Laura Carrocci spent a decade building a career as a criminal lawyer and prosecutor before a pivotal period in her life put the spotlight on her happiness and health.
Laura wanted to start a family, but while embarking on the emotional rollercoaster of IVF treatment she realised her career wasn’t healthy.
“It was about two and a half, almost three years of fertility treatment and at that time I was working as a prosecutor at the Director of Public Prosecutions here in South Australia, and that was I guess the tipping point for me, the icing on the cake,” Laura told Bushy Martin on the Get Invested podcast.
“It was easy to manage a challenging and at times stressful career, I think a lot of people have those sort of jobs, but then going through the process of IVF, it really challenged me to look at the way I was living and question if it was sustainable, if it was healthy. And my answer to both of those questions were no.”
Laura realised she wasn’t alone. Many professionals were technically trained and experienced, but without emotional capacity.
“I look back now and most of the stress was my inability to manage my own emotions and mindset,” she said.
“What I saw in that career for myself and for the vast majority of people that I worked with, was a lifestyle and a way of working and living that was not sustainable in terms of long-term success. If we look at success being having a sense of purpose and accomplishment in our work, but also having a sense of good health and strong relationships.
“I think it’s a challenge that a lot of professionals face. They go gung-ho into their career and they invest a lot of time and energy into it, but we’re not taught at school or at university how to manage our emotions. We spend a lot of time educating our intellect, and not a lot of time educating our emotions. I often think it’d be fantastic if there was a subject at school, or at university, on how to think and how to manage your emotions, and how to design your life.”
Seeing the need, Laura decided to address it – advising, supporting and educating others as a life coach and mentor.
Laura focuses on the foundations of health, relationships and purpose, asking her clients the tough questions and helping them create high performance habits while working towards sustainable success.
Laura said many clients initially contact her looking for happiness, but the ingredients are already there.
“I think the biggest lesson, before we start changing habits, and hacks, and trying to look at how to increase our productivity etc. we have to learn is that until we realise we are enough, and that we’ve got everything in us right now we need to be happy, we can choose to be happy and to be content with what we’ve got right now, we’re not going to be able to sustain long term success,” she said.
“Because if your idea is you’ll be happy once you reach a million, or reach two million, or once you get the kids to move out of home, or you pay off the mortgage, that is like a never ending hamster wheel.
“And once you get to that, people go, ‘But then why would I want to keep moving forward? I’ll lose my mojo, I’ll lose my drive’ but what I see is that’s the complete opposite. Once you realise that, you have an understanding that you have potential and possibility within to move forward, that you can do that in a way that’s aligned to what you truly want as opposed to think that there’s something out there that’s going to make you happier.”
Laura believes the key to unlocking success and fulfilment is in the mind.
“That’s the biggest high performance habit you can come back to, looking at what’s going on in here (mind)?” she said.
“What are the sentences I’ve got going every day from the moment I wake up to the moment I go to bed? And how can I start reframing them in a way that’s actually helpful? And I think that’s a big one, in terms of managing time, I look at not just having a to do list and scheduling your day, but how can you start reducing the decisions you’re making every day?
“Little things like that sound really simple, and a lot of us brush over them. That’s where I see clients making some of the biggest, easiest gains. Automate your morning, ritualise your evening, create your schedule for the next day the night before, and really invest some time in planning. That’s a really big one I think for people in terms of asking yourself better questions, reframing what’s going on inside your head. And that’s the constant work for all of us.
“And then really taking responsibility for how you’re spending your time. Because a lot of us think we’re using all of our time, and we’re not. We’re spending a lot of it on what we think’s urgent. A lot of it on the busyness, the busy work. And we’re not moving forward, we’re not actually taking massive action and doing things each day that move us forward towards the things we say are really important.”
Listen to the full interview here.
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