to the next thing. And it assumes that there will be a time when that change your questioning is going to be easy. When that scheduler calls and says hey, it's time for you to move on to this firm or change practice groups or leaves a law altogether, that it will feel different. Because we'll know that we're being finally called at the right time to do it. That doesn't happen. It doesn't work that way. It's never easy to make those times those kinds of changes, and it never feels good. Ultimately, that thinking just assumes that there will be a time when you can act without fear, or reservation. And it's just not how it works.
8:58
That's not how our biology works. Anytime you do something scary anytime you move outside of your normal routine and what's known to you, it's not going to feel good. And so waiting for the right time when it's going to feel less scary, is just going to keep you stuck. It keeps you in the safe and the familiar. And it justifies your unwillingness to do the scary thing, right? When we say, well, it's just not the right time. Like it just doesn't feel like the right time. It's a very grown up kind of justification. That's really fear. And it really just keeps you from doing the scary thing. In my experience. Those of us that wait to find some certainty that the time is finally right to make that big decision, we only end up getting beat over the head with our own truth. The truth that you've known all along, but you kept ignoring, waiting for a sign that it was a perfect time to act. When we ignore those inklings that we need to make a change and we tell ourselves that we have to wait for the right time, life typically turns up the volume and makes that truth even harder to ignore.
10:06
There is no right time. If you feel driven or called to do something or make a change, pay attention to those urges, they're not going to go away. They will just get louder, and the messaging typically becomes more painful so that you can ignore it. Give space to the possibility that you already know the right decision. But you're allowing fear to cloud your judgment and convince yourself that you need to wait a little bit longer.
10:31
That brings us to step two, the justifications. When we're able to stop focusing our energy on whether or not is the right time to act, we can instead start examining why we want to make the change or not make the change. And why do we want to leave the job or stay in the job. And this is really where all of the learning resides. If there is no such thing as the right time, all we have to do is consider the decision itself. As we discussed in the last episode, when we're trying to evaluate important decisions, the most essential question you can ask yourself is why do I want to do this? Why do I want to leave the job? Why do I want to stay in the job? And then we start sifting through the answers to those questions. It's really that simple.
11:21
For example, if your reasoning for wanting to leave your job is because, I just don't think I'm cut out for the way this firm works. I'm not happy here. My boss is a total jerk and he's completely unpredictable. I don't want to work this much, they expect too much out of me, I have no balance. If those sound familiar to you, you simply have to ask yourself, if I liked that reasoning, do I like that explanation? Do I feel good about it?
For many of us, these types of justifications are at the root of a lot of decisions. We leave jobs because we let insecurity or fear get the best of us. And that sounds like I just don't think I'm cut out for this, I don't think I can make this work for me. Or we leave because we place all of the blame for our unhappiness on the job. We're unhappy because the boss makes us unhappy. We're leaving because the job makes us work too much. If that's your reasoning, and your justification, and it feels right for you, by all means execute on the decision with that rationale, there is no judgment here. But here's the thing. Just because you like your rationale for acting, it doesn't mean you have truly solved the problem. The practice of law is always going to come with certain challenges. And it's always going to push you to grow in new in different ways.
12:46
These types of justifications give away all of our power. We imply that the job or the boss, have the ability to create happiness and balance for us. And unfortunately, that's just not how happiness works. That's not to say that there isn't some relief that can come from leaving a boss that you hate, or a job that has you working all hours of the night, certainly there's going to become a little bit of a reprieve the second you leave that place. But what I have seen time and time again, is that when we blame a job for our unhappiness and lack of balance, and we leave thinking that that will fix the problem, we end up recreating the whole scenario all over again, in the new job.
13:36
These types of justifications where the job makes you unhappy or the boss is ruining your life, those justifications overlook our role in our own unhappiness. There's that saying, you know, wherever you go, there you are. And before I started coaching, I thought it was the most ridiculous thing I've ever heard. But now that I'm so far into this, I get it. Whatever patterning you have, that gets triggered by certain personalities, or that tends to blow through your boundaries and gives more than you want to… that patterning, those parts of us, follow us into the new job. And it creates the same dis-ease there as well. I can't tell you how many clients initially come to me, because they want to find the next thing. They want a new job, they want to get out of law altogether, or they just want to move to a new firm. And they work together with me for a short period of time and that's our focus and that's our goal, and we accomplish it and they're excited and I'm excited and they move on. Right. But that's where the coaching stops. And then usually a year, year and a half later they come back. They come back because they feel the same way in the new job as they did in the last job. And they're starting to realize that the reason that they've been unhappy in these last couple jobs. It's not because of the people, it's not because of the work, it's not because of the firm. It's because they're not showing up in a way to make it different for themselves, because their patterning has them acquiescing to every request, taking on too much work, not having any balance, being a people pleaser. They start to realize that wherever they go, there they are. And they bring all of those things with them. And they end up recreating the same unhappiness, but just in a different environment.
