Lawlady's Divorce Blog

Home for Christmas

Happy Holiday Greetings from the Boise Library. I'm home visiting my family for the holidays. Boise doesn't change much, and yet it does change. There is the Connector now bisecting the center of town with a freeway that can get you from one side to the other. This is new. Parts of town have bigger and better houses than before. But the Chinese restaurant where I ate dinner in high school with my boyfriend is still open up near Fairview Avenue. Do you have a home that is permanent and a place you regularly return to? Or is your sense of home, a new place that didn't exist for you 20, 30, 40 years ago? I know that some people count their friends or special people as their home base and regularly check in. I think the benefit of a long term sense of home is that it provides a reference point in life. It's nice to have a time or a place that you can regularly return to that gives a guage of how you are developing. I have a friend from junior high school that I go long periods without seeing. Every few years we have several days together. From the vantage point of spending time with her, I notice in myself if I am achieving what I hoped to achieve, am I living within my values, have I gained weight, do I feel more confident and comfortable, and a series of other questions. As you emerge out of this year into the next, I hope that you find a patch of time to check back with yourself to go inward and evaluate your performance and direction of life. They say that many Americans lack a deeper or spiritual connection to life. We spend too much money at Malls because we are filling a void that we think can be filled with beautiful objects and cool shiny new things. The objects can't give us, at the deepest level, those things that we crave. In the end, if you wait long enough, all those interesting new things end up garage sale items. That can be a sad day when you realize your dream-- the one you had at the store-- didn't really come true in the way you had planned. May this holiday season, you find the inner light of satisfaction-- and with that inner satisfaction the sense of time collapsing and everything settling just as it should be, unfinished projects and all. Blessings to you this holiday. Stefani

Astrology and Career

Here is a string of comments that happened between Curt Rosengren and I.  (Is it plagerism to lift this from his blog?!@!)

From me to CurtRosengren.typepad.com (a must-visit blog).

Curt- I really enjoyed this exercise. I tried it on my blog, Lawlady.typepad.com. The only thing is... I think I don't understand what a story is... Or, I wrote some freaky story with an ending that seems sort of morose. What is the moral or punch line to a typical or great career story?

His post/comment back: 

Hi Stefani. Fun to read that.

Re your question, I can only answer it - as I typically do - with another question. What would the moral or punch line to a great career story be for YOU? Because it truthfully doesn't matter what I think would be a great punch line, since I'm not the one living your life. What is it that YOU want it to look like?

Which brings me to my next thought. Your story doesn't sound like it's finished. It sounds like it has actually just reached the beginning.

Now is when it starts to get interesting.

  I responded with this email. He encouraged me to post this, swear words and all.

As the astrologer said, the top of your chart is your career house. After Saturn - the planet that kicks your butt into gear - finishes with your career, it moves on to kick you in the butt in your acquarian zones of influence, humanitarian concerns, places where you team up with others to pursue goals and values that have special meaning for you. Essentially, it's no longer about your career but doing what you
love that you feel is highly important, but the focus becomes more on personal fulfillment, not so much career advancement. Blah, blah, blah... I can see the wholistic career schtick coming right back at me. Isn't that just when your career gets interesting, right when you quit giving a fuck what anyone thinks and do it for love, for your own sanity. 

Career Perspective: Get Some Distance

eCurt Rosengren of CurtRosengren.typepad.com is one of my favorite career writers. He's a contributor to a fabulous career magazine:  Worthwhile.  Today he writes about the benefits of telling your career story as if you were discussing a third person.  In a nutshell, tell your story as if you were talking about someone else.

I'll do my own life as an example for you (and as an exercise is personal growth for me). 

The Lawlady's  8 year Career Adventure:  In 1997 the Lawlady (although she wasn't called that then) was finally fed enough, and despairing enough, to do something about her career malaise.  She quit her cushy, part-time insurance defense job with no new job in sight.  Rather than blow her $13,000 car accident settlement money on a trip to Indian to "find herself" she decided she would take a sabbatical from work and figure out her true career path.  She told herself each day when she would get scared, "I'll trust that if I am industrious every day applying my talents, skills and interests, the Universe will reward me and put me to work doing something people will pay for."  The same month that she quit without a new job, she also began an intense meditation practice. Essentially, she was going to make "finding God" a bigger priority during this time off of work.

Fast forward.  Lots of struggling and dark thoughts.  Why is it that periods of unemployment scare us so much?  The mediation classes helped her combat a dark, foul mood that lingered longer than it should have.  Sometimes along the 8 year journey, she would get buzzy insights about work and the way the law could be better; how to blend spirituality and law; and how to weave divorce ritual into the law.  Sometimes she was patently arrogant and missed making valuable connections that could lead her to better speaking gigs, or part-time trainings with more senior family law attorneys.  She clearly wasn't perfect, but she did enjoy a moonlighting stint as a romance columnist for a cheesy, local women's paper, and got to experiment with different modalities for doing divorce. Her work was mostly on the fringe of the mainstream divorce community, so she could explore and try new techniques, blending counseling styles learned during her mediation trainings and at the various self-help trainings she had attended in the past.

After a few false starts with different groups, she eventually found her niche with collaborative divorce. This wasn't a theory of divorce practice she developed herself, but it did have a well established base of practitioners in other states.  She paired with a better known local attorney and they grew Washington's first collaborative law practice up to about 65 paid members, training about 100 lawyers, mediators and allied professionals in the state. She presented for the WSBA and King County Bar Association on the topic, culminating in a year of busy speaking gigs including a presentation on Divorce Ritual to the International Alliance of Collaborative Practitioners.  Then suddenly at the end of the 7th year, she abruptly quit her co-presidency of the local Washington collaborative law group she had founded, and left to buy and renovate a Tudor House in the Roosevelt neighborhood, a few blocks from Whole Foods and East West Bookstore- natural business allies.  The decision to quit NW Collaborative Law (her collaborative law baby) and buy the new facility was a snap decision which is odd for someone who normally makes more thoughtful, meditative decisions. 

Or maybe is wasn't so snap.  Or maybe is wasn't so unusual. In retrospect, the decision to quit 8 years earlier without a job could be called snap. 

What was surprising is that the move to the new location didn't come with a sense of thrill and excitement, as she thought it would.  It was more challenging and difficult.  After the first frenzied year, she felt more disillusioned with the purchase. 

She consulted with an astrologer about the issue.  "You reached the pinnacle.  You set a goal for yourself and achieved it.  The firework display has happened.  Now its time to take your reputation and influence and take yourself down off the mountain top. It's your choice how you get down."

"Wow," she thought, "that's heavy." 

"Go do something you really want to do,"  were his parting words to her.