Creating balance as a lawyer (with Olivia Vizachero)

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Is it true there are industries where balance is just impossible? To answer this question, I interviewed, Olivia Vizachero, founder of The Less Stressed Lawyer. She and I dive straight into talking about the challenges of creating balance in an industry that rewards overworking. We speak about what it takes to create balance, specific decisions that need to be made along the way, mindsets that open up the possibility of balance and the nitty gritty of creating boundaries.

Topics in this episode:

  • Can you create balance as a lawyer?

  • The trade off of money for time, what to do about it?

  • What gets in the way of creating boundaries in overworking cultures?

  • The importance of deciding ahead of time when you plan to work and not work

  • Rest as a productivity tool

  • An equation for creating boundaries

  • Dealing with discomfort when you try to stick to boundaries

Show Notes & References:

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Transcript

Intro

Rebecca: Today on the podcast, I am speaking with Olivia Vizachero. She is a life coach for lawyers, helping them to design a life that they're obsessed about. I invited Olivia to be on this podcast because I really wanted to talk to her about industries such as law that are sort of known for being terrible at work, life balance, where culturally, we sort of see them as being over workers and being rewarded for overworking. This is such a fun podcast to record with Olivia. We talked about things like, is it really possible to even create balance in an industry such as law? We talked about what it takes to actually take ownership over balance in that type of industry where everyone around you is overworking and you're the one trying to stick to some boundaries. And then we got into the nitty gritty of what it takes to actually create for yourself boundaries and then stick to them when times get hard. As with most of my interviews on this podcast, you're coming in mid conversation, so I don't introduce her until about a minute in. But this one, this one is fun. Are you ready? Let's get to it.

Welcome to the Ambitious and Balanced Working Moms Podcast, the place for women who want to balance their ambitious career goals with their life as a mom. If you're looking to feel more confident, decisive, and productive at both work and home, then this is the place for you. I'm your host, Rebecca Olsen. Let's get to it.

My audience is ambitious women that have ambitious careers and they are moms, and they were fine going all in with all of their time and all of their energy before, but now they're not so much anymore - maybe they shouldn't have ever been. That's not really the point, ever. But they get to motherhood, and they say, I can't do this. I don't want to do this. And yet I don't know how to operate in a different way. And I have an industry that rewards the way I've been working, and so what do I do about that, right? And so that conversation comes up a lot for my people. And I think you, as a coach for lawyers in an industry that I think quintessentially would say is about overworking or culturally, we have that view, at least. It feels like a really rich conversation.

Well, Olivia, welcome to the podcast. Super excited that you are here. Tell me a little bit about what you do and who you work with.

Olivia: So I'm a life coach for lawyers who are ‘over the overwhelm’ and want to live lives with less stress and far more fulfillment. A huge part of that is this conversation on figuring out what balance means to an individual person. One of the things that I always talk to clients about is like, we want to define what is enough for you. Because what is enough work for one person might be radically different from what is enough work for another person. So we have to come up with your own bespoke definition of what enough is. And then once we have that answer, we can start to reverse engineer how to create a life that's in alignment with that definition. Part of that is going to be involved setting boundaries, learning how to manage your time, learning how to constrain and deal with all of the negative emotion that comes up from boundary setting, putting parameters in place, making decisions ahead of time - when do you work? When do you not work? Dealing with the guilt or the worry or the anxiety that comes up from honoring those decisions that you've made. So that's a big part of the work that I do, and some of it's overcoming the stigma, I think you've already touched upon this a little bit, but people thinking that this is just inherent to the practice of law, that it just is the way that the industry is and there's really not much to be done about it. And I'm really committed to debunking that myth and teaching people how to design a life on their terms, one that they're really obsessed with.

Rebecca: Let's talk about that for a second because I think for sure, we just think that there are industries, law being one of them, medicine probably being another one. I work with a lot of people in the startup environment. Just generally speaking, you work a lot, your identity is kind of wrapped up in your job, and that is the majority of your time. I'm curious, do you think that there really are industries that work life balance is just not conducive for? you really do have to just be all consumed in your job and that is where success lies.

Thoughts create your results.

Olivia: Yeah, I don't think that's true. There are two points here that I think are really important. Number one, there's always going to be examples of people not doing it that way. And you may have to look for them and be very intentional about finding them, but they do exist. I have plenty of clients that work a limited number of hours and make a lot of money. They don't have to give up the success that they want. Now, they may have had to hustle in the past in order to get there, but there is a point at which they achieve the balance that they want and the financial security that they want. And the prestige and the success that they want. So finding examples of that and then modeling it, you don't need to recreate the wheel, take someone else's house and put it into practice, but be really intentional about finding those examples. And they're probably not people, especially if you work in big law. I coach a lot of people in big law. The examples are not the people around you. You have to go outside of the firm that you're in probably to find them, but you might not have to. You might find some people that do have some pretty strong boundaries and some balance within your organization. But if you don't go search for examples of what's possible. The second thing that I think is really important is it's just really unhelpful to tell yourself that it can't be any other way because you're going to have a really defeated mindset. And I teach my clients thoughts, create your results. So if you think it's impossible or you think it's going to be so much harder in the practice of law, you're going to have so much more resistance to making the changes necessary in order to create the structure in your life that you want. So you make it so much harder to achieve. So I don't think there's any value in telling yourself that it's harder or that it's not possible if that is the industry that you're going to stay in and it's something you want to work towards.

