#330: Re-Choosing Your Life

Re-Choosing Your Life

Here's a transcription of this episode:

Today we are talking about the concept of re your life. If you think you can't, if you think you don't know how, listen to this episode, I'm gonna give you everything you need to know.

Hi, I'm Dina Cataldo, a master coach and ex criminal prosecutor. I created Be a Better Lawyer Podcast for driven lawyers like you who want more from life than sitting behind a desk.

You've been playing by other people's rules.

Those rules have left you overwhelmed.

Unfulfilled and feeling like a hamster on a wheel. I've been there. I was doing everything people told me to do to be successful, working late nights, weekends, and trying to make everyone happy. So why wasn't I happy and I wanted more in life? When was I going to find time to find and pursue that? Well, I did. And I'm sharing with you my secrets to living a happier and more fulfilling life.

This podcast gives you a lifetime of wisdom, mindset, principles, and bedrock strategies to give you unshakeable confidence, more time to pursue your goals, a powerful sense of purpose to uplevel your life and law practice and so much more. These are things we were never taught in law school. This podcast bridges the gap between law, school and life. I'm so glad you're here. Let's get started.

Welcome my friend. How are you doing today? So this concept of re your life is something that I struggled with for a very long time and I didn't fully understand the power that is in re my life every area of my life until I started recognizing the amazing shifts I was making.

So if you feel stressed out or overwhelmed in your work, if you feel anxious, if you are feeling like things are just so hard and how do I change things? I want to encourage you to really take this episode to heart. Because when you start really thinking about, do I love every aspect of my life? Am I choosing things I want to choose?

Because sometimes you're not going to love every aspect of your life, but are you forcing yourself like a square peg in a round hole to grind through your life?

There's a big difference because I can choose something that maybe isn't my favorite thing to do, but I do it because the larger picture of my life, wow, I love it. I absolutely love it.

There might be things on my calendar that I don't wanna do, but I do them anyway because I have a bigger picture for my life. I have a bigger picture of service and being able to be my full self in the world. And that is something that I have chosen to do because I see how impactful it is. So I wanna share this with you, this concept of re your life, because so often I'll talk to lawyers who tell me they have no choice.

They have no choice but to take that client because of the money.

They have no choice but to work 80 hours a week because that's just what the office requires.

And they haven't recognized the choices that they've made to get to the point where they are now and recognize, Hey, yeah, that was a choice and I get to make new choices. That's the position I was in. I literally thought I had no choice. I was a prosecutor. I was working 50 to 70 hour weeks. I had no choice but to work the hours I was working. I had no choice but to, you know, keep figuring out ways to make it work. Whether that meant cutting out parts of my life, whether it meant grabbing a quick snack instead of a healthy meal, whether that meant skipping the gym, whether that meant skipping out on fun in my life. And all of it was in service to the work where my brain said, you have no choice. And it was so apparent to me that I had abdicated all responsibility for all of the choices I had made and all of my future choices by staying in the position I was in.

And this was really apparent when I wanted to start a business and there was a part of me that said, no, you can't do it because you don't have time. You need to work harder at your current work in order to create finances, in order for you to fuel your business. And it was just like this back and forth, back and forth. And it never got me moving in the direction I wanted it to go until I decided, no, I have a choice. I get to rechoose how I live my life.

I get to rechoose my morning routine.

I get to rechoose how I treat myself. I get to rechoose the people that I spend time around.

Do I wanna spend time around people who aren't kind to me?

Do I wanna spend time around? You know that guy who was a jerk <laugh> and I was just like, wow, I have no choice.

Versus when I took that all back and I recognize, wait, I have choices.

I can walk away. I can create steps and take those steps to move towards creating a business. I can take steps to distance myself from people who don't serve me and who maybe are negative that don't fuel my passions. And those kinds of choices aren't easy choices, but they were fulfilling choices. And when we don't honor ourselves and rechoose our life based on what is going to fulfill us, we are going to die a little bit every single day. We're gonna feel more depleted, we're gonna feel more like we cannot do it. And our brain just repeats that thought, I can't do it. I I hear you Dina, but I can't do it. It's just you don't understand my particular circumstance. I can't do it. I have kids, I have responsibilities.

I have a mortgage.

Yeah, I get it. I did too. I did too.

It's not easy.

And it's not an overnight decision.

It starts with a single step, which is simply acknowledging that you made choices to place you where you are right now, whether you like it or not, the place you are right now, those were made by your decisions. And this is not to use this against yourself to beat yourself up. Like, oh, I shouldn't have gone to law school. I shouldn't have chose that job. I should have done this. I should have done that. That's not what this is about. In fact, if you notice yourself doing that, pause and take a breath. Because when we beat ourselves up, it just beats us into submission and tells us, well keeps stuffing that square peg into the round hole. Just keep doing it. It does not encourage us to move forward.

