Hello, how are you doing today? So I want to remind you that you have a relationship with your business. Yes you do. You may not know it. You may think, how can you have a relationship with your business? And I'm going to tell you that the thoughts that you have about your business form that relationship. In fact, any relationship that we have is based upon the thoughts that we have about that person, about that thing. And we might think that there's like some magic glue in the universe that holds us all together. And that's what forms a relationship. And, but what really forms that relationship are our thoughts and that's why we can have relationships with people. Even after they pass, like they've longed passed, you can heal that relationship with them by doing the work, doing all the, the work that goes with our thoughts and understanding and having compassion for ourselves and them and all of that work I do with coaching clients.

But I also do work with people who have businesses, their own practices, where they are, you know, having a rough time of it. Meth, whether they don't have enough time, they think or they think their business should be more successful than it is right now. These are the things that I go through them with and one concept that I work with them on is the manual that they have for their business. Now a manual, what is a manual? Well, it is a handbook that we have. We have a manual for every person in our lives, everything in our lives and it basically in our head, right? This is all in our head. It basically just outlines how we want them to behave. So then we can feel good and we can be happy. And if you've seen the movie beetle juice, that's what I think of when I think of the manual.

It's exactly like the handbook for the recently deceased, right? It's found by Alec Baldwin and Geena Davis after they pass on. And those are the characters that are in that movie and it, it just tells them exactly how they are supposed to behave after they die. Like everything in that handbook is telling them exactly how they're supposed to behave, exactly how they're supposed to be in the world now that they have died. But of course they are just doing what do right because they didn't even know about this book and they are doing everything wrong. So this manual is a set of expectations, a set of expectations that we have for anything in our life. And we probably don't even know that we have one. So before I dive in on how you can make this work for you and understand how you think about your business and understand that the expectations that you might be having may not be helpful and may actually be hindering your progress, your progress in your business.

I want to invite you to download my free busy lawyers guide so that you can take back control of your day. Now, if you are a busy lawyer and I know what you're thinking, are there any other kinds, then you're going to want to grab it. I teach time management different than anything you've ever experienced and I teach you how to think about time differently to get more of it back. It's not about managing your calendar, it's not about getting the perfect planner, it's not about using your planner differently. It's about understanding how you think about time. And I start you

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forward slash busy lawyers so you can get the busy lawyers guide that's at Dina cataldo.com forward slash busy lawyer. All right, so we can have manuals for people in our lives. For instance, we may become upset because our partner doesn't do what we expect them to.

We have an expectation that they do things like listen. Instead of trying to fix the problem we're writing about or take out the trash, and if they don't do what we expect them to do, we become upset. Or maybe we expect our parents to respect our boundaries, but we've never communicated them, but we think that they should just know that it's unreasonable to stop by an invited on a Sunday morning when and then we become resentful. So while our expectations of others might seem totally reasonable to us, totally justified, it can hurt our relationships with the people in our lives releasing our manuals, letting the people and the things in our lives be who they are in the world without us trying to control them or manipulate them, releases so much pain for ourselves. I want to invite you to think of your relationship with your practice as one of your most important relationships.

One of the relationships where you spend the most time and whether you know it or not, you have a manual for your business. Understanding your thoughts about your expectations of your legal practice and observing how you speak about it can be enlightening. So I'm going to walk you through a practice you can do at home to understand that relationship and strengthen it over time. And this is also going to help you release some painful thoughts that you might have about yourself. So I want you to know that this is a practice that I work with coaching clients on and the more you do it and the more you understand this concept, you will be able to see it in action and you will be able to stop it when you see it, which is pretty amazing when you've practiced these thoughts over and over again to have the ability to change them and to have the ability to change how you not only think about your business, but how you behave in your business.

The more you understand your current relationship with your practice, the more you can strengthen that relationship. Just like you can strengthen a relationship with your partner just by working on yourself because you don't have to change your partner. You don't have to change those things in the world to be a little better. What you have to do is work on yourself and releasing your expectations of how things work in the world and that way you can really not only strengthen that relationship with your business, but you're actually working on growing your business that you have created. Right now I'm working with someone who's just started a business and we discovered she has a really big manual for how her business should be working. She believed it should be easy, that it should have more clients, that it shouldn't take so much of her time, that it should become more successful, faster, that it should be working better.

Maybe you can relate to this. We all have these thoughts that, you know what? We're not just, we're not at where we want to be. We always think we're always going to be happier down the road when we've created something else and it looks differently. It matches exactly what our manual should look like, right? Like we have this description in our handbook that says, Hey, it should behaving a certain way and when it behaves in that way, then we will be happy. Then we will have the success that we want. And I want you to imagine all of the expectations that you have of your business. And we'll walk through this step by step, but I just want you to have a general idea. Maybe you have some of the same expectations that my client has and I want you to imagine saying these things to a child, a small child, maybe somebody that you love.

