The Lawyer Life Podcast

Why People Use Life Coaches

• Autumn Noble

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Why do people use coaches? What do they talk about? Why would I need a coach? Today we explore all of this and more.

CHAPTERS:

00:00 Breaking Free from the Drama Triangle

09:25 Navigating the Tension Between Desires and Expectations

15:29 Overcoming People-Pleasing and Imposter Syndrome

Watch the full episode on our YouTube Channel: https://youtu.be/Gvgu9nWiYa4

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Autumn G Noble (00:00.314)

You are listening to the Lawyer Life Podcast, episode number 27, how to know if you need a coach. Hey everyone, welcome back to the Lawyer Life Podcast. I am your host, Autumn Noble, the founder of the Lawyer Life Collective, where we do life and career coaching for attorneys. We are continuing on our journey of hot takes,

 

where we unpack some of the most useful tools and takeaways from our first season of the podcast. Last week, we explored how to be happier in law and pulled some of the best nuggets from this season's episodes. This week, we're going to continue on the hot takes theme and unpack how to know if you need a coach. I get asked this all of the time.

 

What do you actually do in coaching? What do you talk about? Why do people actually need coaches? Why can't they figure it out on their own? So in honor of all of those questions, I'm going to pull out some of the most common topics that I coach around with women and lawyers. I'm hopeful that after listening to some of these hot takes, you'll get a clear understanding of whether or not coaching might be something that can help you take your life and your career to the next level.

 

So hat take number one, we go all the way back to episode number two, the drama triangle. In that episode, we explore a dynamic that I see all of the time with many of my coaching clients. And that is the situation where you feel like everyone around you is against you. You're surrounded by villains and terrible bosses and horrible clients and toxic law firms. And you're just stuck in this place and you can't figure out how to get out.

 

If that sounds familiar to you, listen up. The drama triangle might actually be what's at the root of this problem. You hear these overgeneralizations like, my boss hates me, this firm is toxic. Those statements just drip with drama and this villain victim dynamic.

 

Autumn G Noble (02:19.949)

In those types of narratives, we are playing a role in what Steven Cartman calls the drama triangle. The triangle examines the connection between personal relationships and power in conflicts. And the triangle identifies three main characters that play a role in conflicts, the persecutor, the rescuer, and the victim. So let's dig into these parties a little bit and learn a little bit more about them before we apply them to our careers. So,

 

We start with the victim. The victim in this model feels persecuted, oppressed, helpless, hopeless, powerless, maybe even a little bit ashamed about feeling all of those things. They seem unable to make decisions to change their circumstances, to solve problems, to take pleasure in life, or to achieve any meaningful insights into their circumstances.

 

So when I say the victim, it doesn't necessarily mean the actual victim, but instead it's someone who is feeling or acting like one. Very powerless, very hopeless. The victim seeks to convince themselves and others that they can't do anything, that nothing can be resolved, all attempts are futile, despite trying really hard to fix their circumstances. Next we have the rescuer.

 

The rescuer's line is always, let me help you, let me fix this for you, absolutely, let me jump in on this. The rescuer is a classic enabler. They feel guilty if they don't step in to the rescue and they ultimately become angry and kind of move over into the persecutor role when all of their attempts to save the day invariably fail to achieve any meaningful change. Their rescuing actually has,

 

negative effects. It keeps that victim dependent on their rescuing and it doesn't allow the victim permission to fail and experience the consequences of their own choices that got them there in the first place. When the rescuer focuses their energy on someone else, it actually enables them to ignore their own issues. And that's true for all of these characters and we'll circle back to that.

