Rachel Clar:
Being willing to say, "This is where I end and you begin, this is where you end and I begin," and speaking in a more assertive way that protects your time, protects your energy, makes clear what you are and are not willing to participate in. Boundaries are everything.
Sonya Palmer:
This is LawHer. I am Sonya Palmer, senior vice president at Rankings, and your host, where the boldest and brightest women in law share how they own power faster and keep it longer.
Rachel Clar:
It's very challenging because women lawyers as a whole, I believe, share the same struggles that I've shared personally, which is go big, but don't make people uncomfortable. Go really high, but don't be a witch. That's from generations and generations of conditioning.
Sonya Palmer:
For generations, women, especially those who are caregivers and are in service-oriented professions, have been taught, often implicitly, that strength looks like silence, that good behavior means self-sacrifice. Psychologists call this intergenerational transmission of behavior. It's not genetic, but it is powerful.
Rachel Clar:
The archetype of the good girl as a lawyer I think would be the same as the archetype of any good girl in any profession, which is living someone else's dream.
Sonya Palmer:
Through modeling, reinforcement and culture, we learn which traits are in safety and belonging, and which ones trigger resistance or even punishment. So when women feel that stomach drop or the sweaty palms or the pounding heart as they speak up, it's not weakness, it's a nervous system responding to centuries of conditioning that said, "Don't rock the boat."
Rachel Clar:
We get habituated to giving away our own power and not setting boundaries. So for example, a lot of women who are attracted to me and my community are big givers, but I hear things like, "I want to help these smaller businesses that can't afford my firm and I'll help them grow."
Sonya Palmer:
Women in the workplace studied by McKinsey and LeanIn, found that women leaders spend significantly more time than men on non-promotable work, mentoring, supporting their teams and carrying the emotional labor of their workplaces. It's meaningful work. But without boundaries, that kind of giving doesn't just wear us out, it can hamper business development.
Rachel Clar:
And I'm like, well, you can offer them a newsletter. You don't have to give them your $800 an hour time and then wonder about your business development time being better spent. So is there a way you can make more impact in less time and be more discerning? So I talk a lot about givers. And so Adam Grant... I always mention this. Adam Grant, who is a Wharton professor and a bestselling author and many wonderful things, wrote a book called Give and Take, and he talks about this study. Thousands of adults in this ladder of success were either givers, takers, or matchers.
So most of us in this world are matchers, meaning we're transactional. But there's givers and takers. And so I'll always ask people, "Well, who do you think is at the top of the ladder of success?" The correct answer from his research is that, at both the top and the bottom are givers. So how can that be? The givers at the very top... The givers at the very bottom, what I call dormant givers, have poor boundaries. But once you have really great boundaries, you go to the top. So that would be an example of a boundary with yourself, that you can still be a really generous giver and a really top tier giver, but not be personally available to everything. Think of Oprah. She's the ultimate giver, but I don't have access to Oprah.
The more I focus on it, the better I get. It becomes like a little game. It's like, "Oh, X, Y, Z happened and I did not like that. That did not feel good." Whether or not I say something, most boundaries are in our heads. I don't have to be burning bridges and saying all kinds of things, but I want less of that, I want more of that. I mean, I had a wonderful experience prepping for this podcast, so I know I want more of that. I was in real estate for almost all of my career until pretty recently. Within my real estate journey, I made several stops. So basically, I would get good enough to be dangerous in a particular sector of the real estate industry and I would get curious to try something new.
First, it was what they might call vanilla development. It was warehouses and commercial office buildings, both buying and building them and managing them. I was always working for a developer, just to be super transparent. These weren't my own assets. I had a little stuff on my own, but I got rid of that at some point. Then I got into affordable... When there was a downturn in '08 and Obama put all this money into the economy, I got into affordable housing. It's a very complicated system and there's constantly more layers of complication being added onto it. And so by no means did I master that, but I learned enough to be reading big HUD regulations and explaining it to my developer boss and working on eventually doing contract work for national developers. And that was thrilling. And then it was time for a change.
Around that time, I transitioned into urban infill development. I was working on developing a big downtown neighborhood, which now exists in downtown Rochester. And after that, I got into solar. Yeah.