It does not encourage us to rechoose our life. So when you just acknowledge like, yeah, I, I made choices here.

I actually want this to feel empowering because when you recognize that you've made choices to be where you are, that means you can make choices to go in a different direction. It means you have the power already to make new choices. It's just you're not tapping into it. You're not tapping into that capability that you have. You made decisions along the way and sometimes they just felt like accidents. But you made a choice. You made a choice.

Oftentimes, sometimes I'll say when I started working at the DA's office that it was just kind of happenstance. I walked into this office to do a clinical in my, in my law school and they said, oh, what do you like doing? And I said, I, I like writing.

And they hooked me up with the DA's office, which sounds entirely different because I wasn't doing a ton of writing, I was doing more court work, right?

I started doing more writing as you know, I got into trials, but it's not something that I necessarily would associate with enjoying writing. And I didn't accidentally go in there. I chose to go into the clinical, I chose to try out the DA's office.

I chose to stay at the DA's office and I chose to continue being there until I decided to leave. And those were all choices that I made. I can't delegate my choices to other people. It's always gonna be based on my choice. So let me put this in example to what I often hear from my clients, which is, well, I don't have a choice. Like I had to take on this client for financial reasons.

And sometimes it's true, but most of the time I find it's not true, right?

Because it might be a completely different practice area or this is a person that you already know, they are not someone who's a good fit for your practice. And yet you might be saying yes to them.

Or you might be saying yes to picking up the phone and talking to a client versus saying, Hey, I can't talk right now, but I would love to set up an appointment so that we can talk further. Or having your assistant, you know, route it to an assistant to pick up the phone.

These kinds of things are choices. But often we get into this helpless mentality of, I can't make a choice. It's not up to me. I had to do it. We don't have to do anything. I like to bring up this example because it's so, it's so mind bendy, which is even if you have kids, you don't have to pick up your kids from school.

You don't have to. A lot of people don't. A lot of people don't pick up their kids from school. Now, are there consequences to not picking up your kids from school? Absolutely.

But I want you to know it's a choice. And you're making that choice. Because no matter what time you're taking off or the time you're taking out of your day to do it, you are making a conscious choice to pick up your child.

Like this is not something that is an accident. This is not something you have to do. So I wanna just offer up this recognition that you have made choices in the past and you can make choices for your future.

This is not something that is even, this is not even something that is debatable.

And this is, hey, you made choices and now you can make new choices. You can do this in every single area of your life, whether it's your friends, whether it's your family.

I have actually seen this, you know, in my, my family, both of my parents made choices to disconnect from their families. And was that easy? No. And they made their lives, they designed their lives intentionally to cut out those parts that were not serving them or their relationship. So you get to make choices. This is a beautiful thing.

We have freedom of choice.

And as long as you're telling yourself you don't have the ability to choose, you're powerless. And you never change. I hear this all the time. I'll hear somebody say, oh, I'd really like to start my own practice, but I just can't. It's just too scary. Okay, that's your choice. But you're also choosing a hard, right? Because both of those choices are hard. Whether you decide to stay in your current practice or start to a new practice, both of those charge choices are hard.

If you decide to stay in your current practice, even though you feel unfulfilled and you have this burning desire to do something else, it's hard to acknowledge that you gave gave up on that. It's hard to acknowledge that you made that choice and that you feel unfulfilled because you didn't go in that other direction. It's hard to wonder what if, what if I had made a different choice? And then there's the heart of starting a business and then leaving.

It's a different kind of hard, but it's a more fulfilling hard.

I know this from my experience because even though it was hard and I needed to really look at some things that I hadn't looked at, like my finances, I needed to look at the actual numbers I needed to look at the facts of it doesn't make sense for me to leave right now.

Or how can I arrange my time so I can take calls and do my day job? How do I do that? How do I figure that out?

That was hard, but I made the choice to do it because it led me in the direction of something that felt more soul fulfilling. And then when it came to actually leaving my job, that was another kind of hard, I needed to just say, okay, let's just do it. Let's just put in my resignation.

I actually gave myself six months. I told my boss like six months in advance. I'm like, okay, in six months I'm leaving. 'cause Then I'm like, okay, I gave myself a date I can prepare myself mentally in six months. And so I turned in my letter of rec resignation six months before I actually left. And it was, it worked out the way it needed to work out.

