The Coaches' Chronicle is a monthly feature spotlighting one coach, one philosophy, and one meaningful conversation.
The Coaches’ Chronicle is a recognition-driven editorial platform devoted to highlighting coaches and leaders who are sharing their work with depth, integrity, and heart.
Each month, we feature one coach and go deep into their philosophy, lived experience, and the work they are here to do in the world. No noise. No filler. Just a conversation worth your full attention.
The Coaches' Chronicle™
Paul Karvanis: The Lawyer Who Stopped Walking Past the Mirror
By Jonathan Carroll, Founder, The Coaches' Chronicle™

A conversation with the coach behind two bestsellers, one bold mission, and a quiet refusal to settle for what looks like success from the outside.
Paul Karvanis was in his second year at a top Bay Street firm when he first realized something was off. He was working a file he could not stand. When the deal died, he ran down the hallway to celebrate. Then a new file landed, even worse than the last. Then the dead deal came back. "And I realized they were all the worst ever," he told me. "I was only really appreciating what I was going through in hindsight rather than in the moment. That was my first sign. You're not actually happy right now."
It would take him another decade to act on that signal. Twelve years in law in total — across private practice, in-house at a major international retailer, and the public sector at a Crown agency. Two Amazon bestsellers along the way: The Happy Lawyer, drawn from interviews with more than a hundred lawyers, and The Successful Associate, drawn from nearly fifty conversations with managing partners, chief people officers, and firm leaders. A Co-Active coaching credential and an ICF PCC. The founding of Leader Rising, a coaching practice with one clear mission: to prepare the next generation of lawyers to lead the legal industry.
What follows is our conversation, trimmed lightly for readability.
The View from Inside the Career
Jonathan Carroll: You spent nearly twelve years in law across three sectors. From the outside, that's a career most people would envy. When did you first realize something was off?
Paul Karvanis: I think I first realized something was off pretty early on. I was in my second year at the law firm and I was on the worst file ever. The material was boring. The client was demanding. I remember thinking, this is terrible. Then we got the pens down email, meaning the deal is done. I remember being super happy, sending a note to my buddy. The next week I got on a new file and thought, oh my god, this file is the worst file ever. Me last week was mistaken. And then, wouldn't you believe it, a week later I get another pens down email. And then the following week, that first deal that died came back. I thought, no, me from last week was wrong, this deal really was the worst ever. And I realized they were all the worst ever, and that I was only really appreciating what I was going through in hindsight rather than in the moment. That was my first sign. You're not actually happy right now.
Jonathan Carroll: You've written about feeling pot-committed — trapped not by circumstances but by the fear that the life you'd love didn't actually exist. Can you take us inside that fear?
Paul Karvanis: It's really hard to know that you're miserable, to know that you want something else, and to not feel comfortable going for it. Since becoming a coach, I've worked with a number of people like this, where week in and week out we have the same conversations and nothing changes. It took me a while to realize they actually had multiple parts. A part of them showing up to these calls that was incredibly afraid and desperately wanted to leave, and another part that wouldn't let them leave. That was my story. I felt largely trapped, and was only able to make smaller moves at the margins. The good news is, as long as you're in motion, you're not stuck.
Jonathan Carroll: You describe a kind of ultimate failure — success after success, but still not feeling successful. Why is that pattern so common among high achievers?
Paul Karvanis: The problem is we often don't know what's going to make us happy. Most of us have our version of I'll be happy when. I'll be happy when I lose five pounds. I'll be happy when I get a promotion. I do this work. I wrote a book called The Happy Lawyer where I talk about this stuff. I still have these thoughts in my mind that say, this is the one piece that's missing. But that's ridiculous. Of course it's not the one piece that's missing. High achievers in particular are vulnerable because they generally achieve what they set out to achieve. They get there and realize they're not happy, so they think, I must have picked the wrong thing. The goalpost keeps moving. I call that goalpost drift.
The Inquiry That Started Everything
Jonathan Carroll: You had friends and colleagues who were happy practicing while you weren't. What did that contrast stir up in you?