Sonya Palmer:
By every traditional measure, career trajectory, credentials, the scope of her work, Rachel was thriving. But the outward success did not reflect her innermost feelings.
Rachel Clar:
Feeling like a huge failure. Feeling like a huge failure because so much of it wasn't on my terms.
Sonya Palmer:
But she wasn't alone in feeling like something was deeply off. According to the American Bar Association, women in law report higher levels of anxiety, depression, and burnout than their male peers, even as they continue to outperform in school, on the job, and in leadership roles. The gap between what looks like success and what actually feels like peace, for many, it's wide, and it's quiet until it isn't.
Rachel Clar:
I think I had given away my agency and my power bit by bit by bit until I just, as I approached 40, I did not recognize myself. And it was like, I wouldn't even say I didn't recognize myself because that implies I knew who I was and am, but I definitely felt that my life was majorly off course, I mean professionally, in a way, and also personally. So I felt it was time for a big refocus so that I could turn the Titanic.
Sonya Palmer:
But turning a ship that size takes more than just a new direction. When everything feels off course, professionally, personally, sometimes the only way forward is to look back. Understand where Rachel was headed, we needed to understand where she came from. Takes going back to the blueprint. For Rachel, that meant revisiting the story she was raised on, about ambition, responsibility, about being a good girl.
Rachel Clar:
I come from a very tight-knit family. My family has deep roots in western New York, and we've been in greater Rochester for a long time, many generations. I am the oldest of three kids. And I think part of the origin story of the business has to do with being a good girl for a long time and being told to reach high and get good grades, and at the same time, not ruffle any feathers, don't make people uncomfortable. My dad and I are very close, but it's also complicated. I would've no problem arguing with him. And also when my siblings would get in trouble, I would represent them. I wasn't called on to represent them, but I would speak for them because they weren't as articulate, because they were little. So my parents would find that hilarious and say, "You should be a lawyer. You should be a lawyer."
Sonya Palmer:
Even before she had language for it, Rachel was stepping into the role of advocate. But back then, it was about smoothing over conflict, not challenging the system that created it.
Rachel Clar:
So by the time I was seven, I wrote my dad a note in crayon that was like, "When I grow up, I want to be a lawyer. I want to guide my client to winning." Blah, blah, blah, blah, blah. They later framed and gave to me at law school graduation. From a young age in elementary school, I was being indoctrinated that this was the right direction to take my life and that any other avenue I considered was veering from where I really should be. So it was a part of me that loves art. And even just to look at me or my background, I love art, I love creativity. I really am playful. And there's a lot of other directions that might've been interesting, but it was like, "Nope. You are a lawyer. It's who you are."
My mom was mostly at home. She's a huge community volunteer. So of course, unpaid labor. But she was very committed to community work. And that's a big part of my heart and soul from her. My father is a dentist. He's the first generation... He's the oldest of his family. And he's the first generation to have gone to college and grad school as well. My father, being self-employed, when I was a kid, I had to fill out some paperwork about his employment. I put none. They asked who was the employer? I put none. And he just thought that was the funniest thing. Being first generation and then being self-employed, I just think there was such a over and above our culture's drive to work, work, work. I just think there was that huge drive to make sure that he succeeded by overworking and working all the time.
And so I think I got my work ethic from him. But also, there's a tendency where that can be really hard for me to bring into line. And so I've done some deep work trying to unravel some of the origins of that. When I was in high school, I was in a some sort of honor society. The teacher had us meet with the CEO at the time of Kodak, which is based in Rochester, New York. We have massive problems in Rochester with wealth inequality and pollution. I raised my hands and asked him, "Does it bother you that we have major pollution problems and that our rivers and our streams have chemicals in them from Kodak?" And he was like, "Nope. No, it doesn't keep me up." And I was like, "Huh."