And it's not easy to go out on your own because there's lots of unknowns, right? How much, you know, what am I making? And then you need to create the ability, the capability of creating revenue on your own and taking initiative and promoting yourself.

And those are all other things that you are learning.

And that can be hard.

But when you choose your hard, you choose it based on what feels like it lights you up the most.

Yeah, it's hard, but oh my gosh, I can't wait to start my own business.

This is where I'm supposed to go. So as long as you are honoring yourself, any hard you choose is going to be the right hard. But if you are staying in a hard, because it feels normal and safe, and this is just, you know, this is what everybody else is doing. Or my parents always told me like, you should be a lawyer.

Or my parents always told me, you know, you've gotta do life this way. And you're surrounding yourself with people who are like saying you're crazy. Don't think about it.

Don't think about leaving. Like you've got it good and you listen to them. You are also making a choice there or listening to them. 'cause I also had people telling me like, are you sure you wanna do this?

And I, I said, yes, I am doing this.

And I knew deep down that that was the direction I needed to go because it felt right what I was doing felt like trying to push myself into being a person. I didn't wanna be, I didn't want to be around the horrible things that people do to each other. Like if you are a da <laugh>, you, you're listening to this, there are things in this world that I don't wanna surround myself with.

I don't wanna surround myself with those things. So I was choosing to surround myself with those things.

And then I chose a different path, one where I get to help people who wanna change, who wanna follow their goals, who wanna follow their dreams and change their mindset so that they can create what they wanna create.

And that is so fulfilling because I get to help them, whether it's managing their time so that they can open themselves to up to possibilities, whether it's spending more time with their family, starting a family, that's a big one. Or even creating a new business, right? The these are the things that I get to do now because I help people recho their lives. And to me, that fills me up. Even if there are nights where I'm like, wow, you know, I'm working a little late tonight, but it feels so good.

Like in a really fulfilling way, not in a kind where I need in the past, where I was a lawyer, where I needed validation, right?

I was working so that I could get approval from people in the office.

For me.

Now if I'm up late, it's like, yeah, this is great.

This feels right, this feels so good. And there's a big difference. And when we don't believe we have a choice to feel the way that we feel when we believe we don't have a choice to do anything differently, we rob ourselves of that opportunity to feel fulfilled, to feel into the person we are meant to be. So that is the first thing, is recognizing you have a choice. Recognizing that you've made choices in the past and that you can make choices in the future. The second thing that I wanna share with you about re choosing your life is that you don't have to just turn your life upside down.

You start with little things and you show your brain, ah, yes, okay, this feels good.

This is the right thing. Even though it's hard, I'm choosing a hard, even though this feels hard, this feels good. Like it feels like the right thing. And that was for me, and I bring this up a lot because this was a big turning point in my life. You might have a totally different turning point, but when I decided I was tired of feeling rushed and overwhelmed and panicked in the morning and hitting my snooze button 10 times and feeling like I was just like a crazy ball of fire trying to get out the door in the morning, I didn't like how that felt.

And I decided to re-choose how I felt in the morning. And for me, I was like, okay, well what do I want? What do I want?

I, I got awareness around an area of my life that I want to re-choose. And then what do I want to feel? Well, I wanted to feel calm. I wanted to feel present. I wanted to feel like I, you know, had the opportunity to sit with my coffee, to, to read if I wanted to, to journal if I wanted to, to whatever I wanted to do. I wanted that. And so then I got into the process of, okay, well what do I do next?

Okay, well let's rechoose how I start my morning. And it didn't happen overnight.

I didn't suddenly stop how, you know, stop turning off my snooze alarm.

What I started doing was picking little things. It's like, okay, well what could I change?

Okay, well, I changed one thing, which was put my phone in the kitchen, which made it real difficult to stay in my bedroom.

So I got up and I would turn it off in the kitchen. And then once I was up, I decided, okay, look, I am not going back to bed. I'm not going back to bed. I'm not going back to bed. Because at first I started to go right back to bed and I'd fall asleep and I'd go through that same process over again. And it felt horrible. And so I said, okay, no.

Now we gotta recho how I do this.

The next choice is not going back to bed and telling myself, no, we're not gonna go back to bed. We're gonna just start the coffee and we're gonna get moving even if we're moving really slowly. And that is how you change things, is you start re choosing those things in your life you dislike. And you start saying, well, what do I want? And you start to clarify that.

You start to just say, do I like waking up like this in the morning?

Do I like the foods I'm eating at lunchtime?

Do I like the people I'm spending time around?

Do I like when I drink four glasses of wine in the evening?

Do I like and fill in the blank?