Maybe it's a nephew or a niece. And I want you to imagine yourself telling them this. You should be easier to raise. You should bring in more money. You should earn your keep. You shouldn't take so much of my time. You should be more by now. You should be more fill in the blank, right? Like you should be more, you should be better. You shouldn't be giving me such a hard time as essentially our businesses, our children. We create them. We raise them, we cultivate them, we think about them all the time. Why would we choose to think about them in this way? So my client came back to me after we did the work that I'm going to talk to you about and she did some work on her relationship with her business and she implemented, I loved this, I totally loved this.

She implemented date time with her business just like she would have date time with her husband. She implemented this time specifically for her business to think about her business, to think good thoughts about her business, to understand her business and to really start forming and strengthening that relationship with her business. She'll have a cup of coffee and you know, she just loved this shift. She loves this shift of actually sitting down and forming a relationship with her business and dropping the expectations, right, dropping those expectations and then forming some compassion not only for her business and how new it is and how she's cultivating it, but for herself and how she is showing up for her business. One of the things that we're doing when we talk about our businesses like this, we are piling on all of these expectations. Well, they're really the expectations that we have of ourselves and we're beating ourselves up and taking it out on the business.

We're projecting all of our perceived inadequacies onto the business and reinforcing those thoughts in our brain. Now, who wants these kinds of thoughts in our brain, right? Like, Oh, well, you should be further along. You should be making more money. You're not doing what you should be doing. You're not good enough because everything we do is motivated by how we think it's going to make us feel. It's natural that we would be doing this. We truly believe that this train of thought is not only going to help change the business, but it is going to make us happier when it performs as we expect it to do. But here's the thing. When we look back at the fact that none of us would say any of these things to a formative, a child in their formative years, because we know that it is not going to be helpful.

It's easy to see that these expectations, these thoughts, they're demoralizing, right? Like when we look at talking to a child about these things, we see that they are not motivational at all. Here is the exercise I encourage you to do. Now you won't want to write it down, but write it down anyway. Don't do it. If you're in a car, but you need to get this down on paper, you will be able to see those thoughts that are under the surface when you take the time to do this work. First I want you to ask yourself, what would you like your business to do? Would you like it to have more clients, to make more money, to take less time, be easier? You know, ask yourself what else? Like, don't just stop here. Ask yourself what else? Because when you ask yourself that question, you'll be able to get to the next layer.

Do you want your business not to get in the way of your free time? Those are the kinds of thoughts that can be really harmful over time. So I want you to recognize if you are having them. Once you've made this list of all the things you would like your business to do, then I want you to write down for each item why you want your business to behave that way. Maybe you want it to take less time because you are exhausted at the end of the day. Maybe you want it to be easier because you feel like it's so hard that it's just impossible or maybe you don't want it to get in the way of your free time because you want more time with your partner. I want you to really think about these. These are our why's. This is why we think the way that we think.

After you've done this, for each of those items, I want you to ask yourself, how do you think you would feel if your business did what you expected of it behaved according to your manual for it? Do you think you'd feel more freedom, more security? Do you think you'd feel more ease or more relaxed? And these are all the things we think we are going to get. If we talk to our business this way, then ask yourself, how would your thoughts about your business change if it met your expectations in every way, right? Do you think that you'd say to yourself that you love it more? Do you think you would devote more time to it or that it was fun? Maybe you'd have gratitude for it. Then ask yourself, what do you make it mean when your business doesn't meet your expectations? Does it mean that it's not worth your time, that it's not fun, that it's not working right?

Those are some of the thoughts that can come up over and over again, and when you start asking yourself these kinds of questions, you're going to begin seeing when you don't speak kindly about your business and also about yourself. You're going to start seeing some of these things pop up in your life, and that is where the awareness comes in and you'll begin recognizing when you're beating yourself up rather than taking productive action because productive action does not come from the thoughts. You're not good enough. You should be doing something productive. Action comes from thoughts like, you know what? We can make this work. I can figure this out, and then when you were taking total responsibility for your relationship with your business and how you behave towards your business and in your business, everything begins to change. When I was coaching my client, I asked her, what do you think would happen if you had love towards your business?

What do you think would happen? I'm asking you, what do you think would happen? Do you already have some ideas? Do you are already have some ideas of how things might shift in your business? Shift in how you show up for your business every single day? I want you to answer that question and then find me on Instagram. Tag me in your story or post and let me know if you had any aha moments here because this can be life changing. This can be a real game changer for any practice when we start implementing these thought patterns, when you start recognizing the old ones and start implementing the new ones. All right. I hope that you got some food for thought. I will talk to you soon. Bye.

Hey, if you enjoy this podcast, I offer one on one coaching using my be a better lawyer framework. That's where we rewire your brain to help you create the life and the practice that you want. Go to Dina cataldo.com to schedule a strategy session.