Paul Karvanis: It led to me starting the Happy Lawyer Project, interviewing over a hundred lawyers — happy, miserable, and in between — trying to find the patterns. My initial hypothesis was that happy lawyers are happy because they're passionate about the work. And yet, when I started the interviews, I found happy lawyers who were not passionate about the law, and unhappy lawyers who were. I realized that this passion variable I thought was so important is not as important as I thought it was.
Jonathan Carroll: What did the research reveal instead?
Paul Karvanis: I did find a pattern. Happy lawyers were all self-aware. But the lawyers who were only self-aware were actually stuck and felt pretty miserable. They needed self-awareness and they needed to be taking action. They reflected, took a step, reflected, took a step. That was not what I wanted to see. I like to tackle things sequentially, achieve them, and move on. I was hoping to treat happiness like that. Get happy, put my focus on something else, be happy forever. But life changes. We change. The people who weren't constantly looking at it and taking intentional action — their happiness didn't last.
Jonathan Carroll: There's a turn in your story where you realized building the right life circumstances wasn't enough — that you also had to become a different person inside those circumstances. What cracked that open?
Paul Karvanis: The second pattern was what people focused on. Community. Self-compassion. Health. Excellence. Alignment. I came to realize my kryptonite was the self-compassion piece. I had achieved a whole bunch of stuff by riding myself, raising the stakes, making everything seem like the end of the world. At some point I realized, I've now built the life I wanted. I'm doing law less. I'm doing coaching. I have balance. I have my family. This is the life I wanted. I'm still not happy. That was what made me come face to face with, okay, well, if I'm still not happy, what's wrong? I was killing it on all of these except for that one piece. That's what started this idea of trying to be a different person — where I didn't raise the stakes, where I still pursued excellence, but because it was fun rather than because the world would fall apart.
Jonathan Carroll: You frame your work around two levers — perspective and reality — and you insist people pull on both. Why both?
Paul Karvanis: I don't think you have to. There are happy people who've only pulled one lever. The monks and the Buddhas have only been pulling on the perspective lever, and they're very happy. That was not going to be me. Up to that point I'd lived the other version, trying to pull only the external lever and not the internal one. That hadn't worked either. For me, and for people like me, we've got to do both. Which isn't a bad thing, because it is in taking action that our self-awareness gets further developed. This is the classic overthinker's trap — waiting until they've figured out everything before they act. The problem is you often can't figure out everything until you're taking action.
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The Pivot into Coaching
Jonathan Carroll: Coaching wasn't an obvious next step from corporate law. How did you find your way to it?
Paul Karvanis: My mentor gave me a book called How Will You Measure Your Life? by Clay Christensen. He tells a story about Disney Paris. Their formula predicted eleven million visitors a year, and at their other parks people stayed three days. So they figured thirty-three million guest days. The park opened and started losing money hand over fist. It turned out they were right on the formula. Eleven million people came. But people only stayed for one day, because Disney Paris had fifteen rides versus the forty-five at their other parks. Christensen's point: test your assumptions, starting with those least likely to be true and with the most severe consequences if they're wrong.
I narrowed my options to three things: own a retail store, become a fiction writer, or become a therapist. As a classic Type A, I didn't even question the assumption that I'd succeed. The real assumption was, am I going to like this more? Because if not, I switch careers, take another five to ten years to build it back up, and I'm not any happier. Same shit, different pile. So as a way of testing whether I wanted to be a therapist, I tested coaching, because the real question was, am I going to like sitting with people one-on-one and talking about their problems? I did my coaching courses, started coaching in the evenings and on the weekends, and realized I actually really like this. That was the start of something beautiful.
Jonathan Carroll: You trained at the Co-Active Training Institute, where we met, and went on to earn your PCC. What did that formal training give you that law did not?