 

Autumn G Noble (04:38.893)

Next we have the persecutor, which I call the villain. It just seems more accessible to me. The persecutor insists, it's all your fault. You are the problem. This is not my issue. They're controlling, blaming, critical, oppressive, angry, authoritarian, rigid, and superior. But when you blame,

 

the villain in turn, they often get really defensive and they might switch over to the victim role when they're attacked by the rescuer or the victim. The victim is the primary character and they're interacting with the persecutor whom the victim blames for their suffering and their unhappiness and their challenges. But then there's this rescuer who's periodically stepping in to try and alleviate the victim's suffering. Now in the complicated world,

 

of practicing law, I often see my clients vacillating between the victim role and the rescuer role. And let me be very clear, nobody likes that news in coaching. I hated it when my coach would say to me that I was acting in the victim role or often the rescuer role, but let's just call a spade a spade. And I will explain how we kind of dip into those roles, but that's often the characteristics of the attorneys that I work with.

 

When we're the victim, the partners, clients, bosses, they're the persecutor. They're the reason that we're overworked, exhausted, burnt out, and have no balance whatsoever. They're the sole cause of it, and they're the sole reason why we are unhappy in our particular jobs. In contrast, when we are operating from the rescuer role, we often rise up to solve all of the poor planning.

 

crappy demands and ridiculous needs of the persecutors and villains around us. The rescuers are often the ones who will step in to help at the 11th hour when others on their team have dropped the ball. You can all think about those scenarios where we get an email forwarded to us from some senior attorney and you see the date and the time that they received it was a week ago, 10 days ago, whatever it was, but suddenly,

 

Autumn G Noble (06:59.213)

Now that it's due and the deadline has arrived, they're dumping it on your desk and expecting you to fix it and put your name on it for them. That is a classic villain rescue or kind of a dynamic. As young attorneys, it's not uncommon for us to feel like, well, I don't have any other choice but to do this for them and to cover up the fact that they have actually dropped the ball and this is not really my issue. So we work late.

 

We disregard our own boundaries and we try to step in and save the day for the rest of the team. In one role, we're angry and suffering in our victimhood. And then the other, we're often energized by that action because we imagine that all of this rescuing and savior service will mend that relationship with our persecutors, will give us some value in their eyes. The reason this situation persists,

 

is that each participant has their own frequently unconscious psychological wishes or needs met without ever having to acknowledge the broader dysfunction or harm that is done in the situation as a whole. The victim often disregards opportunities to stand up for themselves and own their own power, whereas the rescuer rarely connects with their own value and worthiness outside of all the rescuing.

 

activity. They're searching for meaning and worthiness there and that is partly what drives those actions. But as long as we're caught in this triangle, we're not ever able to look inwards and address those underlying needs that drives us to show up in those roles. That will do it for Hot Take number one, the drama triangle.

 

If this interests you, be sure to head over to episode two to listen to the rest of that episode and learn how to get out of that toxic cycle. For hot take number two, we're also going all the way back to the beginning to uncomfortable dreams. Many of the women that I work with in coaching show up because there is this tension between who they want to be and how they want to show up and how they feel like they're supposed to show up.

 

Autumn G Noble (09:25.101)

to succeed. When we start any professional journey, there are going to be all sorts of people who are more than happy to tell you what you're supposed to do and how you're supposed to act in order to be successful. But what I have found is that when we take that feedback and we camp out with it, it creates a tremendous amount of dissonance between what people are telling us and how we feel we need to show up to survive.

 

In this hot take, we explore that disconnect and how coaching can help you overcome it. You know, as humans, we just constantly like to tell ourselves what we should be doing. And we buy into all these rules about how we're supposed to live and how we're how things are supposed to work out. And a lot of us just wholly wholeheartedly buy in. And it just stagnates us.

 

So I wanna share with you an example of how nefarious that little word can be and how I see that affecting my clients and their long -term goals and happiness. I recently had a client who was really struggling to manage her time and stay afloat in her practice. She was a mid -level associate in big law, lots of responsibilities, lots of sophisticated work. Her shoulds, sounded something like this. I should always keep my office door open in case anybody needs me. I should always answer my office phone or my cell phone when someone calls me from work. I should always stay on top of my emails and I should always say yes when I'm approached by someone to work on a project.

 

Autumn G Noble (11:11.853)

All of these shoulds, all of these thoughts, they sound very noble and purposeful, but truly they're all really rooted in fear and that fear sounds something like this. People will think I'm not friendly if I close my door when I'm busy. People will be mad at me if I don't answer my work phone when they call. I might miss something important if I'm not on top of my emails and then I'm going to get into trouble.

