How to Stop Catastrophizing (i.e., spinning out in the worst case scenario)
Dear associates–
Lawyer brain loves to catastrophize-i.e., to focus on and spin in the worst-case scenario.
One thing that’s making work more miserable for you than it needs to be?
Repeatedly thinking or talking about how “behind” you “feel.”
Tens of Thousands of Hours
The average person will spend around one-third of their life at work. That’s tens of thousands of hours of your life.
TENS OF THOUSANDS.
(That doesn’t include the unpaid labor at home that women tend to do the bulk of.)
Self-Advocacy Part 2
If you want to advocate for yourself more often, you can both decrease your discomfort with it and expand your capacity for taking action despite your discomfort.
Self-Advocacy Part 1
Most women will come to a point in their career where putting their head down and working hard just isn’t enough any more.
Your discomfort with doing something has no bearing on how good you are at it.
I was talking to a client recently about a thought error that she had, and it's one that I see it a lot of my clients, so I wanted to share with you.
What she was doing was she was mistaking her level of comfort with an activity with how good she was at that activity.
The Billable Hour Ethos
Working in a billable hour model warps your view of time.
We already get so much messaging about time and productivity before we even make it to the practice of law. (How old do you think you were the first time you heard “Time is money”?)
How You Think About Hard Things
"You will never change the fact that being human is hard [sometimes], so you must change your idea that it was ever supposed to be easy [all the time]." Glennon Doyle, Untamed
Top Tip for Managing Up
When it comes to managing up as a law firm associate, here’s one of my top tips: Err on the side of communicating more than you think is necessary
Time Management Techniques Aren’t Enough
All the time management techniques in the world — no matter how good you get at them — aren’t going to help you feel good about your time without an accompanying shift in some of your current beliefs.
What Managing Up Is and Is Not
On deck for March in the Survival School for Associates webinar series: Managing Up
Shame and self-judgment are pretty shitty motivators.
Because the action you take is actually fueled by you trying to escape the shame and self-judgment. Usually by trying to achieve your way out of it. By getting the promotion. The new job. The title. The degrees. The relationship. The body. The habit streak.
A Decision Not to Decide
Sometimes the decision you need to make is deciding not to decide right now.
Paving a Path to Burnout One .1 at a Time
One year as a mid-level associate, I spent 10 months straight annualizing about 2300 billable hours.
Let’s talk about that to-do list.
It’s Monday. Are you putting together an overly ambitious to-do list that you inevitably aren’t going to complete? So that you can then beat yourself up about it?