"Most people live and die with their music still unplayed. They never dare to try."

                       Mary Kay Ash

My ideal client is smart, talented, ambitious and full of energy and wants to be successful but she also wants to embrace her femininity.

She went to law school with an optimistic and ambitious outlook and set of goals.  Her parents told her she could be and do anything she put her mind to.  When she launched into the real world after taking the bar exam, she soon after realized that there are obstacles that she didn't know existed, or that she thought were the stuff of previous generations.

She has some legal experience, but she feels like her experience isn't in line with what she really wants to do and her practice area may even conflict with her own personal values and beliefs.  What's more, her job limits her growth by keeping her in one niche area that she's not particularly fond of, and she doesn't have opportunities to expand her skill set. 

She gets negative feedback but no instruction at work, even when she tries her hardest and does a good job.  Her accomplishments go unnoticed much of the time.  Partners ignore her ideas, leave her behind for all the important marketing and networking functions, and never invite her to lunch even though she sees them taking the guys to lunch all the time.  Forget mentoring.  She can't find a friendly female attorney to help her and the guys seem to have their own club.

She started off her job enthusiastic and ready to shine, and she showed up early and stayed late, and even came in on weekends.  She missed birthday parties, holiday celebrations, trips, vacations, and worked while very sick.  Over time, she didn't see her efforts paying off.  Nobody noticed she was there early.  Her time in the office on weekends wasn't enough.  Taking work home didn't help because all that counted was showtime, and eventually she began to feel like a firefighter living to put out fires, even in her sweaty nightmares that woke her in the middle of the night.

While she has ideas about marketing and putting herself out there, her unique perspective and fresh thoughts are shot down at meetings and she's encouraged to stick to the old happy hours and sporting events.  Then when the big presentations or pitches come up, she's left behind at the office to hold down the fort.  When she does make a contact, her bosses are only too eager to get the contact from her and deny her the credit of any resulting new work.

In the end, she sees her job as a hopeless, dead-end and she knows these partners are never going to let her be herself and shine the way only she can, and they are never going to make her partner.  Frankly, she doesn't know if partner means anything to her or if she wants to make partner, and she knows she doesn't want to be partners with them.

Little sexist comments and behaviors crop up and seem to be the way the legal world works.  A partner who "jokingly" wants to know if she's trained in massage, one who asks if she's planning on having kids and quitting the practice (as if there aren't other options), another who just can't seem to stop asking when she's getting married and moving away every time she has a date.  Implicit expectations arise that she drink a little more and dance with the clients at happy hour because that's how you get business, and she's told she can't come to certain outings because it's just guys and then they can't make jokes or swear or comment on other women...that just wouldn't be fun for the clients.

At work, if she cries she's weak and if she gets angry or stands up for herself she's a bitch with anger-management issues.  So on bad days she goes to get a fresh mocha and wipe away her tears before coming back for more of the same. 

She plays her life like the movie Groundhog Day, repeating the same scenes over and over, knowing there has to be something better out there, but needing the paycheck to keep the student loans at bay and not having free time to find another job or find her passion.  So, she gets in the car early in the morning, fights traffic, listens to the secretaries gossip and fight, puts out fires all day, takes the harsh criticism, says "sure thing" to all the last-minute briefs and road trips for hearings out of town in blizzards, gets tattled on for being out to lunch just a tad more than an hour, settles a few cases here and there, makes a few nice connections with some clients who like her because they can see she's a person but gets lectured about how she needs to shorten her phone calls to be more productive, and then she gets back in the car to fight traffic to get home in just enough time to eat, clean up dishes and go to bed to start it all over the next day.  She's constantly running on adrenaline and dreaming of a calmer existence.

My ideal client wonders what all the talk about how versatile a J.D. is and about "alternative careers" and wants to know what that really means, because she can't find anything that looks any better on those lists or in those books and every time she applies for something other than a legal job they tell her they aren't hiring lawyers but they'll keep her resume.  They just can't seem to understand why a lawyer wouldn't want to be a lawyer, or would want to be anything else.

She wants to know where her dreams went.  She wants to know why she sold out for a crappy view of the interstate highway out the 20th floor window for a salary that isn't even impressive.  Heck, she's just breaking even.  Most of all, she wants to know where she went...what happened to her, and she wants to get herself back or at least step into the new self that she gets to define and embrace, femininity and all.

She wants to stop pleasing others.  She wants to stop living someone else's script.  She wants to stop worrying what her parents, spouse, and friends will think.  She wants a do-over or a make-over, or to just have the charade over.

She's ready to get real, to make her own game, and to use every strength and advantage she has to begin a career that aligns with her values, talents and goals.  She's ready to feel better about every decision that brought her to today.  She just doesn't know where to start or what it might look like.

Now, this may not be you in every paragraph, but I bet you're in a sentence or two.  I bet you wonder where your dreams went, how you can empower yourself to do what you want to do in life, how you got so far off the path you thought you were on, and how you can get back  to being the you that decided to go to law school at 22 years old.  If any part of this story resonates with you, you may be my ideal client.