Ed Honnold, JD/LICSW

Transition counseling to help attorneys explore career options, match skills with vocations and overcome obstacles to change. Honnold also offers therapeutic counseling to reexamine midlife goals, and to balance demands of work life. His is certified to administer all the major assessment and planning tools. A Yale Law School graduate and licensed clinical social worker. Honnold is a former law clerk for the US Court of Appeals, law firm associate, and legislative director to a member of Congress and the USAID Office of General Counsel. He is founder of a Washington DC-area personal transitions support organization. Director, Day Center, Psychiatric Institute of Washington. Contact: edhonnold@yahoo.com.

Realistic Guidelines for Change
By Ed Honnold

Though a lateral move within law can sometimes occur quickly, a more radical career change may take considerable time to accomplish. Years, in fact. In my experience as a legal career counselor, radical change typically occurs in four phases:

1) assessing the nature and causes of your discontent;
2) overcoming the influences that lead you to continue your current work, even if it makes you unhappy;
3) envisioning an alternative to your current work that suits your interests, skills and values, and that deeply excites you; and,
4) seeking (or creating) a new job or profession.

Let’s look at each phase in detail:

Assessing the Nature and Causes of Your Discontent

The Misery Index — The first step is to take a rigorous account of your current professional experience. Ask yourself what elements in your work you enjoy or don’t enjoy. Take a reading of what I call your “misery index”. On a scale of 1 to 10 (with 10 being the most miserable), what tasks generally prompt the highest and lowest stages of discomfort. Now, ask yourself whether there is a way to salvage your legal career, or even your current job, by seeking more of the types of work you enjoy and less of the other. Seeking a different practice area, avoiding or pursuing further litigation work, or moving from the private to public sector, may be worth considering. At least it would buy you more time while you consider more radical alternatives.

Take note of your pain — Physical and emotional pain are powerful motivators for change. The lawyers who are most successful in achieving a bold alternative to their current work are often those who start out being the most miserable in their current law practice. So, pay close attention to several things:

Notice how often you get headaches, backaches, stomach pain;
Notice symptoms such as insomnia, fearfulness, anxiety, loss of energy and enthusiasm;
Notice the experience reported by many lawyers that “it just doesn’t feel right” to be at work, or feelings of detachment, lack of motivation, or resentment toward the demands of work;
Notice the language you use to describe your professional life to friends and family, especially when you are being ruthlessly honest.

Instead of distracting yourself by doing more legal work, or planning exotic vacations, or shopping, drinking or surfing the Internet, practice sitting with your feelings and writing about them to yourself. This attention to your experience will increase your awareness of how unhappy you are and strengthen your resolve to making change. Try to see your discomfort as an ally to your change process rather than its enemy.

Rule out alternative sources of discontent — In assessing and interpreting your state of mind, consider whether other factors may be governing your experiences at work. For example, how well is your primary relationship working? If you are single (or even in a relationship), are you lonely? Are you neglecting to pay attention to important friendships? Are you neglecting to exercise, get enough sleep, eat a healthy diet, or plan for fun? Are you victimized by high standards of performance which may have helped you to achieve success in law, but may also prevent you from enjoying your success? If your primary issue is that you have not yet learned how to find happiness in any sector of life, and you have poor coping skills, a career change alone may bring little relief. As the Buddhists say, “wherever you go, there you are.” Instead of changing your practice, you may wish to consider counseling, meditation, yoga, or other healing practice.

The Influences That Keep You Stuck

Count the money — Many lawyers feel “stuck” in unhappy careers because of law school debt, large mortgages, expensive tastes, financially dependent family members, and aspirations to an early or comfortable retirement. Though financial considerations can be significant, ask yourself whether money concerns may be “standing in” for other, more intangible and inaccessible issues. For example, how much is it worth to you to be happy? When your life ends, will it seem worthwhile to have earned an impressive income over the course of your life by doing meaningless work? And realistically, how sustainable is a high income in law practice if you are unhappy, resentful and unmotivated? Keep in mind that many unhappy lawyers eventually move on to highly successful and profitable alternative careers.

