The Lawyer Life Podcast

How to Transform Any Relationship

April 03, 2024 Autumn Noble
How to Transform Any Relationship
The Lawyer Life Podcast
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The Lawyer Life Podcast
How to Transform Any Relationship
Apr 03, 2024
Autumn Noble

In this episode, we dive deep into the art of transforming any relationship. Whether it's with a partner, friend, or family member, we uncover the secrets to making meaningful connections and fostering growth together. Join us as we explore practical strategies for strengthening bonds and turning any relationship around. Don't miss out on these game-changing insights that could redefine your connections.

Watch the full episode on our YouTube Channel: https://youtu.be/DusV8yHUv0U

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:

Show Notes Transcript

In this episode, we dive deep into the art of transforming any relationship. Whether it's with a partner, friend, or family member, we uncover the secrets to making meaningful connections and fostering growth together. Join us as we explore practical strategies for strengthening bonds and turning any relationship around. Don't miss out on these game-changing insights that could redefine your connections.

Watch the full episode on our YouTube Channel: https://youtu.be/DusV8yHUv0U

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:

 You are listening to the Lawyer Life Podcast, episode number 21, How to Transform Any Relationship. Hello and welcome back to the Lawyer Life Podcast. I'm your host, Autumn Noble, founder of the Lawyer Life Collective. In the collective, we explore all things lawyering, the goods and the bads, to make your legal career as successful as possible.

 My work in the collective pulls from all of my experience and my own legal practice, building a team, leading a group, making partner teaching in colleges and going in -house with the Fortune 300 company. And I leverage all of those experiences to help my clients explore and pave their own legal path. Over the years of practicing law and coaching attorneys, I have been able to identify how to overcome the biggest challenges that we as lawyers face in the legal industry. If you ever find yourself struggling to do it all and create the success that you truly want in your career, this is the podcast made for your ears. For those of you that have been listening all along, I love you and welcome back. Okay, everyone, if you haven't heard, the Lady Lawyer Collective is starting today, April 3rd at noon central. If you missed the Lady Elsie the last time around, this is your chance to get in on all of the goods.

 

If you're ready to unlock the secrets to thriving in the legal world, join this transformative seminar series designed for ambitious lady lawyers eager to master the art of practicing law. Whether you're a recent law school graduate or a seasoned professional seeking to elevate your practice, this series is your golden ticket. We're diving deep into essential skills, business development strategies, and independence building techniques that law school never taught us. Don't miss this opportunity to reshape your career path and create a successful, fulfilling future in law. Sign up now and let's embark on this journey together starting today. Grab your seat at the LawyerLifeCollective .com and sign up for the Lady Lawyer Collective Seminar Series. All right, my friends, today we are wrapping up our discussion on relationships. Yes, we could devote an entire podcast to this topic, but this will be the last installment for now.

 

Autumn G Noble (02:20.046)

So far, we have dug into dealing with difficult humans, not that we have any of those in the legal industry, and how to know when a relationship has run its course. Now we are completing this trifecta with an exploration of how to transform any relationship that is in need of a little tune -up. Before we dig into this topic, a little story about myself and my own coaching journey. Nearly a decade ago, I went through a pretty terrible divorce and rebuilt my life from scratch. This meant leaving behind my beautiful home and all of my things and starting out completely fresh in my own home. Initially, I start off with the little rental property for me and my dogs, and then I eventually bought the house next door, which was a 120 year old house with a double lot, a big yard, and a pool all for me to sort out and figure out all on my own. It was a lot for me to take care of, and I was beyond proud of this little house.

 

Years go by, the divorce is over, I'm in a relationship with a man who is now my husband. And at the time, he was living across town from my sweet little house I had just bought. And I was working downtown as a partner at a law firm. Because he's a firefighter paramedic, he works 24 -hour shifts. 24 is on, 24 hours off. That meant that when he was available for 24 hours, I would hop to it and try and make time to see him before he disappeared for another 24 hours.

 

What that meant was I was constantly fighting rush hour traffic to drive home from downtown, grab my dogs and drive across town to see him. Over the years, I had enough of this fighting rush hour traffic and just running around like a mad woman trying to make time for him. And so I said, we either have to stop spending so much time together because this is driving me crazy or you need to move in with me because I and my things cannot fit into your house.

