Hey, welcome to Lessons From A Quitter, where we believe that it is never too late to start over. No matter how much time or energy you've spent getting to where you are. If ultimately you are unfulfilled, then it is time to get out. Join me each week for both inspiration and actionable tips so that we can get you on the road to your dreams.

Hello and welcome to another episode. I'm so excited you are here. I wanted to take this episode to tell you a little bit about my story. I know I talk about my story a lot and so I feel like everybody already knows that I quit, you know, being a lawyer and kind of what my journey looked like. And then I realized there's a lot of new people around and obviously people haven't been listening to my podcast for five years when I did my first original like story intro.

And so I figured it's time for uh, a repeat another addition of kind of how I ended up here, how I went from being a successful lawyer who was extremely unhappy to quitting that and figuring out what I really wanted to do. Starting this podcast and creating a multiple six figure business where I work fairly part-time, I get to be at home with my kids. I get to do a lot of the things that I love. And so I figured I would go through that story again today with you because I know that it's helpful to see how other people kind of created what they created and hopefully you'll get some inspiration, maybe some tips and get to know me better. So if you're new here, welcome. I'm so happy you are here. Uh, let me tell you a little bit about me. So I was like most other type A, you know, overachieving kids.

I sort of cracked the code on being a success, quote unquote success based on what society had told me I needed to do. I was lucky enough for whatever reason, I was good in school, I was good at taking tests and I learned very early on that you just do what you're told. You don't ask questions. The adults know better, they'll tell you what to do. You memorize, you take the test, you do well, you get the pat on the back, you get to feel good about yourself. And so I think like a lot of us, I didn't ask any questions. I put my head down. I studied really hard, I did really well in school and I decided kind of at the ripe old age of 11 that I was gonna be a lawyer. Obviously not based on anything just because I really wasn't into science and blood and stuff and I didn't think doctor was the direction and I wasn't really into kind of fixing things like engineers.

And I think at the time in my house those were kinda the options. You could be an engineer, you could be a doctor, you could be a lawyer. And I loved arguing. I loved like thinking about things in different ways. I loved looking at things in different angles and I really liked learning about the gray areas of ethics and morals and laws and all that stuff. And so I sort of decided I was gonna be a lawyer and I didn't question it, which I think a lot of us do. I chose that everybody kinda gave me the pat on the back and then I set out on this mission of like this is my goal and I just have to do what everybody tells me I have to do to achieve it. And I did. I got good grades. I went to college at uc, Irvine.

I was a psychology degree with a minor in political science and I had sort of in college questioned a little bit. I thought maybe I'd go into psychology, maybe I'd become a psychologist. But ultimately when push came to shove I was kind of like, I'm still really interested in law. And so I went to uc, Berkeley for law school. I got into a really great law school and I actually loved law school also. I think law school tends to catch a lot of people who don't really know what they wanna do. They get to the end of maybe their college career and they're sort of at this like, what now? I'm not ready to go out and work. I don't really even know what I wanna do. This kind of sounds like maybe a good option. And so I had a lot of people I knew in law school that had sort of been there.

I had been one of the rare people I think that was like, no, I wanna be a lawyer. I thought I really wanted to be a lawyer, even though I didn't have any idea what that meant. I didn't know what the day-to-day work was gonna be. I didn't know what it was gonna require out of me. And so I chose to go to law school and I loved law school. I thought law school, like the intellectual exercise of thinking about laws and learning the theory and understanding like what goes on behind, you know, creating laws and considering different laws and all of that stuff really fascinated me. And so I did well in law school as well and I really didn't question anything. I was kinda like, yeah, like I am killing it. I'm just gonna keep kind of going along this path. And it wasn't until I actually started working as a lawyer where I very quickly realized like, oh, what have I done?

I don't like this at all. Like it was so antithetical to my personality. I am a very non-confrontational person. I am a very people person. I like being with people. I like talking to people. I don't really like being in a room, you know, with a computer by myself for 12 hours. And as soon as I started working, it very quickly became apparent that this isn't what I wanna do. And when I left law school, I went to a big law firm for people that aren't lawyers. There's a series of law firms called Big Law and they're kind of like the top, I don't know, 20 or 50 law firms that are kind of international law firms. They have offices all over, you know, they have all the high profile clients, all the high profile cases and they're very intense places to work and they pay really well.