Rebecca: Yeah, and that last part actually is really important. I was thinking about some of the ways that I coach my clients through some of this. And it always has to start with, do you want to stay? Because you always have the option to leave. You don't have to stay in this industry. You can leave. Majority of them, when you even ask that, they're like, well, no, I mean, I definitely want to stay. They forget that there's a choice here. Every day you wake up with the choice to remain in the industry that you are in or decide to get out and go do something else. There is not a right or wrong to that. But you have to own that decision and decide that this is what you want. And if you are going to stay, then what needs to be different? What needs to change? What does balance look like now that you aren't giving yourself an out by saying maybe this isn't going to work? Because ultimately, when you're saying this is just the way it is, it's a completely defeatist mindset. There is no problem solving in that. It's just like, well, sorry, my life is in somebody else's hands. My life is in this industry I've chosen. It's just not helpful.

Olivia: It's just happening to me.

Rebecca: It's just happening to me. I have no control.

Olivia: Correct. And that is actually something that I talk about when I talk about my own story in getting to big law and my decision to leave big law, I was very much of this defeatist victim mindset of, like, my life was happening to me, and I didn't actively choose this job that I got pushed to take it by all that I surrounded myself with. And I also was blind to the fact that I kept choosing it every day. And I agree with you completely. It is so important and empowering to wake yourself up to the agency that you're exercising every single day and being really clear. Why do you keep making the same choice day in and day out? And do you have your reasons? And if you don't, you've got to address that.

Rebecca: Yes, for sure. I know for a lot of people, sometimes they have to dig deep into that. It's not very clear to them why they're staying.

Olivia: Exactly.

Rebecca: And they have to tap into something that's on some of the deeper levels. A lot of the women I work with, we do a lot of work around separating themselves from their job and stop thinking about themselves as just being a lawyer. Stop thinking about yourself as just being an executive or a teacher or just an achiever. Generally, that isn't who you are as a person. It's what you've chosen to do. But it is not your essence as a person. And so we spend a lot of time trying to help your brain see you're more than this job. You could use your skill set in lots of different ways. What do you love about deciding to stay here? What are your other options if you decided to leave? So you just open that perspective up a bit to say, I'm not pigeonholed. I have a skill set that's transferable anywhere if I choose to, here's where I want to be or not want to be and here's why.

“I am here to believe that what you want to accomplish is absolutely possible.”

Olivia: I think there's also something that is beneficial to your listeners, because I don't know if you get this, but every once in a while, I'll have clients get frustrated that I don't agree with them. There are plenty of people in my clients' lives who are going to agree with them about how hard their job is and how the industry is. They're surrounded with people that have probably the exact same perspective about how much of a challenge it is. That is not what I am here for as a coach. I am here to believe that what you want to accomplish is absolutely possible and to help you reverse engineer creating that for yourself. So I think just as unhelpful as it is for my clients to believe that it just is the way that it is, it also doesn't serve them for me to believe that and agree with them.

Rebecca: Yeah, because if you're in agreement, neither one of you could get to rise above it, to see the other side of it, and to dream, to have a vision for it. You said something just a second ago and it sparked something for me. A lot of times my clients will say things like, well, it would be so hard to change the culture of this company or the culture of this industry. It would probably take a lot of effort and energy on a lot of lawyers' parts to change the industry, to change the culture. Maybe you want to engage in that. Maybe you don't want to engage in changing the culture of an industry. And we never want to wait for the culture to change or the industry to change or your boss to do something or your company to do something or anybody to do anything in order for you to live your own life. The idea that we need to regulate this and wouldn't that just solve all of our problems is one, not useful and two, I also find it not to be true because I have clients that work in the most amazing companies that are super family friendly and give them lots of flexibility and they're still working 60 plus hours a week because they don't know how to control their own working habits. And so it's never just the industry, it's us when we have to take a lot of ownership over our own overworking tendencies in order to get to that balance.

Olivia: And you'll see that with people that leave environments for a new opportunity and they'll think, oh, this is about to solve everything. And then they get there and they're still working weekends and they're still almost pulling all nighters pretty frequently. And it's like, yes, because you brought your same brain with you, the same brain that thinks overworking is what's required and that's how you prove yourself and that you need to prove yourself and that's how you establish your worth and that's how you impress people and get them to think highly of you and that if you don't do those things, then it's going to equate to failure. So it's a fear based model that you're operating within and that's going to carry you regardless of whether or not you work for an environment that has ping pong tables and respects care obligations or not, or if you work for a little bit of an outdated, more antiquated model that has base time requirements and some of the traditional structure that we typically see within the law.

Time has nothing to do with your ability to be a great mom.

Rebecca: There's this idea that success and time are related to each other, right? The more time you put into something, the more successful you're going to be at it. And we see it in personal life too, as moms, the more time you spend with your kids, somehow the better mom you are. And I always debunked that by saying, well, that means every stay at home mom is better than every working mom. Do you really believe that? And they're like, well, no. And like, right, because time has nothing to do with your ability to be a great mom. That's an easier one for people to initially stand and go 100%, that's not true. And then we transfer that same idea over into the workplace and you're like, can you be successful in less time? Well, let's just start with the assumption that that's possible. And then what? I'm curious how you start to work with people as it relates to time. We have so many thoughts about time and how it relates to success, and particularly if you've been in a hustle environment for so long, how do you start unwinding the connection between success and time with your clients?

