The Lawyer Life Podcast

How to Be Happier in Your Career

• Autumn Noble • Season 1 • Episode 26

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Summer hot takes - quick and simple tips to chew on this summer. Today we explore how to be happier in the legal profession. We unpack insights on embracing the yin and yang of practicing law, taking ownership of emotions, and finding direction in one's career.

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Autumn G Noble (00:00)

Hey everyone, welcome to the Lawyer Life podcast, Summer Hot Takes. It's summer, it's hot, and if your life has been anything like mine, you've had regular late night, pre -dawn encounters with tornado sirens and torrential rain and flooding basements to boot. My friends with small humans tell me that their children are out of school for the summer and life is suddenly getting busier.

 

Vacations are on the horizon and the pool is calling and the last thing we need is a heavy listen to further jumble our brains. That is why the Lawyer Life podcast is taking a summer hiatus to share with you some hot takes for quick listening to keep you going before the real work begins anew in August. This week we are talking about how to be happier in law and we're pulling some of the best nuggets from this last season into bite sized pieces for you lovely listeners. For those of you who may be a little bit confused about what's going on here,

 

My name is Autumn Noble and I am the founder of the Lawyer Life Collective, Life and Career Coaching for Atturys. We have just concluded our first season of the Lawyer Life podcast and now we are pulling apart and reanalyzing all of the best moments of 2023 and sharing them with you here for your summer enjoyment. So sit back, relax, grab a margarita and let's go to the pool and do a little exploring of some simple shifts we can make to be happier in our profession. Our first summer hot take comes from episode number three,

 

why we aren't happier in law where we unpack the common mistake of fighting against reality. And I challenge listeners to embrace the possibility of the yin and yang of practicing law in order to create greater happiness. Here's what we had to say.

 

We are lawyers, we are not factory line workers. Our days are never the same from day to day and moment to moment. It's always hard to say what we're going to encounter in any given day or week, or even how and when our day is actually going to end, or if it's going to end at all. While every area of practice in law is different, each type of practice is going to come with its own unique little picadillos, the goods and the bads, the positives and the negatives, yin and yang.

 

Everything in life is going to be 50 -50 each a half of that yin yang symbol. For example, I love lifting weights and working out and I try to go to the gym as often as I can, which is generally not as often as I would like, but I love lifting weights. I love taking exercise classes and I love that jell -o -wee kind of fatigued feeling that you get in your body. I love going home and taking a nice little bath and Epsom salts after I've had a really heavy lifting day.

 

And I always know, okay, these next couple of days are really going to suck because of that workout. And I love when I'm laughing and my abs hurt because I had such a good ab workout the day before. I love all of that for the trade -off that it gives me. I love the endorphins that I get during the workout, those feel -good vibes that I get after the workout. I also love the physical and mental changes that I can see over time. Absent all of those,

 

early mornings, days of soreness, painful laughing sessions. I wouldn't have any of those benefits. So I sign up for that trade -off. I recently had a client who came to the session and she was telling me about how much she loves the majority of her work. She loves the people that she works with and she loves the types of challenges that she's getting with her particular area of practice. But there's a portion of her work that she didn't like. Specifically, she didn't like the type of work

 

or the type of people that she had to work with when she was working on a similar kind of ancillary subject matter within her practice. Over time, she was really starting to get frustrated with those people, with that work, with their clientele, and she didn't want to keep working with them. The way she felt about it was, I love my job, but these people and this work are making me absolutely miserable. So she came to me wanting to explore whether or not it's time for her to move on.

 

As with lifting weights and working out in general, you have to take the good with the bad. There's going to be pains that accompany your successes. It's going to be challenging and there are going to be days, projects and humans that you don't like. And that is okay. That alone is not a reason to leave without a little bit more exploration. So that sort of feeling of I like this, but not that is not the sign that there's a problem that needs to be fixed.

 

it's a sign that we need a little bit further explanation before we make any drastic moves because again, we're sort of buying into this idea that everything is 50 -50.

 

When we know that we're signing up for a struggle, at least part of the time, the only thing that we have to evaluate is whether our current position provides us the types of challenges that we want in our lives. The goal is not to get a job without any challenges, any jerks, any terrible partners or subject matters that we just don't like. It doesn't exist. The goal, rather, is to sign up for a life with the types of challenges that you want.

