The Lawyer Life Podcast

How to Know When a Relationship Has Run its Course

• Autumn Noble • Season 1 • Episode 20

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Annoying boss? Energy vampire friends? Cringey co-workers?

How do we know when a relationship has run its course and it's just time to walk away?

How can you tell if a relationship is unsalvageable?

It all boils down to some very simple considerations.

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ADDITIONAL RESOURCES:

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 in my own practice building a team, leading a group making partner teaching in colleges and going in house with a Fortune 300 Company. And I leverage those experiences to help my clients explore their own legal path. 

Over 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 juggle it all, and create the success that you truly want in your career, you are in the right spot. For those of you that have been listening all along welcome back. 

Before we dive into today's episode, I want to tell you about one of the most exciting opportunities that the Collective is offering this season. Beginning on April 3, the Lady Lawyer Collective Seminar Series kicks off for another round of seminars, addressing How To Lawyer For Real, this series is the core of all of my coaching work, and it takes everything that I have learned from my own practice and coaching hundreds of other attorneys over the last 15 years and it distills them down to six seminars that will teach you everything they should have taught us in law school to actually create lasting and meaningful success in law. The series is completely confidential, there is no expectation of participation, or screentime. No one even has to know that you are there. And the best part is, if you're already coaching with me one on one, your seat is free, send me an email and let me know that you want to get in on the next series. Check out the link in the show notes for additional signup details, or send me an email to autumn@thelawyerlifecollective.com to get the information. I promise you this will give you the most effective and the most important tools that I can possibly teach you in coaching to completely transform your career, you do not want to miss this series. 

Okay, now that that's out of the way, let's go ahead and get started on today's topic where we are continuing our discussion from the prior episode on dealing with difficult humans. Even after all of the coaching that I can give you on how to deal with difficult people, it is a fact of life that not all relationships are meant to last and so the question becomes, how do we know when a relationship has run its course and it's just time to walk away. We spend a lot of time discussing this in particular in the episode on How To Know When It's Time To Leave, which specifically targets ending professional relationships and changing jobs. Today, we are going to be getting a little bit more granular and looking at one on one relationships in our professional lives as well as our personal lives. So if you're thinking about leaving your job, consider reviewing the episode on How To Know When It's Time To Leave before coming back to this episode that will focus on the more deeper interpersonal relationships at play. 

So let's go ahead and dive into this topic by first paying attention to those professional relationships and then we're going to pivot to the personal relationships in our lives. As we discussed in the last episode, at the heart of our challenges with others, are these ideas about how people in our lives are supposed to act and what I posit in that episode is that people are supposed to act exactly as they do. They're allowed to act and be any way that they want and we have to stop fighting that reality and just let them be. In the same way that we don't really want them to tell us how to live our lives, we have to give them that same freedom. Now from there, we have decisions to make and that's what we're going to talk about today.

I recently had a client who was telling me a story about an encounter that she had with her firm's leadership relating to arguably discriminatory compensation. And what she said was, I found out that another associate who had lower hours than me, fewer clients than me was making significantly more than I was. And as you can imagine, she was feeling really incensed about this and so she decided that she was going to go and talk to her leadership team about it. And as she starts relating this story and sort of asking them to help her understand the discrepancy, the leadership team that she was talking to just blew a gasket and got very defensive with her and in fact threatened to fire or her for even raising the issue. And as she's telling me the story, I'm thinking of my own similar experiences that I've had in practicing law where we bring something to the leadership team, hoping for a constructive dialogue, and it just goes down in flames. 

When we think about those types of difficult encounters, my clients or the ones that we've all had in our own careers, part of the problem with this situation, or part of our problem and frustration with the situation is that the other party is not acting in accordance with our manuals, for good bosses, or good leaders. So it's really our disdain for how they handle that scenario that drives where we go from there. And usually, where those types of situations put us is that we vacillate between confronting the person and kind of having an epic showdown, or just avoiding them, and trying just to get on with our life and our day. 