Olivia: So a big part of this is that people don't have an ability to understand what their capacity is. Time just expands, and they keep taking work on, and you think, eventually I'll get to it. And what's going to happen is either time is going to expand from the start and end time during the day, or your to-do list is just going to get pushed out weeks and months down the road. It just expands. This is actually a perspective that has become so much clearer to me as a coach because I have sessions with my clients that recur each week. So I'm very clear on what my capacity for work is. I know when I'm at capacity. I know when I've taken on more clients than what a full capacity is for me. I know when I'm under it. I have such a clear understanding about what enough is, and I see it being something with my clients. They really don't understand it. And the model is just to take on the work, always say yes to it, and then figure it out later. So understanding what your capacity is, and that starts with, like, figuring out how many hours do I want to work each week? Or what do I want to accomplish each week? And maybe you can do that in less time. It's not essentially exchanging time for money, but for people that are in a billable hour model, it probably will be exchanging time for money and figuring out what goals do I want to hit, what is enough here, and then setting that into place and going to work on unwinding all of the judgments you have around. Is that enough? Can you get the work accomplished in that time? If you can't, are there other ways to outsource it to where you're not the person doing it? Coming up with some innovative solutions in order to stay within the confines of the parameters that you set for yourself?

Rebecca: I'm curious about this. I use the word enough a lot. The way you're talking about it, maybe we can interchange the word capacity with it. Is that true? Is that the way you're thinking about it? What's your limit? What's the stopping point for you?

What is enough to you?

Olivia: I think you have to define enough with a measurable metric. And I find that in so many different ways people aren't doing that. And it can be what's enough money, what's enough time, what's enough balance, what's responsive enough, what's productive enough, what's efficient enough. These are all things that you want to put numbers to. Because otherwise what all of my clients tend to do is this adorable thing that our brains love to do, which is, I don't know what enough is, but it's not this. And then we just keep chasing the horizon. That's where that hustle culture comes in. And you keep feeling inadequate, you keep striving for more and then you never hit the point where you feel satisfied or proud or accomplished because you've never set the destination point in the first place. So it's really hard to identify when you arrived where you wanted to be. It's also really hard to come up with a game plan of how to get where you want to go if you haven't decided exactly upon where you want to go.

Rebecca: I love that. Yeah, I just did a podcast, so this one will come out after it. So you can go back and listen to two podcasts, I think, before this one, where I talk about what it means to be satisfied and how we live in a culture of more and more always. And that robs us of our ability to literally experience that feeling of well done, good job, I'm enough, I have enough, I'm good enough. Like, to sit and rest in everything that you've done and accomplished and have and be with it in that space of like, calm, joy, rest, sufficiency. Like, our culture is always about that. I love this conversation because it's such an important one to have. What we're talking about now is kind of deciding ahead of time. Where is that point of satisfaction at the end and what does that look like ahead of time?

Olivia: And when you separate the math from the mind drama, you can start to see different paths to accomplishing the goal. For my solo practitioners, if their goal is to make a certain amount of money, okay, you can do that by billing more hours, if that's how you bill. Or you can create a subscription service and give more value to the world but without exchanging more time for it. Or you can bring on contract employees to take care of some of the work where you free up your time, but you're still able to bill them out at a certain rate. You can increase your rates. Like, there are all of these different ways to make the equation work. Same thing with number of hours worked. A lot of law firms have billable hour requirements and you need to figure out the standard in a lot of firms is 2,000 hours. Monthly that breaks down to 166.6 repeating. You can always tell when people worked in big law because they know that number like the back of their hand. You’ll see that like spread out over a week and then if you have a judgment about that not being enough, you have to examine that. Why is that not enough, if that's the firm standard? And this touches on something that you mentioned earlier that I wanted to make sure that we spoke about. I hear from people all the time, well, they expect me to work twenty-four-seven, and they'll call my clients on it. I'm like, no they don't, no one told you that.

Rebecca: It wasn't in the contract. You didn't sign that.

Olivia: Exactly. I'm not saying that the expectation might not be my transactional attorneys who do deal closings. The expectation might be to work from 06:00 a.m. to 11:00 p.m. And to be responsive to email within an hour or less than that during a deal closing. That might be the requirement. And let's be very honest about whether or not that's the expectation. So people can opt in or opt out with full agency there, but getting really clear on what the expectations are and what they're not, whether they were ever communicated to you or whether you came up with them yourselves. And one of the things that I've been talking to my clients a lot about recently are the unofficial job descriptions that people write for themselves. It's not what's going to be on your LinkedIn bio, or your firm website, or your company website, or job title on a business card, or your signature line in an email. Your unofficial job descriptions are the story you've decided for yourself in your head about what your role is. And I’ll see that come up for people like, oh, I need to be a lifesaver. My job is to win all of the time. And you'll talk to them and you're like, is that even possible to get your clients 100% of what they're seeking? And they're like, Yeah, that never happens. I'm like, well, no wonder you feel inadequate all the time. You describe your job in a way that's not possible.

Rebecca: Yeah, you've completely set yourself up to lose. I say you, like, threw yourself into a boxing match without any gloves on, and you're like, blindfolded. How are you going to win that?

Olivia: We'll use terms like, to do the best job possible. I'm like, Please tell me how that's different from perfect? Because they're pretty synonymous. It just sounds a little bit more achievable than perfection.

Rebecca: Sounds a little better. But of course, there's always an ability, like, we should always be striving to grow. Like, there's always areas of gap to grow in on all sorts of levels.

Olivia: Exactly.

Rebecca: You will never meet that expectation either because there's always more that you could do or if you stayed up, we're able to do that and so forth.

Why it is NOT better for you to overwork.

Olivia: I used to strive for that. One of my goals when I was practicing, if I could have made myself never sleep, I would have opted for that. And I tried through a lot of really unhealthy ways that I do not recommend to anyone. It was really bad for my health and wellbeing, I think this is the other thing that's important for people to talk about. You have to start to build the case for why it's not better for you to overwork, 

Rest is a huge part of productivity.

Rebecca: To overwork totally. Like, why? Rest is a huge part. You want it to be a part of your life, but it's also a big part of your productivity. Like, it's a huge piece of productivity.

