Transcript: 5 Business Blind Spots with Dina Cataldo

I'm really excited about it because it is going to be super informative, but not just that it's kind of a mini training. So I encourage you to not only listen to this podcast, but also like answer the questions that I'm going to pose to you. Sit down, write the answers and really get into your brain about this that I find is the most helpful thing is to really begin refocusing your brain.

And when you start doing that work that daily, sometimes it's painful work of getting into your brain. That's when the big changes start. So how are you doing today? How is it with all of the stuff that's happening in the world? Okay. Are you taking care of yourself? Okay. I don't have kids, so I have to take care of my people. So if you are struggling right now, you can do this. You can make it through anything. And one of the things when I'm, you know, going back and forth with people on Instagram, cause that's where I hang out with people the most. If you want to spend some time with me there, I'm at Dina dot Cataldo. But one of the things I go back and forth with people about are just like the fun things and focusing on what we can work on, what we can change, what we can impact rather than focusing all of the things, rather than focusing on all of the things that we cannot change.

All right. I hope you're able to find some of that in your own life, if not come and find it with me because I love talking to new friends on Instagram. It's really been a great place for me to get to know some of the people and know some of the people who I'm actually working with, like people who were hiring me to coach them. And it's a great place to not only get a little extra coaching on the side, right? Like that is the free coaching I offer is in the podcast. And in my Instagram posts, that is where you can get some of that inspiration to live better, but it's also a place to connect. And that is what I'm looking for with Instagram. So if you want to meet up with me there, if you want some of that connection, go to Dina dot Cataldo on Instagram.

And that's really where I spend most of my time. Not really, but most of my time online, that's where I am. Okay. So let's talk about these five business blind spots that lawyers have when they are building their practices. And I've gained a lot of these insights through coaching lawyers, talking with my own friends who own their own practices in building their practices, the problems that come up and they are the same problems that pop up for every single business owner. So I don't want you to feel like you're alone in this. It's not exclusively lawyers who are having a difficult time with this. It is it's a business mindset that we need to get accustomed to. And when you are hoping you can spend most of your time in the legal technician, part of your business, rather than in the function of your business, working on your business, it's really easy to ignore things, ignore feelings, ignore thoughts, ignore decisions that are popping up in your business that need to be made that need to be addressed.

That is what I want to do in this podcast is to shed some light, wait on dark areas of your business so that you can start doing some excavating on your own and start seeing the bubble lined spots. One by one, the awareness is the first part. So that's why I'm going to break these down by one, how they can show up. And then I'm going to give you some questions gins to ask yourself that way you're able to really look into what's going on in your brain. What's going on in your business and how you are showing up or not showing up for your business. Blind spot. Number one, decision making most lawyers don't characterize themselves as indecisive. We believe we are action takers. And that's why when we procrastinate, we are extra hard on ourselves because we think we're broken. Like there's something wrong with us.

One of the topics lawyers come to me with on our coaching calls is that they don't trust themselves. And they don't necessarily characterize it as not trusting themselves, but they're indecisive. They do a lot of research, but they're really slow to act. They are afraid of making the wrong decision. So they do all of the things. They go into all of the interwebs to figure something out, to be told a step-by-step verbatim thing that they're supposed to do and how they're supposed to do it. And they don't make a decision. If you're not making movement in your practice, then you may be indecisive. Being indecisive is a great way for our brain to avoid doing what needs to be done, avoiding putting our face on the marketing for our business or showing every single week consistently in our marketing. And it can be the way that we talk ourselves out of a decision too.

We tell ourselves we should be saving money or trying something new. Instead of focusing on what we initially committed to. Have you ever done this? You've committed to showing up daily on social media, for example, for your practice. But then you decide that you really should be creating a new training and then you make the new training, but then you don't promote it. And then you decide that you really need to focus on creating a podcast or a blog. And we just keep shifting our focus rather than honing our skills in one area and making small tweaks to what we are doing. This constant change in decision. These multiple decision after decision after decision does not help you gain momentum in your business. What have you made a decision? And you decided to make that decision work for you. So I dropped $18,000 on a year long coaching training, and I decided that I was going to do the work.

I decided I was going to jump in and go all in on myself. And I wasn't relying on the coach to get me results. I was relying on my willingness to make the training work for me, no matter what it was, I was going to make it work for me, but our brain doesn't do this automatically. We've got to be actively thinking about how we're going to take responsibility for our results and our brain when it's on autopilot just is doing what it thinks it's best. It thinks it's protecting us. If we're decisive, we may do something scary and that's uncomfortable. And the scary thing is always what pushes us to grow further. So I want you to know that when you are scared, that is a signal that maybe you should be paying attention to something else, and you need to be exploring that area, ask yourself, do I trust myself?