 

People will stop giving me work if I say I'm too busy. All of those fear -based worried thoughts were truly the foundation of all of those shoulds. And when she bought into those, they were completely sabotaging her career. She was constantly behind on projects and distracted because I don't seriously, how can anyone focus when you're constantly being pulled away by your phone or your email or randos who show up at your office store?

 

She was missing deadlines and she was just completely underwater. The net result of all of that was that people were frustrated with her. She was getting into trouble and people did stop giving her work. Everything that those shoulds were supposed to protect her from, they were actually creating for her. She was creating a self -fulfilling prophecy. And ultimately the firm ended up putting her on a performance improvement plan to try and clean up her act.

 

The wildest thing about this, when she came to me and she's telling about her struggles and she's telling me about these challenges, the craziest thing is that she actually knew how to resolve the problems. She just didn't want to experience all the discomfort that was gonna go with it. She knew she needed to set boundaries. She knew she needed to manage her calendar better. She knew she needed to start telling people no and protecting her energy and her space to focus.

 

Autumn G Noble (13:08.557)

She just didn't want to experience all the discomforts that are going to come with that. Furthermore, doing so would fly in the face of all of those shoulds that she had completely invested in about how she was supposed to show up and act as an attorney. All of that was going to challenge her to reconsider who she wanted to be instead of who she thought everyone else wanted her to be.

 

This is such a common challenge. None of us want to rock the boat. We want to fit in and we want to be liked. It's like we're bamboo, but we want to be an oak tree. It's painful and it's hard to realize and accept that we have to do things in a way that feels authentic and right for us as we are who we are. And to show up any other way.

 

is also going to be incredibly painful, but it's going to be painful in a different and less rewarding kind of a way. It doesn't feel good to show up in authentically to pretend that we're an oak tree when we're bamboo, right? It also doesn't feel good. So the paths before you are both equally uncomfortable, but in different kinds of ways and different kinds of payoffs. And therein lies the rub taking action that feels right and authentic to us.

 

often requires us to go against the grain and experience those discomforts, to challenge our closely held thoughts, beliefs, and assumptions about what kind of human we are supposed to be. What a good lawyer, spouse, mom, sister, daughter is supposed to look like and what they're supposed to act like. It requires us to invest in the discomfort that comes with the creating a life that we actually want, a life that we feel drawn to.

 

and uncomfortable dream. As we unpack that hot take about how we are supposed to act and who we are supposed to be, it makes sense that the next hot take is going to continue down that path and explore the challenges and the struggles that we have saying no and asserting our boundaries. It is rare that I work with a coaching client that is not struggling with this very issue.

 

Autumn G Noble (15:29.549)

If this sounds like you, listen up to hot take number three, coming from episode number 11, People Pleasing and How to Stop. When I was in my early twenties, I moved to Washington, D .C. to work for a boutique law firm. While I was there, my direct supervisors were from New York City. So a farm girl from Iowa was quite the novelty in my little office. And I often

 

was chided for my Midwest nice attitude. After that little excursion, my next legal job took me to a national firm in the Midwest. There, my supervisor was another New Yorker. And once again, my Midwest nice was met with much distaste. At first, their criticism of my Midwestern attitude, it really bothered me. After all, I was just being polite. And what was wrong with that?

 

But over time, I realized that what they were criticizing, it wasn't Midwestern civility. What they saw instead was an insecure young attorney who was afraid to make waves, who was afraid to be honest for fear of upsetting others, and who was afraid to really use her voice. What they really saw was people pleasing disguised as good manners. You gotta love those people pleasing tendencies. We've all...

 

got them. It may seem like simple Midwest nice, but at its core, people pleasing is rooted in deception. And we're going to talk about that today. When we put the needs and feelings of others before our own, we relegate our truth, we relegate our voices, and we implicitly acknowledge that we are less important than those were desperately trying to please. So,

 

Let's start with the why. Why do we do this? Why is this so appealing to us? Think about the last time that someone asked you to do something that you really didn't want to do, whether it's an additional project at work when you're already overloaded and sacrificing any semblance of life, or maybe it's an additional nonprofit board position for an organization that maybe just doesn't really interest you.

