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If you’re an unhappy or bored attorney, you likely suffer from the empty feeling that your future holds no hope. You might be resigned to the fact of living a less than ideal or hoped for life.
Religions, spiritual practices and self-development trainings have all, in one form or another, taught us that we create our own realities.
As Einstein said, “Reality is merely an illusion, albeit a very persistent one.â€
As you live your life as an attorney, you are always presented with choices. Wherever you are in life right now (like, for example, an attorney who wants to leave the law) represents the sum of your previous decisions, actions and non-actions.
As the Dalai Lama said, “Happiness is not something ready made. It comes from your own actions.â€
What you repeatedly think about at a certain point in time will soon manifest itself in your tangible universe. You can experience your subjective reality in any way you choose.
And as Justice Oliver Wendell Holmes Jr. said, “The life of the law has not been logic; it has been experience.”
Or as I like to say, if you keep doing what you’re doing, and thinking what you’re thinking, you’ll keep getting what you’re getting.
How you, unhappy or bored attorney, respond is most important
But what is even more important or influential beyond what happens to you is how you interpret what happens to you, and how you respond to it.
If you continually think you’re stuck practicing the law, if you think you have no “transferable” skills, if you think you’re too old to leave the law, if you think you’re pigeonholed as an attorney, if you think you can never make money in a “non-law†job, then that is the future reality you will create.
So … if you’re unhappy or bored with your practice of law and you truly want to leave for a new career, then you have to find a way to feel different about what is right now in your life.
Because if you can feel and view your current life in a better way, you can influence your future to be better.
How to do this?
How to make your future better
At a high level, it’s about counting your blessings for what you do have, being grateful for what is going well for you, appreciating all that is good in life …
… yeah, important … sure … but too touchy-feely and kind of hard for you to act on right now, yeah?
Okay, so here below are some very tangible, actionable things for you to consider to think differently about being “stuck†as an attorney and to change your future version of yourself:
– Start small. It’s hard to change your thinking in huge, grand ways, especially if you don’t deep down believe what you’re trying to do.
– Begin to realize that all you do as an attorney (present well, write clearly, teach concepts, be the adult in the room, put out fires with clients, etc.) are in demand and “transferable†to “non-law†jobs.
– Shift your mindset so you do not look at your law school debt as weighing you down, but rather as money you borrowed/paid to arm you with these “transferable†skills you do have right now. Make this weight less heavy.
– Do not feel like you have to pay down your law school debt with only money you make from being an attorney. This requirement is ridiculous. You can pay it down with money from any job you work at.
– Realize that you can find, or create, your own self worth and identity separate from being known as an attorney. There are many other cool and hip and respected titles and roles out there.
– Realize that his whole experience as an attorney – as bad, stressful, anxiety-producing and dead-end-feeling as it is – is there to help you realize that you don’t want to be an attorney any longer. And life is about realizing what you do want, and also what you don’t want.
– Do realize that you are not alone. Many attorneys feel just like you do.
– Do realize that you have help. You just need to ask for it.
If you truly do want to leave the law, there is no better time to take your first step than now.
Click here to take our free quiz to see if leaving the law is right for you.
Click here to learn more about how you can join us in the Leave Law Behind Coaching Program (you can begin for only $97 a month for 12 months, that comes out to ~$3 a day.)
We’re committed to helping you to leave the law at your own pace, on your own schedule.
And as the sage Rabbi Hillel said “If not now, when?â€
You also like some of the other posts we’ve written here at Leave Law Behind:
https://leavelawbehind.com/2019/03/24/7-transferable-skills-lawyers-have/
https://leavelawbehind.com/2019/02/06/knowing-unique-genius-helps-to-leave-the-law/