So they pay a very high salary. But that is because they own your life and you work an obscene amount of hours and it is extremely stressful. And I decided when I had gone to law school, I really went with the idea of wanting to like work on a topic that I was really passionate about and I really wanted to help people. And so even during law school I had done a lot of clinics and done a lot of work for underserved communities. But I sort of made the decision when I was leaving to take one of these big law jobs because I was gonna come out with a lot of debt. I was gonna have like over a hundred thousand dollars in debt from law school. And while I knew I could pay it over time I didn't want to like I knew that the job I was gonna eventually get was not gonna be that high paying, it was either gonna be working for the government or working for a nonprofit.

And so I made the decision to go to a big law firm for a couple of years so I could get this high salary and I could pay off my debt aggressively so that I wouldn't have a lot of student loan debt. And then I can decide more freely what I wanted to do. I wouldn't be beholden by these golden handcuffs. And I'm really glad I did that. I went to a top 10 law firm and I was like 27 at the time and I was making for me obscene amounts of money, something that, you know, even at the time like my parents who immigrated here when I was five years old weren't making. And so you know, as a 27-year-old you sort of feel like okay, I made it and I was extremely unhappy. Like just as soon as I got there I was like this is not what I wanna do.

I do not wanna be locked in a room working 15 hours a day, 16 hours a day. I would routinely do all-nighters like working 24 hours a day when you were kind of working on deals or working on a a case that was going to trial or whatnot. It was an extremely stressful situation for me. I didn't know how to manage my mind at the time. And on top of that I felt a lot of guilt, like I said, because I was living kind of this American dream and I was achieving things that a lot of people in my family hadn't achieved maybe until that point. And I really felt like who the hell am I to complain about this? You know, like how could I ever complain about something that so many people would kill to have would trade places with me in a heartbeat?

Right? And I also had a lot of shame around why am I the only one that can't cut it? Everybody else seems to be able to do it. You know, when they're emailing you at three in the morning to kind of like work on this matter or you know, make these changes in a document. Like other people are just doing it so why is it so hard for me to be able to keep up? And there was a lot of things that were normalized that I look back now and I'm like, thank God I couldn't keep up. Right. There was a lot of, whether it's you know, taking Ritalin or taking drugs or doing other things to keep you up or doing really unsafe things in order to be able to keep up with a schedule and a demand that is unnatural. I just really became depressed.

I was like truly like the unhappiest. I had been in those kind of two years and I realized like I can't do this. Like I have to get out. I know I wanted to save money and I did and I was lucky enough I moved back in with my parents so I didn't have to pay for rent. I realized what a privilege that was that I was able to do that. I paid off a lot of my student loans and then I figured, well if I'm unhappy it's just the job. I never wanted to be a corporate lawyer. I never wanted to be in big law. I always wanted to kind of help the underserved. So maybe if I go and find a job that I'm more passionate about, um, then I will find happiness, right? And so I did. I quit that job at Big Law and I became a federal public defender and I was very passionate about the work that I was doing.

I was doing specifically something called capital Habeas Appeals, which is basically like the federal level appeals for death row inmates, people that had capital cases. It was very different than what I had been doing before. It was very emotional, it was very like emotionally charged. It was very interesting and like I said, I was very passionate about the topic of the death penalty and the criminal justice system and all of the injustice that happens within it. But lo and behold, I went there and I was maybe not just as unhappy but I was extremely unhappy there too. And I didn't realize this at the time 'cause I really wasn't doing any mindset work, but it was the first time that I realized like, you know, what's the saying anywhere you go, there you are. It's like anywhere I went, I was taking the same brain I had with me and a lot of that brain consisted of perfectionism and like killing myself to be perfect at everything, to get everybody to love me, to need a lot of external validation, to be a people pleaser and never be able to say no to anyone God forbid.
Like I say no to my bosses, right? Like doing anything that was asked of me going way above and beyond and really burning myself out. And so even though the job changed and I was a lot more passionate about the thing, the day to day was the same. The day-to-day was like you know, actually having a lot less resources when you work at the public defender's office than I did at the big law firm. I didn't have as much like support staff and all that stuff and it was still mostly me working alone in an office by myself for like 12, 15 hours a day. And so even though the subject matter of it was more interesting to me, I just was like, this is not what I wanna do. I don't wanna be doing this for the next 30 years of my life. Like I cannot imagine doing this.