 

Autumn G Noble (17:50.925)

or a family friend who asks for legal help in an area that you know nothing about. I want you to think of that situation and see if you can connect with why the decision was hard. Why was it hard to say yes or no? What was it that drove you to ultimately say yes when you really just wanted to say no? It might sound something like, well, I should help. It's the right thing to do.

 

meaning if I say no, I'm being a jerk or I'm not being a good person. I don't want to disappoint anybody or let anyone down. If I don't say yes to whatever they're asking of me, there's gonna be some negative consequences like I won't get any more work from them, I'll lose a client, people won't trust me, people won't like me, they'll think I'm lazy, something along those lines. So as you think about,

 

those scenarios when we say yes and we really wanted to say no, part of the reason that we do this and part of the reason these decisions are hard is because we have some story that we're telling ourselves about what it means if we say no and why we should say yes, even though that we don't want to. All of those thoughts are incredibly persuasive in the moment and they seem 100 % factual.

 

but none of those thoughts are actually founded in any facts. They're just opinions and assumptions, and they're all rooted in fear. We worry that if we don't help, others are going to judge us. We worry that others will think we're not a good person or we're not a team player if we don't say yes. We worry that something bad will happen if we don't follow through on all of these requests. And we take all of those worries,

 

and we spin them into facts and stories that we tell ourselves, facts and stories that we believe and that we allow to dictate our actions. For some of us, this is rooted in imposter syndrome, which is generally a collection of feelings of inadequacy that persists despite evident success to the contrary. When we're experiencing imposter syndrome, we often suffer from chronic

 

Autumn G Noble (20:11.242)

self -doubt and a sense of intellectual fraudulence that overrides any feelings of success or any external proof that we are in fact competent and good enough. Many of the women that I encounter suffer from various manifestations of imposter syndrome and many of us handle imposter syndrome by slipping into a persistent helper role.

 

And PS, if you haven't listened to the episode on the drama triangle, it expands upon this tendency of ours to take on the rescue or role in the drama triangle. And that episode further illustrates this issue. And I strongly recommend that you listen to that episode on the drama triangle if this is resonating with you. Imposter syndrome persistently tells us that we are a fake.

 

and that we will be found out and that eventually everybody's gonna realize that we don't belong and that we really need to be shown the door. One tendency to combat those fears is to make yourself irreplaceable. And so for many of the female attorneys that I work with, this takes the form of being a constant caregiver, helper, or rescuer in that drama triangle. Recently, I had a client who was expressing to me,

 

how important it was for her to always be seen as reliable and somebody that others could always count on. She was always offering support for new projects and teams, even when she knew she didn't have the time or the capacity. And more often than not, she would come to our sessions operating on fumes, completely exhausted and frustrated that no one could do anything without her. She was totally burnt out and she really wanted to change the pattern.

 

So as we explored her patterning, we came to understand that this was completely a mess of her own making. She consciously took on more than she was able to handle, and she was really reluctant to give up that part of her practice. On the one hand, she knew that it was making her miserable, but at the same time, she didn't want to give up that important and needed position. She didn't want people to gripe.

 

Autumn G Noble (22:35.562)

if she said no to more work, she didn't want people to judge her, she scaled back, and she imagined a parade of horrible comments that she believed her coworkers would make if she stopped helping everybody. She really, at her core, she wanted to be needed, and it was really hard for her to conceptualize letting go of playing that role. She wanted to be an essential player on every team.

 

That made her feel really safe and secure. But this is what imposter syndrome does. It creates patterns of coping with our fears of inadequacy. We craft ways to cover up our perceived shortcomings to keep our little secret safe, to keep secret the truth that we aren't good enough.