15:36
You're free to allow yourself to make decisions based upon those justifications. That is wholly your right. Leave because the boss is a jerk leave because the firm asked too much of you. Absolutely. If that makes sense to you, do it. But my question to you is this. Do you really like your reasons? Do you feel good about that justification? And what's more? Is your reasoning faulty, and really just a means to escape some of that deeper work on yourself? Is it possible that whatever role you had in creating your current struggle, will continue to recreate the same challenges elsewhere.
Be honest with yourself about why you're wanting to do or not do something and carefully examine those justifications. Stay because you want to stay, but stay because you like your reasons for staying, or leave because you want to leave and because you like your reasons for leaving. As we examine our justifications, we have to be honest with ourselves, about what is driving us to action, and those inklings and feelings, they're not always going to be shouting at us telling us like get out now move on abandon ship. Rather, sometimes what's driving us to act and driving us to consider leaving is a little bit subtler, and maybe even simpler. And it might even be a knowing that something needs to change. It might not necessarily be the job or the relationship or whatever it is. Instead, it may be how you are showing up relative to those circumstances.
17:07
But you're not going to know that until you start digging into your rationale for leaving and what's driving you to consider that at all. It's often easier to stay put than it is to take the risk and try something new. But it's also easier to leave than it is to do the hard work to change how you are showing up in order to get more of what you want where you are. It's easier to leave than it is to fight for more balance and use your voice in your current job. Just because something is easy or comfortable. It doesn't mean it's the right decision for you. Leaving is often an easy solution to a challenge. But are you leaving because it's hard and you don't want to do the work to make it better? In contrast, are you staying because it's easier than moving on to something new? We must learn to honor ourselves and respect the questions that present themselves to us on a deeper level.
18:05
Ask the questions explore what is bothering you, and what is causing you to question your current state. You are the only one who can ever determine if it is the right time for a change. But if you keep ignoring those nagging questions, you'll never get to the right answer for yourself. And instead, we continually run and run and chase something better only to find the same thing everywhere else. Or we stay put because we're afraid of what is out there.
18:35
Last, this brings us to the so whats. This is a part of the process where we tackle any fear that is keeping us stuck. When we eliminate the drama and get really clear about our justifications for acting, the only thing that will keep us from executing is fear. So in order to act, we have to take a look at those worries. We do this by asking yourself If I act and I make the wrong decision, so what? answering that question will ultimately bring you face to face with your worst case scenarios. When we ask so what over and over and over again, we eventually get to the root of the fear. In coaching sessions the most common answer I hear when I asked what are you most afraid of when it comes to making this change, when it comes to leaving this job? The most common answer I hear is, Well what if it's worse elsewhere? What if I leave and the next job demands even more of my time or my boss is even worse than here? The devil that I know is better than the devil that I don't know kind of thinking.
19:50
From there we can take that answer and start saying okay, so what? We eventually get to the realization that if that happens, we will be called to change how we show up, rather than changing the job. When we go down that line of questioning, what if the next job is worse? What if the next boss is worse? What if they demand even more? That calls us to say, so what? What would I do in that instance? I guess I would have to show up differently. I guess I would have to start doing some work to see how I can show up and change how I respond to those types of demands. Right? When we continually ask, so what in our brain tells us it's just going to be worse somewhere else, and we end up at, I guess I'll have to do something different. I guess I'll have to change how I respond. It really forces us to kind of take ownership of our own actions and reactions, in the event that worst thing comes to be the case.
20:56
That type of exploration and that type of answer tells me that at the root of all of this exploration, there is some aversion to doing our own work. If I leave, and it's actually worse elsewhere, that means I'm going to have to do some really uncomfortable work. How do I stand up for myself? How do I set boundaries with a boss? How do I get better at time management? How do I tell people No, when I'm already underwater with work. Right? Those fears that fear that it's going to be worse elsewhere, ultimately calls us to address all of that in our work. There's always some deep desire to avoid that work that comes with setting boundaries and working our relationships. That type of wondering and fear about like, what if it is worse elsewhere, it gives away all of our power, because it's rooted in this idea that a boss or a job can completely control our happiness, and our balance.
From there, we can start to see and understand our faulty beliefs and instead develop a plan to address them. How would I show up differently? What would I do if the boss was worse there? Or if the firm started to ask me to sacrifice in the same way the last firm did that I don't want to, right? We can work together from there to change that patterning, so that the next job can never be worse than the current because we won't be the same person in the next job, because we will show up differently there.
