Sarah Cottrell: Hi and welcome to The Former Lawyer Podcast. I'm your host, Sarah Cottrell and on this show I interview former lawyers to hear their inspiring stories about how they left the law behind to find careers and lives that they love let's get right to the show.

Hello, hello, everyone. I'm so excited that you're here this week because I'm sharing my conversation with Goli Kalkhoran. Goli worked as a lawyer at a firm and then as a federal public defender. She quit the law, started her own business. She now has a podcast called Lessons from a Quitter where she interviews people, both lawyers and non-lawyers, about leaving their careers for other careers and finding a life that they love. I am super excited for you to hear this because she and I are very aligned in our thinking about your career as a lawyer and what you should be aiming for in your career and in your life. Let's get to the conversation.

Hi, Goli. Welcome to The Former Lawyer Podcast.

Goli Kalkhoran: Thank you so much for having me. I'm so excited to be here.

Sarah Cottrell: I am so excited to have you here as well. I know we were just talking about this but when I was setting up the social media for Former Lawyer, your account was one of the first accounts that I found when I was looking for what other former lawyers are out there and I was like, “Oh, this person, they understand where I'm coming from.” Let's start with you introducing yourself to the listeners and we'll go from there.

Goli Kalkhoran: Sure. I don't know how much of an introduction you want but my name is Goli Kalkhoran. I was a lawyer for about seven years. I was in Biglaw for just under two years, very short period of time, and then I was a federal public defender for a number of years. Then in 2014 when I had my first son, I decided after a year of really going back and forth and a lot of soul searching and introspection that it was time for me to leave the law.

That started this journey that I've been on since 2014. Now five years of jumping into entrepreneurship, starting a business that I knew nothing about and then that ultimately led me to this podcast that I have called Lessons from a Quitter, which, like you were just saying, Sarah, I love that there are people now coming out to talk about this stuff because I felt very lost when I was leaving and I really wanted examples of other people that had left behind this identity in life that they had created because they just weren't happy.

I really wanted to create that space for people to show that it's okay to start over and it's okay to admit that you're not happy and to make a change. I started Lessons from a Quitter where we interview people about the same things. It's not just limited to lawyers but there tends to be a lot of lawyers because shockingly there are a lot of unhappy lawyers. I interview people who have left and started a new career.

Sarah Cottrell: Yes. It's great. Everyone who's listening, if you haven't listened, you should go listen because I completely agree with you that it's one of those things that I wish had been out there. My vision for The Former Lawyer Podcast really came out of my own experience where I was like, “I wish there was something like this,” and then now I hear from people either, “I'm so glad this is out there” or “I wish this was out there when I was thinking about leaving.”

Let's go all the way back to when you first decided to go to law school. Can you talk to me a little bit about why you went to law school in the first place?

Goli Kalkhoran: Yeah, sure. I don't know whether it's strange or not, I guess it is, I was one of those people who had made up my mind at the ripe old age of 10 or 11 that I was going to be a lawyer. I literally never wavered, not once. I never thought about anything else. I never picked another profession that I might be interested in. I basically just put my head down.

I was good in school. I think it helps you get on these paths that some other people have for you, you just don't question it because you're being praised and praise is like a drug, especially to a people pleaser like myself. I felt like I'm doing everything right. I'm getting good grades. I went to college. I got into a great law school and I just never questioned it.

I would say, I’m unlike a lot of people I think that go to law school who, on my podcast I talk to a lot of people and they tend to get to the end of college and not know what they want to do and they just decide to pick and they think, “Oh, maybe law school,” I wasn't like that. I really was excited and I was all in. I did moot court and debate teams. I was very much into doing trial work. Even like law school, I’m one of the rare people who loved law school. I just felt like this is my path. I'm on the right path. This is going to be it. This is going to be awesome.

Then I became a lawyer and things did not turn out that well. But that was my initial thing. I honestly don't even know where it came from. My grandfather was a lawyer but he passed when I was five so I didn't have any modeled lawyers in my family and yet I had just stuck to this decision and went full force of it.

Sarah Cottrell: Yeah. I had a somewhat similar story in that there weren't really any lawyers in my family or in my immediate surroundings growing up so I didn't really know that much about what being a lawyer entailed. But by the time I got to law school, I was definitely like, “Yes, I'm supposed to be a lawyer.” I'm not sure on what basis I came to that conclusion.

You said you worked at a firm first and then you were with the federal public defender. At what point in that process did you start to think, “Hey, maybe this is really not for me”? When you were still at the firm, was that already something that was percolating around or did it take longer than that?

