MSBA Fit Friday Presentation by Rachel Coll, Certified Life Coach 

Rachel Coll is a certified life coach for lawyers and other ambitious professionals.  In weekly one on one sessions, Rachel helps her clients work through the unique challenges that they face in their personal and professional lives.  Prior to becoming a coach, Rachel spent the bulk of her 12 year legal career working as a prosecutor, handling domestic violence and sex offense cases.  She now coaches clients privately from her home in Arlington, VA, and still holds a bar license to practice law in Washington D.C. and Maryland, as well as a life coaching certification from The Life Coach School.

Rachel met with members of the MSBA  and led a discussion on all things love and lawyering as part of the Fit Fridays series.  Rachel works with clients who often find themselves frustrated in their personal lives, and has connected the dots of their displeasure to years of legal practice.  What she offers are tools for overcoming our mind’s “legal training” so that we can have more productive, less frustrating relationships with the people we love.  Even if we can’t ever change them or what they do!

As lawyers, we often: 

1.  Solve problems externally because it’s LITERALLY our business to make other people DO  stuff (or not do stuff) in order for our clients to feel better. It’s only natural we think the  same is true in our personal lives. 
2.  Imply intention from action. It’s how we prove cases. Again, naturally we do this in our  personal lives as well. 
3. Use the past to predict the future, because… precedent.  We get new outcomes all  the time, and just because things have “always gone” a certain way with other humans  doesn’t mean things will always continue to go that same way. 

The solve: 

1.  Separate Facts from STORY 
   1. Facts can be proven in court- a judge would take judicial notice.
   2. NOT “ she doesn’t think I’m good enough” but “she said ‘I don’t want to date  you”.The  latter is the fact. The  first is our painful story.
   3. The story is what we make things people SAY or DO mean about us.
   4. We can change our story, not the facts.
   5. When we change the story, we feel better.
   6. What they do is  “fail to communicate”  BE specific.
   7. He didn’t respond to my text for 28 hours.
   8. What are you making it mean? He’s not thinking about me? We don’t  have good communication?
2. Take yourself through an HONEST direct exam: 
   1. Why does my romantic partner have to text me more than my best friend,  mother, sister, colleague? 
   2. Does your partner need to be thinking about you all the time?  
   3. Do YOU? 
   4. How do you know what they’re thinking? (you don’t) 
   5. Do you think about them when you’re not texting them? 
3.  Start to loosen the GRIP on the painful story.

Rachel Cole can be reached at rachelelizabethcoll@gmail.com 

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