Battling Self Worth As A Lawyer In A Competitive Legal Industry: Ayaz Saboor On The Minotaur’s Maze Podcast
In this episode of The Minotaur’s Maze podcast, we delve into the transformative journey of Ayaz Saboor, an ex-lawyer (like me) who ventured into the world of entrepreneurship.
Ayaz talks about his battle with self worth and whether he was good enough in a very competitive legal industry.
He spent years asking “why would they pick me?” before finally flipping the question.
Ayaz Saboor wanted to be a lawyer because of Jim Carrey.
Specifically, Liar Liar. The 1997 comedy. He watched it as a kid, saw a lawyer being dramatic in a courtroom, and thought: that’s what I want to do.
He laughs about it now. The rational for the dream evaporated pretty quickly when reality set in. But the dream itself stuck. Carried him through college, through university, through a first-class degree in law and business; which, as it turned out, meant almost nothing in terms of actually becoming a lawyer.
That’s the first thing most people outside the legal profession don’t understand. A law degree is not a qualification. It’s a starting point.
After the degree you need the Legal Practice Course. After the LPC you need a two-year training contract with an actual law firm, which thousands of people apply for and which most never get.
By the time you finally qualify as a solicitor you’ve spent the best part of five to seven years in preparation for a job you haven’t started yet. Except, in my experience, the job from pre-qualification doesn’t actually change.
Yet somewhere in the middle of that process, usually around the point where the rejection letters start piling up, the internal Minotaur shows up.
Watch Ayaz Saboor on The Minotaur’s Maze Podcast On YouTube:
The Question That Stops Most People Before They Begin
Ayaz put it simply. His biggest internal challenge, then and in some ways still now, was self-worth. Feeling good enough. Two minotaurs that have, and still do, cripple many. (You can read more about silencing this inner critic here.)
Not imposter syndrome in the fluffy LinkedIn sense. The real, grinding, daily version. Where you look at the statistics on a training contract application, 1,500 applicants for twelve spots, and the first thing your mind does is start arguing against you before you’ve even opened the application form.
“Why would they pick me out of all of these people?”
He spent years asking that question. Mostly in the wrong direction.
The shift happened gradually. Not a single moment of clarity or a revelation on a weekend retreat. Just the slow accumulation of experience, of proving to himself through the work that he could actually do it.
Paralegalling while studying the LPC part-time. Working directly with a partner at a level of exposure that was, by his own description, unusual for someone so junior.
Small pieces of evidence, stacking up until the question flipped.
“Why not me?”
Three words. But he described walking into rooms three centimetres taller once that switch happened. Chin out slightly. A quiet readiness.
Not arrogance, he was clear about that. Just the recognition that he was as capable as the others in the room, and that the job now was to show it rather than hide from it.
That shift is the whole ballgame. Not just in law. In anything. It’s how you truly begin to master your Minotaurs: the internal work ALWAYS comes first.
The Catch-22 Nobody Warns You About
Here’s something the career services at most universities don’t tell you clearly enough.
To get an entry-level paralegal position, most firms want six months of legal experience. To get six months of legal experience, you need a paralegal position.
Ayaz described it exactly as it is: a hamster wheel. A unicorn hunt. The position that technically exists but requires something you can only get by already having it.
His solution was radical: move his entire life from Manchester to Cardiff for a paralegal role. That’s not a small thing. That’s disrupting your geography, your support network, your comfort, for a foot in the door at the bottom of a profession that may or may not want you.
Most people won’t do that. Which is, of course, part of the point.
What struck me in this conversation is that Ayaz didn’t present this as heroic. He presented it as obvious in hindsight, difficult in the moment, and entirely necessary.
The people who want it enough will make the uncomfortable moves.
The people who want it on comfortable terms usually don’t get it.
That’s not a moral statement, it’s just how high-competition fields work.
He also discovered something else during that period: he’s dyslexic. The academic underperformance that had made certain grades feel slightly below his ability suddenly made a different kind of sense.