Goli Kalkhoran: Yeah, no, it definitely wasn't at the firm because, like I said, I had gone to law school with a lot of very strong beliefs of what I wanted to do. I never went to law school to make a lot of money, that just never was something that I really cared that deeply about. I knew I was going to do some public interest or government work or public sector. I didn't know what it was but I'd gone to law school to help the voiceless and do something that I felt very passionate about.

When I was at law school, I wasn't even planning on interviewing with law firms. I had no interest in being in a law firm and the only reason I did it to be honest is that when I got to crunching the numbers and thinking about it while I was there and I was talking to some friends and it was like, “I could get a summer internship,” and everybody talked about these law firms, you would get paid a ridiculous amount for three months of basically partying. You don't really do anything as a summer associate. It was getting $20,000, $30,000 to just go for a couple of months and work at these law firms.

At the time, I think the one smart thing I did was I was very conscious of my loans. Because I knew I always wanted to work in public interest, I wanted to minimize my loans as much as possible. I didn't want to have to worry about paying back so much so I tried to always take out the minimum and really live as frugally as I could so I didn't have to take out too many law school loans.

I just thought, “This is a pretty smart idea to go after my second year to a law firm so I can basically not take out many loans for my third year because I could just use that money to pay for most of my third year,” which is what I did, and then I ended up just getting sucked in. I really actually loved law firm. I was at the office and I just thought, “Maybe I'll go for a year and pay back the rest of my loans and then not have to worry about loan forgiveness programs and all these other hoops you have to jump through. Then I can leave with no loans and I can go do the thing I want to do.”

When I was at the law firm, I knew it wasn't going to be for me. I knew I wasn't going to like it and so I never really took that as to mean I don't like law. I kept thinking I just have to get through this to go do the thing that I love to do and really find what my calling is. I wasn't surprised that I was unhappy at the law firm. I accepted that, I was like, “I'm going to do my time here and then I'm going to leave.” It wasn't until I went to the federal public defenders where I really started thinking, “Huh, maybe it's not just about that position. Maybe law is just not right for me.”

Sarah Cottrell: Can you talk a little bit more about what it was about the job that you just felt wasn't a good fit? Because I do think there is sometimes this narrative out there where people think, “Oh, well, I don't like firm work but I might like this other type of legal work.” Certainly, I think that can absolutely be true for some people but obviously, that wasn't your experience. I'd love to know more about what was going on there.

Goli Kalkhoran: Sure. I think that we tend to want to look at the good parts or the positive things, and you want to, I don't mean to say I was looking at things through rose-colored glasses, I had chosen this, I worked really hard to get this degree, and I knew that it was a vehicle to be able to help people and so I never really stopped I think to understand, like I said, I didn't have lawyers in my family, I didn't have any lawyers even in the vicinity of my family and friends and so I didn't really understand what the day-to-day looked like.

Once I got to the federal public defenders, what I really started realizing is that while I do love helping people, I hate the day-to-day of this. I should say at the federal public defenders, I wasn't doing trial work, I was doing federal habeas appeals for death penalty clients in Arizona so it was emotionally charged but it was also just, like most litigation, 12-hour days alone in office writing, and I am a very extroverted outgoing person. I thrive on interacting with people.

I started realizing that most of litigation, obviously most of law, is you sitting by yourself behind a computer, working insane numbers of hours, and doing very either intense or emotionally-draining work. I was doing the same thing, I kept thinking honestly even when I had my son and I left on maternity leave, I had no intention of quitting. We were going to move from Arizona back to California and I had every intention of going to another legal job because I just never even thought that it was possible for me to leave. I just felt this dread that this is what it is. I hate the day-to-day but at least I can maybe help some people.

But I think the more I sat and thought about it, I was like, “I actually just don't like what I'm doing.” I like certain parts of it and yeah, maybe 10% of it where I get to interact with clients or I get to do this part where I feel like it is very meaningful. That's great, but the other 90% is literally killing me slowly because it's not only the working insane hours, working alone, now looking back I realized how detrimental the adversarial system was for me. I just didn't like being in constant fight mode and conflict mode and, “Oh, the prosecutor did this, now we have to win out.” It's like being petty and each side is just doing things to bother the other side.

There's no real actual reason. I would constantly have anxiety about this stuff. I get fired up very quickly. I think why I debate is I thought I liked this conflict stuff and I just got to a place where it was honestly weighing down on me emotionally so much where I was like, “I just don't have the energy to do this. I don't have energy to constantly fight.” Obviously, I was doing death penalty appeals and so the stakes were very high when somebody's life on the line. When you feel you're doing things that are just petty or the prosecutors just doing things just to piss you off, I was like, “What are we doing? What is this game? Why are we doing this?”