Paul Karvanis: Law was one skill set. Coaching was a totally different one, because in coaching you have to learn how to be with somebody. If you're a chef in the kitchen, you're only as good as your tools. As a coach, your main tool is yourself. I remember wondering whether I should stick with Co-Active and become a CPCC or just get accredited with the ICF on my own. I realized, I don't know where this coaching career is going to go, but I want to be at the top of the game. I want to be the best coach that I know. As soon as I realized that, it was a no-brainer.
Jonathan Carroll: Your coaching focuses on the overlap between happiness and high performance. Why that overlap, and what do most coaches miss when they treat them as separate?
Paul Karvanis: I love the more complicated things, so the overlap with its extra variables plays to my strengths. I also believed they're linked. The happier you are, generally the better you are at high performing. When I was looking at the happy lawyers, most all were at some level pursuing excellence. By focusing on the overlap and being intentional about it from the get-go, we end up improving both — as compared with people whose mandate is to help someone be more successful, and the person does, but they're miserable.
The Books and the Craft Behind Them
Jonathan Carroll: When firms started inviting you to deliver the Happy Lawyer talk, they often wanted you to speak to incoming first years — but you knew that talk wasn't built for them. What did you do with that mismatch?
Paul Karvanis: First I complained about it. Then I realized the obstacle is the way. If you're a first year going into one of the big firms saying what I want is balance, I'm not going to work evenings and weekends, most firms are going to say, good for you, man, you're also not going to work weekdays. Those who take their work more seriously get better faster, and they leave you behind. By their fifth or sixth year, they'll have done maybe an extra year's worth of work, and it'll have been higher quality, more challenging, because people give the work to those who want to do it. So I asked myself, if the Happy Lawyer message isn't what juniors need to hear, what is? That became The Successful Associate, drawn from nearly fifty interviews with firm leaders. The big message: as a junior, you've got to get better. It doesn't matter how good you are as a first year. If you don't improve, by the time you're a fourth year you're not good enough. What's far more important than how good you are is how good you are at improving.
Jonathan Carroll: What separates associates who thrive from those who fizzle out?
Paul Karvanis: I think of it like Maslow's hierarchy — a junior's hierarchy of success. At the base is quality work and reliability. If you're not doing quality work reliably, nothing else matters. People don't want to staff you. Among those who can do that, some are differentiated by people skills. They can read a room, know when to offer their idea, know when to keep their mouth shut. Among those who can do all of that, the ones who take ownership — both responsibility and initiative, appropriately, not too much, not too little — those are next-level. There's no one most common problem because different people fall at different steps. The reality is if you don't have the table stakes, you'll never have the opportunity to demonstrate the other parts.
Jonathan Carroll: What did writing the books teach you about your craft as a coach?
Paul Karvanis: If you want to learn, do. If you really want to learn, teach. As coaches, we're not really teaching most of the time. We're guides. We walk beside people as they walk. When I wrote the books I had to figure out how to teach, and how to teach it in a way that met people where they were. One of the sections I'm most proud of in The Successful Associate breaks down your reputation, your image, your brand. We want to be authentic. I want to be this, I want to be that. I agree completely. But it's worth asking, what is the authentic me? When I was starting, authentic me was shorts on the weekend, t-shirts, I go for runs, I'm not that pretentious. If you think about it, I've just described a set of preferences. That's not a being. That's a menu of preferences. Who we are at our core is so much bigger and more beautiful than any of these preferences on the menu.
The Mission and the Profession
Jonathan Carroll: Leader Rising exists, in your words, to prepare the next generation of lawyers to lead the legal industry. What does that leadership look like?
Paul Karvanis: To lead, you need to matter, and you need to take your responsibility to lead seriously. Mattering looks different depending on context. Sometimes you matter in the profession at large because you're a leading practitioner and people trust your voice. Sometimes you matter because of the impact you're making on one individual. I'm not putting one above the other. You've got to matter, and that's in part where the focus on the pursuit of excellence comes from. The most common way it looks is, I'm going to do really well. I'm going to keep leveling up and getting better and gapping up until I exist in a class of one. And I'm going to let myself express who I am and who I want to be on that path. I'm not going to fall into step because other people have.