And so at the time I didn't think there was any way out, I'd sort of just resigned myself to the fact that like, well I'm a lawyer and this is what lawyers do. And so I had really like done what most people do is I was complaining to my husband, I would come home and complain to my family, to my friends, I would about it. I would constantly complain to my coworkers about how terrible it is. We would all have this like, I call it the Misery Olympics where like everybody is just kind of complaining about who has it worse. Like I would remember talking to law school classmates who are at different places and we would all like complain about like whose situation was worse And nobody batted an eye like nobody thought like hey this isn't normal for us to all be this unhappy, for people to be depressed and anxious and on medication and you know, thoughts of suicide or whatever comes up for a lot of people in these really high intense professions.

And I think we all just kind of like, yep, it's par for the course. It's just the way it is. It's normal, right? It's normal to dread your weak, it's normal to have anxiety on Sundays. And that was just sort of my normal routine for years. And I ended up quitting my job in 2014 because I had my first son and we wanted to move back. I had moved to Arizona when I became a federal public defender and we were moving back to California. And so it just sort of necessitated me leaving that job and then finding another job. And so I honestly feel like if that didn't happen, if that wasn't like kind of the universe's way of me getting out there, I would've just stayed. I would've just gone on my maternity leave, I would've complained and then I would've gone back and I would've done the same thing.

And maybe at some point I would've been unhappy enough that I would've left but it wouldn't have been at the time that I did. I ended up quitting and moving to California and I decided I was gonna stay home with my son for about six months, like until he was six months old. And in that time find another job. And I had every intention of finding a job as a lawyer. And when we came back to California, I remember as I started looking for work and I started applying to different places with every application, with every job description. Like I would just go on these job boards and I would see job descriptions. I just like felt this pit into my stomach. I just felt nauseous every time and I kept thinking like, oh my god, I don't wanna do this. Like regardless of what the job description was, I was like I don't want to do this.
And now you know, my priorities have changed. I had a son and the idea of working those 80 hour weeks, the idea of not coming home when he was awake and like only basically seeing him a little bit was really hard. And at the time, like I said, I had been working as a public defender so it's not like I was rolling in the dough. I remember my husband saying like, 'cause I was complaining a lot, he was saying, well if you don't like it that much, why don't you try doing something else? And I remember rolling my eyes and being like, what do you mean try doing something else? I'm a lawyer. Like I have studied for years I worked now I had about like seven years of work experience at that time I was like I can't just do something else. Like this is who I am.

My whole identity had been kind of wrapped up in that. But it did get me to start thinking like could I do something else? Could I use my law degree to do something else? And you know, bless him, he planted that seed for me to start start really thinking like what else could I do? You know, I was looking at a lot of non-profits and their pay was just abysmal and he was like, for the amount that you're gonna work, the pay that you're getting, like you could make that money going in being a manager at like a retail store or doing you know, anything else. And at the time it was just so hard for me to accept that that like yeah but I am this lawyer, I'm this like, this is my identity, right? Like the, I'm this success, I can't just go and do this.

And I really had to sit and think about what does that success mean to me and what does that identity, what am I willing to give up in order to be able to tell people I'm a lawyer? You know? Like what am I willing to sacrifice in order to keep up this appearance of success even when I am deeply unhappy? You know? And so that sort of started the ball rolling. I wish I could say that like it was kind of, I made this epiphany and I decided to quit. I took about a year off that first year. That six months kind of turned into a year and I will acknowledge, like I would like to stop and acknowledge that like I had that privilege of being able to do that. So my husband, we were able, we had kind of worked out our finances and we realized we could take like a year without me having a salary.

And I sort of decided to take that year to really think about what I wanted to do. And I know that a lot of people don't have that ability. I think a lot of people do and they still don't 'cause they're scared because they're scared of the gap on their resume. And I was too, I was scared that I wasn't ever gonna get hired again. I was scared that nobody would like understand why I took a year off and that they would use it against me. I was scared about what it meant about me. Like I was this lawyer and I had all these thoughts about, well I'm just gonna be a stay at home mom and all this other BS that was kind of put into my head. There was a lot I was kind of grappling with in that year going through a lot of shame and guilt and I wish I had kind of the mindset tools that I have now.

