Conversations With Cady

I taught my first class this week. It was fun and a great learning experience. It has me reflecting on firsts throughout my life. My first relationship, my first job, my first trial, my first heartbreak, etc. We learn so much from the first time we do something. With my first relationship, I learned what it felt like to be loved and supported. I learned about companionship, compatibility, communication, and adventure. From my first heartbreak, I learned how strong I am on my own and that with alone time, we develop the skills we need to thrive in and out of relationships. I valued my independence, my friendships, my family, and travel.  From my first law job I learned about good mentoring, hard work, and the importance of time away from the office. My first boss put such an emphasis on spending time with family and friends and really disconnecting. He believed that you needed at least a few weeks time off to really create distance between you and your workplace. I am forever gratef...

Anxiety sucks. I can’t remember when I started to feel anxious. I don’t really remember dealing with it until after law school. After I graduated, I had big goals and I thought that I could only accomplish them by perfecting the craft. I put a lot of pressure on myself to perform. My best was never good enough. Only perfect was acceptable. This pressure may have led to the uneasy nervousness I now associate with anxiety.  Anxiety manifests in many ways for me. Early on, it caused me to lose sleep. My brain raced for hours on all the things I had to accomplish the next day or all the ways I could have done something better that day. I ruminated on the emails I sent, the demand letters I drafted, and the meetings I had with clients and my superiors. It was all consuming at night and I constantly feared I could have done something better. At night time, I lost control of my thoughts and regularly spiraled into the negative and worst-case scenarios. A few years into my practice, I star...

A few weeks ago, I finished a coaching class on acknowledgement. The theme of the class was that we need to be aware of our client’s strengths and acknowledge when they utilize them to show up in a certain way in their personal or professional lives. The interesting development in the class, though, was how awkward it felt to receive acknowledgement or recognition and how wonderful it felt to give it.  This is how it went. The facilitator requested that I discuss something I was proud of from the previous week and enlisted my classmates to acknowledge my efforts. Immediately, I got sweaty. I was uncomfortable. I put my Zoom mic on mute and just smiled and nodded as my colleagues sang my praises. What should have been an enjoyable experience, was simply awkward.  So many of us do not handle praise. We feel we are not worthy of recognition, that we do not need it, or that we’re just doing what we’re supposed to do so it’s completely unnecessary. We explain away the acknowledgmen...