 

the types of challenges that you are committed to tackling because of the trade -off. If your current battles, if the current negatives of your job are not the ones that you see as worthy, maybe it is time for a new challenge. But don't leave simply because the challenge exists. Leave because it's not the kind of challenge you want in your life.

 

When we start believing that there's something wrong with the challenges in our workspace, the type of work, the type of people, the type of projects, we start believing that that's the problem. It makes us miserable. It makes us think that there's something wrong here. But if all of those things are the type of bad that you are willing to sign up for, then nothing has gone wrong here. And there's no reason to be unhappy with where you are.

 

For instance, going back to my initial analogy, I know that in order to be fit and healthy and relatively sane, I have to work out a couple times a week. I know it's not always going to be fun. I know I'm not always going to look forward to it. I really don't like getting up super early to do it most of the time. But I choose the types of challenges I'm willing to endure, those early morning classes when I don't want to get out of bed.

 

or having to go to bed early the night before and stop doing the Netflix binge because I know I'm going to the gym early. I know that I'm going to feel really terrible the next day. All of those are challenges I am willing to endure. I don't want to have to do those things, but I'm willing to subscribe to them as the 50 -50 associated with the health and fitness that I want. I accept that it will be dreadful at times, but it will be my kind of dreadful.

 

from that headspace, there's nothing to be frustrated about. It's just sort of business as usual. I hate getting up at five o 'clock in the morning. Yeah, that's my 50 -50. I picked this, right? Like nothing has to change here. Everything is okay. So for my client, the most important question that I asked her was, what if nothing is wrong here? What if it's okay that you don't love every aspect of your job, that you don't love every person that you work with? If that's okay,

 

Then what?

 

When we stop seeing the 50 -50 as a problem that needs to be fixed, we can focus instead on accepting those aspects of our reality and stop fighting with them. We can take that energy back and reallocate it to doing something different in that 50 -50 that we are now signed up for. It's only when we stop fighting reality can we allow the dust to settle and really take stock of our lives and authentically decide, okay, what's next?

 

If this is my world, if this is my 50 -50, who do I want to be in this space? We're not trying to fix it. Instead, we're taking the focus back on us, not external, and asking, who do I want to be in this space?

 

The answer to that question is obviously going to be very different once you choose to accept the bad parts of your job and stop focusing all of your energy on those things and people and aspects that are beyond your control to change. At the foundation of this premise is this notion that people will rarely change and there are circumstances in our lives that we are unable to change.

 

It's unlikely that my client was able to dramatically change the type of work her practice group did or that they assigned to associates at her level. Maybe. And we certainly dove into exploring that, but likely not. Right. When we sort of accept that there are just certain parts of our job that are what they are. People are jerks. Clients are jerks. They can act however they want to. The work is what it is. When we can let that go and stop railing against it.

 

It gives us freedom and it gives us power. It gives us power to accept our role in this space because prior to that realization, our role has been just being angry and pissed about a million things that we can't control. When we let that all go, we can instead say, OK, my power resides in me and how I want to show up and who I want to be in this job, knowing that there are certain aspects of this 50 -50 that I don't like.

 

Instead, we take that power back and ask ourselves, who do I want to be in this 50 -50 that I have signed up for that's not always going to be perfect because that's life? How can I show up differently so those aspects of my job don't fester and upset me and suck me back into that drama triangle, essentially, where the client and the partners and the job, they're the villain, I'm the victim, right? How do I step out of that and sort of

 

take those things as they come, show up differently so that I can learn from these parts of my job that are quote unquote driving me mad. Living with and handling problems is part of what it means for life to be 50 -50. It's truly what it means to be human. The choice then is to decide what types of problems are you willing to deal with in your career? If a mansplaining boss isn't the type of challenge you are invested in working through, then by all means move along.

 

knowing that there will be other similar challenges wherever you go. If you think a mansplaining boss is something that you can just handle and like that's part of your 50 -50, then we can absolutely craft strategies around dealing with that and explore why it is that that bothers you so much and how can we show up differently when someone does that to us. There is no unicorn job out there waiting for you. They all have their own unique challenges. We have to take back our authority and decide.