I didn't and I suffered a lot for it. I felt very lonely. I felt very ashamed that like I couldn't hack it or I can't hack it or I can't figure this out. I had so many friends who had had kids and just went back to work and I again, I kept thinking like, what's wrong with me that I can't do that? Then I'm having such a visceral reaction to going back. So I struggled with that for about a year and in that time though, I did really grapple with this idea of my identity and who am I if I'm not a lawyer and what if I could leave and you know, are there other options and were there other things I could do And what was important to me and what was my definition of success? And so I had a lot of very in depth conversations with my husband, with my family, with my friends about these topics.

It's not to say that I had a lot of answers. I remember my husband said one thing that really stuck with me 'cause I kept really holding onto this fact that I had spent so much time and energy and money becoming a lawyer. And I kept thinking I can't throw it all away. Like I cannot throw these, you know, 10 years of law school and work. But like really all my life, like it had been like 20 years of me saying I was gonna be a lawyer, working towards being a lawyer, going to undergrad to be a lawyer. Like my whole identity had kind of been on this path. And my husband said to me like, okay so you're gonna throw away the next 30 and 40 years because you don't wanna waste that 10. And it really was like a light bulb for me at that moment.

Like I realized at the time I was 32, 33, I can't remember exactly in my early thirties. And I kept thinking like, I'm gonna work until I'm 65, 70, right? Probably more at this point. I've only done this for 10 years and I'm this unhappy. Like could I do this for 30 or 40 years? And I really couldn't, I couldn't see myself doing it. And so I realized like the thing that's holding me back again, like it actually wasn't the finances in our situation. Like I had the privilege of having a marriage where I, you know, could rely on my husband's income and that we could make it work. And by the time that first year was up, my husband's company, he's also an entrepreneur, started taking off, you know, a little bit. And so we had a little bit more financial kind of cushion for me to not immediately need to bring in a paycheck.

And I kept thinking like even when I don't quote unquote need the money, I have this insane guilt and insane shame for not making money, for not going back to work, for not having this identity for you know, all of the messages that women are given. And I worried about all of it, but ultimately I kind of came to this place of like, am I willing to slow down for a couple of years and figure this out and figure out what I wanna do and give myself that space and ask the questions that I've never asked up until this point, right? And not go after the path that everybody else had told me to go on, right? This is the first time I've sort of questioned like, who am I and what do I even want? And it was a really scary thing to question because I had never even like remotely kind of dug into that.

I thought I knew who I was and I remember thinking I don't have any other skills or passions, like there's nothing else I really want to do, so what am I gonna do? You know? And I felt very lost like all those my lost years. But I'm really proud of myself for wanting to sit in that discomfort and figure it out and know that like the only way outside of that lost feeling is through it is to figure it out. And that's gonna be really uncomfortable and that's going to take dealing with a lot of people's judgments and a lot of people thinking I'm, I should just go back and get another law job. My own doubts, my own worry that like, oh now there's too much of a gap on my resume and what am I gonna do? And you know, all these other thoughts that I had, I was like, I, I'm willing to sit with that discomfort and figure this out because I don't wanna go back to a place where I was that deeply unhappy and I don't wanna spend the rest of my life doing something that I hate.

And so I'm not gonna go through the whole journey. But it really led me on this like discovery of myself and I started just going to meet up groups 'cause I didn't even know what other people did for work. Like truly at that point I was like, I know there's engineers and doctors and I don't wanna do those, but I know there's tons of other jobs. Like people talk about being a product manager. I don't even know what that means. Like I've never looked into this stuff. So this was like in 2015 I started going to a lot of like in-person meetups, I would find meetups in my city and I went to the randomest meetups, I went to like ones for engineers and I went to ones for like graphic designers and I went to all of these different types of places to just see what people do and talk to them and figure out what their jobs are.
I talked to a lot of lawyers, I talked to a lot of people that had been leaving and I ultimately stumbled upon a couple of like entrepreneurial meetups. And I started going to some of these startup events that were just like kind of pitch competitions like Shark Tank style. And they were so cool. Like it was the funnest time I had had in a really long time. And I was just sort of amazed by the people and not just their ideas and their businesses, but their passion for what they were doing and how excited they were and how much they loved it. And I just had never really gone to networking events like that. I, I feel like when you go to a lawyer networking event, it's not the most exciting. People are not the most happy. And so I was very like drawn to the energy of the people there and I kept thinking like, this is amazing.
Like people are coming up with really amazing ideas and they are taking these really big risks and going all in on them. And I remember as I went to those meetups more and more just because I was, I was having fun and I was curious and I wanted to know what they were doing, I kept thinking like, why am I telling myself that I can't do this? 'cause I remember I kept thinking like I could never start a business. I have no idea what I would do. I have no business acumen, I have no business like education, I wouldn't even know where to start. And it was at these networking events where people would pitch, people would talk about their businesses and no shade. This is no shade to them. I just kept thinking like, there is nothing different about this person than me. They're not smarter than me, they're not more, you know, committed.