 

So that was the conversation that we were tap dancing around for, I don't know, maybe a year or two. Eventually he moves in with me. As you know, I have two little Sheba Inus and he has an Irish Terrier. So when he moved in, we created this sort of Brady Bunch family. Now remember, this is a house that I love and I have decorated beautifully. It's got really high ceilings and crown molding. And I had these beautiful white, drapes that were floor to ceiling that really accented the height of the rooms and I just was really digging what I had done with decorating the house. 

 

So anyway, one day I'm sitting there at the dining room table eating breakfast and Mike, my husband now, is gone for 24 hours. And so it's just me and the dogs. And I look over at my beautiful white curtains and I realized that the bottom portion of those curtains are stained yellow and so I immediately realized that the only dog capable of doing this to the curtains was the one male dog, which was not my dog. I'm immediately just pissed because I love this house and we're trying to make things work and the dogs are all with me all day long. And now here we are with this new dog added to the mix just destroying these curtains that I love.

 

And so I immediately kind of fly into a rage and I start getting really pissed about it. Later that day, I was talking to my coach about the whole scenario and I explained to her how frustrated I was that this dog was ruining all of my nice things. And she very simply asked me, well, do you want to feel frustrated about this? And I was emphatic in saying, no, I don't want to feel frustrated about this, but I am frustrated about this. Then she asked me,

 

So why are you frustrated about it? So of course, I'm thinking she's clearly not getting it. So I'm gonna explain to her once again, how nice these curtains are and how expensive they are and how I don't like them to be yellow, I want them to be white and how I don't want this dog making a mess of my house and on and on I go. And I realize I'm ranting and raving and she's just sitting there laughing at me. And she's laughing because it was pretty clear that I believed the dog, was what was making me feel terrible rather than my thoughts about the dog. She asked me one more time, why are you frustrated about it? Very pointedly. And I had this moment where it's like, I really wanted to explain to her for the third time why this dog was making me so freaking pissed. And that's when I realized that the point she was trying to make was that if I didn't wanna feel frustrated about it I was going to have to change the way I was thinking about the situation and this dog, because her point was that the dog was not making me feel any kind of a way. I was frustrated because I was busy ranting and raving and condemning this dog in my head. And she wanted me to see that. If I didn't want to feel frustrated, the ranting and raving was going to have to stop at some point. 

 

Ultimately, where she led me, was the conclusion that if I wanted to not be frustrated about the situation, I was going to have to accept the possibility that there was more than one way of thinking about the situation, which I didn't really want to hear in the moment, but I understood the point that she was making. It didn't mean that there wasn't some validity to my thoughts that were making me frustrated, but what it meant was that there was also some alternate ways of thinking about the experience.

 

It meant that I was going to have to choose whether to remain in that frustration or gravitate toward another line of thinking that didn't make me want to scream at the damn dog. I needed to find some other truth about the situation that I could throw my emotional weight behind. So having realized this and recognizing the dog was not zapping frustration and anger into me, I started to take some ownership over my role and how I was feeling and then from there I was able to explore some alternative truths. I shifted instead to believing that if this was the worst thing that would happen when cohabitating with my boyfriend, then life was pretty darn good. I also shifted to believing that this was just another obstacle that we were gonna have to figure out as a couple and...

 

While neither one of those thoughts were pretty or flowery or made the situation okay, but they did allow me to live in a space other than frustration and they allowed me to see a bigger picture aside from the anger where I could start strategizing a path forward. So it really allowed me to kind of foreclose this angry blow up with my boyfriend and some unnecessary battle with this poor dog. 

 

This small gesture of owning our thoughts and emotions is critical. And doing otherwise is what we refer to in coaching as emotional childhood. It's childlike because it eschews all responsibility for our emotions and puts it all in someone else or something else. In this instance, I was being emotionally childlike because I was blaming the dog for my feelings. And when my coach asked me,

 

Why are you frustrated? I went into explaining how the dog was making me frustrated. I was blaming the dog for something that I was creating for myself. For example, I once had a client with a summer intern that she described as quote unquote driving her crazy. The intern was constantly at her door with question after question and how to print things. Who should she ask about taking a day off? What was she supposed to wear to a client event? Should she ask another senior associate for help on a project, or was it a big deal if she was 10 minutes late to work? 

 

All those inquiries seemed to be never ending to my client, and she was always at my client's door several times a day, and my client was irritated about it. So every time she said she heard a knock at her door, she would just inwardly start seething. I swear to God, if it's her again, I'm gonna lose my ever -loving mind. Can she not tell that this is irritating me? Can she not see it on my face?

