From Lawyer to Legacy Builder: Creating a Big Life Without Limits
In 2020, my husband and I were able to travel to Morocco in the midst of a global pandemic to complete the adoption of our son. It was the fulfillment of a dream, or maybe a premonition, I had since I was a teenager. He was ten years old at the time and didn’t speak a word of English. When he did start speaking English, he couldn’t stop. One of the first thoughts he shared with me was his desire to start a YouTube channel chronicling what he referred to as his “big life.” While the YouTube channel was a HARD no, (I’d be the pariah of the adoption community!) I did love the idea of his big life and I tucked it away knowing there was something there.
What “big life” means has definitely evolved.
It’s the idea of taking everything that has come before, good and bad, and building something brave and beautiful out of it. You don’t pivot, you don’t throw it out, you carefully get in touch with what you love and who you know you were meant to be and you move towards it with purpose.
After I turned 50 I finally started seeing how it all comes together. I think so many of us are there.
We feel like we are more than what we majored in in college or graduate school. More than who we married or the gave birth to. We reserve the right to change our minds and reinvent and reconfigure what our lives look like. I’m a lawyer. No matter what else I do for work business consulting, speaking, teaching, it always comes back to being a lawyer. That’s ok. It’s more than okay, I love being a lawyer, but there are parts of it I don’t love. I don’t like the stress, I don’t like the pressure of billable hours, I don’t like spending my days in an office. So I don’t do that part, at least not all of it all the time.
But so often we get caught up in the idea of I’m X, so I can’t be Y. My X is being a lawyer. When one of the businesses I’m growing becomes stressful or has a setback, my inner critic says, “why are you doing this? Why can’t you just be happy being a lawyer?” Louder than my inner voice is the voice of my friends, family, and colleagues saying the same thing.
Luckily I have had mentors and supporters along the way who have encouraged me to keep doing what I love and cheering me on as I’ve created a way to do it. I feel like a time traveler who has figured out where the road not traveled meets my here and now.
I soft launched my own firm earlier this year. After spending 15 years at the same firm and close to as many years doing alt-law kinds of things, it’s definitely a bit like The Alchemist in that it feels full circle but in the best way.
Changing my mindset around who I’m supposed to be has helped me immeasurably. Before you can really kick off your next act, you must allow yourself to sit with what you already are and what you have been through.
We have places to go in 2025, but first, you have some decisions to make.
What are you taking with you as you move forward? What are you leaving behind? Which voices do you listen to and who do you drown out? A simple start is journaling. Nothing fancy, just a few minutes either before bed or first thing in the morning. Sit with your own thoughts and start writing. Identify the roses in your day: the people, places, and things that give you joy and make you feel like the best version of yourself. Do the same thing with the thorns (you know who or what those are). Let yourself really process how your body reacts to people, places, activities.
In the last few years I’ve gotten really good at both identifying the roses and the thorns, and while it seems like common sense it really isn’t. We become numb to those pain points and keep pushing through long after we should have set boundaries or made a change. We do it for good reasons and we do it because sometimes we don’t give ourselves the breathing room to do something differently. Give yourself the room to identify what works and what doesn’t work. It’s the first step to building your Success Mindset. Once you know where you want to go and what you want to leave behind, it becomes far easier to create a roadmap.
