When I started out as a young lawyer, I was fortunate to practice in a firm that understood what it meant to compete for success.

If you ask most people, competition is a zero-sum game – I (or more appropriately, my client) win, you (your client) loses. Certainly, in law although I believe this is true in almost every walk of life, our success is measured by wins and losses, how we compete. But my mentor, George, was a Latin scholar and he instilled in the young lawyers a different understanding.

The word compete in the classic Latin means: ‘strive in common; strive after something in company with or together; to meet or come together; to agree or coincide’. Collaboration, not the cutthroat approach all too common today. By competing, we grow together and mentor each other and collectively we improve, growing towards the goal. What a novel approach.

I thought about this distinction when working recently with a client, a young lawyer, who was on the verge of burnout disillusioned with what she thought was her dream job of practicing law with a nationally recognized firm in a specialty area of her choosing. Prestige, financial reward and lots of resources were at her disposal. Yet this turned out to be not enough.

We explored why she does what she does – why practice law? And we explored what are her core values and her needs to feel successful, not in the eyes of others, but to her own satisfaction.

It turns out that what she needed, what she desired, the most was competition in the traditional sense. She needed support from her peers, her family and friends and her co-workers. Competition in the way of support and guidance – striving together, not at the expense of others.

Many of us have found that even with the trappings of success, if we find ourselves surrounded by people who don’t help us grow, something must change. Either the relationship (work) or we need to change. As humans we seek to be surrounded by like-minded people or a work environment to be healthy. This does not mean to surround ourselves with unicorns and rainbows, for that is not real life circumstances. But it means that even if those around us have different points of view, we can learn together without destruction.

Ultimately, when we face a relationship which affect us negatively we have five options and we choose one of them, sometimes by default.

• First, we can stay embedded in the negative energy which keeps us a victim to the circumstances. If we choose this option, our energy will continue being drained until there is nothing left.
• Second, we can leave the relationship. We can choose to leave on good terms or bad terms, but leaving the relationship is sometimes the best for both parties. The key is to leave with dignity and true to your core values.
• Third, we can accept the relationship and we can decide either it is too much effort, takes too much energy to leave or change or the relationship is ‘ok as it is’. Depending on how we proceed, this choice may be temporary or long-lasting.
• Fourth, we can change the relationship. This requires effort to communicate with others in the relationship to state your needs and seek a different approach from others. This choice also requires determination to hold fast to your wants and needs to be sure the relationship does not slip back into the past.
• Fifth, we can change our perspective of the relationship. This choice starts with trying to see the relationship from the perspective of the other person(s) involved. Can we see where they come from and understand why they act the way they do? Does this approach lead to a better relationship? Or it may lead to one of the other choices. This fifth choice provides the best approach as it allows us to evaluate the situation more objectively. Even if we decide on one of the other 4 choices, we do so from a perspective of strength.