Olivia: I was so inefficient when I was not resting and not taking care of myself in that way. It took me 30 minutes to write a three sentence email because I'd keep overthinking it and I'd delete it and I'd rewrite it and I'd go back and forth. Or my analytical skills just weren't at the top of my game. So you have a hard time seeing it in the moment when you're so sleep deprived, but the hustle does not make you more effective.

Rebecca: And a lot of studies have shown that too. It's super fascinating. I remember one that I look at or quote a lot is it's up to 55 hours or beyond your productivity is a fifth of what it was prior to that. And then it's only good for another 5 hours. And then anything after I think it's 60 something, a little after that. It's as if you shouldn't have worked at all. It's so nominal that it's not even worth it. We have to build a case in our brains that shows two things, really. Like, one is rest is a big part of productivity. So you're going to do better work, it's going to be more efficient. But two, you are also deserving of rest. Like, you are a human being that is worthy of a break. And we are designed as human beings to take breaks. Actually, one third of our life is meant to be asleep. We are meant to be in a place of rest at least one third of our life. And we're deserving of that. We need to build a case for that as well. But it's not just about this other goal. Like, you just being a human being that has rest, that's fine. That is a legitimate reason that should be supported.

Olivia: You don't have to earn it. And the other thing that I see from people all the time, which I just shut my clients down with this. They're like, Well, I'm not doing it because I'm lazy. I'm like, no you're not. You're just I've decided all of my clients, none of them are lazy. Like, it takes too much work to get to where they have ended up. Just de facto, they're not lazy. There's such a lie in industries like this. If you're not doing the hustle, then de facto you are lazy. I'm like, No, I refuse to subscribe to that. I'm not here for it. I shut my clients down when they come to me with that as well. It's like, no, we're not here for that anymore.

Rebecca: I'm circling back a little bit even as we started this part of the conversation because you were talking about writing the job description that isn't actually her job description and understanding that and having really clear expectations, which I on some level, I assume then there might be a conversation with some people potentially that you work with your boss or your partners or whomever they would be around, what your boundaries are going to be from here on out, what you've decided for yourself. You have to get clear on it first with yourself. And yeah, you probably are going to have to communicate some of this to other people at some point and that's going to be a really important conversation to get. They may or may not understand or they may not even care. Usually they don't even care. They're just great. I mean, as long as you do good work, it's fine.

Your job is to stick to and enforce your own boundary.

Olivia: Yeah, I teach my clients. Are you required to have the conversation? No, you're certainly not. Are there reasons you might want to? Probably. Now here's the thing - this is where we have to enter into the tough love part of the conversation. People don't have to understand, they don't have to like it and they don't have to adhere to it or respect it. That's not their job. Your job is to stick to and enforce your own boundary. So really teaching people what a proper boundary is, I will hear clients, I told people that I'm not working weekends and they keep emailing me on the weekends. I'm like, yes, of course. And they always will and you can't control them and they get to and it's not a problem and you can just wait to respond on Monday. All of that is fine. You can have the conversation. It will probably make your life easier and everyone can get on the same page, but they don't have to like it. And the other thing that I teach people all the time, are you absolutely able to work less, set boundaries, honor them? For sure. Will there be a consequence? Maybe, depending on what the expectations are of the work environment that you're in, what you signed up for and agreed to originally. If you have a billable hour requirement that's 1950 a year or 2000 hours a year and you decide, yeah, I really just want to do 1500 a year, like, yeah, you're probably not going to get a bonus and you're probably going to get a talking to and they might decide some further, more drastic action than that. Everyone gets to make decisions based off of this. But you absolutely can still choose to work less. But there may be a consequence for it.

Rebecca: Which case you might not want to stay there, but it might not be the place for you. If that is their expectation of you and you've decided that isn't what you want to work within, that's fine, that's great. That just tells you it's time to leave. It's time to go find something else that fits within your parameters. That's your choice.

Olivia: I also think it's important for people to be really honest about what you signed up for? Did you always have a problem with this? Because I will see a little bit of a shift and I know you and I talked about this when we were planning to discuss some of these topics for the podcast episode, but people will be fine with the hustle culture and the money that gets exchanged for a certain billable hour target and they're good with it up until the point where their lives change, and then they want the environment to be different. And I see that a lot with my clients. And it's kind of the old thing like, you got to dance with the one that brought you, you knew this was hustle culture. Wanting big law or these environments that really focus on exchanging time for money and they reward exchanging more time for more of it. That's the program here. So wanting it to be a place that really honors care obligations, much like you were talking about earlier, like, yeah, we can want the industry to be different, but it's going to take a while. I do believe there's always going to be an environment that rewards Hustle culture. I think there will be trends shifting away from that because I do believe with the implementation of technology, you can make the same amount or more money without having to hustle for it. We're starting to see that as tech comes into industries like law. I'm sure, um, you can see that in startup industries as well, right?

Rebecca: Yeah.

You always have a choice and can opt-out at any time.

Olivia: With that in mind, there's always going to be a market for people who hustle and that's fine. If you don't want to be in that type of establishment, you can opt out, uh, of it. And we don't have to make it a problem for those who do want to sign up and exchange that much of their lives for monetary benefit.

What is it that you really want in your life?

Rebecca: Circling back to something you said a bit ago you were talking about well, let me just say that a lot of people come to me and they're like, but I want both, why can't I have both? Why can't I problem solve for both? And the answer is, yeah, maybe you can. Let's talk about that. You probably haven't put a whole lot of thought into how this is both. And so let's discuss that maybe in your current environment, your current job, your current employer, whatever the situation is, maybe, maybe not. If you wanted to make the same amount of money and you wanted to work less, what would be required of you in order to do that? Let's start with that and then start to build out some ideas from there to your point, like, let's not reinvent the wheel. How are other people doing this? And that is where it needs to come back to that idea of choice again, what is it that you really want to problem solve for? What is it that you really want in your life? Let's decide that and then figure out how to have it versus if it's possible, then I will have it. Where you're kind of delegating that out the possibility out to the circumstance of your job or your employer, whomever it may be, your boss, the firm.