I think I was just really disappointed that he didn't give me some sort of like, "No, it doesn't keep me up, but it's a really great question." Or, "I'm proud of our environmental team and I want us to do more" or say something that really validated me. But again, he's a CEO of a Fortune 500. He's not going to validate others, let alone a teenage girl. I wondered if the question was rude and if it was impolite of me to ask him a bad question. But now, I would say, yeah, now I would call it a hard question or a smart question. That kind of chutzpah is not how I was raised to be. So I think there was a dance between being good and being bad, disruptive, that took me years to reckon with. And I think I'm still figuring it out. It's like, it's fun stretching myself more and more into being fully me.
Sonya Palmer:
That internal dance between approval and authenticity didn't disappear when Rachel got to law school. If anything, it just found new steps.
Rachel Clar:
In high school and college, there was definitely some cultural differences where sometimes I felt a little out of sync with my class. For example, I'm not a drinker. There was a lot of partying. I'm not anti-drinking and I do drink, but I don't drink to get drunk. But I mean, overall, I feel very positive when I think back about law school. I feel like it was probably one of the better, if not the best, stop in my education. I can remember moot court and how, I mean, I could almost fall over. I was shaking so hard. I remember another kind of mock trial that I literally brought in my elderly aunt to pose as a witness. And she pretended to be a heart surgeon.
It was very challenging academically and it was very confrontational. My mind goes more to moments that were really fun, people that I felt really safe with or felt really community with, is what sticks out. So I definitely remember Professor Branson. He was really funny. Professor Brostoff and Professor Burkoff, who's now Dean Burkoff, if he's still working. I mean, these people were, each, absolutely brilliant, but also really showed they cared about us in different ways. And that felt really, really good. I was in a new city and just living a much more grown-up life than college. And I don't know. It was just really... I felt very cared for.
When I moved home, I worked for this private, the small midsize firm. It was deeply disturbing how my boss felt liberty to speak to me. I just became instantly aware that while he's super friendly, he was not looking out for me at all, and I did not have a voice other than being playful and dutiful. And the billable hours was the other piece. I literally had a sheet on my desk with six minute increments for the entire day and having to say like... Podcast interview and block out, I mean, it was before that time. But block out all these things.
Someone came into my office, another young woman who worked at the firm and she told me that she had had a miscarriage. So we had a long conversation. But when she left my office, I thought, "Oh damn, that was an hour, hour and a half," whatever it was, and I had to cross off all this time that I was going to have to make up. And I referred to it as a high-class sweatshop. And the part of me that's so justice driven and also so sensitive, I felt like I was a cog in someone's money making machine. And again, later at other points in my career too, I felt that in other ways. So billable is not the only way to make your employees feel like that. But it sure did for me.
So around that time, I began exploring real estate. And at first, my thought was, "I'm going to be Rochester's first female, big scale female real estate developer." And it's funny now, but at the time, the way I was going to do that instead of raising money or buying things that were little that I could afford or any of that, I was going to find basically a father figure who was going to mentor me. And it took me a lot of years before I figured out that real estate developers do not become real estate developers because they are mentors at heart. I don't want to tell you how long it took me to figure that out, but it took me a while to figure that out. I didn't know. You don't know what you don't know.
Sonya Palmer:
For many high achieving women, especially in law, stillness isn't just uncomfortable, it can feel dangerous. Because when you've built an identity around being useful, driven, in control, slowing down doesn't quite feel like rest.
Rachel Clar:
I have massive resistance to slowing down. Massive resistance. And I mean, it took me years to figure out it's because I don't want to feel the feelings that happen when I slow down. And I thought that meant if I took an afternoon off, I would instantly burst into tears. And I was like, "No, no, no, that's not how I feel." And that's not how I feel. But more that if I took an afternoon off and did nothing, it would make me uncomfortable. And that particular type of discomfort is enormously uncomfortable. Yeah. Maybe deep underneath that, there's feelings that I still don't understand. But it's unhealthy. And it's our society and our industry, and it's got to stop.
I turned to Buddhism to see if I could start to quiet my mind and to gain clarity, what was the right thing to do. I definitely was not getting clarity from my faith. And so I wanted something that did not have a dogma with it and did not have someone's wagging your finger from the outside. The brain naturally, when it settles and quiets, compassion is what emerges. And so going on this deeper and deeper journey into essentially compassion and love for others and for myself has just been the most incredible journey, and I'm very excited to weave that into the business more and more in the future, but that's still something that's personal and less a part of my offering.