I think I had these grand visions, as most people do, when you want to make a change and you want to help and then you start realizing you're just a cog in this wheel, you're not going to make any difference. It's just the most unfair, horrible system. It's really, really emotionally difficult to keep being a part of that and realizing that maybe you can help in one situation in a very small way but on the grand scale of things, you're not really doing much but being a part of this.

I think all that really got me to a place of thinking that even if I go to another job, it's going to be more of this, it’s going to be me working insane hours, it's going to be me sitting in a room by myself, it's going to be me working in a place where it's tit for tat and everybody is trying to one-up each other. I don't want any of that.

Sarah Cottrell: Yeah. I think you're so right that your personality really does matter, especially if you're doing litigation. I'm definitely more introverted but I had the same issue with just not liking always having to be in conflict mode like you were saying. Because some people I think can do that and it doesn't really affect them very much, but that was just not me. It sounds like it wasn't you either.

I listened to another interview that you did and I can't remember which one it was but I know that you mentioned something along the lines of how normalized misery was. I would love for you to talk about that a little bit and share what you meant by that.

Goli Kalkhoran: Yeah, absolutely. Just to go back, I definitely think that personalities matter and maybe if you have a personality, a lot of people may want to sit in a room by themselves, that is really great. I actually don't think there's a personality that really likes to constantly be fighting. Even if you do, I would imagine that there is some trauma or something that you're dealing with from your childhood, or whatever, that has put you into that fight-or-flight mode where you want to fight constantly. Because I think that is something that is exhausting for everybody.

I just think that a lot of us have just accepted that that is what the profession is and so we've dealt with it. But it's not until you leave that you start realizing how insane it is to live like that on a daily basis. I actually thought I liked that part of the job because I thought I was good at it because I was ready to fight at all times and it wasn't until I left where I realized how insane that was.

To piggyback on that, and what I talk about a lot on the podcast, is when you're in this, like we've all just resigned that this is the way the legal profession is and there are very specific things that we are forced to do as lawyers that I think really makes the majority of the profession unhappy but we've just accepted that that's the way it is, whether we have to respond at all hours to client request, or whatever, even if it's not a life-threatening emergency, you have to be on call all the time, weekends or whatever. You have to work these insane hours. This type of petty back and forth with opposing counsel, whether it's in civil litigation, criminal, or whatever, we're going to constantly try to inflict as much pain as we can or whatever it is.

What I was starting to notice when I left is that everywhere that I was, whether I was at the firm, at the public defenders, or just at a networking event, it became this icebreaker between lawyers. I feel like everybody's just unhappy and everybody is talking about it, one-upping each other about the hours you work, how horrible your partner is, or whatever. When I was at work, we would just come in and commiserate about how much we hated all these different things whether it was about office, politics, the clients, the work, the judge, or whatever it was that we were complaining about.

You never even bat an eye, you don't question it, you don't think, “Hey, this is insane that we're all this miserable and we're just sitting here and we're going to come in the next day and keep doing it.” Nobody even thinks about, “Maybe I shouldn't do this.” It had never even crossed my mind at that time. I just was like, “This is it.” I don't know, I guess I was resigned to this life sentence of I'm going to have to do this for the rest of my life and maybe I can find a job that's remotely a little bit better or the working hours are a little bit better. But at the end of the day, this is it.

Now when I'm out of it, I can see how insane that is that we have all of these CLEs about alcoholism, depression, anxiety, suicide rates, and substance abuse, and nobody is really batting an eye as to why are these rates so high in this profession and why are we all just assuming that we have to stay in this or that we made this decision, “This is it, or we can't change things.” I never even thought about that until I left.

Now I look back and I realize now when I go to networking events with people that are happy in the work that they do and actually like to do what they're doing, I realized how sad and how crazy it is that we were all just in this collective miserable place. It just seems like it's an accepted part of the profession.

Sarah Cottrell: Yes. Oh, my goodness. Yes, 100%. Obviously, I agree and I relate to that so much too because for me, early on in my legal career, it didn't even occur to me to care whether or not I was happy with my work, or to consider the fact that I was miserable as something that I should take into account in terms of determining my path forward. It was just so normalized, I feel like it sounds crazy, like you said now talking about it, but at the time, initially, it just didn't even occur to me that it mattered.