When encountering difficult people in our professional lives. One of the most common responses that I see my clients reach for in these types of scenarios, is just to avoid the person or confront them, just as my client was kind of vacillating between the two, this is a pretty common response. In that scenario, she really felt like there wasn't any solution, other than just to have it out with this person and likely make the situation worse, or just try not to interact with them and avoid them completely. But as we worked through and coaching, and as I've realized, in my own encounters of similar situations, there are flaws with both approaches. 

When we fantasize about confronting the difficult humans in our lives, or simply avoiding them altogether, we are either trying to get the other person to change by confronting them, or we are trying to remove them from our orbit, so that we don't have to do any work. We dream of confronting them and seeing them take our comments to heart so that they can change for the better, and then everything will be okay. In the alternative. We think that if we can just escape this person, and not have to deal with them, then everything will be okay, in that scenario, too. But in either case, we're trying to change or eliminate the problem person, so that we don't have to feel angry and frustrated anymore. And they're in really lies the problem that we've discussed in the last episode: wanting someone or something else to change so that we can feel better, is a futile endeavor that rarely works. Instead, our work rests solely with ourselves, and how we handle the situation and how we create our own emotions by choosing our reactions intentionally. So what do we do when we're faced with a situation where the people around us operate in a manner that directly conflicts with how we think good co workers and bosses are supposed to act and every cell in our body wants to scream at them or never see them again? What do we do? 

First, we own and recognize the issue is competing manuals about how people are supposed to act. In my client's situation, her boss wanted her to be more gracious and deferential to him and his decisions. And she wanted him to be more open minded, supportive, and less reactive, or aggressive, to name a few things. But we really had these competing manuals about how each person is supposed to show up. And those manuals are inconsistent and mutually exclusive. Second, we have to recognize that in order to decide what to do, we have to let go of that frustration with how the other person is acting, and just take them and their reaction at face value. So we stop being frustrated that they don't fit our manual, and that we're not going to fit their manual, we just put that aside because it's not helpful. Instead, we have to recognize like, Yeah, I'm frustrated, because you're not comporting with my idea of what a good leader is supposed to be, and I'm pissed about that. We have to let that go. And instead say, this is likely how this person is going to continue to show up and if that is the case, and that's their manual that dictates their own actions, what do I want to do with that? And can I just let go of that frustration and try and make a decision from a clean space? 

We do that not because we want to condone what they have done, but because we want to intentionally and consciously decide our next move from a space that is rational and not Emotional or clouded with anger, and frustration, we want to be driven by logic. 

I know in my own career, when I experienced those types of really frustrating encounters with leadership, I had to leave the firm physically that day and find some space to cool down because I knew that if I stayed at the firm, if I stayed at work that day, I was going to sit there and fume and likely let that anger, drive my actions, especially if this person were to like, show up at my door to try and talk through things, it wasn't going to go well. And so I knew that I needed to remove myself from that location and from those possibilities, so that I could process my frustration, let it go stop fighting with the reality of how this person was, let that pass, and then start making decisions about what I wanted to do from there. 

Similarly, with my client, we had to brainstorm ways where she could find her own space, just sort of calm down, and let go of that fight about how her boss had showed up, and start taking some active steps to consider the options ahead of her. That space, it allows the cloud of anger to kind of clear enough for us to really consider if our disconnect in manuals with this person is enough reason to leave, when we can sort of accept this is how this person is going to act, because that's consistent with how they think they should act and that's what their manual says. If we can sort of let that be and decide, you know, is that disconnect between their manual and my manual for them, is that a deal breaker for me? And that's really the only question that we have to answer. 