It reframed a lot. Not as an excuse, he was clear about that too, but as information. Useful information about how he processes things, and what accommodations he might need to get out of his own way.
The Hard Work Problem
I pushed him on something that I’ve seen play out in law firms from the inside.
Is it enough to be the hardest worker in the room? The most disciplined? The most results-oriented?
His answer was layered:
Yes…but only if you can articulate it.
This is where a lot of genuinely capable people fall down. The application form is perfect. The work rate is exceptional. The results are demonstrable.
And then they get to a video interview or an assessment centre and they crumble; because they’ve let the weight of what this moment means override everything they know about themselves.
Ayaz was direct about it. Hard work matters. Results matter. But if you cannot communicate your capability; if you cannot speak about what you’ve done, what you want, and why this specific firm, then the capability doesn’t land. It stays invisible inside you.
This is not a confidence issue. This is a communication issue. And it’s fixable.
His advice to the mentees he works with is simple: stop applying to fifty firms because you think volume is the answer.
Law is a precision profession. Quality over quantity. Know what you want, know why you want it, and then go after it specifically rather than scattering applications across every firm that shows up on a search.
And be honest about what you actually want, which requires knowing yourself, which most people in their early twenties have not done the internal work to do yet – but which is another crucial aspect of the Minotaur Mastery framework. It all starts with defining your version of success first.
He spends a lot of time asking his mentees not “where do you want to work?” but “what do you want your life to look like?” The career question is downstream of that one.
Why He Left…Two Months After Qualifying
This is the part that will resonate with anyone who has ever climbed hard toward something and then looked around at the people who made it to the top and thought: I don’t want to be them.
Ayaz qualified as a solicitor in Regulatory Compliance and Investigations in 2021. Two months later he handed in his notice.
He’d looked at the senior lawyers around him and seen something that stopped him. Not incompetence. Not cruelty. Just misery.
People who had made it, who had everything the process promised, and who were, by his honest observation, not happy.
He saw what the next twenty years looked like if he stayed on that trajectory. And he decided not to.
I can personally relate to this, as I saw the exact same thing in the big firms, and the small firms I worked at. I saw what the others were doing on a daily basis and asked myself, is this what I want to be doing for the rest of my life?! It was a massive hell no from me.
Back to Ayaz, COVID had given him breathing space he wouldn’t have had otherwise. He negotiated mornings only, no Fridays, for a month during lockdown.
And in that time, rather than watching Netflix or sleeping in, he started paying attention to what he actually liked doing. He was already gravitating toward property. He was already seeing aspiring lawyers on LinkedIn, scared and overwhelmed, and feeling something he recognised.
He started an informal WhatsApp group. Within a few hours: 150 people. He capped it there. Group sessions followed. One-to-ones.
The feedback loop that taught him he was actually good at this, not just competent, but genuinely useful to people going through the worst part of the journey he’d survived.
That clarity is rare. Most people discover what they love through a long, expensive process of elimination. Ayaz discovered it by accident, in lockdown, with his meetings cut to mornings.
The Status Trap
We got into something that I’ve thought about a lot from my own experience leaving law.
When you leave a high-status profession, and law is a high-status profession, regardless of whether it deserves to be, there is a grief process nobody talks about.
You don’t just leave a job. You leave an identity. You leave the way people react when you tell them what you do. The slightly widened eyes. The “oh, a solicitor” that changes the register of the conversation.
Ayaz said something interesting. He still introduces himself as “ex-lawyer” before anything else. He said it almost sheepishly, like he’d caught himself doing something he hadn’t fully decided to do.
But he was honest: he doesn’t think he’d be comfortable being introduced on a podcast without the legal background mentioned first. It still functions as a trust signal. It still does something.
I know that feeling. The status of the title was a form of external validation that stood in for the internal kind I hadn’t built yet. When the title goes, you find out very quickly whether there’s anything underneath it that you actually believe in.
In the post-career era we’re now entering in, a lot of professionals are going to feel awkward losing tha identity.