They're not hard working. I know that for sure. There's just nothing that is different from this person than me. Why do they have the confidence that they can just go out and ask people for a million dollars, you know, to fund their startup? Or why are they going all in on this? How are they not afraid, right? How are they not afraid of failing? And I started realizing how much my mindset was holding me back, how much I was telling myself what I could and couldn't do, what I was and wasn't capable of. And how much of that was just a story because there really was no difference. Like at the time, like I said, I was like in my early thirties and I would watch like 21 year olds who had never worked, who had no idea, who had no like life skills like up there pitching their ideas.

And I was like, why does this person have the confidence to be up here asking for money? And you know, having their own back and standing up there and saying what they want. And I like, I have a law degree from a really prestigious law school. I have worked in really intense work settings. I have proven myself over and over again. I still don't have the confidence to believe that I could run a business. Why? Like where does that come from? And a lot of that started me both on the journey of entrepreneurship and on the journey of mindset. Like I really started realizing there's a problem here and it's not outside of me. It's this intense fear of failing, this intense fear of not being a quote unquote success. The intense fear of judgment. This intense fear of not figuring it out and what other people were gonna say about me and all of this stuff.

And I realized like I am going to limit myself so much in my life if I let that take over, I am not gonna try anything because then the only things I can try are things I know I'm gonna master and that's the law and I don't wanna do that. So if I'm gonna do something new, like I have to be open to the fact that it might fail even if it's not entrepreneurship. I had to be open to the fact that like, you're gonna try things and it's not gonna go well and that has to be okay and how do you get there? And so I went on my own journey of like really learning more about my own brain and the human brain and why we're so afraid and what was I so afraid of? Because again, I realized if I am in this position where like I have a very supportive spouse and I have somebody where I, you know, can rely on that income and I didn't need to go and get a job immediately and I had all of these privileges and I still was debilitated from even trying like so many other people I know didn't stand a chance, right?

When you have all these other actual like financial pressures and all these other things that would kind of weigh you down, I kept thinking like, why am I so afraid? What am I so afraid of? Right? Like my brain would tell me that this fear was like, I'm never gonna get a job again. We're gonna lose everything. If I don't start making money right now, we're gonna become homeless. And it wasn't true. I mean yes, I did need to start making some income and you know, we did have a lot of discussions around that and finances and and all that stuff. But I was catastrophizing. I was going to this place of like, I am gonna lose the respect of everyone. Everyone's gonna hate me. I'm gonna become homeless. Like my mind had just run wild with everything that could go wrong. I'll never get a job again.

What if I regret leaving the law? What if I wanna go back to the law and nobody ever hires me? And it was like those fears on loop. And so I started really working on that heavily on those thoughts on like, can I figure out a way to manage my own mind? And that's when I found thought work, which is the kind of brand of coaching and mindset work that I do, that I teach my clients because it changed my life. It truly taught me how to start managing my mind. And as I started learning how to manage my mind, I started also learning more about entrepreneurship and started really thinking like could I start a business? And it really appealed to me because I wanted to be home with my son more. I wanted to have flexibility, I really wanted the freedom. And so I kept thinking like maybe I could do this.
Like it started as a seed and I started kind of watering it and it started growing into this idea of like, could I start a business? Ultimately kind of fast forward a little bit, I did decide to start my first business. At first I was just looking for ideas because there was nothing I was really passionate about and I didn't really think I had a skill that I could sell. And so I was looking for a product at the time because I was also in the kind of startup world. And so I thought I needed to have a product that's a story for another day. But I ended up coming up with this. I wanted to make a photo booth out of like an iPad because at the time there was still only photo booths that were like DSLRs that you'd have to pay someone like a thousand dollars to come to your wedding or whatnot.