Jonathan Carroll: You work with high performers who are used to being the smartest in the room. What does it take to do real interior work with someone wired that way?
Paul Karvanis: What's coming up is a buddy of mine from undergrad. I reflected to him recently that more than almost anyone I knew, he was so good at talking himself into and out of things. He was so good at convincing himself and rationalizing. More than twenty years later, I said, dude, this was always one of the things going on with you. And he said, oh my god, you're so right. I wasn't able to see it before, but because of the growth I've undergone, I now finally see it. It can be really difficult when you're that smart, because you can justify anything. It's hard to realize what's true and what's not, because in a way you're creating your own truth so convincingly that you believe it. I think I'm well suited to helping those people because I hear in different layers, and I've seen the different pitfalls in myself.
Jonathan Carroll: You've spoken to audiences of six hundred and to groups of five. What does the small room give you that the big one can't?
Paul Karvanis: You get to see it land with each individual, and you get to meet them where they are. People aren't convinced because I convinced them. They're convinced because they see something that makes sense to them and they change their mind. In a big room, I give my talk and hope I've met them where they are. In a smaller room, when they feel comfortable enough to ask a question, they will, and I can guarantee I'm meeting them where they are. In a bigger room, they're going to hold on to that question the whole time, and it introduces skepticism for everything after it.
Closing Reflections
Jonathan Carroll: There's a line in your writing: the one thing we don't risk is lying there at the end of our life regretting the chances we didn't take. When you wrote that, were you speaking to your clients, your readers, or yourself?
Paul Karvanis: All the above. The regrets aren't about what you've done, they're about what you didn't do or didn't attempt. There was a woman who worked with people who were dying and wrote about the five most common regrets. One of them was, I wish I'd lived a life that was more true to myself instead of to what I thought I was supposed to be doing. We don't generally regret being authentic to ourselves and taking that risk. We regret not doing it.
Particularly with lawyers, we are often cautious and risk averse. The industry trains us to be that way by rewarding us for spotting problems. If you look at the financial markets, risk and reward are linked. Not taking risk seems like the safest thing we can do, and yet when you zoom out and look over the long term, it's actually one of the riskiest.
Jonathan Carroll: What's the question you're sitting with in your own life and work right now?
Paul Karvanis: If everything is happening for me, if I see the synchronicity and see how things I initially didn't want ended up working out for the best, then what is the balance between being a passenger — letting these things happen, knowing I'm being taken care of — and on the other side, taking charge and taking agency? If everything's working out, why not just rely on it? But I also believe we're meant to make things happen. That's the thing I'm sitting with.
Jonathan Carroll: Where does it have you leaning?
Paul Karvanis: Michael Singer, who wrote The Untethered Soul and The Surrender Experiment, is my unofficial guru. The Surrender Experiment is about his life, and it's so fascinating to see its trajectory. I sat with this book and tried to figure out, what's the balance? How do we surrender and yet also have agency? I've realized his teaching isn't about not having agency. It's about throwing yourself into what you're doing with all that you are. What he gives up on is the direction. He lets life give him the direction, and then he throws himself into that direction with all that he is. Where I'm leaning is, you assume full agency with zero attachment to outcome. Trust that it's going to work out. I think that's it. Trust.
Jonathan Carroll: Much easier said than done.
Paul Karvanis: Indeed, my friend. Indeed.
If Everything Succeeds — What Changes?
Jonathan Carroll: If everything you're building succeeds, Paul, what changes about the legal profession, the people inside it, and the coaching profession?
Paul Karvanis: The backdrop of my business is AI, which is going to make real waves in the legal industry. It's already taken out huge swaths of work that would have gone to junior lawyers. The business model is going to change radically. If firms aren't charging for their juniors the way they used to, where are the juniors going to get their training? The industry is already in the middle of one of the biggest changes it's ever seen.
Where my work makes a difference is in the intentionality with which people navigate it. Up till now, the status quo trained people through years of practice. That's all about to change. We're going to see a quicker, more direct path through to the end result.
