An amazing thing happens at a certain point with my coaching clients. As we explore our Unique Genius, we begin to get comfortable and more confident with our true skills, and strengths, and with what we really enjoy as a person.
Through our Unique Genius exercises, we of course identify many of the traits we’d associate with being a lawyer (leadership, synthesizing information and issue spotting, negotiating, advocacy and counseling, writing clearly and succinctly). And we also identify many skills and strengths we may knew we had … but may not have actively thought about in a while (kind, loving and trustful, a dependable rock, great personal style, loves computers, full of life).
And as we get comfortable with these real skills and strengths of ours, we then turn our attention to the multitude of jobs and opportunities in this world … beyond the limited litigation and transactional law and academia silos that we know of. And we begin to understand how our skill set fits really well with many of these new non-legal opportunities.
We begin to see that our leadership skills can serve us well as an executive of some kind (CEO, executive director, COO, VP), an administrator, project manager, or even as a commissioner with our local government.
We begin to see that our ability to synthesize information and issue spot can serve us well as a management consultant, qualitative researcher, member of a think tank, business process director, analyst or lobbyist.
We begin to see that our ability to advocate and counsel can serve us as a head of compliance or as an auditor or HR manager or in risk assessment.
We see that our ability to write clearly and succinctly would serve us well as a grant proposal writer or in a policy position or as a journalist or a blogger or contributing writer or as a copywriter or drafter of corporate training materials or as an online content manager.
And if we’re kind, loving and trustful we see that these traits can be helpful with developing trustful, sincere business development partnerships and in building and maintaining an organization’s culture.
We see that being a dependable rock is essential to the role of COO and HR manager or assistant to a CEO.
We learn that great personal style is a huge asset in account management, corporate presentations, being a business broker, merchandising, retail buying and fundraising.
We learn that having that general love for computers and technology is a huge asset as a high tech product manager.
And being full of life is actually a professional requirement for the Chief People Officer job we just learned about.
And we learn that there are more jobs out there beyond just litigation and transactional law and academia.
We learn that there are more ways to make money beyond just billing by the hour.
We also learn that there are more ways to be an expert than just by providing legal advice.
We learn that even as low as we can be, as devoid of confidence as we can be, as frustrated as we can be, as out of hope as we can be, as clueless about next steps as we can be … there really is a huge world out there of possibilities and that we are really, really good at a lot of things that the world needs.
And most importantly, what we learn is that, as we become more confident and courageous, we will ultimately not fail at what we really want to do.