A Monumental Shift to Decide if Deferring Your Bar Exam Test Date is the Right Move for You?

Part Two

If you missed it, read part one here.

“Until you make the unconscious conscious, it will direct your life and you will think it is fate.” Carl G Jung.

In part I we discussed how life evens, with accompanying emotional responses, deeply embed a principle of what is ‘good’ and ‘bad’. Unbeknownst to yourself, you may be trying hard to stay on the ‘good’ side of this principle. This principle can be illogical, you likely internalized it before you had full information to think it through. Nevertheless, it can be controlling and may be the culprit behind your Bar Exam woes. Here’s a real life illustration.

One man, a law student, carries a clear disdain for lawyers.  He focuses on all the jerks in the field and preaches all day that he will not become like them.  Can you see the problem with this picture?  As he focuses on all that is ill with the profession, he is communicating to himself, over and over again that it is not good to be an attorney.  We are socially conditioned to 'be good' and not 'be bad'.  Why then, would his mind ever let him enter a profession that he feels is so deeply flawed?  His mind will surely work against him being categorized as "bad".

Does this man have to abandon his disdain for horrible lawyers?  No.  But he does have to find a different way to think about the situation so that his spirit won't be at war with his conscious intentions to become an attorney.  There's just no way around it.  Your deepest driving desires will win each time. So, if you are facing resistance, it's time to do a deep dive exploration of your thoughts and feelings around being an attorney, or even just passing the Bar exam. 

🕮 There are three methods I use to help clients uncover some of these unconscious presets and the conditioning that is causing them to self-sabotage.  Dream work, Visualization and working with Triggers.  My favorite is working with triggers.  Triggers are when circumstances or people around you push your buttons and cause strong feelings to arise, (you get into a fight with a loved one, a co-worker talks at you sideways, someone rides your tail on the highway).  You may also recognize triggers through extreme repulsion or attraction. Triggers are valuable for uncovering our true beliefs and desires.  When we uncover them we can test whether those beliefs and desires have been playing a role in our dismal results. 

In the case of the young man who judged attorneys as bad, I noticed that he completely skipped over the fact that these people were probably jerks before they became attorneys.  He saw the title of Esquire as bestowing these bad personality traits on these people.  But that's not the end of the heaped up assumptions, unconscious conditioning and emotional presets he was unknowingly carrying around.

Seeking to help loosen up the pent up aggression he had around the subject, I asked him to describe some of the behaviors he saw these attorneys displaying.  When he went on to describe the behaviors he was labeling as "bad", I realized this young man will have a terrible time representing clients and even fending for himself in the world.  The behavior he described was attorneys setting a reasonable fee, collecting on fees, and taking a pass on the clients who could not pay those fees.  He saw such attorneys as evil jerks. 

I didn't press the issue to uncover the source of the belief (after all it wasn’t a coaching session), but I imagine that at some point in his life, he observed someone he cared about on the receiving end of that treatment and formed the assumption that attorneys are jerks.

Then he decided to enter the profession to be the 'exception'.  Yet the deep-seated, emotionally rooted belief that attorneys are largely jerks will present a stumbling block.  Until he comes to terms with supporting himself and even living well through working as an attorney, he is probably going to sabotage himself, if not on the Bar exam, then in his career progression.

His deepest driving desire is to be seen as 'good'--as characterized by generously taking on everyone's case without requiring, or collecting, a reasonable fee.  Somewhere in his life, he picked up the conditioning that asking for and being adamant about receiving what you deserve is bad.  This desire to be ‘good’ and ‘not bad’ and the unconscious tagging of these different behaviors as either good or bad, will stop him before he even gets started.  There are mentors he will pass up (because they're "jerks") and lucrative cases he'll be too busy to take because his schedule is filled with low paying or pro bono cases. He’ll likely have an exponential amount of life stress (how happy can you be when you’re working 60 hours/wk yet can’t pay your bills). And, I can confidently predict major job dissatisfaction in his future.  Unless something changes, he’ll work for very little or even for free. People who do not pay for services are often (not always) the hardest to deal with, being very unappreciative and highly demanding.*

 I quietly wondered "where else does this young man struggle with asking for, expecting and receiving what he deserves?".  After all, these sorts of beliefs tend to be universal; our unconscious mind applies them in every situation. 

🕮 Resistance is gold.  If you inspect it, you can uncover a world of beliefs living in the unconscious that was running your life.  You can now approach these beliefs consciously and take back control over your life.

🕮  You don't need to let resistance dictate your life.  People, situations and things that trigger you are telltale signs of gold.  Grab your shovel, dig in, and find out what's there. Face the feeling.  Examine the story. Decide if you want to continue believing it.  Then, make a decision to believe something different.  For help with this and other methods to get past your barriers and pass the Bar, join the Group.  You may find rescheduling unnecessary.

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*I know it seems like a major assumption to equate low rates to unappreciative people.  Hopefully you'll follow my writings long enough (or better yet, join the group) to see the logic.  But for now just know that I believe people value what they pay good money for--and that belief has served me very well in business.  If you plan on an entrepreneurial journey in any field, play with this logic, you might find it fits.