Part 1 -Redefining Success
I used to think success was a finish line. Win the trial. Get a 6 figure verdict. Get a 7 figure verdict. Private planes. Win awards. Be named a Super Lawyer. Get Top Attorney from 5280 Magazine. Get inducted into the Multimillion Dollar Advocates Forum. Get inducted into ABOTA. I thought if I just kept stacking wins, one day I’d feel done — like I’d finally arrive somewhere and get to exhale.
That day never came – my achievements were never good enough to say “I am successful”. And if you’re a trial lawyer and a mom, I’m guessing it hasn’t come for you either.
Here’s the uncomfortable truth I had to sit with: you can win the case, make the number, get the promotion — and still feel like a failure by dinner, because you missed pickup, snapped at your kid, or spent the drive home replaying every mistake instead of noticing what actually went right. That’s not a productivity problem. That’s a definition problem.
The trap isn’t wanting the goal. It’s how we’re measuring ourselves in the process.
There’s a concept from Russ Harris’s work on Acceptance and Commitment Therapy that reframed this for me: most of us have been handed a broken measuring stick. We were taught that success is a destination — a pile of achievements you accumulate until you feel good enough. But achievement-based success has a cruel design flaw: the goalposts move. You hit the target, and almost immediately a new target appears a little further out. Partner isn’t enough — now it’s equity partner. Six figures isn’t enough — now it’s seven. The win isn’t enough — now it’s did I win well enough.
If your sense of success is tied entirely to outcomes you don’t fully control — a verdict, a client’s decision, a promotion committee — you are handing your self-worth to something outside yourself. That’s a rough way to run a life, and it’s an especially rough way to run a life that already includes opposing counsel, a docket, and a toddler who did not sleep last night.
A different question to ask yourself
Instead of asking “What have I achieved?” — try asking:
“Am I living in line with what actually matters to me, on most days, in the small moments no one is grading?”
That’s a completely different measuring stick. It doesn’t ask whether you won. It asks whether you showed up as the lawyer, parent, partner, and person you actually want to be — regardless of the outcome. You can lose a motion and still succeed, if you prepared with integrity and treated your client with respect. You can miss a deadline once in a hard season and still be living your values, if you’re honest about it and repair it. Values-based success is available to you today, not someday after the next milestone.
I’m not telling you to want less. High achieving is in your DNA, and it’s not going anywhere. I’m telling you to point that drive at something you actually have control over.
Getting honest about what your values
This sounds simple until you try to do it. Most of us are fluent in what we’re supposed to value — “family,” “excellence,” “integrity” — but far less clear on what those words mean in our actual, specific life. Vague values don’t guide decisions. Specific ones do. I have asked many clients if they have ever done a true value assessment, and 90% of them say no. Until we know what truly makes us tick, our north star, our core values – we have nothing to measure ourselves against.
A few questions worth sitting with, maybe with a notebook and a closed door:
- When have I felt most like myself at work — not most successful, most myself? What was I doing, and what did that say about what I care about?
- If I imagine my kid describing me as a mom in twenty years, what do I want that description to include? Not achievements — qualities.
- What kind of lawyer do I want to be known as by the people across the table from me, win or lose?
- Where in my week do I feel a quiet sense of “this matters,” separate from any external reward?
Your answers probably aren’t going to be “billable hours” or “trial wins.” They’re more likely to be things like presence, courage, honesty, growth, being fully in the room I’m in. Those are your values. They’re not goals you complete — they’re directions you walk in, every single day, for the rest of your life.
Living them daily — in five-minute doses, not grand gestures
Living in your values isn’t through one big overhaul. You live them in small, repeatable choices: the ten minutes you put the phone down at dinner, the honest email you send instead of the avoidant one, the way you talk to yourself after a hard hearing. Success, redefined this way, becomes something you can actually do today — instead of a scoreboard you check at year-end and usually feel behind on.
A useful daily practice: at the end of the day, instead of asking “did I get enough done,” ask “where did I act in line with what I care about today — and where did I drift?” That’s it. No grade. Just information you can use tomorrow.
What to do when your values collide
Here’s the part nobody warns you about: your values will conflict. Regularly. And it will cause discomfort. Being fully present for a closing argument and being fully present for your daughter’s recital can occupy the same Tuesday at 4pm, and you cannot do both at once. This isn’t a sign you’re failing at values-based living — it’s a sign you’re a human with more than one thing you care about.
When values collide, a few things help:
- Name the conflict out loud instead of pretending it isn’t there. “I care about both of these things, and today I can only fully show up for one” is a much healthier internal sentence than silent guilt.
- Choose deliberately, not by default. Even if the choice is made for you by circumstance, decide how you want to show up within it — call during the break, send the voice memo, be fully present the moment you walk in the door instead of half-present all evening.
- Zoom out past the single day. You are not required to perfectly balance every value in every 24-hour window. You’re building a life over years. One trial-heavy week doesn’t erase a year full of being a present parent— as long as you’re paying attention and course-correcting over time, not letting one value quietly disappear for good.
- Let go of the idea that a well-lived life is conflict-free. It isn’t. A values-conflict-free life usually means you’ve stopped caring about most things. The discomfort of the trade-off is actually evidence you’re living a full, values-rich life — not evidence you’re doing it wrong.
The exhale you were waiting for
If you’ve been chasing the version of success that lives at the next milestone, I want to offer you something more sustainable: you get to feel successful today, on a random Tuesday with no trophy attached — because success was never supposed to be about arriving. It’s about direction. It’s about whether the way you practiced law, showed up for your kids, and treated yourself today actually lines up with who you’re trying to be.
That’s a version of success you can access constantly. Not someday. Today.
If this resonated, I’d love to hear what values came up for you when you sat with those questions — drop a comment or send me a message. This is the first in a short series on sustainable success for lawyer-moms; next up: why “the gap” is quietly making you miserable, and how to close it.