Goli Kalkhoran: Yeah, no. I know. It was just so unbelievable that you're so quickly indoctrinated to the fact that this is the way it is and you don't even question it. It's like, “Okay, I guess we're all just miserable now. I guess everyone will just keep going along with their day as if nothing's happening.”

Sarah Cottrell: Right, yes, totally. You said when your son was born or you were getting ready to go out of maternity leave, you were still thinking you would go back. Talk to me about what happened to change your mindset on that.

Goli Kalkhoran: Yeah. It was a long process, it's not something that's easy. When I went on maternity leave, I was going to go back to the FPDs. It just so happened within that three months, I mean it wasn't all just within three months, my husband and I had been talking for years about moving back to California. At the time we lived in Arizona. I grew up in California. I've lived here basically my whole life and I always wanted to come back. My family was here.

I wanted to move here so that had been a discussion that we had been having for a number of years about moving back and we were always looking at being able to buy a house here and when he was going to be able to move his business. It all came to a head right when I was getting ready to go out on maternity leave but it was still uncertain, then when I was on maternity leave, it happened very quickly where we just ended up finding this great house where we wanted to live.

He was at a place where a couple of things happened in his business where he was able to basically be able to leave and open up an office in Orange County and had this window of transition. It all really fell into place where we were just like, “Well, I guess we're moving to California.” That really prompted me to have to quit my job there in order to obviously move back here. I honestly think if I lived in Arizona, I probably would have just gone back to the FPDs. Maybe I would have left at some point after that but at the time, that was really the catalyst of me leaving.

It was when we moved here, my son was three months old and so because I was already taking the time off, I decided this is a good time for me to spend a couple more months at home with him while he's still so young. It started out just as that. I was like, “Well, maybe I'll just stay home for a couple months while I look for work.” I actually started looking for other jobs and I started applying. It was just in that process that every job description that I would read I would feel sick to my stomach, I would feel a lump in my throat.

I would read the description of, obviously, the legal work that you have to do and I would just think, “I don't want to do this.” Whether it was in civil or whether it was criminal litigation, I just was like, “I don't want to be doing this.” Then I would say that to my husband as we were talking and I would start to apply for a couple of jobs. He was the one, god bless him, who started planting the seed in the beginning. He was like, “Well, if you don't like it so much, why don't you try doing something else?”

I remember rolling my eyes when he first suggested it and being like, “What are you talking about try something else? I'm a lawyer. I didn't go to this law school and practice for this many years to just try something else.” But it planted a seed. It made me think, “Can I try something else? Is that even possible? What else would I try?”

That really took a number of months. Actually what happened, I think there was this confluence of really fortuitous things in my career that led me to being able to say, “Okay, I'm willing to maybe take a step out,” because basically what had happened was I was still applying for public interest jobs and it's honestly insane, some of these jobs, what they pay and what you have to do.

I'm a new mom. I have, at this point, a four or five-month old at home. I obviously want to be able to see him. I want to be able to be at home. I'm applying, I remember, to this specific job with a well-known public interest organization that wanted to pay me less, I think it was $50,000 and they just kept harping on the fact like, “Well, there's a lot of nights and weekends,” and my husband, again, in these conversations was like, “You know you could make $50,000 as a manager at Nordstrom, right? You don't have to do this. You don't have to work 60-hour weeks, 80-hour weeks to make nothing.”

I know it's not nothing. A lot of people, $50,000 is not nothing, I'm just saying for the amount of hours that I would be working, the amount of stress, and the amount of emotional toll that it would take on me and my family. I think that was really more of my awakening where I was like, “Why am I doing this? Why am I forcing this so much, just so I can say I'm a lawyer or just so I can say I'm doing this work? I know I'm helping people but do I have to martyr myself and my time with my infant child or my life with my husband or whatever, because I have promised to help people that may not have as much privilege as I have?”

That really took me a long time and I still struggle sometimes with getting over that guilt of feeling I could be doing more, I could help. It came to this place like, “Maybe I can help in other ways. Maybe there are other things I can do where I don't have to be working in a job that I don't like on a day-to-day basis and working really long hours and not even really making anything.” That was the start. I say the start because it really still took me, I would say, a good six months before I admitted to people that I wasn't going back to law.

I would say for a long time, “Oh, I'm just taking some more time at home with my son while he's young. Oh, I'm looking for a job,” because I just didn't want to deal with the conversations of, “Wait, what? You're not going to be a lawyer anymore?” I didn't want to deal with any of that so I was like, “Let me figure out what I want to do before I start telling people.” That was that journey for me.