And I wanted it for my son's birthday, but I didn't wanna pay that much and I was just wanted something that was fun for like the kids to use. And so I had gone on this like exploration of trying to create this for ourselves. And when I realized there was nothing at the time on the market, I started talking to my husband who is an engineer about like whether we can make something like this. And I decided to start that as my first business. Now in hindsight, not the best idea for my first business because I had to learn hardware and like how to build out kind of this product. I had to learn like manufacturing, I had to learn software, I like to create a photo booth app that we were gonna put on these iPads and tablets. It was a lot. But I am really grateful that I started it because even though I was terrified, even though I really had no idea what I was doing, even though I knew I wasn't passionate about it, like this was the big thing that I want people to know is that like a lot of times people think that the thing you have to find is the thing that you're gonna love and that you wanna do for the rest of your life.

And I know for me by that point, I had been spending like a six months trying to come up with an idea for a business to start and I'd come up with a couple other ones and they just weren't working out. And when this came up, I sort of made a decision. I was like, I know this isn't something that I'm like super pa. I'm like, oh my god, this is the best thing that, you know, I don't really wanna be in the event space. I'm not that excited about it. I think it's something that people will use and I think I can create a new type of business with it. But the reason I decided to pursue it was because I was like, well, I don't have any other ideas. And so instead of waiting, I will use this as my education. I will use this as a way to learn entrepreneurship even if it doesn't work out.

I will learn a ton, I'll learn about product and product design and manufacturing and I will learn about sales and marketing and websites and traffic and all of that stuff that I need to learn anyways. And hopefully, you know, that will lead me to the next business or whatnot. But for now, like I don't wanna keep sitting around. And so I started that business, it was called usy Booth. I started that and I actually made it into a successful business. I started a different type of rental model. So instead of, you know, you hiring a photo booth business where they would come out and set up and have an attendant, I had it where it was like everything was compacted into like a suitcase. People would pick it up from me, they would take it, use it at their event, and then they would drop it back off so I could rent multiple units.
I started renting them, I started selling them. I learned how to do a ton more than I ever thought I could. I started making money, I made back all of my investments that I had put in to kind of start building this business. And I learned an unbelievable amount in those years. Most importantly was that I learned that I could do it, that I could figure it out, that that this was something that had no history in, no background in. And I just realized how persistent I am and how when I'm committed to something, I'm gonna make it work. And I would just find people, I would cold call. I remember how many people I would call 'cause I didn't know anything about manufacturing. So I would just call up manufacturing kind of firms and be like, I'm trying to do this. Like do you guys do this?

Who should I talk to? You know, whatnot. I did that for everything. I did it for software, I did it for design, I did it for every, and I started realizing like it's figureoutable. If I can get out of my own way, if I can get out of the thoughts of like, who am I to do this? It's never gonna work. I don't know what I'm doing. Everyone's gonna laugh at me. If I could move past that, I could figure it out. I would fail a lot. And trust me, I failed a lot in those two years. But I ended up kind of creating this business. I was using it kind of as like a side hustle income at the time. I had another kid. Uh, I was sort of part-time working and at home with my two children. So that takes us to about 2018.
And in that time, not only had I changed a lot about my own mindset, I started also having a lot of conversations with people about quitting, about whenever I would tell people I used to be a lawyer, they would wanna know the story, they would wanna know how I left. If I ever told like any lawyer, I was like, I would always hear, oh my God, I wish I could quit. How did you do it? And I started hearing it from other people too. I started talking to people and they would tell me like, you know, what they were doing. And then when I would tell them, you know, I used to be a lawyer, they would say like, oh yeah, I used to be a doctor or I used to be an engineer and now they're doing something completely different. And I was like, wait, what?