Unproductivity happens — If you come to believe that your current career must end (especially if, despite your best efforts, it is ending), accept the fact that your work output and quality of work product will suffer in the final months. Most lawyers find it impossible to maintain their accustomed high standards of performance during their career’s terminal stage, when their personal misery index is high and their thoughts are turning to what they will do next. Ending an unhappy professional life is often the most painful stage in career transition. Many lawyers exert massive and costly efforts to conceal their unproductivity, hoping that no one will notice … at least not before they depart. Many lawyers fail to acknowledge this loss of productivity to others and themselves because it engenders such profound shame and mortification. If you are experiencing some degree of “end stage” unproductivity, keep this in mind — it’s normal. In fact, it may be essential to build the momentum needed to make a change.

Honor your resistance — Even up to the last possible moment (and long past any logical point-of-no-return) many lawyers will “bargain” with the death of their careers. They will find logical and persuasive reasons to continue doing what they have been doing. A career change process inevitably encounters various manifestations of psychological resistance — fears that family, friends and colleagues will disapprove of the change; that the alternatives are not sufficiently clear in mind; or fears that financial obligations demand that you put off your departure. If you have a high tolerance for pain, fear and self-doubt, such resistance can keep you blocked indefinitely. There should be no dishonor in experiencing such resistance. Without psychological defenses of this and other kinds, we would all be emotionally unbalanced. Try to develop a compassionate and nonjudgmental stance toward your doubts.

Envisioning a Career Alternative

Mobilize your vision for an alternative — A transition toward a new career may be motivated initially by pain. But it will be consummated only by a rigorous assessment of your skills, values and passionate interests. A common flaw in career change is the belief that the “right” choice of career can be “found” somewhere and “pursued” like a hound chasing a fox. It is more realistic to expect that a sustainable career choice arises from a rigorous inventory of the process of your own life as you currently live it. Most important is to take account of your interests, which will usually reflect your aptitudes and values.

Envisioning a new career resembles solving a mystery. The clues are all available within yourself and in your current behavior. So, begin to look for clues in the nature of the books and magazines you read, in the content of your social conversations, in your fantasies and dreams, and in your weekend and other “spare time” activities. What activities do you most enjoy when you aren’t obligated to do anything for someone else? Many lawyers discover that the best career move has already been taking shape naturally “around the edges” of everyday life. A professional job should deeply engage and excite you, involving interests that are deeply grounded in an experience of your true self.

Career assessment — At this time, it may be useful to take one of the widely available career assessment tests administered by career counselors and by law school placement and alumni offices. These tests may be particularly useful if you are considering a wide range of career options, or if you feel clueless or overwhelmed by available options. The tests, though, will not provide a definitive answer to your inquiry because they cannot substitute for the hard work of identifying who you are and the nature of your mission in life.

Envision an ideal job — It is often helpful to imagine an ideal job for yourself, assuming that you have all the needed skills and that your financial needs will be met. Many lawyers discover that their ideal job is not as unrealistic or unattainable as they initially expect, and that their best career moves point toward implementation of some variation of their “ideal job”.

Identify a range of possibilities — Open a file for each “possibility”, and investigate each option systematically. Talk with people already doing this kind of work; attend professional meetings and training programs for people in each field; gather articles and other source materials for each field; and assess the entry requirements, pay scales and economic prospects for each option. Most important, notice your level of interest and excitement about each one. Do you feel “called” to learn more and more about certain ones? Keep these files open as you investigate further, and close the files that register little activity.

Seeking or Creating, a New Job or Career

Develop a working hypothesis — From your investigation of job possibilities, you will eventually choose one which you will explore more intensively. Proceed with a “working hypothesis” that this will be your next career, until you either prove or disprove the hypothesis. Continue to assess your level of excitement and interest. You will know you have made the right choice if you experience a sustaining desire to pursue it further. If you find your interest waning, replace this option with one of the others from your possibility set, and test the next hypothesis the same way. Eventually, your “right livelihood” will arise and supplant all the other possibilities.

Bring your new career into being — Put your working hypothesis to its final test by taking a course, reading books, actively networking, and applying for jobs — or preparing to create a job — in the new field. If you are on the right track, options will open in front of you as you take initiative.

Relax — Career transition need not be continuously painful; it can often prove enjoyable, especially as momentum builds toward a satisfying outcome. If you approach this process with a relaxed, non-judgmental, self-compassionate attitude, the results are more likely to satisfy your deeper desires.