Sarah Cottrell: This episode of The Former Lawyer Podcast is sponsored by my free guide: First Steps to Leaving the Law. Look, I know that there are a lot of unhappy lawyers out there who are overwhelmed at the thought of leaving the law and literally don't know where to start. You can grab this guide and take the guesswork out of it. Go to formerlawyer.com/guide and start your journey out of the law today. Seriously, you can get it and start today. Back to the conversation.

That brings up a really good point that I think would be interesting to talk about because I know for a lot of people, what other people are going to think about them leaving the law is a significant impediment to them actually making the decision to leave. It sounds like your husband was obviously very supportive, but talk to me a little bit about how you dealt with what other people would think about it or what other people thought about it and how people who are thinking about leaving should themselves think about this issue of, “Well, what will other people think?”

Goli Kalkhoran: Yeah. It was a huge, huge issue for me and I think it's a big issue for a lot of people. I know for me, and I still struggle with this, I care way too much what other people think of me and like I said, part of this people-pleasing thing and I think I developed not only an identity as a lawyer, which I had and everybody that saw me, I had literally always been the girl that was going to go to law school and then the girl that's in law school and the girl that's a lawyer and so I never had any other identity.

I think that I had also created this identity for myself of always being the rule follower on the path, getting good grades, I was always doing what I was supposed to do and so it was very, very scary for me to do something that other people wouldn't understand, which is not what you're supposed to do. I had a very hard time. That is one of the things that I struggled with the most where I felt not only the fear of leaving being a lawyer, I think for women in particular and mothers, there is a lot of pressure too about basically not quitting once you become a mom because I think there are so many people that leave these high-paying professions once they become mothers.

There is this pressure of carrying that torch and you feel like, “Well, am I just a failure? I couldn't cut it. Why do you have to break that glass ceiling for other people or whatnot?” I felt this specific amount of pressure of “Oh, I'm just going to quit to be a stay-at-home mom. I did all this work and I became a lawyer and I had these coveted jobs at getting into the federal public defenders, which I guess is hard and these Biglaw firms,” and so I have felt a lot of pressure about leaving all that.

I will say that, again, my husband was key. I think it's really key to have someone that you can talk to about this stuff, whether it's a friend, a therapist, your husband, spouse, parents, or whatnot because I think we tend to be able to give better advice to other people than we can ourselves and we can see their problems a little clearer. When I would voice these things, and in your head, it sounds totally normal, but even when you're saying it out loud, it also sounds crazy. You start realizing, “Well, this is a little bit insane that I'm staying because of this reason.”

But as I would talk through this stuff with my husband, he was just saying, “You know you're going to stay in a job that you hate every day. Those people aren't in that job from 8:00 AM till 8:00 PM. You're doing something you hate just so you can tell other people that you're a lawyer? That's your reasoning for staying?” When you say it like that, it sounds insane, you're like, “Okay, well, I'm going to spend the next 30 years doing something I hate so that nobody else feels uncomfortable about my decision,” and I think it's just really reframing it.

I think a lot of times we just accept that something sounds normal or like, “Yeah, everyone's going to think I'm crazy and maybe they're right,” but then when you take a step back and you realize, “Well, I have this one shot,” and it's so cliche to say you have one shot at your life but you do. I was like, “My kids are only going to be young for a very short amount of time and I get to decide what I want to do with that.” I'll say I have that privilege because I had the support of my husband and we could make it work on his salary. I was able to make a decision to not go back to work and so I'm very aware that I had that privilege.

I just decided I'm going to give all this up. I'm never going to get this time back with my kids. If it was just up to me, I wouldn't be going back to work, but I'm doing this so that other people aren't upset or that I don't have to have this difficult conversation with family members. Once I reframed it like that, it became a lot easier to realize that this is crazy and the same thing I think was the same reframe about thinking of, “Oh, I've wasted so much time, I put in so much time and money to get this law degree, to get this experience, to work for this many years, I can't just walk away.”

I had a lot of that stuff and I think a lot of times, we have a lot of the sunk cost fallacy of, “Well, it's just a waste.” Even that I think once I reframed it as, “Okay, well, let's say I've ‘wasted’”, which I don't believe it was a waste and I think it has led me exactly where I need to be, but I did that for 10 years, “I'm going to do this for another 20 or 30 just so I don't waste that 20? That's insane. I can create an entire different life in the next 20, 30 years. I can become wildly happy and successful in anything else I choose and yet I'm choosing to stay in something just so that I don't feel I wasted it.” I just think it was just a reframing of what I had accepted as these truths and that made it easier to walk away.

