An Exercise in Understanding Your Own Resentments
[00:00:00] If I had a bad experience with someone at a law firm that left me with some resentment, how should I handle future interactions with this person who I may run into? We're still in the same market and legal circles. Should I act like nothing just happened to avoid any awkwardness?
Okay. Resentments are a big thing. Resentments are something that does hurt a lot of people. And a lot of times people will carry around resentments and resentments can harm you. You should probably act as nothing happened, but you should also understand, why? Write down or just put the person's name--
What they did?
How does it make me feel?
Did I do anything to contribute?
I remember once I was interviewing with a firm because my friend told me to interview there and I was currently employed with a firm. I interviewed with this guy and he was really rude to me and he said--
Why are you interviewing here? You're only a law clerk. What are you doing? And I was like, my friend told me to go. I talked to you. He said, yeah, I can do all this type of work and stuff. It just made me feel horrible. So I wrote down [00:01:00] how it made me feel and that it made me feel badlybad and what he did and which was very rude to me. The firm shouldn't have been rude to me when I had just come in for an interview? And how it badly makes me feel? And then I thought, what did I do to contribute to this? And what I did was I interviewed with this firm. Because I was happy at my existing firm, I probably shouldn't have gotten interviewed. I was told that I was interviewing in my first six months of the job, which was probably a dumb thing to do. That's being very disloyal and he was bringing that up to me and making me see that, and it made me feel bad about myself.
He also was pointing out that, I hadn't even gotten my bar results yet, so I was still a clerk. And so all these different things that he brought up made me feel bad. I realized because of everything there that I had contributed to it.
I contributed to what happened.
I certainly didn't know him in apology. But my actions are something that created the issue.
That's a good exercise sometimes when you have your resentments, cause a lot of people to carry around resentments and here are [00:02:00] all sorts of programs, whether self-help programs and focus on resentments because resentments can do a lot of damage to people.
And so if you understand your role in it, then you know you can sometimes understand how you may have contributed to the problem and what it brought up in you.
That can help you quite a bit.