 

Does she not understand how disruptive this is for me? Why can't she just schedule a minute with me where we can address this all at once instead of these constant interruptions? When she was telling me this story, she was visibly irritated about the situation and she was angry at the intern and she repeatedly just kept saying, she is really driving me insane. When we blame another person, or the actions of another person for our feelings that is us living in emotional childhood. We're not taking ownership for how we feel. We're giving these other people and these other circumstances all of the power. We're believing that those people have the ability to control how we feel. So like children, we kind of throw this emotional tantrum because we aren't getting our way. These people aren't acting the way that we want them to act.

 

Autumn G Noble (11:49.71)

The dog is mistaking my curtains for a fire hydrant and the intern was mistaking my client for her personal secretary. We are not taking ownership of our power over ourselves, but rather we are allowing their actions toward us to dictate how we show up and blaming their actions for our own. That is emotional childhood. It's no different than blaming our imaginary friends for the vase that we knocked over. We're blaming someone else for something that we did or created.

 

The reason that my client felt irritated every time the inn turned darkened her door was because she was thinking thoughts that made her pissed. She's swimming in negative thoughts that created anger. Can she see that I'm busy? She was just here 10 minutes ago. Why didn't she ask me then? I can't believe she isn't getting it. And on and on she would go. And those thoughts were why she was so frustrated. The first step into addressing this situation was to get my client to recognize the true source of her feelings.

 

And that was not the intern making her crazy. She was making herself crazy, her thoughts were making her crazy. So first she had to recognize all of those thoughts that created anger and frustration in her. Once she recognized those patterns, she was able to evaluate whether those thoughts were serving her in the relationship. Clearly, showing up in anger and frustrated and fuming about the intern all day long wasn't getting anyone anything good and it wasn't helping anyone. Furthermore, it wasn't helping her be the leader that she wanted to be. She wasn't acting like the partner that she wanted to be for that young intern and she wasn't being authentic and that was fueling her frustration even more. 

 

You are the only human capable of making yourself crazy. It's a hard pill to swallow, but once we can recognize that we're the source of our consternation through our thoughts, we can take a clearer look at how we're truly showing up in our lives. In this case, my client was not showing up how she wanted to. She wanted to be a good leader and an example, but she was letting that anger sidetrack her. Through working together, we were able to set aside the anger and emotional blame and imagine instead how she could show up as the best version of herself.

 

Autumn G Noble (14:11.502)

She took ownership of her emotions and thoughts and decided to create a different result. So she shifted her thinking to, I can use this as an opportunity to mentor this intern. I can set her up for future success by discussing some professional boundaries with her and helping her see a better way of interacting with partners and supervisors. From there, my client scheduled some time with the intern and she used that time to discuss all of the support available to the intern as well as the importance of respecting other people's time. She made it clear to the intern that going forward, she would be more honest with her about her own boundaries and which questions were appropriate for her or that should be directed to other people. Meaning don't ask the partner how to print something, right? These are the types of things that should be directed to your secretary. 

 

And she prepared the intern to start hearing that type of feedback from her and letting her know that she was doing it from a place of good intention and that she would, moving forward, redirect the intern to those resources. They agreed also that moving forward, they would meet for 20 minutes every other day over lunch to check in and discuss any questions or dig deeper into projects or whatever. Ultimately, the message was questions about really anything shouldn't be repeatedly addressed by office store drive -bys.

 

In that instance, my client was able to access her own positive mentorship experiences from her past and approach a situation with empathy and compassion and the willingness to support this intern on her own professional path. All of this was possible because she was able to stop blaming the intern for her anger and frustration and identify the true cause, which was herself and her thinking. She evolved out of that emotional childhood and took ownership for how she wanted to show up and how she wanted to feel about the relationship. When her anger and frustration were quashed, she was in a much better space to address the situation in a professional manner. And she therefore showed up as the leader that she really envisioned herself to be. In turn, my clients in her work allowed the intern to better understand office dynamics and it forced her to access some of her own resourcefulness rather than seeing my client as her on -call easy button for everything. 

 

This is really at the heart of the work that we do, and especially the work that we do in dealing with other people and learning how to show up differently in relationships and therefore change the relationships. In either of these cases that I've talked about with my husband's dog or my client's intern, we could certainly have chosen to live in those thoughts that we felt so strongly about. And I could continue to believe that the dog was ruining everything and he was a horrible monster destroying all of my nice things. And my client could have gone on being irritated with the intern. But the goal is to make those choices consciously and intentionally, rather than acting like our negative emotions just happened to us without our say so. When my coach asked how I wanted to feel about the situation, I truly did not want to feel frustrated.