Olivia: One of the things that I want people to focus on, this tends to be a search for autonomy. You want to be the one who gets to decide what flies, what doesn't. And I always tell people, start with trying it where you're at because they decide ahead of time that it's not going to work and you haven't figured it out yet. I also see people come at this from a ton of fear and worry that if they make any change, there's going to be a negative consequence to instilling boundaries and honoring boundaries and limiting the amount that they work. And I always offer people, you're either going to continue to do what you're currently doing and burn out and leave. You're going to quit without trying any change, or you can stay, try and make a change and see if it flies. In no scenario but for making a change, do you end up working because the hustle and the overwork, you will eventually burn out. It's just not sustainable. So I always offer to people, start with trying to do it differently and see what happens if you like where you're at. Now, from there, I think it's really important to focus on the ways that we can create the ‘and’ situation that you're talking about. How do we get the money and the balance that we want? A big thing that I teach my clients - and I know you work with working moms. I see women really dropped the ball here, and I am on a mission to get them to stop dropping the ball. You need to understand how your organization makes money and you need to devote a significant amount of time to building a book of business if you are in an environment that you can do that in. So if you become someone who has their own book as a rainmaker, you will get the leverage that you want. You will get a say in how much you work. You want to attend soccer games and you want to take vacations with the family, and you don't want to be living and breathing under someone else's schedule and assigned workflow? You can create that for yourself, but it requires you building your own book of business. It's also how you can create an income that you want without having to be the person doing the work. So you bring business in, you can assign it and delegate it to other people, create the autonomy that you want and the leverage that you want. To a lot of my people, it sounds you want to be an entrepreneur and you may not have thought that you did, but what you're describing to me is a little different than working in a law firm environment where they have standards or rules that they want you to adhere and you're like, Yeah, I'm not really interested in that. So if you work for yourself and come up with a business model that supports your lifestyle, it's been so fun for me to watch coaches do it. One of the reasons that I wanted to become a coach was because I wanted to not have limits on my income potential. And I didn't have belief at the time that you could do it in the practice of law. I now see the practice of law so much differently and I'm like, oh, you could totally have a scalable business model in the practice of law. You just have to, again, find those examples, don't have to reinvent the wheel. We can take inspiration from other industries on how to provide value, create different service options that are scalable and don't require the exchange of time and money. Those are probably going to be the two different ways that you do that. You can also go work for firms that have different compensation models. If it's contingency fee work, you can make a ton of money and not kill yourself in exchange for it. So there's different ways to do it, but you have to be clear about what it is that you want and ask yourself, how do I do both? There's a way to do both.

Believe that change is possible for you.

Rebecca: Start with the idea that it is possible first. Not really always has to be the first conversation with yourself because the only reason you wouldn't go after it is if you were believing that that wasn't possible for you. And then if you just strike that from the table and say, yes, of course both are possible. Of course there's going to be a give and take somewhere. I don't know what that give and take is going to be, but there's going to be a give and take, it's going to look a little different than life looks now. And that's 100% okay, let's just start. Yeah, it's possible now. Let's go figure out how we're going to make that work.

Olivia: Here's another thing that I think is important to highlight. One of the things that people might have to give up - I'm going to phrase this very intentionally is their current definition of prestige.

Rebecca: I'm glad you're getting into this. Yeah, tell me more.

Changing the definition of what is prestige.

Olivia: I had to change my definition of what I considered prestigious. I used to think it was the most impressive law firm in the state. That I lived in, which is where I worked, people were very impressed with it. Well, really only attorneys that I knew were impressed with it because no one else knows the name.

Rebecca: If you would have told me, I would have no idea.

Olivia: Exactly. You're like, okay, great, that sounds cool. Like, how is that different from any other law firm?

Rebecca: So your lawyer got it. Okay, great.

“I think being able to work three days a week and make millions of dollars is the coolest thing.”

Olivia: I had to change my perception of prestige. And rather than it being some big name law firm that a bunch of attorneys thought was a really big deal, I switched it to being able to make any amount of money that I want from anywhere in the world and being able to vacation as frequently as I desire. I think being able to work three days a week and make millions of dollars is the coolest thing, the most prestigious thing on the face of the earth. Anyone whose definition of prestigious not that I'm like, uh, you're confused.

Rebecca: Yeah. You're really confused for sure. That's prestigious right there. That's badass.

Olivia: So I had to adopt that and really redefine how I looked at that word. I was really basing prestige on what other people considered prestigious in the past. And then when I redefined that word for myself, it was so much easier for me to let go of living someone else's idea of what an ideal life was and to start designing a life that matched what I valued.

What is most important to you?

Rebecca: I love that because if you want to create balance in your life right now and your tendency is to way over work, you can't keep doing what you're doing in order to create balance. Because if you just kept taking the same action and operating in the same way, you're just going to create the same life that you have. So you're going to have to change something or maybe lots of things, potentially, but at least something is going to have to change and it's likely going to have to be the way you are thinking about various things. And so if you're thinking about life is all about money and you want more time and you're still thinking though that money is it, then we have a dissonance there. Now, of course, we were talking about before, we can go about trying to problem solve for that. But there could be a pretty big gap. We have to start with going back and thinking about how are you defining these things and what really is most important to you. What are those priorities that you have for yourself and why are they priorities for yourself? Like, you got to be 100% on board with what it is you want and why you want it to start with, so that you can go out and create it. Because if you are 100% on board with the life that you want and what success really means to you and what having an amazing career means to you, what being a great mom means to you and what prestigious means to you if you're 100% on board with that, there's going to be natural momentum that's built towards that when other people question you, just you said before, when people don't think that this is prestigious, I'm like, what the hell are they thinking? Because your brain is so convinced of it. There's this sense of like, I don't get it. Like, of course this is the best life. I'm going after the best life. I'm sorry you don't think that way, but for sure I'm on the right track.