 

What types of challenges do we want to sign up for and stop fighting with the way things are? While it might seem relatively straightforward and simple, what I often find is attorneys who are struggling to overcome certain negative realities that accompany their practice. For instance, if you're the type of person who wants to have a very clear cut schedule, who doesn't want to have unpredictability, pop up on a Friday night when they're heading out of the office and who doesn't ever want to work on weekends,

 

You always want to be able to show up to those PTA meetings or to your kids soccer games. Being a litigator or a deal lawyer is probably not going to give you that flexibility. And that's not to say that other types of practices don't have their own unpredictability and things that come up on the weekends. That's not what I'm saying at all. What I am saying, however, is that choosing to be a deal lawyer, choosing to be a litigator comes with it. Unpredictability.

 

being sort of beholden to the schedule of the courts or the plans of the opposing parties in the deal, whatever it may be. But there is a certain surrendering of your schedule to parties outside of yourself. That is the nature of the job. So if you take one of those jobs and that's your primary frustration, you are fighting with the reality of that type of work and you're going to lose every single time because the only way you get happy in that scenario is if the courts

 

play ball with your schedule, or if the party's to the deal, abide by your schedule. And it just never happens. And so you have to go into that knowing that that's the 50 -50 of those types of practices and asking yourself honestly, am I willing to sign up for that? There's no right or wrong answer, but we have to at least ask. And if we choose I'm willing to sign up for that, then we have to let it go and stop being angry about it because it's a battle that you're just never going to win. Next, we know that

 

Yin and Yang of Practicing Law and we head over to episode number 21, How to Transform Any Relationship, where we learn hot take number two. In order to be happier in our practices, we have to stop blaming others for our feelings. That includes our frustrations. If we are unhappy, the only person we have to blame is ourself. Bear with me here as we unpack this one.

 

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.

 

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 intern 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.

 

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 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 client's inner 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. That one is always a hard pill to swallow, but I promise you, the sooner you start taking ownership,

 

for how you feel and not look to others as the cause of our frustration, the happier you're gonna be immediately. The last piece in the puzzle for finding more happiness in your work is to start getting clear about what's working and what's not working and to start taking action to change it, knowing that nobody else is going to do the work to create the career that you want. This is something you are going to have to build largely by yourself.

 

For this hot take, we go all the way back to episode number four, where we discover that part of our unhappiness in law is due to our very own lack of direction.

 

If you're not setting goals that bring up negative thoughts and emotions, you're simply not goaling big enough to force that growth. And again, it's really about getting uncomfortable as we talked about in our first episode. Okay, so now we know why having some direction in our careers is important. Why do we often choose to remain in the tornado rather than looking at these questions or setting new goals?

 

The question that I posed earlier was this, what are we running from? What are we avoiding by not looking at these questions and giving them an honest answer? For many of the lawyers that I work with, it's actually pretty simple. They know that something has to change, but they don't want to face it because they're afraid to fail. They know they want to work less, have more balance, change their practice area, move firms, form their own firms.

 

All of these are goals that I hear, but oftentimes we're afraid of the risks that accompany those challenge. We're afraid of the growth and the negative thoughts and negative emotions that come with identifying that goal and starting to act towards it. The ultimate risks that a lot of people are afraid of is that they pursue those avenues and they end up with egg on their face. They're afraid of how they're going to feel if they push for boundaries.

 

or balance and get completely rebuffed by their supervisors or their firms. If they ask for a new supervisor and they're told no, or they ask for a raise and it's declined, or if they start their solo firm and it completely tanks, that is what keeps a lot of people from acting in furtherance of their goals. The idea of those emotions and how it's gonna feel is so huge and looming that it's a lot easier just to stay.

 

where we are, but ultimately it's just fear of failure dressed up in sort of a very grown up, noble and rational outfit. It might sound something like this. I'm concerned with what my life would be like if I stayed and I have some worries there, but ultimately it's safe here to remain where I'm at because I have a good job and I make good money and everything else is just unknown and maybe it's gonna be worth somewhere else.

 

It's surprising how often I hear something along those lines in my sessions with lawyers. Recognizing that things aren't working and that something has to change, it is incredibly painful. Realizing that we have to endure the pain of leaving or the pain that accompanies a fight for change is also not a great place to be. It's not fun to fight for more boundaries and space and balance in your life. So we stay.

 

And often we stay and we hate it and secretly boil beneath the surface about it. What I see that often looking like is we pour ourselves into our work because we don't want to face those realities. It's a lot easier to live in that fight or flight frenzy all day long than it is to stop, connect with that part of you that's wanting something different and ask those painful questions. So instead of we work like crazy to avoid that knowing. I see attorneys who stay and they're bitter.