Sarah Cottrell: Literally everything that you said, I'm like, “Yes, 100%. People who are listening, these are all the things that I'm saying.” It was very similar for me. I was very much that person who was like, “Well, I'm on the path and I need to stay on the path. This is the path,” and no real consideration of, “Is this actually what I should continue doing?” and then feeling that pressure of, “But I should keep doing it because I've done it,” and just all all the things that I think everyone feels.

I think one of the things that I really want people to know from this podcast is just because you feel those things, that doesn't mean that you should or shouldn't leave the law. It's totally normal to think and feel all of those things and it's still worth exploring whether or not it's the right thing for you because ultimately, most people who end up leaving the law, I think sometimes there's this perception that they just absolutely knew what was going to happen when they left and had some crystal ball experience. That's really not how it works. I think—and you would probably agree with this—that if you're someone who went to law school and is practicing law, it can be very hard to step out into something where there is no set path.

Goli Kalkhoran: 100%.

Sarah Cottrell: Can you talk a little bit about that and what your experience has been with that?

Goli Kalkhoran: Sure. I know I keep saying my husband, I was having a ton of these conversations with my husband so that's the only reason that it came up a lot. But I remember one specific conversation where I literally, you know The Real Housewives of New Jersey, one where she flips the table over? I swear, I was enraged when I was talking to my husband. We were in one of our millions of conversations of me really getting to this place of wanting to leave. I don't know what we were talking about but he just said, “Well, Goli, you've always taken the easy path,” and I swear I just felt myself becoming the Hulk in a rage, just becoming red.

I was like, “Easy path? Do you know how hard I have worked?” When I calmed down, he was like, “Let me explain. You've always taken a path where somebody has laid it out for you, you just had to do it. They told you, ‘Okay, now you take this class, then you take this test,’ then you apply to the school, and you always do that. You never had to make that decision. Now it's a much more difficult decision because you have no idea where to go.”

It obviously made sense and it's 100% true is the scariest thing, and I think the reason most people end up staying, to be honest, and the most people that I talk to too, is that as human beings, not just as lawyers, I think obviously if you're a type-A personality who is used to achieving and used to checking off these boxes, it's even harder, but human beings don't like uncertainty.

We are evolved to have things that are safe and things that we know. There's that whole saying better the devil you know than the devil you don't, and it's just the reality of this, it's the reality of why—I know there's a lot of other reasons—but why do people stay in such horrible, let's say abusive relationships or in a lot of different horrible situations is because we cannot even imagine what the other side is.

What happens if I leave and it's even worse, or I don't even know where to go, or I don't even know where to start? That uncertainty is so anxiety filling in us that we just think, “I'll just deal with this. I already know how to deal with this. Even if I'm unhappy, at least I know the level of unhappiness and I can work around it.” That is the biggest thing I've found for people that I talk to. That was the biggest thing for me beyond caring what people thought. I just kept thinking, “I don't even know what I would do.

I've never even looked up to think about what else I like, what else I'm good at, or what other skills.” I have no passions, like everybody had these passions they're following and I'm like, “I don't have a passion. This is what I've always done.” That was scarier to me than leaving because I was like, “I don't know what I'm going to do. I just want someone to tell me what I should do so that I can just figure out that path and I can do those steps.”

I think that was the hardest, but honestly, that is what's made me grow the most in the last five years. I'm a completely different human being and I think that the reason because of that is because I have learned to accept the unknown and be comfortable with being uncomfortable. I think that has given me so much confidence in myself to figure things out and to not need to know, not to have this false sense of control over my life, and realize that I'll figure it out as I go along.

I think that that is something that everybody deals with. Again, like we were just saying earlier, I think a lot of times we just think we're these special snowflakes and everything is just unique to us but we all have the same fears, we all have the same doubts, we all have the same anxieties.

Everybody that I talk to, it's literally the same story and everyone that does leave has the same amount of fear that you have. It's just that they decided, “I'm going to push through it. I'm going to do it anyways. I'm scared and I have no idea what's going to happen and I might fall flat on my face and I'm going to have to deal with everybody talking behind my back, rolling their eyes, questioning what I'm doing, or whatever it is, but it's still worth it to me to try to figure out a way to be happy than to stay in this.” I think really that's the only difference.

Sarah Cottrell: I totally agree. Tell me more about the businesses that you're running now.

Goli Kalkhoran: Sure. I think that when I left, again, I wish I had hindsight 20/20. I don't know if I would change it but I was so desperate to figure out the next thing. I'd always told myself that I wasn't good at business. I knew nothing about business and I didn't care about business. Like I said, I had created these stories that I didn't even go to law school to make money, I don't care about money, I don't need to make money, and in this time of deep personal discovery and introspection, I started really questioning a lot of the stories I had made up about myself and the limiting beliefs I had.