Why or why not ask yourself? What decisions have I been putting off? You can ask yourself, why am I putting it off? And where am I abdicating responsibility for my results in my business. So this is the section where you can put this on pause and go back and listen to those questions and write them down and fully get into your brain about what's going on in your business. When it comes to decision making blind spot, number two, they think hating their business. Isn't a problem. So a lot of lawyers believe that their business is innately unlovable. They hate the business side of their practice and they wish they didn't have to deal with it. I wrote an email recently on this, and if you're not on my email list, go to Dina, cataldo.com forward slash masterclass. And you'll be on my email list and you will get a free training too.

So go to Dina, cataldo.com forward slash masterclass. During a coaching session, I had a client. Jessica, tell me how much she resented her business. I mean, she loved the technician side of it. That was awesome, but she hated, hated the business side. The solution that we came up with for her was this okay. Weekly dates with her business, like full on dates. Like this is the time for us to spend some time to gather some time, to have a cup of coffee and really think about what's going on in the business. What I think about the business. In fact, that would be the perfect place to be answering these questions is in a business date, a date with your business, right? Not only did this show Jessica's brain that she was committed to it. She had quality focused time to do the thought work she needed to do to make her business and her relationship to it thrive because so many of us focus on the doing, and we're not focusing on the mindset.

If we're not focusing on how we think about our partner, on how we think about our business, on how we think about ourselves, everything's on autopilot. And then we don't get the result that we want. And we're wondering, well, why didn't I get the result that I wanted? Because you didn't continually focus your brain on it. Having a business is exactly like having a relationship. You live and breathe your business. You bring it to life with your words and your actions. So why bad mouth it imagine telling the person you most love in the world? Things like I resent you, this isn't working. I hate spending time on you. It feels really gross, right? Like those horrible things. We would never say that to someone that we loved. And that's what we do every single time we hate on our business. Would you stick around for that? If you want to create the business that you love, the business of your dreams, you've got to put in this kind of work. It's like any relationship that you have. So here's a few questions you can ask yourself to get more awareness around this blind spot. Sorry guys, I gotta have a sip of water here.

What do I think about my business? Why, why do I think that? What do I think about my clients? And why do I think that? All right. So when you start thinking about these different topics, you're going to come up with things that maybe you didn't expect. And that is where you can begin doing the work of exploring how you are thinking, why you're thinking that way and what you can do to create a different result in your business. Blind spot. Number three, we want someone else to take care of everything. And then everything would be just fine. It would be perfect. They want, they literally want a supervisor to tell them what to do. And when I'm not even kidding you, okay, are you this person?

So, so they,

If only someone would come in, organize everything for them, then they could just implement and everything would be perfect. That's not how it works, right? Like if you don't already understand this, that's okay. That's what you're here for. But I want you to understand that if you want to build a successful practice that you love, first, you have to know the ins and outs of your business. It's part of the relationship process. Before you can buy something for your loved one, you have to know what they like. You have to get to know them in order to know what they like before you can hand over the reins of your business, you need to know what your business needs and thrives on. You've got to know it on a really intimate level. And how many times have you heard these, you know, stories about celebrities and business owners that were brand new and they handed over the reigns of their business of their finances at only to be totally taken to the cleaners on their financial reports.

They had all their money taken from them. It's because they weren't paying attention to their business. And if you're a celebrity, the businesses, you, and weren't paying attention to what was going on in their finances, I think it's Oprah that says, you know, always sign your own checks, right? So you always know what's going on in your business. This is going to help you. When things aren't running as efficiently as they could be, you're going to know it. And you're going to have the opportunity to train your employees to do better because you understand how your business works and what it is capable of. A great book. I always recommend on this is the revised one minute manager. I will link to it in the show notes, but this is what you need to do. If you want to be able to know your business and then hand over the reigns and then have somebody who can help accentuate your business.

They're not there to run it for you. They're there to help accentuate it for you eventually, if you've got a big enough business, yeah, you can totally hand over the reins to someone you trust someone you've trained and you have the ability to watch over things like Facebook ad spending, because you understand Facebook ads. You're not just throwing it out to somebody else to do it questions to ask yourself in this area. And what do you wish you were not responsible for in your foreign your business? Let me say that again. What do you wish you weren't responsible for in your business? Why, what would it look like for you to take a hundred percent responsibility of your business? How would you show up for yourself and your practice? If you did, those are really good questions. Like this is really good stuff, guys. I hope you.

