KNOWING OUR 'HOW" AND OUR "WHY", ALIGNMENT AND EMBRACING THE STRUGGLE - PART 2
Hope you all had a good week. Welcome to Part 2 of my blog “Knowing Your Why.”
All week long I have been getting messages about how important it is to know our values and be in alignment with them. On Tuesday of this week, I had a guest speaker come to my class of 3L law students to speak about her journey in law, which included her struggle to obtain what she called “Life -Work-Integration” (as opposed to work life balance). She also mentioned the importance of knowing your values and living in alignment with them. At that point I had to let the students know we did not plan that!
Last evening, I had another guest speaker who spoke about his personal journey with finding harmony between life and work and the importance of knowing our own values. Again, not planned. However, he also stated it was imperative for our own mental health to not only know our values and adhere to them but to also ensure our values were aligned with those of the organization we work for.
I have taken all this as a good sign I chose the right topic for my first blog posting.
Does the term Work Life Balance imply that work is somehow separate from life? Is that true? Can balance be achieved? What do we even mean by balance? And does it not differ for everyone?
I interviewed another experienced lawyer on the weekend. We spoke at length about the Work Life balance and concluded it is about integration with our life. It is qualitative not quantitative.
The truth is life does not fit neatly into compartmentalized contexts. Our relationships, our finances, our health, our passions, our work – it is all connected. It is all our life. Is life something that is meant to be perfectly balanced? Or is it something that is meant to be lived?
Our lives are composed of many different contexts (physical, emotional, spiritual, intellectual, financial, social, etc.). Our values may differ in each one, however, they all weave together into one connected whole. Who we are flows into every area of life. When we bring purpose to one area of life, we bring it to all. Even if our work may not necessarily be our purpose right now, we can still bring our purpose or reason for being to our work.
Perhaps we do not have to keep searching for purpose like it is something to be found. Maybe it is something we already carry deep within us and that we will uncover when we look within.
And in the meantime, while we are trying to figure out what to do with our life, we can choose to focus our attention on bringing purpose to whatever it is that we are doing right now. If we were to do that, work may become more than just work. It may become more a part of an integrated, meaningful and fulfilling life.
As I have said before, asking the right questions is everything. So instead of asking “how do I achieve work life balance”, maybe the better question is “how do I live my life where I bring my reason for being into everything that I do, including my work”. The point of life then becomes to uncover what your reason for being is - so your life is filled with meaning. If you know your why you can endure any how.
In Part 1 of my blog, I also talked about ensuring you are following your own path and not one expected of you. We need to ensure our reason for being does not get buried by the volume of work we need to get through. We should try to remember to do our best to avoid the #1 regret of those who passed away prematurely (Regrets of the Dying – Bronnie Ware), which is not having the courage to live the life we wanted but living one that was expected of us. Not being true to ourselves and living only to please others is no way to live. It is the surest way to thwart your very reason for being alive.
So how do we avoid falling into that trap? I suggest trying out this exercise: List 3 things you are actively pursuing in your life right now and ask yourself the following questions:
1. Are these all coming from your own desires or are they coming from something external to you?
2. Are you pursuing them due to the pressure or expectation of another?
3. Do you still want to pursue them, or do you deep down want to pursue something else that may matter to you more, and if so, what small steps can you take to explore that?
Disappointing someone is not fun. But there is a massive difference between being nice and being kind. Kindness is not weakness. It requires courage to be kind to yourself and set healthy boundaries to ensure you are living your life which is aligned with who you truly are and who you know you ought to be or who you ideally want to become.
Another great take on this topic is from Mark Manson, who wrote an article on it 7 Strange Questions That elp You Find Your Life Purpose. His language may be a bit crass (so apologies for that), however, I am citing it because Manson challenges the idea that purpose is something that can be “found”. Rather, he believes it is something that happens while you are exploring and trying new things –it is created through our actions and choices, and the meaning we assign to them. He encourages us to embrace the “messiness of life,” which I think as lawyers is something we all struggle with.
Letting go of our death grip on the steering wheel of life and learning how to flow with it may not be easy for some. The fear of change is real. But again, what is fear? What I have learned slowly but surely is that by facing my fears, including the fear of letting go of control, is that once you genuinely do it, only good things seem to happen. So maybe the universe is actually our friend and not our enemy. Maybe once we truly let go and learn that truth for ourselves, life begins to look and feel brighter. It certainly is less exhausting.
Not saying it is easy. It is scary to explore or embrace what we are afraid of. Fear, however, is just a feeling after all. We are hard wired to avoid pain and seek pleasure. But that is why it is so necessary to acknowledge the fear but do it anyway. It is on the other side of fear where we will uncover our why. If we never try, we will never know our full potential.