Olivia: Yeah, I don't need you to co-sign.

People-pleasing gets in the way of creating balance.

Rebecca: You don't care what people think. And so often, what gets in the way of balance, what creates overworking, is a lot of the people-pleasing and a lot of the not wanting people to be disappointed, not wanting to look you aren't as committed or, you know, the comparison. All these very typical things that get in the way of us creating balance. And in those moments, you care so much less about what other people are thinking when you are 100% on board with the life that you're creating for yourself and why you're creating it for yourself.

Change requires change.

Olivia: I think there's another point here that's so important to make, and you've slightly touched on this and what you just said. There is a dissonance here and change requires change. And one of the things that I get really clear with my clients on is what do you want to be better at managing your time or people policing? What do you want to be better at having boundaries or managing other people's perceptions of you? Being very honest, people will come to me and they're like, I want to work on time management, I want to stick to a schedule. I'm like, you don't want to stick to it more than you want to be available to people, or more than you want to be hyper responsive, or more than you want people to think that you're the best X, Y or Z, whatever your job title is, you care more about that than you do ending work at six and going to live your life, that's fine, you can choose that. But let's be very honest. In order for something to change, something has to change. And so long as you pick people pleasing over these other things that actually help you create and achieve balance...

Rebecca: Probably create the life that you want.

Olivia: You’ll just get more of the same.

Rebecca: We're starting to talk a little bit about boundaries, or we're kind of hinting at that. And I would love to make this accessible for people as much as possible because we keep saying, like, of course you're going to have to create boundaries and people have this idea, maybe in their head of what that actually means. I'd love to kind of get into a conversation about what a boundary means and what's going to have to happen in order for you to hold it. So how do you talk about boundaries with your clients?

What are boundaries?

Olivia: So I always teach them the framework for a proper boundary. First and foremost, it’s an ‘if they ___, I will___ statement’. So if someone else does whatever the action is, it's not about controlling their behavior and saying that they will or won't do that. It's not about controlling the other person. It's about what you do in the event that someone does a certain activity. So if they email me over the weekend, I will wait until Monday to respond. It's always about your actions. Or if a client calls me at 8:00pm, I will not answer. I will wait until the morning. One of my rules. I never take unscheduled phone calls. It's just an absolute no for me. So that's a boundary. If you call me and we don't have a scheduled  call, I will text you immediately. And I don't care at all what your thoughts are about that. I will watch my phone ring. I will wait for the ringing to stop, and then I will text you and say, hey, I saw you called. What's going on? Now, from there, I might decide that a call is warranted. Usually it's not, especially if it's a client of mine. It's probably something we can either work through text or address during our next session. But I'm never going to get on the phone without knowing what it is that we're going to discuss. That helps me manage my time better. It helps me be less reactive. That's a good example of it. You want to make some of these decisions ahead of time.

A boundary is a decision ahead of time.

Rebecca: The decision ahead of time is the way you're really describing it. Right. And then holding to it ultimately, which is, of course, the harder part, for sure. Always. A lot of people, though, haven't even done that first step. So let's be clear. A boundary is a decision you've made ahead of time about what it is you want, what you want to hold to what's most important, and then what you're going to do. When somebody else tries to conjure you up in some way to cross over that boundary, they do something that sparks something within you and that becomes really difficult for you to hold onto. So then there's the second part of, like, we got to hold this boundary.

Olivia: And it's going to be uncomfortable.

Rebecca: Of course it's going to be uncomfortable. So you could say you're going to leave at 6pm, but let's really talk about what happens at 5:55. When you get a call from a client and they need something from you, what are you going to do and how do you hold to it? So first, what we do know is that that moment is going to feel uncomfortable. You're not going to sit there and go, oh, this is easy. I'm just going to ignore them and not give them what they require and feel so amazing about my service towards them, you're probably not going to feel that way.

Olivia: The truth of the matter is there's discomfort both ways. So there's discomfort that comes from sticking to your boundary and following through with it, and then there's the discomfort that comes from not following through with it. Normally, if you're dealing with people pleasing, especially, it's guilt versus resentment. So you get to pick. I strongly suggest picking the route that leads you to the life you want to live. Because if you have to feel uncomfortable either way, pick the one that gets you the results that you want as opposed to the route that doesn't get you the results that you want. But you also want to make sure that with boundaries, you're always leaving room and acknowledging that the truth of the matter is that people have free will. I just coached someone on this earlier today where they were like, they can't keep CC me on emails and I'm like, they 1000% can for the rest of time.

Rebecca: For sure. It doesn't matter how much you tell them not to, like, they will. It's fine.

Olivia: You can shut your door and say, I'm not, um, talking to anyone during this time and people are going to come knock.

Rebecca: My gosh, I was totally that person in my last job, I think about that. The poor person that would always close their door at lunch and I would be totally the one be like, knock and I just walked right in and I'm such a terrible team player. Now I see it. But then I was like, why is the door locked? Like, I’m just going in there I need something. So I was totally that person.

Olivia: I had judgment around it, too. And I actually thought some of the men that I worked with in Big Law did a better job at this than I did or some of the women that I knew because we were looking for a little bit more community, I think. And they were like, yeah, it's great to have community, but also make sure you get your work done. And they were better at closed door policy. Crank out the hours, get in your eight billable hours for the day and get out by 5:30, which is possible if you are really rigid about people's access to you. And I had judgment around it, but now I'm like, that makes sense. And actually they're kind of inspirational. Thank you.