One of those was around business. I didn't know what I wanted to do so I started just going to as many meetup groups in my area as possible. One was I wanted to get out of the house, I was in the house all day with a newborn and so one night a week, I would have my husband watch the baby while I went to a meetup group and another was I just wanted to see what other people were doing. I wanted to see what other jobs were out there. I still thought maybe I could get a job with my law degree.

Through that, I ended up going to these meet-up events and I ended up loving these tech startup meetup events in my area which was really news to me because, like I said, I wasn't into entrepreneurship and I definitely am not a tech person. I'm the least tech-savvy person you've ever met and so I was just so surprised by myself that I loved them so much. I just got so much energy around being with people that were so obsessed about what the project they were doing and so excited, and the pitches and watching these, it was mini Shark Tanks at these meetups and it was just such a really fun group.

I got very involved in that. That ended up leading to me creating this product as a photo booth. It's a digital photo booth. I started making it for my son's first birthday and then I started realizing, “Hey, I could maybe make this into something because people really loved it.” From that came my company called USIE Booth. I manufacture these digital photo booths. They're small very portable photo booths that you take GIFs, boomerangs, pictures, and then you can text or email it.

We do a lot of events in Southern California but we also do a lot of leases and we sell them. We do work with a lot of corporate clients and retail stores, restaurants, things like that. Like I said, it was very random and it was just something that I was interested and I was like, “Oh, let me try this,” and I've learned everything from this.

I learned how to manufacture a product. I learned how to build software. I learned marketing and sales, setting up a business, and doing all of that stuff. I now run that on the side. It runs mostly on its own and I haven't really devoted a ton of time to it in the last year because I've been doing the podcast.

I started that a little over a year ago. It's called Lessons from a Quitter. It started just as a podcast and the social media handles that were part of that, but it's grown into this really amazing community that I love. It is 100% my passion now, my obsession. I work as much as I can on the podcast because I just love having these conversations with people and seeing how people navigated these doubtful times in their own histories and how they created these new lives for themselves. It's just been so rewarding to have people that love the podcast and it has helped them on their journey.

We're doing our first group program where it is a group of eight people and I'm helping them go from knowing they want to leave but not knowing what they want to do, to gaining the clarity and figuring out their action plan of leaving their careers. I will be running that again probably in the new year. I've just been growing that and figuring out what the podcast and this community is going to transform into. That has been really exciting. I spend my time doing those things while I'm also only really working still part time because I have now two little ones and I try to spend as much time as I can with them as well.

Sarah Cottrell: I know I've said this 5,000 times but I love all of that. For sure anyone who's listening to this podcast should also be listening to Lessons from a Quitter because, like you said, it's interesting how people have such different stories and yet the stories are so similar in certain ways. I think that you can really benefit from just hearing what people have to say about making these types of changes in their careers, and how it, and I think this came through in what you were just talking about, but how it flows through to all sorts of other things in your life that yes, you're talking about your career or your job but it doesn't generally just stay confined to that arena.

There are people listening who are lawyers and they definitely know that they want to leave the law but they're not really sure where to start or they're just unhappy in their law jobs and they're not 100% sure they want to leave, but maybe they do, what advice would you give to people in those positions?

Goli Kalkhoran: Yeah. I would say that the biggest thing that will help you in any decision that you make, and in life in general, and it sounds a little bit cliche, I know right now with all the woo-woo out there, but I think you got to get really quiet with yourself because we tend to want everyone else to give us the answers. I say this, I was constantly going to my husband and I wanted someone else to validate how I was feeling.

I'm not saying it is worthwhile to talk through a lot of this stuff, but I feel like there's so much chatter and there's so much where we take in other people's opinions and we're constantly like, “Should I do this? Is this a bad idea? Is this a good idea?” before we've ever even actually formed it within ourselves.

The reason I say this is that deep down, you already know what you want and we all have these gut feelings, we all know when something feels right and when something doesn't but we aren't really trained to listen to it. I think we are actually trained more to push it down and we are taught this like, “Well, life is hard and it's not supposed to be fun and work is blah-blah-blah,” whatever all these BS mantras we've been instilled in that you just have to suck it up and do it. I think it really takes getting yourself quiet to really think “What do I want for my life? What is it that is going to make me happy?”