So why not equate embracing our fear with something positive? Why not have faith it will result in good? We tend to get what we expect in life. Believe it and you will receive it. Believe and try to have faith that flowing more with life and embracing the unknown will not produce chaos or disaster in your life but rather a profound sense of calm, peace, meaning and happiness. I came across a great quote on this just yesterday:
“Faith and fear both demand you believe in something you cannot see. You choose.”
- Bob Proctor
For those of you who can muster up the courage to try letting go, I think you will be very pleasantly surprised at how much better you feel and at how much your life, both personal and professional, improves. I know it is counter-intuitive, but so it seems is most of life.
Another very important related concept is our self-talk. I read somewhere that as children we all talked out loud to ourselves. As we grew older and were taught it was unacceptable we then internalized it. Some say we “privatized” our private speech. Personally, I think we might all have been better off had we not done that. Maybe if we said out loud what was going on in our heads, we might better realize how harmful our words were. We might realize what we say to ourselves we would never say to a dear friend. So why do we say it ourselves? We do not deserve that.
What I found to be most helpful to curb negative self-talk is the realization that just because I have a random negative thought pop into my head does not mean it is true, nor am I legally or morally obligated to identify with it or even think about it any further. I get to choose whether to do so. If my thought is helpful I will follow it. If it is harmful I will acknowledge it but not allow it to take me down another rabbit hole of despair.
Another important revelation about self-talk came to me while I was studying the subconscious mind. Most of what we do daily (some say as high as 95%) is governed by our subconscious mind and thus wholly unknown to us. How can we fix something we are not even aware of. Most people (especially stressed out lawyers) know what we need to do be feel better - eat healthier, get more sleep, drink more water, take regular breaks, exercise, be mindful, meditate, breath deeper, be kinder to ourselves and others, be grateful for what we have, stop procrastinating, stop trying to be perfect, focus more on the positive, let go of control, etc. We know what we should be doing. So why don’t we do it?
Most likely the real reason is our subconscious mind does not think we really want any of those things. The issue is not lack of motivation. The real issue is whether we are giving conflicting and faulty instructions to our own subconscious mind, which is then acting upon them – since one of the rules of the subconscious is it does not judge or evaluate the instructions it receives.
The prime directive of the subconscious is to keep you safe, however, it relies upon you to know what is safe for you. If you say to yourself, “this job is killing me” then you are telling your subconscious mind your job is painful. It then believes it must ensure you do not have to do this terrible thing called a job anymore. It assumes you know what is best for you. This is why you may suddenly get sick. Your mind, which governs the operation of your bodily functions will try to ensure your body does not allow you to continue to work. It will stop you from doing what you have told it is harmful to you. This is why I tell my students the most important collaboration in life is not with your partner or your work colleagues, but with yourself and your own subconscious mind.
As lawyers we are experts on words. That is how we serve. It is how we make money to pay our bills. We are masters at it. What would happen if we spent as much time thinking about how we word things at work on how we are wording the things we say to ourselves. Diseased thinking can easily turn into physical disease if left unchecked. It is incumbent upon us to correct our diseased thinking before it manifests in the body.
Our self-talk needs to become precise, detailed, clear and as positive as possible. It is critical to our health and the quality of our life, both personal and professional, that we say we mean and that what we say is actually what we really want.
Being precise with the words we say (both to ourselves and others) reminds me of wonderful book, The Four Agreements, by Don Miguel Ruiz from 1997. The Four Agreements - Wikipedia. Ruiz writes that the #1 agreement we should all keep with ourselves is to be “impeccable with our word.
Another one of Manson’s 7 questions that caused me to think is “what would you do if you knew that you simply could not fail?” Fear is failure is another fear that holds so many of us back from reaching our full potential and having a meaningful and purposeful life.
What if we adopted this as our new approach to life? What if we held a growth mindset and said we are not going to fear failure? It appears to me that this is what the happiest people have figured out. They are not embarrassed by failing. I think this is because not only have they come to learn they do not need external validation to feel worthy (they intrinsically know they are more than good enough), but also because they know that failure is just feedback on their path to achieving whatever success looks like for them. If they fail, they assess what happened, take that information into account, re-adjust, and take another shot. Then it is rinse and repeat over and over until eventually they hit the mark. To such people failure just does not exist. This is growth mindset in action. Please check out Carol Dweck’s seminal work on this: What Having a “Growth Mindset” Actually Means
Manson also says that instead of finding our purpose (which places undue pressure on ourselves) we should instead ask, “what can I do with my time that feels important to me”.