 

I didn't want to be happy about it, but I didn't want to live in a dark pit of annoyance and bitterness towards the dog that I actually loved and that was loved by the man that I loved. That meant that if I wanted to feel something other than frustrated, I was going to have to work at it. I could have chosen to own I want to feel frustrated about this and then move forward from there. But for me, that wasn't really what I wanted.

 

When we find ourselves living in frustration over the circumstances of our lives, we have to take a step back and acknowledge that what is making us frustrated is not the events around us, but rather our thinking about them. Then from there, we can truly ask and consider, do I want to be frustrated? And if so, I'm just gonna continue on with these thoughts. If not, I'm gonna have to do the work and find some alternative truths. We must shift from seeing our knee -jerk, perspective as the only truth available and invest instead in believing that every situation has multiple truths available to us, each truth creating incredibly different results for us. But a word of caution, let's not forget that life is yin and yang and we're not supposed to feel good about everything. Sometimes it's okay to choose to be on fire with anger or swimming in a puddle of tears.

 

Autumn G Noble (18:57.422)

So what does this have to do with transforming relationships? If we want to have a better relationship with someone, meaning we wanna feel better about that relationship and about that person, we have to do our own work on our own brains. And it does not mean that the other person needs to change anything. There are always opportunities for boundaries and difficult conversations and that's a separate issue. But what I'm talking about here is if we want to have a better relationship with someone and not cringe when they're around and not rage at them when they're around or be frustrated every time they open their mouths, we have work to do first. From there, then we can decide are boundaries appropriate? Maybe the relationship is over or whatever. But first and foremost, if we're wanting something different in the relationship, the work is on us.

 

Because ultimately the point I'm driving at here is that our relationships with other humans exist exclusively in our heads. They are a compilation of our thoughts and our stories about the people in our lives. The relationship is not some separate entity that you and the other person agree upon. Your relationship is whatever you believe your relationship is and that belief is going to be based upon all sorts of stories and historical experiences. Every person with whom we have a relationship has their own version of the relationship that they keep and they cultivate within themselves. Each person may see the relationship vastly different than the other and they most certainly will see themselves differently within the relationship as compared to how the other person may see them. 

 

Therefore, those relationships with other people are based purely within our minds and that relationship doesn't exist independently of each other, rather it's completely dependent upon each individual and totally subjective. Knowing that, we then have complete autonomy to make the relationships in our lives whatever we want them to be. There is no such thing as I have a terrible relationship with my sister. That's an opinion.

 

Autumn G Noble (21:18.19)

And that opinion is one that the holder is inevitably supporting with all sorts of evidence culled from the party's history to prove that the parties have a terrible relationship. That interpretation of the past and that perception of the evidence is completely one -sided. It's all founded in the opinions of the one individual.

 

The sister, on the other hand, might not remember any of that stuff and might only remember the flowery stuff. And she may instead believe, I have a great relationship with my sister. Those opinions, when taken together, don't create a fact, but they do form the basis of the stories that we have about that relationship. Our opinions and our recollections from the past, when taken together, do not create a fact but they do form the basis of the story that we have about that relationship. And that story is our interpretation and our description of the relationship and whether it's good or bad. When we decide to believe something about a relationship, my boss is a jerk, my sister is a brat, our brains will get to work finding all the evidence of that belief within our present and past existence. 

 

Our brains will not sort through the data in an unbiased manner and come back and say, you know what, there's really not a lot of data to prove that your boss is a jerk or your sister's a brat. No, your brain won't weigh that information to determine whether our belief is true. That confirmation bias is only going to find evidence to support the conclusion that you're starting off with. So we have to start becoming more aware of the conclusions and decisions that we have made about the relationships in our lives.

 

We've made conclusions about our relationships with each person that we encounter. So if we want better relationships or different relationships in our lives, we have to change the way we think about the people around us. If you want a better relationship with your sister, you have to stop believing she's a selfish little brat. I don't have a sister in full disclosure, so this is purely hypothetical. In other relationships, you might have to stop telling yourself that...

 

Autumn G Noble (23:27.182)

You and this other person are never going to see eye to eye. If you want a different relationship, that belief is never going to help you get there. When we treat our perceptions of relationships as factual, we foreclose the possibility of ever having a different relationship with the people around us. So often, we wish we had better relationships with others, but we overlook our role in the relationship. 