The people inside are going to feel more agency, because they've been part of that path. When you feel that extra agency in one aspect of life, it spills over into others. When we feel we don't have enough time, money, happiness, we're less likely to be generous with others. If we want to make change in the world, we need to put people back into abundance. Even though The Successful Associate is about success, not the inner work, the pathway to success has so much overlap with that same journey people would take on the inside.
As for the coaching profession, AI has changed a lot. We've all read so much AI-generated writing that we now refer to AI slop as a new category. In this world of AI slop, there's even more value for someone speaking as a human, direct and from the heart. The value isn't to be more like an AI coach. It's to be more yourself, to be more human. If coaches take anything from my journey, it's that the pursuit of excellence is a worthy endeavor in and of itself. And if you find a process you like, one day you're going to look up and realize you're being interviewed on the Coaches' Chronicle.
One Piece of Earned Wisdom
Jonathan Carroll: If you could share one piece of earned wisdom with a new coach entering the industry today, what would it be?
Paul Karvanis: I try not to say too much because so much of what we think is true just happens to be the lessons we've pulled from our path. I've been coaching for eight and a half years. If I knew at the beginning that's how long it would take, I don't know if I would have done it. But just because it took me eight and a half doesn't mean it would take someone else two. If I were starting again, I'd get it done in two.
People need to ask whether they're making a business of it, or a vocation, or both. If it's a vocation, just the pursuit of excellence, the pursuit of mastery. If it's a business, you'd be wise to sell what people want to buy. I spent a long time as a generic life coach, and not that many people want to work with generic life coaches. If you have a tumor in your head, you don't go to your family doctor. You go to the surgeon that specializes in those types of tumors. There's a lot of power in niching down. I resisted that for a few years, and the few years since have been a constant evolution of how I embrace the niche I've chosen and eventually the niche I'm creating.
Editor's Note
A Final Word
What strikes me, reading back over our conversation, is how much of his journey Paul has refused to outsource. He did not wait for the right book to find him. He wrote it. He did not wait for someone to tell him what the next generation of lawyers needed to hear. He interviewed nearly fifty of the people who would know, and gave them the answer. And he did all of this while doing the harder, less visible work of becoming someone who could sit with the question of whether he was being a good enough friend to himself.
Paul calls himself a Happiness and High Performance Coach, and the title fits. But what he is really offering — to lawyers, to professionals, to coaches, to anyone whose CV looks better than their internal weather — is permission. Permission to notice. Permission to test the assumption. Permission to take the itty-bitty action and see what it reveals. Permission to pursue excellence not because the world will fall apart if you don't, but because the pursuit itself is one of the most worthwhile things you can do with a life.
Jonathan Carroll — Founder, The Coaches' Chronicle™
Watch the full interview with Paul Karvanis and Jonathan Carroll below (59 min).
Jonathan Carroll, Founder
The Coaches’ Chronicle
Jonathan Carroll is devoted to elevating the art and profession of coaching through depth, mastery, and conscious impact. As the Founder of The Coaches’ Chronicle, he curates conversations that invite reflection, integrity, and a more mature expression of leadership within the coaching industry.
Through his work as a coach, author, facilitator, and strategic partner, Jonathan supports conscious leaders who feel called into greater alignment, coherence, and purpose. His approach emphasizes presence over performance, wisdom over tactics, and the long view of meaningful, sustainable expansion.
Jonathan’s work is rooted in energetic alignment, intuitive leadership, and an ongoing exploration of infinite possibility. He is particularly drawn to the intersection of time honoured mysteries and modern day mastery, where inner development and real-world leadership meet.
He is also the founder of The Dragonfly Club™, a global community and experiential ecosystem offering private alliances and immersive retreats for visionary leaders at pivotal moments of evolution. Across all his work, Jonathan creates space for clarity, refinement, and a more grounded expression of what it means to lead in our modern world. Click on Jonathan's photo to connect with him on LinkedIn.

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