I’m a big fan of Jen Sincero’s “You Are a Badass” series of books.
In her book around Money, she has a chapter called “Align With Your Truest You.” What jumped out at me was her insight that:
“So often we discredit the things that come naturally because we’ve bought into the idea that success needs to be difficult, or that if something comes easily to us, it must come easily to everyone, and therefore isn’t worth pursuing in any serious sort of way.”
Permission to believe in yourself.
As you frame out your Unique Genius (Module 4 of the Leave Law Behind Career Coaching Program) and really begin taking those steps to align what you do well with alternative jobs out there, please keep this insight from Jen in mind. I feel this is what we’ve seen surface in the recent Unique Genius Spotlight Live Trainings.
You are detailing (or soon will detail) your skills and strengths. You are bucketing them. You’ve got (or are getting to) an idea of what types of jobs might be a fit for you. Sure, you have more research to do and more jobs to find and more informational interviews to go on. But you have (or soon will have) a nice Unique Genius anchor to work from.
But then I’d like you to really believe it.
I’d like you to not discredit it.
Let’s make sure you believe that what you are good at, your Unique Genius, is valued and needed and unique.
You now have permission to believe that what you are good at now is more than sufficient to land a non-law job.
You have permission to free yourself of the belief that you are not good enough, and that you need “something more” … like going back to school or tacking on some new credentials.
You can now believe to your core that just because what you are good at comes easily to you, you can still be paid well for it.
You have the space now to believe that whatever goal(s) you have in life (financial success, alignment, happiness, support, joy, bliss, freedom, more time, better relationships, more meaning) doesn’t need to be miserably difficult to attain.
You have permission now to scrap the belief that you will always need to “pay your dues.”
But when you choose not to believe these things, you choose to not believe in who you truly are. And then you invariably will fall back to listening to the voices around you and in your head that do not benefit or help you.
I’ll end with more advice from Jen:
“When we push against who we naturally are, we feel stress, things don’t progress easily, we beat ourselves up for getting crappy results, everything is an effort. This is why listening to what everyone else thinks you should be doing (including your scaredy-cat self) is so deadly. You wind up trying to force your way through life, which can make sitting on your butt at a desk all day utterly exhausting if it’s not what you want to do.
Meanwhile, when you listen to your heart and connect with who you’re meant to become, you have energy because you’re in a state of flow, things happen more easily, opportunities land in your lap, you’re turned on, inspired, engulfed in a sea of brilliant ideas. Yes, there will be challenges and things will blow up in your face, but learning experiences are different from wasting your life pushing a boulder up a hill.”