You're choosing your life. The easy fruit to grab for me was where I felt panicked and overwhelmed and just like I, I was just on fire. My whole body, I recognized that was so painful for me and I decided to rechoose what I wanted. And when I started to rechoose and like rechoose, all the little things I did within that one habit of waking up in the morning, rechoose when I wake up, when rechoose, when I went to sleep, recho, did I drink alcohol the night before when I used to drink alcohol, right?

It's like those are the things that I decided to change just little things at a time. And then when I was drinking alcohol and I recognized, wait a minute, when I drink alcohol, I don't like how I feel when I wake up.

I notice that I'm actually really dragging for a couple days after I've drunk alcohol. Well, what do I wanna change? Well, let me try this. Let me try white wine instead of red wine. Let me try beer. And, and I didn't like beer <laugh>, but like I changed all these things and I'm like, th none of this is working. None of this negotiation is working for me, so I just need to stop. And I stopped. But that took time. It took negotiation and it was hard. But I chose my hard, I could have chosen the hard of dragging for days. I could have chosen the hard of not building my business because those days I was giving them away to the alcohol.

And that one evening of fun. And then I was feeling horrible about myself. So that was one hard. And then the other hard was, okay, I'm gonna give up this thing that I have been attached to for so long that has really been part of my identity, because this is something that all of my friends do. I'm gonna choose that hard because in service of my fulfillment and service of my higher way of being and what I really want in my life and what I wanna choose, this hard's way better, this hard at least gets me in the direction I wanna go. But if I'm choosing a hard that is not to my benefit, then I am hurting myself. I'm choosing to stay stuck where I am and I'm choosing not to go after what I really want. And so those are the things that if you feel stuck right now, if you want something bigger, you are choosing what direction you go.

You're choosing whether or not to stay in that feeling of maybe disappointment or shame or, or guilt or, or just like this regret of not following what you want and you're choosing that. Or you can rechoose, you can rechoose every little corner of your life. Who are you married to, who you are friends with, who you have in your life, the neighborhood you live in, right? Anything in your life, you are choosing it and you get to rechoose it. And it doesn't happen overnight. But when you start making choices in the direction you wanna go in the most, so soul fulfilling way that you can, things start changing. Everything starts shifting. You start showing yourself your capabilities, you begin taking action and you start seeing the domino effect. Because once you make time for yourself, once you, let's say for me, change my morning routine, I recognized, oh, wait a minute, I can change anything.

I can decide that this is the time that I use in the morning to figure out what I wanna do with my life. I can use this time in the morning to do nothing. I get to choose that. And recognizing you have a choice is so powerful because when you recognize you have a choice, even when the two choices feel hard, you're recognized that you have the power to say, yes, I want this and I don't want this. And then you go on the path. And the phrase I love the most is the one that's said by Don Juan, which is choose the path with heart. And you cannot go wrong when you choose a path with heart. And so often in the legal profession, we're taught to just ignore what we want, grind through it. This is how it's supposed to be as a lawyer.

And we listen to all the people around us and we look at everyone around us, and everyone around us is experiencing the same thing. And we tell ourselves, this is the way it is. Let's, let's just make the best of it. You are making a choice. You don't have to make that the best of anything. You can decide to do new things. You can decide to take your life in a whole new direction. You could become a painter. And the, when I heard myself like tell myself, oh, there's all these different things I could do. My brain was fixated on money, which is fine. Like that's a natural thing. And so when I was thinking about money, that's what I was like, well, does this make money? Does this make money? Does this make money? But that felt horrible. It felt horrible. And as long as I was making money as a lawyer, I could experiment.

I could say, okay, well let's try this, let's try this. And I tried like a dozen different things. And then I found coaching and I was like, this is amazing. This is amazing. I gotta figure out how to make this work. And so sometimes the choice is to experiment. And that was the what I needed to choose. I needed to choose that there were other things out there in the world. I had to believe that and just say, okay, I choose to figure this out. I choose to try things. I choose to take action just to see, just to see is there a possibility for me anywhere else? And now, look, after several years I left my legal career of like 16 years and I walked out the door. And I'm not saying you have to walk out the door of your legal practice to make a new choice, but I just wanna ask you to consider, are you making the choices that feel the most soul fulfilling for you? And if you want help really sifting through your life, understanding more who you are, and being able to make more choices that help you recho a life that you love, a practice that you love, a business that you love, I wanna invite you to book a strategy session with me. You can book at dina cataldo.com/strategy session. Alright my friend, I hope this gives you some food for thought because when you recho your life, you can recho a life that you absolutely love. Alright my friend, I'll talk to you next week. Bye.