For Ayaz, there was something underneath. The businesses he built, the mentoring service for aspiring lawyers, the property company with his partner, both came from genuine interest and genuine capability, not from ego or status-chasing. That distinction matters more than most people acknowledge.
The Two Things That Actually Help When You Don’t Believe You’re Good Enough
He ended with practical advice for anyone going through the self-worth crisis, and he was clear this applies well beyond law.
The first is an audit of evidence. Sit down. Write out everything you’ve done since sixteen. Every part-time job, every grade, every piece of work experience, every skill you’ve developed.
Most people who feel they’re not good enough have genuinely never done this. They carry a vague sense of inadequacy without ever testing it against the actual record. The record is usually more impressive than the feeling.
The second is harder. Get off LinkedIn. Or at minimum, get clear on what LinkedIn actually is, a highlight reel.
Nobody posts the rejection.
Nobody posts the hard Monday.
You see training contract announcements, promotions, testimonials, and success stories. All day. Every day.
And if you’re in the middle of your own difficult stretch, that feed is going to compound the self-doubt in ways that are difficult to see while they’re happening – that internal Minotaur is just gonig to grow and grow.
Remove the trigger. Whatever it is. Create space to focus on yourself.
Neither of these is a silver bullet. But they’re the difference between feeding the inner critic and starving it.
You choose, consciously or unconsciously, which one wins.
Where Ayaz Is Now
Two years and a few months out of law. Running two businesses. A mentoring service for aspiring solicitors that he’s built primarily through LinkedIn. A short-term lettings property business around Greater Manchester with his partner.
He wants to start a podcast, lawyers speaking honestly about what the journey actually felt like. The fear, the self-doubt, the moments where it nearly didn’t happen.
His belief is that more visibility on the reality of the process would help the people currently going through it feel less alone.
He also wants to get on TikTok. I told him we’d hold him to it.
If you’re an aspiring lawyer or a professional navigating a career that’s harder and lonelier than you expected, find him on LinkedIn. Ayaz Saboor. He’ll tell you what you need to hear rather than what’s comfortable.
Conclusion: Lessons from the Maze
The conversation with Ayaz Saboor offers valuable insights into the realities of the legal profession, the importance of self-belief, and the benefits of pursuing a career that aligns with personal values – all minotaurs most never deal with.
Ayaz’s journey is a testament to the power of resilience and the transformative impact of embracing change.
As we conclude this exploration of Ayaz’s experiences, we see the importance of navigating our own mazes, with courage and determination.
Whether facing internal doubts or external challenges, the path to success is often nonlinear and requires a willingness to adapt and grow.
The world is chaotic right now, change and growth is inevitable – you just have to be ready to tackle it head on. The question is, are you willing to do so?!
Takeaways:
- The journey to becoming a lawyer is challenging and competitive, requiring a law degree, legal practice course, and a training contract.
- Internal struggles with self-doubt and feeling good enough can hinder progress in the legal profession.
- Knowing what you want in your career and being able to articulate it to potential employers is crucial.
- Hard work, discipline, and results-oriented mindset are important, but it’s also about finding the right balance and doing quality work.
- Understanding your career goals and making decisions that align with them is essential for long-term satisfaction and fulfillment. Think practically and explore opportunities outside of the traditional legal world.
- Leaving the legal profession and pursuing entrepreneurial ventures requires careful consideration and support.
- Self-belief is crucial for success and individuals should dream big and take risks.
- Mentoring and supporting aspiring lawyers is fulfilling and rewarding.
- The legal industry needs to adapt to the changing aspirations and expectations of younger generations.
- Practical steps to boost self-esteem include reflecting on past achievements and avoiding comparison on social media.
Chapters
- 00:00 – Introduction and Background
- 07:17 – Feeling Good Enough in the Legal Profession
- 26:36 – Articulating Your Motivation and Abilities
- 35:36 – The Challenges and Decision-Making Process of Leaving the Legal Profession
- 43:28 – Dream Big, Take Risks, and Believe in Yourself
- 52:03 – Boosting Self-Esteem: Reflecting on Achievements and Avoiding Social Media Comparison
