I sat there sobbing.

The tears streamed down my face.

I was tired. Worn out. Depleted. Completely spent.

But here… right before my eyes… was someone who understood.

Who “got it.”

The 80-hours weeks.

The ceaseless battles.

The measurement of the value of my life in 6-minute increments.

The unrelenting pressure to bill a bazillion hours a year.

The unreasonable demands of the courts.

The emails, text messages, notifications, and alerts.

The never ending flood of paper.

The deadlines.

Waking up in the middle of the night in a cold sweat… panicked that a statute of limitations had passed.

This woman who would become my coach and guide… she “got it.”

She had walked the path.

Like me, she’d come out of an Ivy law school, filled with hope and optimism. 

Like me, she went to “The Big Firm.”

Like me, she became a trial lawyer.

In this small book I held in my hands, she shared her feelings of hopelessness.

Her fatigue.

Her despair.

Oh… the despair. (For her, thoughts of ending her life.)

I’d purchased the little book because I was despairing.

Just the day before, I’d walked into my beautiful hermetically sealed office on the 18th floor of a brand new building overlooking the river.

A Saturday.

Yet another Saturday.

(The days, the Saturdays, the Sundays, the weekdays, the holidays, they all ran together.)

Yet another brief.

Yet another deadline.

(But thank god, at least I’d make my target billables that month, I’d thought).

I’d looked out across the piles of papers and books piled on my desk… out at the sun rising over the river… and I felt my legs buckle beneath me… beneath the weight of my heavy heart.

I asked – out loud – into my empty office… “Is this how it will be for the next 30 years?”

And I knew in that instant… that it couldn’t be…. It couldn’t be… it couldn’t possibly be this.

There needed to be a better way. 

A better way to use my gifts; my talents… my love of helping others.

There had to be something different… a way out.

But all I could see were the prison bars.

The sunk costs.

Because… now… I had a mortgage, and kids… and a mountain of student debt.

Now, I had “responsibilities.”

I just couldn’t see an escape.

I couldn’t imagine it.

And I had no guide.

Before I found that little book.

And there she was.

Like me, she’d invested so much in her career path.

In her education.

In her internships.

In the interviews and the bar prep.

And now… she’d made it!

She’d made her parents happy.

She had the nice things.

The nice car.

And… now… she was “important.”

Respected by others.

Looked up to.

Significant.

“Successful.”

Except… not in the place where it mattered most… in her heart.

That bone cold Sunday afternoon in February, tucked under a blanket near the fire, with the little book, changed everything for me.

Nearly 30 years have passed.

I can remember back across the decades.. Sunday nights… feeling anxious and depressed about the week ahead. 

Now I find myself a bit sad on Fridays… knowing that the week is over.

Because now… now…  I so love the work I get to do. 

I help mid-career professionals (and more than a few of them are lawyers) create the work and the lives they really love.

Now, I am blessed to be the guide.

It would be a privilege to be yours.

Can we schedule a call?