I wanna what? Tell me that story. How did that happen? When did you make that transition? How did you deal with everyone's, you know, your family's judgments? And I was so curious about this conversation and why we weren't talking about it more about people starting over and trying new things and you know, when they realized it wasn't for them pivoting. And so in 2018 I decided to start a podcast called Lessons from a Quitter. And I really wanted to just have this conversation. I didn't know what I was gonna do with it. My famous last words were that I would never coach anybody. I just wanted to interview people who had quit kind of successful careers and gone on to do something else. To show people that like, you can start over. You can do something different. And so that started in 2018. For the first year I just did interviews.
I interviewed, I would say for the first year and a half, maybe almost a hundred episodes, was just other quitters, quote unquote other people who had really made it in one field and found the courage to leave that even though everybody told them they're crazy and that they shouldn't, and then moved on to something else, something equally cool. And so I loved those interviews in that time, like I said, because I was doing a lot of mindset work myself. And I started seeing everybody had the same problems. I became certified at the Life coach school. I got my certification in this type of mindset coaching. And after about a year, I kept getting the same questions. People kept reaching out and being like, this resonates so much with me. I'm in this situation. What would you do about this? I'm worried about this. My parents say this.

My spouse isn't on board. What do I do about that? And so I just started helping people for free. At first, I was just like giving answers. I was responding. And then I was like, you know, I'm doing this so much that like I started doing free coaching calls, like just everybody could come on Zoom and I, we would just talk about it. And then that led to me doing kind of a group program. I started doing group programs, like six months cohorts, bringing people in who were really unhappy. And I started developing kind of a process. I started creating more videos, more ways to help people. I started learning more. I became master certified about a year later. And then I think in the first year I did it full-time. I made a hundred K. And then the second year I made 200 k.
And I've made around 200, 250,000 every year for the last couple of years. Helping people kind of figure out what they wanna do, helping them quit their jobs, helping them manage their minds around it, helping them figure out what it is they actually want outta their lives. About two years ago I switched the group program to the Quitter Club, which is my membership now. I switched it to kind of a membership model. And the Quitter Club is where I help people come in and learn how to first manage their mind. 'cause that's the most important tool. And then figure out where they wanna go from there, figure out what it is that they love doing, dream bigger, you know, deal with all of the judgment and the fears that they have to deal with so that they can create a life that they want. And for some people that's quitting their job.

And for some people it's not. For some people it's quitting. Really. The stuff that's not working, the reason they're burned out, they might actually like the job, but they're people pleasers, they're perfectionists, they're, you know, need external validation. They have impossible standards. And so we work a lot on that so that they can like kind of reclaim their life so they can actually like enjoy their nights and weekends and not give their whole life to work. So that's the work I do now. And I absolutely love what I do. And what's fascinating is that when you look back, you can kind of see all the through lines. You can see how things connected when you're going through it. None of it makes sense. You're just like, I have no idea how this is gonna go. I don't know if this step is the next right one.
Should I be doing this? Should I not? For me, I am so incredibly grateful to my past self for sitting with the discomfort of like leaving something that was so successful and revered and I had so much approval for being a lawyer, doing that, even though it was extremely difficult because I finally figured out the things that do light me up, the things that I love talking about, the things that I wanna be doing every day. And I know again, that I still have, now that I'm at this age, I still have another probably 30 years to work. And so I'm so grateful that I went on this journey mostly because I think that it liberated me to know that I can figure it out. And so even if I don't do this, even if I decide in five years that this isn't gonna be it, I'm not locked into that mindset that like, I don't know anything else. I have to stay here. And I think that's been the biggest freedom that I've gotten from this whole journey. And so that is my story. It's a little bit about me. It's a lot about me. That was kind of long. If you've stuck around to the end, thank you. I'm so glad to have you here and I'm happy to help you in any way I can on your own journey. If any of this resonates and you feel the same way, I would love to have you in the Quitter Club. You can go to lessons from a quitter.com/quitter club and sign up there so that we can get you started on the same journey. And if you stick around, I'll have a lot more videos and content about how you can do that. All the things that you need to do to kind of quit burnout, quit doing whatever one else wants. Quit living small and really go after that life that you want.

All right, my friends, I'll see you next week for another episode. Hey, if you are looking for more in-depth help with your career, whether that's dealing with all of the stress, worry, and anxiety that's leading to burnout in your current career or figuring out what your dream career is and actually going after it, I want you to join me in the Quitter Club. It is where we quit what is no longer working like perfectionism, people pleasing imposter syndrome, and we start working on what does and we start taking action towards the career and the life that you actually want. We will take the concepts that we talk about on the podcast and apply them to your life and you will get the coaching tools and support that you need to actually make some real change. So go to lessonsfromaquitter.com/quitterclub and get on the wait list. Doors are closed right now, but they will be open soon.