Instead of being frustrated with how they've acted, we can simply ask ourselves, Am I willing to accept this person shortcomings, and the places where they don't align with how I think a good leader should be? And from there, we can decide, okay, if this is a deal breaker, then what does that mean? And if it's not a deal breaker, what does that mean about how I'm showing up in this relationship? And here's the thing, you know, we make decisions like that, and all of our relationships all of the time, we just don't often do it so consciously, you can think about all of the relationships that you have in your life and there's likely things about the people in your life, that aren't exactly in alignment with how you think a good friend should be or a good professional, or girlfriend or mother or whatever. We have people in our lives that we recognize as imperfect, but we've chosen to accept them with all of their flaws. And that's the question that we're really asked here, in our professional relationships where we're struggling with the difficult people around us. Can we accept them and their flaws? Or is the flaw so significant that I need to actually make a different kind of decision and end the relationship or move to a different job? In making this exploration, one of the things that you might want to consider is, okay, is this disconnect with my boss, is it possibly pushing on parts of myself that are rigid in areas where I could be more flexible? Are they pushing on parts of myself that I know that I need to develop? I don't like to have difficult conversations and when he kind of comes at me aggressively, I cower and run away and I don't like that. Is that what's really going on here? And is it possible that this disconnect in manuals is really providing me an opportunity to show up and do some hard work on my own flaws? Those are the types of explorations that we get into when we start looking at the choice about whose manual wins, and if a flawed manual is reason enough to end a relationship. 

In my own experience in practicing law, I had a manual where I believe that good leadership required people to be open to all forms of criticism and to hear all sides of every scenario so that they could make reasoned and balanced decisions. My manual for a boss said that leadership should act swiftly to address any type of baseless disparities in compensation or otherwise. And I know in some of my difficult encounters and difficult conversations that I've had in my career, the reactions that I got from leadership and some of those difficult discussions made it pretty clear that this was going to have to be a battle, if this was something that I really wanted remedied. The question became, was I willing to accept my boss's flawed reaction to my inquiries and have the fight and engage in the battle. Or if I was just simply willing to throw in the towel because it wasn't the type of leadership relationship that I wanted for myself. Ultimately, for me, I decided that I wasn't willing to accept that type of a flawed manual from leadership. It wasn't okay for me the way that that person deviated from my manual, and I didn't have to crucify them for it. I didn't have to judge them for their shortcomings or stew and anger about it for months on end, I simply realized that having a leader that was unwilling to have difficult conversations with me was something I was not willing to accept, it was a flaw in the manual, that was a deal breaker for me. I wanted a leader with enough humility to consider whether I was saying something important, no matter how much it annoyed him. And that part of my manual was not something I was willing to compromise on, so I left.

I remember in one professional encounter I had with a difficult boss, I finally had had enough with kind of the back and forth and the frustrating conversations and being frustrated with how he was showing up and I decided that it was just time for me to move on. And when I went to have the conversation with him about it, he looked at me and expressed how shocked he was to me that I was leaving. And I looked at him. And I said, I'm shocked that you're shocked. And it just like really goes to show you that the way that people react to us in professional settings, or really in any setting in life, it rarely has anything to do with us, they're just showing up the best that they think they can within the framework that they have created for themselves. And his reaction really underscored that point for me. It was never really about me, it was just how we interacted with each other, and how that wasn't working for me. But for him, it was sort of a non issue. That disconnect in how a relationship a professional relationship was supposed to work, that disconnect in our manuals was a deal breaker for me, but for him, it was just business as usual. 

So the beauty of recognizing competing manuals is that it allows us to kind of set aside the subjective nature of relationships and just say like, this is how this person is, it doesn't necessarily have anything to do with me, I just get to decide whether or not I want to accept that or not. And then I can move on, and there doesn't have to be any anger. And my relationship with the leadership at that particular firm really underscored that I wasn't accepting of his manual, but for him, there didn't really seem to be any issue there, and we were able to sort of part ways with this kind of agreeing to disagree type of relationship and move on. 

To recap, when you're struggling with a difficult person, we have to first recognize our manual is the root of the frustration, then we have to stop being angry and just decide to let the other person be themselves. Last, we decide whether their deviation from our manual is enough to walk away. It's sort of like buying a house, when you buy a house, it's not going to have everything that you want, maybe it only has a one car garage and you wanted two, but there's going to have to be a value judgment about whether or not those shortcomings are enough for you to still buy the house. And every job and every relationship is going to be the same way. They're not likely going to fit all of your manuals for coworkers and bosses and leadership. But what we have to do is recognize where their deviations from our manuals are really at the root of what's pissing us off. And then we can decide, do I want to be angry about this forever? Or can I just decide to live with it and move forward with the relationship or not? 

