After years of law school, hitting your stride in practice, and leveling up in your firm along the way, the thought of going solo and starting from scratch can be so daunting. Venturing off the organizational track and stepping into entrepreneurship is risky and requires being bold, but my guest today did it and she’s thriving. 

 

Suzi Nixon is a lawyer working out of Kentucky who made the transition from big law to running her own firm and coaching practice. She’s also the founder of a wonderful community called Legally Blissed and the host of a podcast by the same name. After eight years in trademark law, even getting close to partnership, she started having second thoughts. She took the leap, started her own practice, and she hasn’t looked back since. 

 

We’re talking about how to rebuild your confidence when you have a setback. This is an important topic for lawyers at all levels. The skill of rebuilding your confidence will allow you to take your practice so much further and make a greater impact, and I’m showing you all of the how today.

 

Any time you’re in a line of work where you’re constantly pushing yourself to the edges of your limits, learning new skills, and taking on additional responsibilities, you’re always growing, which means setbacks are inevitable. It’s a risk we take when we step outside our comfort zones, which means learning how to bounce back is essential.

 

Do you have a tendency to fall victim to distractions in your everyday? How often do you tend to leave things late in the game, even when you know you’ve got tasks at hand that need seeing to? If the habit of procrastination seems to be your default mode and you can’t figure out how to turn it around, you’re in the right place. 

 

If your life looks anything like mine or my clients’, your summer is wrapping up, you’re getting back into the swing of a full practice, and work feels like a slump. Your daily workflow doesn’t have the momentum it once did, you’ve got a laundry list of priorities to sort through, and everything just feels heavy and overwhelming. So today, I’m offering a little extra help navigating this transition back to work so you can go from dread, distraction, and avoidance, to getting things done.

 

Over the past five years, I’ve had the pleasure of working with some amazing clients who have made great strides and really succeeded in getting the results they want. When we finish our work together, they’ve reached the next level, and they’re moving forward from there on their own. But what happens next?

 

We all have strategies for what we’re going to do if something goes wrong, but how many of you have a plan to follow when things are going well and you’re seeing new levels of success? We put a lot of effort into achieving a particular goal, but if we don’t think about how we want to manage our resulting success, burnout is never far behind.

 

Marketing was something I never fully embraced or appreciated when I was practicing as a lawyer. There’s this impression in the law profession that if you’re a good lawyer, there’s simply no need to market. In a wider context, marketing is often seen as sleazy, sales-y, or annoying, and something you don’t want to do or even have time for on top of your workload. 

 

However, when I decided to become a coach, I knew my relationship with marketing was going to have to change. Starting fresh meant marketing was a commitment I had to learn to love. And even if you never change tracks, the truth is you’ve spent years in education and practice, and you are uniquely positioned to provide a service that can be so freeing for people, so why aren’t you letting them know you can make an impact on their lives? 

 

Whether you’re here because confidence is something you’ve been struggling with, or whether confidence is something you feel is inherent to who you are and often take for granted, this is a topic that runs central to our professional work and personal lives, and it’s a core skill that we can all benefit from improving. 

 

If you were to bridge the confidence gap between where you are now and where you could be, you would make powerful decisions, carry yourself differently, do things you’ve been holding yourself back from doing, and create even greater impact through your work. And this is a possibility I’m inviting you to entertain this week.

 

Busyness is an interesting topic. As a lawyer, I guarantee you’ve experienced feeling busy. In fact, busyness is a comfortable trap people in all kinds of industries have fallen into. It may feel uncomfortable to be busy in the moment, but so many of us wear it like a badge of honor because it means we have stuff going on and it makes us feel important, which naturally we all love.

 

However, while being busy is not only socially acceptable but often openly encouraged, behind this life of busyness are lots of little excuses and benefits that keep us trapped in a cycle of busy that allows us to ignore other areas of our life. So, even if you’re not actively trying to address how busy you are, it’s important to see how the side effects are showing up in your life.

 

In a profession like law where we’re so reliant on our cognitive function to advocate for other people, and so much value is placed on productivity over self-care, it can feel like there’s no space for mental health practices that take care of your brain. If you feel like this seems woo-woo and that there’s no place for it in your practice, you’re not alone, and I think you’ll feel differently by the end of this episode.

 

Alysia Davies is a lawyer with 10 years of legal experience, having practiced as a civil litigator and clerked for the Chief Justice of Federal Court here in Canada. She’s since made the transition to becoming a registered social worker and counselor through The Member Assistance Program, which serves all lawyers, paralegals, students, and judges, and she’s here to raise awareness of how mental health is showing up in your practice, and how to advocate for your brain health. 

 

In the work that I do with lawyers, boundaries is a topic that comes up all the time, especially around saying no. I’m sure you can think of a time in your professional or personal life when you’ve said yes to something and then immediately regretted it. Maybe you knew you didn’t want to say yes, you weren’t committed or attached to the project, or perhaps you were already overworked, but you said yes, and now you harbor some resentment.

 

Saying no can feel incredibly uncomfortable, so I’m giving you some ideas you can use going forward next time you’re asked to take part in something you’d really prefer to say no to, without worrying about burning any bridges along the way.

 

I met this week’s guest five years ago when she handed me a business card and told me she was setting up shop. What she’s achieved since then is incredible, so if you’re a lawyer who knows you’re destined for more, you need to listen to my interview with Sara Forte. She’s walking us through her journey and all the pivots she had to make to create a work life she loves.

 

After many years of traditional law practice, in 2016 Sara launched Forte Workplace Law, a boutique labour and employment firm that has grown from a solo practice to a team of 14. In 2021, Sara launched Not Your Average Law Job™, an online project shining a light on happy lawyers and their wild and wonderful legal practices. I loved this conversation, and I know you’re going to love it too.