There can be discomfort when you stick to boundaries.

Rebecca: Yeah, I hear you. So there's going to be discomfort. Choose the discomfort that is going to get you to the life that you want to have, ultimately to the balance that you want in your life. What else is going to come along with holding boundaries?

Olivia: Fear is the big thing that I see with my clients. They're terrified that there's going to be a negative repercussion, that clients are going to hate that they're not accessible, that higher ups are going to have pushback. And I think if your fear is so extreme, have the conversation. That is a scenario where you never have to communicate a boundary. You can just set it and you decide what you're going to do when a certain circumstance arises and how you're going to follow through in that moment without ever explaining yourself to another person. But if you're worried, I think that's a scenario where it really will make sense for you to address it head on in order to attempt to get everyone on the same page and make a more informed decision of yeah, they might tell you that there will be a negative consequence, and then you just create some certainty for yourself rather than not knowing. I find that especially the people that I work with, they crave certainty. I love Tony Robbins' thesis on this, of one of the six basic human needs. I tend to find that out of all six that he mentions, certainty tends to be one of the top two that the people that I work with, they really crave. So if you can create it for yourself, create some knowing rather than sitting in, like, the fear of like, oh, I'm waiting for the other shoe to drop. I might get fired. That's always everyone's biggest fear, that they're going to get fired, even though it's probably what they might want.

Rebecca: Yeah. So just know what to ask for the consequences so that you make the decision informed that you are going to still hold your boundary or you're not. You're going to change your boundary based on the information that you have potentially.

Olivia: But then you're doing it voluntarily. Right? You're your exercising agency. You also - and I really want to underscore this, and I think it's something that you probably talk about all the time as well. They might be fine with it most of the time.

Rebecca: They're fine with it most of the time.

Most clients / boss’s are fine with your boundaries.

Olivia: My clients are like, I can just not answer an unscheduled phone call and my clients won't fire me? And they're like, there's no way. Can we just try it? And then they'll come back and they're like, they're really understanding. Isn't that neat?

Rebecca: Humans are actually pretty cool.

Olivia: Here's the other thing, we're pretty rational. And one of the things that I see, I'll hear people say all the time, they're like, well, my clients don't want to know that I have other clients. I'm like, they know. The business model only works like, no one client of yours is going to be willing to pay you your annual salary. So, of course, splitting the cost of your living expenses amongst multiple people, not just one. Like, that's how you make money and not price gouge. One individual, they get how it works. We tend to be much more accommodating than we give people credit for.

Rebecca: Yeah, I love that. A lot of the times what I hear from my clients is my boss said it was fine. I don't need to work on the weekends. Like, they were totally on board as long as I got my work done. So now let's talk about what it takes for you to get your work done by not working on the weekends. That's on you now. So now let's talk about that because now we could actually open up a conversation around what's getting in the way of that.

Making decisions ahead of time.

Olivia: This goes to several of the things that we've talked about today, but most importantly, it's making the decision ahead of time because most people use nights and weekends, and there's a big question mark on those sections of their calendar where, like, overflow can go. And if you have it earmarked for I'll work if I have to, you never have to - It's always a choice. You will definitely expand…

Rebecca: Because you're an achiever, of course you are going to do it. That's going to be your natural tendency.

There will always be more work.

Olivia: And there will always be more work to do. That's the other thing that I think people really have not figured out the difference between academic life and work life. Your career of like, we're in this insatiable quest to be, ‘caught up’ so we can stop feeling ‘behind’ it's like, this isn't school which is an artificial environment where you don't have people continuing to come at you and assign more work and add to your to-do list. Like, the to-do list is finite and it's very protected. You're in a bit of a bubble. There's always more stuff being added. There will always be spinning plates that get wobbly and that you need to go give a spin to if you're working weekends to get caught up. And how people typically mean that is to be done with everything. Whether they realize how they are defining it or not, that is how they're probably defining it.

Rebecca: Or to not have something in their brain that they don't want in their brain that they're thinking about endlessly, like, as if they don't have control. Seemingly that thing is just ruminating in their brain and they can't do anything about that until they complete that task. Also not true.

Olivia: Agreed. But you have to accept that there will always be more to do. And here's what I teach my clients. You probably want it that way.

Rebecca: Of course you do. You wouldn't want a life that doesn't have an endless to do list associated to it. There's a drive forward. It keeps you away from looking at the clock. You're an achiever. There's constantly more to do. There's complex problems to solve. Even just the idea that you have to problem solve what's the most important thing regularly and manage that you probably really enjoy that. That's a really big part of what life giving to you about the work that you do is actually the management of it in addition to the work itself.

“You have to make peace with feeling unfinished and putting the work away, going to live your life and then picking back up on Monday.”

Olivia: Yeah, if you were caught up, for most of the people that I work with, it means you would be out of work and you either wouldn't have a job or you wouldn't have any more clients to serve and then you wouldn't have any money coming in. So it is actually your worst case scenario. So getting really clear on that and knowing if you're always working weekends to, ‘catch up’ and then admitting to yourself you're never going to be caught up, then you will work every weekend. So if you don't want that to be your life, you have to make peace with feeling unfinished and putting the work away, going to live your life and then picking back up on Monday and that it's all going to be fine. So this is the other point that I wanted to add here to go back to what we were saying about making decisions ahead of time. If you decide that you take the question marks off your calendar and you free up those sections of your week and you decide, I'm not going to work weekends or I'm not going to work in the evenings, then you start to adjust how you approach work and your week so much differently. So you set yourself up for a much greater likelihood of success on following through with those parameters with that constraint. Because you're going to do different things on Thursday and Friday than what you do typically on Thursday and Friday, which drives you to work on the weekends. Everything starts to shift and change.