So when you do some deep healing work... And just before I say something that could discredit me to very analytical logical types, #lawyers, I just want to say that extremely successful people like Tyler Perry and Anderson Cooper, and many, many famous people have spoken about this, but I'm just going to say it. When you do deep healing work, you often are invited to reconnect with younger parts of you that are inside, and to start to see yourself as this loving parent that's shepherding the child inside of you and the teenager inside of you through the world. And there's a judge and a critic. And there's different ways of describing your "inner family."
But this idea that you are the love, that's really the root of what Interconnected Us means. That love is who you are. We think we're the critical voice, the judgmental voice. It's really not. That's ego and dysfunction. The more you can separate from that with things like journaling, things like meditation, self-care... I mean, here's a huge one. Lawyers want to stay in our... We're very comfortable in our left brain, the left side of our brain, so to speak, and the analyzing, thinking, writing, arguing, just overthinking, and really neglecting both the body, the need for physical self-care, and just the need for rest and downtime and creativity and friendship and so on.
And so a lot of us can put that way on the back burner as something optional. And yet we know, neuroscience is there completely, that the highest performance are those who take naps. LeBron James and Winston Churchill, and I mean so many famous people, Arianna Huffington, championing rest and time with their friends and creativity and all these things that really get the highest performance.
Sonya Palmer:
But even rest has its limits. At a certain point, the question isn't just how we recover, but why we're running in the first place. And for Rachel, that led somewhere she never expected; spirituality.
Rachel Clar:
It's wonderful to say the word spirituality. It's something I would've completely cringed at even two years ago. But now I'm really like, wow, that sense of interconnectedness to our fellow human and internally, but which is so abstract to someone who's earlier stage, that sounds like such fluff, empty words. But it is.. Your relationship with all these parts of your psyche is what's driving everything you do. The overeating, the overdrinking, the overworking, the avoidance, the argumentativeness, all of it. It all goes back to feelings that you don't want to feel.
And so figuring that out and then maybe feeling the feelings and making amends and all of that is heavy, intense work, and is work... I mean, I think Gandhi has said, "There's no peace in the world until there's peace within." And that's what that means. But most people are like, "Nah, I'd rather not." I mean, I can think of only 98% of the people I meet who are just like, "I'd rather put that under the rug and go forward." I'm like, that's adorable. And the more we become okay with being uncomfortable, the more we can tolerate it. And I can't tell you that I love being uncomfortable. But I mean, even yesterday, I went to swim laps in the afternoon. And it's been a few days since I'd been in the pool. And the first 10 minutes, I was like, "Holy shit, I'm really out of breath."
You would've thought it was my first day back after maternity leave or something, the way I was huffing and puffing. And I think, because I've given so much intentional thought about discomfort and the power in stretching my tolerance for it, in a lot of ways, I could really go long on just how much my stubbornness is an asset in this part of my growth, because I will tolerate a lot and I've grown from it.
Sonya Palmer:
Sometimes, the most powerful shifts don't happen in boardrooms or courtrooms, but in quiet rooms with the right people. For Rachel, one invitation changed everything.
Rachel Clar:
There's a number of women lawyers in town who, for a variety of reasons, were looking for community and were aligned in very specific ways, world view, ambition, humor, just a number of important parts of what makes us choose friends and who we feel comfortable with and can let our guard down. So in that circle, it was stunning to me how much further I could go when I had people I expected to take my questions to, people who I felt like really understood me. It was really, really different than bringing things to my social circle or to my family, who loves me but does not walk in my shoes or understand how I see things, did not have all those experiences along the way. But I felt like my peers really could fully hear me to the extent they hadn't lived it themselves, and the advice I got catapulted me.
What I've learned over the years is you want enough alignment between the participants that you can get really, really real and get what you need, but you also want enough differences that the conversation is interesting and stimulating, and you want guidelines or a leader. So there's a number of things that really make it impactful, as impactful as possible. But there was, for sure, a sharing of the mic, unspoken rules about not dominating and showing respect to one another, and boy, really pulling the best of what each person has and bringing it to the tables so that everyone gets ahead. And it was just very beautiful and touching.
