When our steps forward are harder than they should be and we find ourselves just forcing every action, we have to ask ourselves what is going on behind the scenes? Is there an opportunity to make peace and release some dead weight?
Fear
When you make the decision to head to law school the long pursuit lays itself out before you. So many steps become very clear. You take the LSAT, research law schools, prepare applications, go through the motions of law school, apply to write for journals, do on campus interviewing, get a good summer associate position, and on and on it goes. Then you land the job and 2 years into it, you come up for air and wonder what you are supposed to do next.
Excuses
Whether we admit it or not, we all make excuses from time to time. Lately, I have been seeing so many more excuses founded in the pandemic. It’s easy to blame the pandemic for our weight gain, bad habits, and not taking action. It’s easy to buy into these statements and carry them with us as our justifications for not taking action. But the pandemic is not to blame for your inaction. None of your excuses are factual. They are simply opinions; opinions that are keeping you from living the life you really want.
Dreaded Projects
There are always those projects that we dread doing. We put them off and go out of our way to avoid doing them or ever thinking about them. I recently worked with a client who was tap dancing around her own version of a dreaded project and wanted to share the steps we worked through to de-escalate the dread.
Managing Overwhelm
One of the primary reasons that my clients struggle is that they often feel like their life is out of control. We want to believe that we don’t have any control. We want to believe that work overload just happens to us and we have no role to play in it.
But that is only true if you decide to make it true.
Sunday Mourning Blues
Many of my clients lose the majority of their Sundays to that Monday morning dread. “Sunday mourning.”
What can we learn from those Sunday emotions?
What Other People Think About You
How do you describe your practice to others? When you are at a mixer and someone asks what you do, is there a momentary hesitation about promoting your skills? Why is that?
Having Your Own Back
When trying to make a big decision, so many of my clients get stuck in the quagmire of indulgent emotions.
Indulgent emotions are those emotions that seem really important. They feel like we should pay attention to them. They suck us into their black hole and keep us from moving forward.
They are indulgent because we linger and stay with those emotions for far too long; we allow those emotions to take over and before we know it, we have been out of the game for weeks. We’ve been “busy” worrying.
To Indecision or Not…?
Lately, I had several clients who are struggling to make decisions. One client was struggling to select a topic for a presentation she was giving at a seminar. Another client was struggling to decide whether to ask for a raise. These decisions were weighing heavily on them and they were paralyzed with the options. In their minds, these decisions were momentous. Decisions that could make or break their careers. How to move forward?
You Can’t Do That
We all have our baggage and ugly thoughts we carry around.
Even with all the
skills I can teach you, you will
never EVER do away with ugly thinking.
With practice, you can get better at shifting where possible. And, where that’s not possible, carry it with you.