Okay, so what about personal relationships? And how is that different? While all of the above considerations apply equally to personal relationships, personal relationships are a little bit unique in that we often have a lot more control over who we spend time with in our personal lives. And so the analysis is just a freckle different. For me, whether a personal relationship has run its course, all comes down to how that relationship makes me feel. 

Last summer I spent a lot of time thinking about this notion of cutting people out of our lives and declaring a relationship over and it's really not difficult to find a lot of books and self help gurus who champion this notion of decisively cutting people out of your life, removing chronically negative or toxic people from your orbit. I really was struggling with that concept last summer because I didn't feel like it reconciled with my idea and beliefs about having compassion for the flawed humans that we all are in. In fact, this was on my mind so much in 2023, that my resolution for this year was to connect a bit deeper with myself and start making more intentional decisions about whom I spend my personal time with, and the types of interactions that I choose to engage in. Because it really was all driven by this question of where's the line between self-protection and compassion in our relationships. 

In thinking about people in my life, who were sort of on my life orbit chopping block, I realized that those motivations for ending personal relationships fell into one of two camps, either outright dislike for the person or avoidance. 

When it came to those people in my orbit that I was feeling like I just didn't enjoy their company as much anymore, the realization really hit me when I was driving to meet a girlfriend for a happy hour. And I hadn't seen her for a couple months, and I was really excited to catch up with her. And as I was driving to meet her, I realized, gosh, you know, I've been looking forward to this all day, I never once considered canceling it, I have not been dreading it at all today. And it really struck me that there were people in my life that I was meeting with regularly that I always really dreaded. And when my happy hour with them would come up on my calendar, I would just feel kind of dread. And I'd spent all day long kind of debating whether to do it or not do it? And Should I cancel and is it going to be worth it. And it was just all this mental agony. And I couldn't figure out why I was choosing to engage in those relationships when it was sort of weighing on me all day, because at the root of all of it, I realized that I just didn't enjoy spending time with them as much as I used to. And let's, let's just call a spade a spade. This is rooted in some of my own judgment about these people, I was judging them as too negative or too dramatic or too harsh or any other type of judgmental prescription on the person. I know that I'm being judgmental. But I also know that there was something happening energetically, that I didn't want to experience any longer. Because it was after those meetings, I would just feel really angry and exhausted, I would be frustrated that I wasted that time that I would have rather been doing something else. And I would just fume about it and feel terrible about the whole thing. So judgment aside, it was pretty clear to me that I was not enjoying spending time with some of these people. And I wasn't looking forward to being around them. Partly this was driven by this realization that their energy, that relationship was really draining me. It was draining me in anticipation of the meeting, and it was draining me afterwards, as I was sort of decompressing from the encounter. That's when I realized that I think there is certainly some benefit to deciding when a relationship has run its course. There are inevitably some relationships that chronically take more than they give and require so much energy just to show up for. Especially for someone who's an introvert, that it takes a lot of energy for me to show up anyway, when I feel like the people I'm encountering are taking more than they're giving. I really feel it, for a long time after the encounter. I had these relationships that they just didn't feel good. And they no longer felt authentic. For me, it felt like unrequited affection. And I felt like I was perpetuating a false hood a false relationship. And that was really the crux of it. For me, I was no longer being authentic in the relationship. And that's when I knew those relationships had to conclude. It didn't mean anything about the other person. And it didn't even mean that my judgments about them as dramatic or toxic or whatever. It doesn't mean that any of that's true. We had just outgrown each other or I had certainly outgrown my enjoyment of the relationship. And I wasn't willing to continually show up inauthentic and pretend like I didn't feel the way I felt. So for me, that's how I knew which relationships likely needed a closer examination, and potentially a determination that maybe their season has come to an end and that's fine. 