I think the more you can start just giving yourself some space to just be quiet, you'll get to that answer, you'll know “Is it really this?” because we have the chatter in our head, but deep down, we have a knowing, and if you know that you are unhappy, then it's okay to try to figure out something else. You need to really understand. I wish the one thing I could impart to everybody is that it is okay to admit that you're unhappy, it is okay to accept that you want something different, it's okay to start over.

There's no timeline, all the stuff that we've been sold and we have bought into about getting to a certain place and having a degree and having the white picket fence and the spouse and the kids, all that's made up. Your life can look the way that you want it to look, but you can't get there if you're this frantic running around in this chaos like chicken with their head cut off person.

The more you can quiet yourself down and really get to a place of understanding of “What is it that I want? Is this really making me unhappy? If it is, how do I start putting my own happiness and well-being first,” I think you'll find that answer.

Sarah Cottrell: That's so true. I think that sometimes being really honest with yourself is one of the hardest things to do. It's definitely one of the biggest hurdles in this type of process because, like you said, often, people do know what they want and I think they're sometimes afraid to admit it to themselves, and I say this very much based on my own experience.

Goli Kalkhoran: Oh, 100% me too. Same. I mean, everybody’s like them.

Sarah Cottrell: Yes. Exactly.

Goli Kalkhoran: I think that it is just like everything else. That's why everybody I think right now, we are really seeing this wave towards mindfulness and meditation and all of that stuff. Not that it isn't just to quiet your mind, but the reason just to quiet your mind is so that you can really get more of an understanding of you as a person and get to better understand yourself and be comfortable being with your own thoughts and managing them. I think that, again, with all this stuff, we all have these same hang ups, we all have these same fears, we all have the same doubts and stuff, and it's just really learning how to quiet that down so that you can really get to the place of what is right for you.

But I just recently saw this and I thought it was brilliant. On Instagram somebody had said, “If you're trying to make a decision that you're stuck on, flip a coin, and when it lands on whatever it lands on, notice how you feel in that split second. If you have regret that it didn't land the way that you wanted to, then you already know what you wanted to do.”

I think a lot of times, we know but we don't want to admit it. That's such a genius way of really getting to the heart of what you actually want because we've all had that experience too, where you want someone to pick something and then they pick it and you're like, “Oh, but I wanted the other thing,” so you already knew what you wanted. It's just a cute little trick I think to help you increase the volume of that voice within you where you're like, “Oh, this is what I actually really wanted to do. I'm going to go with this option.”

Sarah Cottrell: Yes, absolutely. Goli, as we're getting towards the end of the podcast, is there anything else that you would like to share about your story that we haven't talked about yet or just other things that you think people who are listening should know?

Goli Kalkhoran: I think we've pretty much covered my story. If you want to hear more of my story, you can always come to the podcast. I clearly talk a lot and I'm sure I'll share other tidbits, but I think that the biggest thing that I would leave people with is that, again, I know where that feeling of there's a low level of despair where you feel like you're stuck in this place that just makes you so deeply unhappy, and I just want people to understand that there's a lot of us that have been there, that have felt that same thing and have found a way to leave that, and you can too. It's just really accepting that you have that power, you have agency to make that choice.

It's a very scary and a very tough choice. I'm not trying to belittle it and say that you can just do whatever you want, but the reality of it is you can. I think once you can accept that, then either you accept that you want to stay, and that's your choice, that's great, and that can give you more power to figure out how you carve a career that really works for you, or you realize that no, you really want to leave and you start working towards that.

But I think the first step is really accepting that you have that agency and you can make that difference. There are people here, like Sarah and myself, who are rooting you on, who are happy to help in any way that we can. I really think that you deserve to be happy and so if you're not, then you can start to take steps to figure out how to make that happen.

Sarah Cottrell: Yes, absolutely. You deserve to be happy. Everyone listening, take note. Thank you so much for joining me today, Goli. Can you let people know where they can find you online?

Goli Kalkhoran: Sure. I would say the best place where I hang out the most is Instagram. You can just come at @lessonsfromaquitter there and find me. Send me a DM, I would love to hear from you, and of course, you can find the podcast and everything at lessonsfromaquitter.com

Sarah Cottrell: Great. Thank you so much. I really appreciate you coming on today and sharing your story. I know that we just have a lot in common in terms of our outlook on the law and career thing so I really appreciate you coming and talking about all of those things with me.

Goli Kalkhoran: Thank you so much for having me and thanks so much for creating this space to have this conversation.

Sarah Cottrell: Thanks so much for listening today. I absolutely love getting to share these stories with you. If you haven't yet, subscribe to the show, and come on over to formerlawyer.com and join our community to get even more support and resources in your journey out of the law. Until next time. Have a great week.