I like that a lot. Another question I love from Manson is, “what is your favorite flavour of pain?” Every pursuit comes with risks and challenges and even pain at times. It is not about how to avoid all that but rather what kind of struggle feels meaningful enough to you to pursue anyway.
Another beautiful and simple approach to finding your purpose is found in the Japanese concept of Ikigai (meaning “the reason for being.”). It asks you to think about 4 key things. It supposes that a full and meaningful life lies at the intersection of where all 4 meet (aka, the “sweet spot”). Here are the 4 things to consider reaching Ikigai:
1) What you love to do? This relates to Manson’s question about what makes you completely lose track of time. What allows you to get out of your head and simply flow and be in the moment with whatever it is that you are doing. We all need to do more of whatever that is for us. For my students I tell them the number one thing to any successful career is enjoying or being interested in the work. Not just doing it for the money but because you are interested in and care about it.
2) What are you good at? This is our expertise or excellence– beyond our competency what do we excel at or what do we want to work hard at to develop our expertise in that area? What do others tell us we are excellent at? Many wise people say the goal in life is to spend our life finding out what our gifts are and then once we do so spend the rest of our life giving them away. Also, there is no law that says we must be an expert in all areas. We all have unique gifts. I think it was Einstein who said that if we judge a fish by how well it climbs a tree it will spend its whole life thinking it’s stupid. Let’s not be a fish who wants to climb a tree. Let’s focus on our true gifts which we were put here to share.
3) What does the world need? This relates to our service. Law is a service profession. That is what we do and why we chose to become lawyers. Ikigai asks us to think deeply about how we want to serve. To me this is getting at our passions. What problems in the world do we want to solve? How can we use our roles to do so? If you are unsure what that is, then just think about what you are compassionate about? Is it the homeless person you pass on the way to work? Is it the push back against inclusion? Is it our planet? What deeply concerns you about what is going in in our world? How can you use your special expertise to help solve the ones that matter to you, no matter how small?
4) What can we also get paid for? We all need to put food on the table and pay the bills – which unfortunately is a reality of our existence- although I will say that this is another worthy area of introspection – how much money do we really need? Again, another topic for another day.
It is a harsh truth that in life struggle and sacrifice are unavoidable. This is the case particularly for lawyers who have put themselves in the line of fire taking on other people’s complex and important legal issues on a daily basis. That is a courageous choice. The research bears out the heavy price to be paid by those who refuse to accept this as truth. I am suggesting we accept this as our reality and stop trying to instinctively avoid all the discomfort in life. What if we were to embrace and accept that every pursuit we have ever done, every challenge we have ever faced, whether personal, or professional, have demanded of us a level of discomfort and hardship.
This acceptance may be liberating. It was for me. It will shift your mindset from seeking a struggle-free or stress-free life to one where you embrace the lessons and growth that come from overcoming the struggle. The key question then becomes, not whether you will face struggle, but rather which ones are you willing to accept and embrace, becoming better and stronger, not in spite of them but because of them.
If you can adopt this mindset or perspective on life, I believe it could ultimately become your secret competitive advantage in your personal and professional lives. It will set you apart from those who shy away from the hard cases or difficult files or clients. You may even want to seek out these sorts of challenges, knowing that doing so will only make you a stronger lawyer and a better human being.
What if the struggle and grind is not there to punish you but rather to test you and give you the opportunity to prove to yourself that you can do it? To allow you to see the power of your own perseverance. What if that is what we start really competing against? Not against each other. But against our own reluctance to push ourselves out of our comfort zones and into growth. The two simply cannot co-exist. It is your choice as to which one to embrace.
By reflecting on your WHY and taking the time to rediscover your purpose (in whatever way that resonates with you), you can create a life and career that feel rich, authentic, and meaningful which will help build a legal profession that prioritizes service, integrity, and community. Reconnecting with your Why, letting go of external validation, healing misalignments, and focusing on a life of service are not quick fixes—they are lifelong commitments. But they are also keys to thriving in law and life. Alignment doesn’t mean life will always be easy, but it gives you the strength, resilience, and joy to meet its challenges head-on.
And remember while it’s never too late to realign, it is also true that tomorrow is never guaranteed. Live today like there is no tomorrow. Let’s all commit to doing one thing to becoming more aligned with what truly matters to us starting today Let’s remember why we started on this journey in the first place. And let’s help each other with this task. We are in this together. From struggle we go stronger. Luctor et emergo.
Wishing you all a wonderful weekend.
Marc.