When you stop listening to that voice in your head, you can in fact get a lot more done.

Rebecca: Yeah, it has to, but it has to start with deciding ahead of time what that set time is, so that you can prioritize differently because you're not going to give yourself an hour later. And if I talk to people I'm like, for whatever reason, a lot of the high achievers that I work with are also procrastinators. There's just a thing connected to those two things. And so we talk about what it like was to be in college and you had a paper due and you didn't do any of it until the very last minute. And so then all of a sudden at 10:00 p.m. At night, you're deciding to write this paper that's due at 08:00 a.m. The next morning. And every single time you're able to write it and you're able to ace it. When we start getting into that, we're like, well why? And you're like, well I couldn't listen to the crap going on in my head. Like, when I felt stalled, I was like, well I got to make a decision because I don't have a whole lot of time here. So you just move past, you move past the perfectionist tendencies. You don't allow yourself to say, well, maybe I should mull it over a little bit more. Maybe I should go research this a little bit more. You can't do that. So you just keep pushing ahead. You can't ask other people their opinions about it because you just got to get the words out of paper. And so you just write and yeah, you turn it in and you're like, I don't know, I'm not sure, but you're willing to. And then pretty much always turns out. That same deadline urgency and all of the behaviors that a deadline causes us to have or to do we just want to recreate that for ourselves with our own sense of urgency within this container of time. You can still get all of that crap done. When you're not listening to that little voice in your head that's telling you you might be doing it wrong or there's another way, or you should research it more, or when you need somebody else's opinion, or if you're worried about this or you're worried about that, when you stop listening to that voice in your head, you can in fact get a lot more done. And you do. Everybody has examples of how that is possible.

Trusting that you've got this figured out

Olivia: And it's stomaching the discomfort. It's stomaching feeling inadequate or confused or uncertain or unsure of yourself or worried that you don't have the right answer. It's tolerating all of that discomfort. I used to be someone that would always seek other people's opinions to co sign my idea. And as I started to build this business, I started trusting myself so much more. And I was like, no, I don't know if this is the right decision, but I'm just going to make it anyways because I didn't want to slow myself down and it always turned out to be fine. So trusting that you've got this figured out, you're a highly competent person. One of the thoughts that I choose to practice is, I'm proud of everything I do. It's not all perfect. It could be better, but it's good enough. It's thoughtful. And I think that going back to what we talked about earlier, about defining enough, uh, defining good enough. Because if you're aiming for perfection, you're going to take a lot longer to do all these things. For me, my standard for something good enough is can I say am I proud of it? Can I stand behind it? And this is the other very basic way of addressing this, but I aim for A- or B+ work. And I'm like, okay, what does that feel in my body? And my reaction to that is not bad versus not great, that's not good enough for me. But good enough is not bad. That's pretty good. Because I think you have to have a way to measure or identify, like, did I reach the not bad stage? And if I did, put it to bed, move on, get to the next thing.

Rebecca: Obviously we can keep talking about this forever, because this is a forever topic. And this is what I talk about here on this podcast. It's been so fun to talk about it with you. I think you just have some really unique perspectives, having worked in an industry that rewards that overworking tendency, and you are helping your people to not do that anymore. And so good. It's so fun to hear you talk and hear how I describe that in a slightly different way, but we're talking about the same concept, same thing. I love that it's so fun to hear that, because it just reinforces a lot of the ideas that I share out there. And now you just get a different flavor of it, if you will.

Never take advice from someone who hasn't done what you want to do.

Olivia: I want to add one more thing that I didn't mention that I do think is really important. I always teach my people, never take advice from someone who hasn't done what you want to do. So if you want to create a life of balance, and you're surrounded by people who don't have balance, stop listening to them. Go find examples of people who have the life that you want to live and follow their advice, follow their guidance. Stop listening to people with limiting beliefs who haven't tried to do it the way you want to do it.

Rebecca: And just keep affirming for you that it's not possible. Find people that believe it's possible. So, so good. Well, Olivia, if people wanted to find out more about what you do, where should they go?

Olivia: You can go to my website, thelessstressedlawyer.com and I'm also super active on LinkedIn and Instagram. My handle on Instagram is @thelessstressedlawyer, and I just started a podcast by the same name, so you can find me there too.

Rebecca: Okay, well, we're going to put all of that in the show notes, too, so people can easily link to that. Thank you. Thank you, Olivia, for being here. I'm so excited for you and the ventures that you have going on in your life and the women that you are sorry. The lawyers that you are changing, because I don't believe you just work with women, right? You work with men, too.

Olivia: Yes, I help the guys too.

Rebecca: Yeah. That's what I thought. I love it. I love it. I love what you're doing. And thanks for being here.

Olivia: Thank you. My pleasure.

Outro

Rebecca: Thanks for listening to today's episode. If you're interested in being guided through the five step process that I'm teaching here on the podcast, where each of the steps are broken down into many lessons that are each ten minutes or less so they fit easily into your day, where you are in community with other amazing, career driven moms, learning to balance the demands of their job and their life. As a mom, where, um, you have the opportunity to coach with me personally to ensure that the process and steps are tailored to you and your unique circumstance, then join me in the ambitious and balanced Working Moms Collective. The Collective is a group coaching program that is designed specifically for ambitious working moms. The doors are always open, and as soon as you sign up, you will get instant access into the five step process so you can start right away. You can get more information and sign up at www.rebeccaolsoncoaching.com/collective

Rebecca Olson