 

and they're conflicted about it. And they hate the fact that they know at some level they're not living authentically, that they want something different and it pains them knowing that and knowing that they're not acting on it.

 

The wild thing about it is that whether they face that reality head on or not and really own it and sit down with it or just keep working and ignoring it, it doesn't matter. It doesn't change the impact that it has on their lives. It weighs on us like this weird albatross that we're trying to ignore through our busyness. But it doesn't work. We become angry and kind of bitter workaholics because over time that becomes easier and a lot less painful.

 

and facing those truths and figuring out what is next. So to bring this all together, the first step is really recognizing what's going on with you to identifying that part of your own happiness is tied to your deeper knowing that something has to change. If there's a part of you that's like, I'm just not super happy at work, it's on you to start asking, you know, is that partly because there's something that I'm avoiding?

 

Is there a part of me that maybe doesn't want to be a lawyer and thinks I maybe made a mistake or wants to try something else and knows that I need to do something different that's going to make me really uncomfortable and I'm trying to ignore it because that can create a tremendous amount of weight and heaviness whether you acknowledge it or not.

 

All right, my friends, that concludes our hot takes for the summer episode one. To recap, in order to instantly create more happiness in your career, the first step is just recognizing that part of our careers, part of our lives, part of our work is not gonna be great. And the sooner we can just accept that and let that be okay, the next thing we have to do is simply decide, is that the kind of yin and yang that I want or not? And then from there, we have a whole host of decisions that we can make.

 

Step number two is to stop blaming others and things outside of ourselves for our unhappiness. Whether you agree with that approach or not, the fact of the matter is that looking outwards for your happiness never works. The only thing that we can control is ourselves, so we might as well start there to start creating our happiness first. Last, consider the path that you're on and ask why. Do you have a direction? Have you made a choice about where you want your career to go?

 

If not, taking stock of what you want and where you're going and asking yourself, am I on that path? Is going to help you get some clarity and reinvigorate your practice so that you can start making plans to get there. Taking back that power and acting in your own agency is a simple way to create more happiness overnight. I hope these simple tips and takeaways will give you a few action items to play around with this summer.

 

For more information on any of these topics, be sure to check out the full podcast episodes related to each clip that are also linked in the show notes. And if you're looking for more candy for your brain this summer, be sure to check out our free webinar on June 19th at 4 p Central, where we will once again be unpacking our favorite topic of how to find more time and get more done. Additionally, for those of you looking to utilize your summer to grow some new skills, be sure to grab your seat at the upcoming seminar series.

 

How to Lawyer for Real that kicks off on July 10th at 8 a Central and will run for seven weeks. If we have not worked together and you are not familiar with this work, this is the simplest way to access all of my most.

 

crucial tools that you need to truly transform your career. This series breaks down everything I have learned over 15 years of my own practice and coaching hundreds of women lawyers from all over the world. If that interests you and you want to accelerate your career and develop the skills that we actually need to succeed in law that law school never taught us, head over to the lawyerlifecollective .com and sign up for our next upcoming seminar series.

 

And hey, there's news. This work is no longer just for lawyers. The Lawyer Life Collective is launching a sister program and series entitled Lady Ish, where we will be extending all of these series and teaching to women outside of the legal industry in a series entitled How to Change Your Life. If you have found this content helpful or if you've attended a series and thought this information should be taught to my friend, my sister, my mother, the women in my circle need to hear this,

 

send them over to autumn noble .com so that they can get their seat in the upcoming series, how to change your life. And last, if we have been hanging out on here for this long and we still have not met, head over to the lawyer life collective .com and sign up for a consultation or a virtual coffee so that we could meet face to face and I can learn more about.

 

You, not interested in a career or life coach, that's totally fine. I still want to meet you. I want to hear about your struggles, what you're like, what's working, what's not working. And hey, in the future, if you ever need anything, at least I can be a familiar face and lend you whatever support I have available. There's literally no downside.

 

head over to thelawyerelifecollective .com and grab that free console now. I can't wait to meet you and hear more about your career. Next week, we continue our hot takes theme where we will start unpacking how to know if you might need a coach. Until then, thank you so much for listening and thanks as always for telling your friends.