In the other bucket of humans and relationships I was considering or people that I was really wanting to kind of distance myself from not because I didn't still love a part of them but because I was stuck in some kind of anger or frustration about them. And it just felt a lot easier to distance myself from them than to actually do the work. Distance was sort of the easy button, as opposed to figuring out what was really going on in the relationship. The people in that camp, they weren't people that I necessarily deemed like toxic or obsessively negative. I felt like there were people who had quote unquote wronged me or someone else I cared about and those perceived slights had gone on, remedied. So rather than preserve any opportunity to bridge the gap by maintaining the relationship, I felt myself really tempted to kind of bow out in doing so would be really just avoiding hard conversations and painful discourse. And so I recognize that there was a group of people that I was kind of pushing away not because they were an energy drain, not because I didn't enjoy their company, but because there was something going on in the relationship that I didn't want to deal with. And distance was the easy way out, it's a lot easier to avoid seeing some challenging people in our lives than it is to show up and work it out. Shutting those doors, it's completely clean and it requires very little of us to do that. 

So for me, I realized that with those relationships, it was really an opportunity for me to show up in love and compassion, without forgiving or condoning whatever had been done and without really wedding myself to this idea that my judgment or conclusion was the right one and I had been slighted. Instead, I just decided to honor the history of the relationship, and choose instead to see their flawed humanity that mirrored my own flawed humanity and to kind of recognize that we were both, you know, flawed in our own ways, and maybe we could just figure out a way to get past it. Because for those people, it wasn't that I didn't want them in my life anymore, and truthfully, if I could imagine a life where the relationship was back to normal, that's what I wanted and that was really the kicker for me. That's how I knew I was avoiding something. I wanted that relationship in my life in my ideal world but I was really tempted to avoid them because in doing so I could avoid doing the work to get the relationship back to where I wanted it to be. 

It is human nature, and perfectly natural to avoid and dread the hard work that comes from maintaining a good relationship and overcoming challenges. But it's truly those conversations and those conflicts that will ultimately make the relationship better, and make you better for it. For those people, the most important thing you can ask yourself is, Would my world be better if this person stayed in my life, and I was able to repair the relationship? If the answer to that is yes, then you know that there's an opportunity for you to stand up and try and bridge the gap. And if you're completely shut down, and if all of those attempts get the relationship nowhere, then you will at least know that you have tried, and you're back at square one where you're considering okay, maybe this relationship has run its season and it's time to move on. But at least you will do that knowing you tried to get the relationship back to where you wanted it to be. 

To summarize, when it comes to our professional relationships, when you're making a decision whether or not a relationship has run its course, we have to own our manual and recognize that that is what is dictating our frustration in the matter. Once we can recognize the role of our manual and choose instead to accept the person as they are, the decision becomes very simple and ask only whether we are able to accept this person for their shortcomings, or whether those deviations from our manuals, are deal breakers. It's a simple and clean analysis once we set aside the manual drama. 

When it comes to personal relationships, we have a little bit more work to do. We really have to start with examining our desire to cut these people out. Is it driven by avoidance due to some deeper issue with the person? Are we tempted to cut them out because it's easier than doing the work on the relationship? In contrast, are we tempted to end the relationship because we have simply grown to dislike them? If we were to meet this person today, would we still choose them as a friend? Not every person on your journey is meant to be with you through every season of your life and it's perfectly okay to recognize when someone's season has come to an end and simply part ways amicably and thanking them for their role in the previous parts of the journey. It does not have to be an indictment of the person, but simply an acknowledgement of your own needs and your desire to be authentic in all of your relationships. 

After working through these exercises, you might have identified a few relationships in your life that aren't quite ready for the chopping block but could certainly use some help. If that is the case, you are in luck because in our next episode, we are going to take this to its final chapter, and explore how to transform any relationship. And unfortunately, it does not involve mind control, but it's about as close as we're ever going to get. As always, be sure to check out the show notes for important resources and updates and particularly to sign up for the next Lady lawyer Collective Seminar Series where we will dig into How To Lawyer For Real and everything they should have taught us in law school. If you do no other work with me, this is the one that I strongly recommend because it is simply so transformative. We will really dig into the most essential coaching tools in one seminar series and teach you everything that you actually need to know to create success in law. So head over to theLawyerLifeCollective.com and sign up for the next series. Before all the seats are gone. Thanks to all of you for your continued listening and support and thanks for sharing with your friends.