This is hurling. Good. Okay. Blind spot. Number four, business owners don't realize that the way they do one thing is the way they do everything is disconnected. Every decision we make not to follow through on our decision or not even to make a decision is how we approach everything in life. It's how you approach your calendar, your workout, what you eat, how you engage in relationships. And when we begin, this is a really good news guys. When we begin exploring one area of our life, it becomes clearer how it's, what we're doing in all areas of our life. It's how we're showing up everywhere. And I see this most clearly when I coach clients to help them drink less, it becomes really clear that the thoughts that we're working on them wanting to cut back their drinking also apply to things like their workload, like how much they work, how much they think about their business, what they think about their business, what they think about themselves, what they think about their time, what they think about other people.

I mean, it is all interrelated guys, all interrelated. And once you start working in one area of your life, in that case, it's, you know, reducing drinking. You start to see where it's showing up in other areas of your life. And then you want to clean it all up. You want to clean up everything in your life. Be take it one step at a time, right? You pick one thing to work on and that will incrementally improve everything in your life. This all stems from our brains being on autopilot, this blind spot. Once you begin watching your brain and seeing how your thoughts impact different areas of your life in the same way and create inefficiencies and self sabotage, then you can begin thinking and acting more intentionally questions to ask yourself here. What's one area of your life you are having trouble with right now.

Why do you think that is? Where else is this showing up in your life? Describe it all. Alright. Blind spot number five. Okay. This is, I love this. I'm going to go back and listen to this. So lawyers don't see how they talk to themselves. Like how they're talking to themselves impacts their business. They say things like I suck. Okay. That was an actual quote from a couple of clients. So I know there must be other people saying the same things to themselves. So that's why I'm throwing this out there. I know people are saying this to themselves. We say things to ourselves. Like I can't figure this out. And my personal favorite, this isn't working now. Thoughts switching. Isn't the solution. Okay. Thoughts switching is when we're just like moving from, I suck to. I'm awesome because we, if we really believe that we suck, we are not going to believe that we're awesome.

Just by suddenly saying it out loud or repeating it over and over to ourselves. We have to have feeling behind that. And when you are making change in your life from a place of, you know, I can't figure this out. You really have to start looking for ways to subtly shift your thoughts. I'm going to talk about that in a second. A lot of clients try to do that. This thought switching, and then they don't process their emotions, which is key to creating the change you want. They don't dig into why they think these things about themselves and how it makes them feel because they don't like the feelings that it brings up. But we have to confront how we think about ourselves and think about our business and what it means about us or what we think it means about us so that we can begin making change.

And once we have this awareness, then we can begin unpacking it and making the shift to more loving thoughts about ourselves. So instead of this, isn't working shift to a thought like, I want to see how I can make this work, or I'm open to seeing how this could work for me. Instead of saying something like, I suck, you can say something like I can see a lot of ways that I don't suck, but I am kind of awesome. And here are those ways. If we don't address how we talk about ourselves, our business becomes a grind. It also stagnates. How can we inspire people into action when we're not inspiring ourselves making offers to help people requires us loving our offers and making inspiring offers that people act on means feeling inspired when we make those offers. And we can't feel inspired when we're thinking uninspiring thoughts about ourselves.

So here's some thoughts, some questions that you can begin asking yourself. What do you think about yourself? Be super honest. Here are the places where you're not so nice to yourself. Like what are those places? Why do you think those things? And what do you think about your clients? And if you're thinking loving thoughts about your clients and not yourself, what's preventing you from having those same thoughts about yourself. Oh, this was really good. This is really fun to put together for you. It was really something that like, I'm going to go through these again and ask them of my own business, because they're always areas of our lives and our businesses that we have these blind spots on. And even if you get these questions in this context and you're like, yes, okay, I totally get that. And you start working in this area.

You can bring these same questions into any area of your life. Like we focused on business here, but you can take this and you can bring it into relationships. You can bring it into like, if you, if you want to get fit, but you found yourself avoiding working out or, you know, whatever it is that you want to do, like bring these questions into those areas of your life, because this is the work. This is going to get you where you want to go. All right, get on my email list. So you can get more of this to keep your brain on track because that is key. Keeping your brain on track, asking it questions, having it think on purpose rather than on autopilot, you can go to Dinacataldo.com forward slash 120 to get all of the show notes for things that I mentioned here and be sure to sign up for my master class.

You can do th**@di*********.com forward slash one 20 as well, and check out some additional resources. Okay. I love doing this. I love creating things that you're going to use and be able to take with you improve your life. So I will talk to you next week. Have a great rest of your week. Talk to you soon. Bye. If you love what you're learning on the podcast, imagine how you'll evolve. When you start implementing what you're learning, you can learn how to work with me to do just that by scheduling a free strategy session, go to Dina, cataldo.com. That's Dina cataldo.com. Talk to you soon.