22:26
Challenging those fears, and going down the so what Rabbit Hole ultimately lands us at a space where if that happens, and if I found myself in that position, I guess I've got some work to do to make things better for myself. And that's power. And that's what we do in coaching. And from there, that fear no longer really matters. We don't have to worry what if it is worse elsewhere? Because we know that we will develop tools that would never let that happen because we're going to be different, we're going to show up differently.
23:02
There are other types of answers that I often hear, when I ask clients like what happens if you leave and it turns out to be the wrong decision, some things they say are I don't want people to think I'm a failure. Or I don't want to be embarrassed if I make the wrong decision. I don't want to admit I was wrong if I end up hating my next job… When we continually challenged those worries with more and more so whats, we get to the heart of it all, which is usually a lot of really ugly self judgment. So we say if I leave and I make the wrong decision and your responses, well, I don't want people to think I'm a failure. Well, so what ultimately what we find is, I'm gonna believe that I failed. I'm gonna believe that I messed up. Or if the response is, well, I don't want to be embarrassed if I make the wrong decision. I don't want people to think I made the wrong decision. Well, so what? Well, because it will mean I did make the wrong decision, and I will be embarrassed. I don't want to admit I was wrong if I end up hating my next job and then going to something else right away. Well, so what? Because it will mean I made a mistake. And I'll be embarrassed by that. Challenging all of those worried thoughts that keep us stuck, often reveals a lot of nasty self talk, which once again, presents room for us to grow in our relationship with ourselves.
24:27
From those realizations, we can start developing strategies to push through those worries and judgments. And that may simply mean that we commit that if we make a decision that doesn't go the way we wanted it to. We're not going to judge ourselves for it and do the whole hindsight is 20/20 thing. We aren't going to make it mean that we're failing at life. Facing our worst case scenarios and developing a strategy where we not only survive, but thrive through those events will dispel the fear of keeping us from acting. Instead of worrying what we will do and what others will think if the worst thing happens, we decide in advance what we will think about it. And what we will do in that circumstance, right? We face that scenario and we strategize around it. We can decide in advance to believe that it's all part of your path, and that you will find another job. We answer the worst case scenario with plans of action, and strategizing. What would we do? Would we find another job? What would we say to people? What would we believe instead of believing that we made a mistake and being embarrassed? When we know that we can make a decision, fail and handle the consequences, there's not really anything to be afraid of anymore. There's no longer any reason not to act.
25:56
Don't let your brain tell you that you can't handle that worst case scenario, that fear that it's going to be worse there and I'm gonna have to leave again and everyone's going to judge me. Believing that will keep you stuck indefinitely.
In sum, don't make your life a merry-go-round of boring and fear driven decisions. Instead, work through the myths and stories that you're telling yourself about the decision and about where you are. Are you stuck in some beliefs that there's a right time and a wrong time to act? That there's a right way to do life and a wrong way to do life? Then explore your justifications. Why are you considering leaving? Why are you considering considering staying? Are you blaming others for your own unhappiness? Or are you ignoring your role in the scenario? Is it possible that you're just delaying some bigger work?
26:52
Lastly, ask yourself what you're afraid of by acting or not acting? Challenge those worries with, So what? Over and over and over again until you can see where that exploration takes you. Is it possible that whatever you're afraid of is a challenge you could anticipate and navigate by focusing on what you will think and do if that worst thing happens. One of the simplest tools I can offer you to see whether you're letting fear dictate your decisions is to simply ask yourself, What would your future self tell you to do in this moment?
27:32
All right, my friends, that is all for today's topic. Thanks so much for being here again this week. If you enjoyed today's episode, be sure to leave us a review and a stellar rating on your podcast listening platform. And don't forget, this week's show notes are packed with additional information on this topic, and an opportunity to schedule a free coaching session with me, or to sign up for our monthly newsletter packed with hot topics and resources to support you on your lawyering journey.
Next week, we dig into a common feeling adjacent to career changes and career development. That feeling that we are running out of time. We hope you'll join us there. As always, thanks for listening, and thanks for sharing with your friends.
If you've been listening and following along with the podcast and have not scheduled a coaching consultation, I urge you to get out there and find a time slot that works for you. It’s 30 minutes and we focus solely on a challenge that you're having. There's no cost involved. There's no high pressure sales. It literally has no downside for you whatsoever. It's an opportunity to sit down with me to talk about your goals, what's working, what's not working, and get you some practical advice and support immediately. You literally have nothing to lose. Find the link in the show notes and I hope to see you soon!