It's counterintuitive that when you're an introvert, honestly, or a self-reliant, overly self-reliant firstborn. But when you're in a room with your peers, you start to see that you're giving something really valuable. It's incredibly life affirming to help others. And it's incredibly confidence boosting to observe that like, "Oh shit, that advice that I gave Sonya is going to help her make more money." That feels incredible. And then, I'm like, "Oh, I have this skillset. Wait a minute." Just around that time, I was coaching a lot of colleagues along the way, and they were making more money, they were getting promotions, they were going for better opportunities.
And I was just kind of... The origin story of Interconnected Us is not a neat little trajectory. It's a bunch of pieces from my past that once I started looking within, I was like, "This was awesome. This was awesome. I'm all about this. And this is what I do naturally." And bringing it together.
Sonya Palmer:
After years of pushing, producing and proving, Rachel started to rewrite the rules. And one simple phrase became a kind of mantra.
Rachel Clar:
Progress, not perfection, is definitely one of the phrases that I have learned and use. And literally, just earlier today, called a friend and said something along those lines, like, "Wow, listen to what I did. I didn't do it perfectly, but I made progress." And that's part of the all or nothing thinking that is so pervasive in our culture and in our industry. One of the things I've learned in Buddhism and part of what I infused everywhere in what I teach is the middle way. This idea that, like Goldilocks, not too hot, not too cold, just right. I mean, in the business, you're constantly trying new things. Everything's an experiment. You're iterating. But as a lawyer, things are either perfect and good or they're bad and a disaster.
And so growing the neurons in my brain and my speech so that, with myself, and so I can help others really establish that both can be true. It's not an all-or-nothing. There's a sign in a friend's house that says, "You can be both a masterpiece and a work in progress at the same time." And when you have other people who are working the program literally or figuratively together with you, it's so much easier to find that middle because there's going to be so many times where we automatically go to one extreme and we need others to be like, "Hey, I'm going to check you on that mindset."
Sonya Palmer:
But some habits die hard, especially the ones we mistake for ambition. For Rachel, unlearning perfectionism meant facing the truth about a voice many of us live with every day, that one that says, "You're only as good as what you get done."
Rachel Clar:
Perfectionism is believing this lie that you're not great the way you are, that you need to strive, strive, strive. When the reality is, all of the self whipping that we do, self-flagellation is such a misnomer that that's a superpower, that that's an asset that's creating higher production. It's quite the opposite. It's a habit that, yeah, for a while, serves you maybe in your younger years to force yourself to stay in the chair and get the homework done sort of thing, or as a young lawyer, get the brief in on time and so on. But the dysfunction accumulates. You can think of it like a progressive disease. And so if you don't start to have a different relationship with perfectionism, with all the self-blame, with the self-criticism, the judgment and so on, it will take you down.
I can say that journaling is transformative. Journaling is absolutely transformative. And I don't want to say I did it the wrong way, but I did it in a way that did not help me recoup massive personal growth until pretty recently. I arrived at a technique that's, I don't know if others do, but I do, and has started to build all kinds of cool pathways inside.
Yeah. I mean, I can't tell you how many years I've resisted all of these truths, because that cultural pressure and that, at least in my brain, how the dysfunction or the disease or the ego manifests is a strong drive to be in constant production. It can't be summer and harvest all the time. It's got to also lay fallow to regenerate.
Sonya Palmer:
Power doesn't always come from pushing harder. Sometimes, it comes from pausing long enough to ask, "Whose dream am I living?" And then choosing differently. If you found something in her story that moved you, we hope you'll subscribe and share this episode with someone who needs to hear it. I am Sonya Palmer, SVP of Rankings.
Rachel Clar:
What gives me hope, quite frankly, is this idea of being able to teach nonviolence to women. Because I think mockery, disrespect, even just adversarialism is not going to save us right now. We're going to have to learn how to engage with others who are different from us in a way that builds unity and interconnectedness, and I hope to be a part of that.