 

that maybe if we're just really needed, no one will ever see that we actually don't belong and maybe we're not as good as everybody else. So we craft ways to cover up our perceived shortcomings to keep that secret locked away. In my client's experience, she was bending over backwards to be available to anyone for any project at any moment. She was constantly canceling personal trips.

 

and social outings with friends to jump on new projects. It had become part of her persona and it was what made her feel like she belonged. And it helped soothe those fears that she was inadequate. It really silenced the negative rantings in her head. They couldn't possibly fire her if they discovered her inadequacies because too many people needed her every day. And so it was sort of this protective little game that she was playing with herself and with those around her.

 

Imposter syndrome, it plays right into this people pleasing and it creates a toxic dynamic that leads us to be really overloaded and out of gas and stuck between, I really want to maintain this facade and this role that I've created, but I also don't want to feel like this and work like this anymore. And so it creates this tremendous amount of tension in our lives because we feel like we need that persona.

 

Autumn G Noble (24:55.114)

to protect ourselves, even though that persona, that people pleasing is really destroying us. All right, my friends, that concludes our hot takes for today. The goal of these hot takes is to give you some bite -sized pieces of advice to help you consider whether you are getting the support that you want and if there are any adjustments that you can make to make your life and your career more in alignment with your ultimate.

 

To recap where we've been today, you might need a coach if you feel like you are constantly in a battle between the good guys and the bad guys. And on the bad guys team are your boss, your clients, and your firm. If that sounds like you, you might be stuck in a drama triangle and coaching can help you unpack that and resolve that tension.

 

Second, if you constantly feel tension between how you want to show up and what you actually want to do and what everybody else is telling you that you need to do to succeed, you are stuck under an avalanche of shoulds and other people's expectations for yourself. In coaching, we unpack all of the imposter syndromes and all of the self -doubt that goes along with it to help you chart your own unique course.

 

forward. Last, you might need a coach if you have a hard time saying no to the requests of other people in your life. If people -pleasing and imposter syndrome are a recurring challenge for you in your life, in your career, coaching can absolutely help you get out from underneath that rock and start living more authentically. I hope that you are enjoying these fast hot takes for the summer. If you want to learn more about any of these topics,

 

be sure to check out the show notes to find the link to the full episodes where we dig into each of these topics in depth. If you have any questions about any of these topics, be sure to send me a note, autumn at the lawyer life collective dot com. And if any of these topics resonates with you deeply enough that you're thinking, you know what, maybe it's time that I actually do something about these challenges.

 

Autumn G Noble (27:17.002)

reach out and sign up for a free coaching consultation today. I promise you have nothing to lose. As always in the Lawyer Life Collective, we've got all sorts of fun things going on this summer. I know everybody's busy, but I also see summer as a huge opportunity to work on ourselves and arm ourselves to prepare for the year and craziness that we all know is coming. One of these options includes signing up for our seminar series,

 

How to Lawyer for Real, where we will unpack everything that you actually need to know to succeed in lawyering. This will unpack all of the tips and tools that I teach all of my clients to transform their careers and create their own unique success. You do not want to miss this. And for those of you that may not be attorneys or for those of you that have friends that could also benefit from this work,

 

We are launching a new series that is geared towards non -lawyers where we will unpack all of the life coaching secrets that I have picked up over the years of working with incredibly powerful and successful women. And I'm offering it to women of all backgrounds and careers in a series entitled, How to Change Your Life. That series is kicking off for the first time on July 11th.

 

For information on either one of those series or to grab your seat, head over to thelawyerlifecollective .com or autumnobel .com. And last but not least, next month at the close of July, we are offering a free webinar entitled How to Overcome Overwhelm for Good. If you're sick of juggling too much and stressing about your calendar and your to -do list on a daily basis, this one is for you.

 

In 45 minutes, we will unpack some of my most crucial time management tips that will not only help you manage your calendar more efficiently, but will give you a better understanding of overwhelm so that you can stop engaging in the cycle. I hope to see you there. Lastly, in our next episode, we're continuing with the hot takes set up and unpacking how to know if you may actually be the root of your problems in your life. I hope that you will join us there.