 

We overlook the fact that we have made decisions about whether the relationship is good or bad. And then we focused all of our perceptions and interpretations of the relationship based upon that conclusion. You will never have a good relationship with someone when you're focusing only on your negative recollections of and opinions about the relationship. It's almost easier to wrap our heads around this when we think about people that we love without any reservation: a child, a niece, a parent, or even a pet. 

 

There are people in our lives that we love unconditionally, but they have faults and they have shortcomings and we have bad experiences with them that we overlook because we love them. We choose not to focus our energy on the fact that the dog keeps peeing on the carpet or your niece keeps stealing your clothes and never returning them. We ignore those things and instead we focus on all the positive aspects of the relationship. And that's why it's so easy to think of them fondly. And that's why it's so easy to believe I have a good relationship with them. Because you have chosen, I have a good relationship with them. And our own tunnel vision is only providing evidence to support that. And everything to the contrary is going out the window. It's not because the relationship is inherently good. We've simply chosen to perceive it that way. 

 

There will be most certainly other people in the world that will not see those same people with such rosy glasses. They're gonna get hung up on their shortcomings and their shortfalls. For those people, that relationship will not be characterized as good and that person will not be characterized as a good person because they're not choosing to focus on any of the goodness. Now, this does not mean that we have to think lovely thoughts about all of the people in our life.

 

Autumn G Noble (25:47.47)

What this does mean is that we have to start taking ownership of the relationships in our lives and our characterization of those relationships as good or we get to choose what kind of relationships we have with the people around us. We get to choose how to think about the people we encounter. In that way, we are choosing the types of relationships we participate in. We have complete control over whether a relationship is good or bad.

 

I propose an experiment to test this theory and transform the relationships in your life that are needing a little help. Consider a difficult relationship that you currently have in your life. Write down all of your thoughts about the relationship and about the person. Write down everything that goes into what you're thinking about the relationship and why you're characterizing it as one that needs a little help. Notice all of the past experiences and history.

 

that fuel and found those thoughts and beliefs about the other person and therefore create your perception of the relationship. Now for the experiment, the next time you see this person, imagine that you're meeting them for the first time. Imagine that none of that history exists and there's no story we've already conceived about them and fueling our interpretation of everything that they say or do in that moment.

 

After that encounter, conduct the same experiment. What do you think about this new person that you just met? Do you think they're a good person? Do you think they're a bad person? Is this person someone that you would like to have a relationship with? Do they have positive attributes? Then consider, is this interpretation different than your original view of them?

 

I actually had a therapist once encourage me to conduct something kind of like this experiment with someone in my life. And she asked me to meet them fresh and treat them as if it was someone that I had just met for the first time. And I was shocked to realize how much I enjoyed their company when it wasn't clouded by all of our history and past mistakes and judgments. And I realized that I could actually enjoy being around them and not be sitting there judging them and being frustrated with them the entire time. Simply letting go of those old and outdated stories and treating this person with a fresh lens really transformed that relationship for me. It didn't mean I had to forget everything that had happened and it didn't mean that I had to forgive them for anything. 

 

It simply meant that in order for me to enjoy their company and have a different relationship with them and spend time with them in a way that resonated with me authentically and allowed me to be the person that I wanted to be, I just had to let go of all of those stories and be open to thinking of them in a new way. What I took away from that experience was that there were a lot of past hurts and really old stories.

 

That I simply hadn't let go of that were clouding my interpretation of that person. I actually realized that everything that was fueling that story I had about them was old and it was coloring every contrary experience. In other words, I realized that the person I had created in my head and was so frustrated with, they didn't exist anymore, but I had continued the story.

 

And I continued the narrative because I was holding on to the past and who that person was. But the reality of it was that when I met them with fresh eyes, I realized that the person I was so upset with, they didn't exist anymore. And I was really holding on to the past and creating a difficult relationship that just didn't have to be that way anymore. So this brings me to the last point. We get to decide whether a relationship is good or bad and that is all it takes to change everything. 

 

I believe that our relationships with others are self -created. Our relationship with other people is something that lives only in our minds, and we make decisions about other people. We choose what we want to think about them. From that place, we characterize the relationship as good, bad, challenging, irreparable, or whatever. We make those decisions and then create the relationship within our brains completely independent of the other person. Have you ever had someone in your life whose understanding of your relationship was completely out of line with your own understanding? Think about former boyfriends, girlfriends, friends. When that relationship ended, it's unlikely that you were both in complete agreement about its demise. What is more likely is that one of you thought things were fine and that nothing needed to change and the other person couldn't stand to be in their presence. How can it be that two people have such divergent understandings of the same relationship? Because there is no singular relationship that is shared and agreed upon by both parties. There's two different relationships as understood by each person. And each person has made unique decisions about the relationship's virtues and drawbacks and they interpret the relationship through that lens.

 

If that is the case, then it simply follows that we can choose whether or not to have a good relationship with each person in our lives. We simply decide whether or not to believe a relationship has run its course or if we're in it for the long haul. To be clear, that does not mean that you should maintain all relationships in your life or that you should always choose to love the people in your life. You can choose to break up with spouses or friends or family members if that's your choice.

 

And sometimes those choices are for the best. But what I'm saying is there is no inherent good or bad relationship. We just make choices to characterize a relationship one way or the other. We simply have to determine our justification for those choices and then own it. If you decide that you want to be frustrated about a relationship, it can be really freeing to just own that and just conclude, I'm frustrated with this person. I don't like to be around them.

 

Yes, I recognize that that's all based upon my thoughts and perceptions, but that's what I'm choosing. And that's it. From there, you can next decide what to do with the relationship and whether a decision is warranted. Maybe you don't enjoy the person. Maybe you want to set some boundaries with them. Maybe you just don't want to be around them. But doing those things from a place of true intention and clarity is powerful because we no longer have to blame them for how we feel. 

 

Instead, we can acknowledge our choice is to feel frustrated with this person and to not enjoy being around them and that we're choosing not to try and see the good in them. In order to transform any relationship, we have to take ownership of them and choose how we want to think about them. Choose what you want to believe about your past relationships and challenging relationships. Those choices will color how you show up in the relationship and the aspects of the relationship that you focus on.

 

Those choices will then dictate your perception of whether or not that relationship is a good one. To summarize today's meanderings, the key to transforming any relationship is to move out of emotional childhood and recognize that you are the source of your negative feelings about the people around you. If you are frustrated with someone in your life, it is not because of them and they're not doing anything to you.

 

Are you living in emotional childhood and blaming them for your frustration? The first step is owning that the reason you're frustrated is because of everything you're thinking about the relationship and nothing more. The most important exploration that is asking yourself, how do you want to feel about the relationship? How do you want the relationship to be? Do you want to transform it or do you want to be frustrated with this person?

 

Do you wanna be closer to this person? Do you want to enjoy your time with them and stop fighting with them in your head every time they're within your line of sight? If you don't wanna feel differently, your work is done. Simply own your choice to feel frustrated about the relationship and then decide what you wanna do next. Is a boundary or a breakup appropriate? If the answer is, I want this relationship to be different, we can ask ourselves whether our perceptions of them, and the stories that we have around them are helping or hurting us in that regard. If there's a disconnect between how we want to feel about the person and the stories that we tell ourselves about them, that's truly where our work begins. And we can begin exploring whether there are alternative stories about the person that are accessible that might create a different result. 

 

It might even require us to focus our energies away from some of those old stories focus on something new so that we can open up the possibility of having an authentic and honest relationship with them, it might require us to focus our energy on different aspects of the relationship and let go of those old stories so that we can open the door to having a real meaningful conversation with the person about their relationship and what's working and what's not working.

 

But in order to do that, in order to show up differently, to put in the work on the relationship, we likely have to let go of some of those old stories and start seeing the relationship through a new lens so that we can start taking different actions to create a different relationship. Regardless of what you do with this work, simply becoming more aware of our thoughts about the people in our lives can be transformative.

 

When we recognize our stories about the people around us, we can start to more clearly understand why we feel the way we feel about the people in our lives. From there, we can then decide if we want to start choosing differently and create a different relationship for ourselves. Because how you feel about that relationship is 100 % in your control.

 

Autumn G Noble (36:28.75)

All right, my friends, that is all for today's topic. Thanks so much for joining us again on another episode of the Lawyer Life podcast. In our next episode, we are going to tackle how to have some of those difficult conversations, perhaps in furtherance of transforming a relationship. I hope you'll join me there. If you are ready to unlock the secrets to success in the legal field that law school didn't teach you, it's time to empower yourself, build your business, and create through independence.

 

Join our upcoming seminar series designed for legal professionals of all levels who are eager to learn the ins and outs of lawyering. From practical skills, networking strategies to building a client base, we've got it all covered. Don't miss this opportunity to transform your career and redefine what it means to be successful in law. Sign up now for the Lady Lawyer Collective seminar series at the lawyerlifecollective .com. And let's embark on this journey of growth and empowerment together.