You're listening to the be a better lawyer podcast with Dina Cataldo episode 86. So how do high achieving lawyers break through generations of being taught that we have to grind ourselves into the ground to get results for clients, build a successful business and create a life we love. While law schools are busy teaching the rule of law, they're slacking on teaching us how to be a better human to create for ourselves the success we thought we'd achieve after law school. This podcast bridges the gap between law school and life.

Well, hello, I hope you are having a fabulous day. So right before I started recording, a dog started barking outside and of course that means my dog is going to start barking. So we're going to see how it goes. We're going to hope that Frankie can be kinda chill with us today. But it is a beautiful early morning, although Chile early morning here in Sacramento. And right now I am in the middle of batching my podcasts. Yes, that's right. I am finally batching my podcasts. So I'm in the middle of recording four of them for you. And I'm excited about the topics that I'll be bringing to you in the next month. So be sure you're subscribed so you do not miss a single episode. Today I'm sharing one of the most impactful or some of the most impactful advice today. I'm sharing some of the most impactful advice that I have received from mentors over the years.

Some of them I've met in person, some of them I've known from afar, and these are all great reminders so that we continue to play big in our lives and in our businesses. So the more we take this kind of wisdom to heart, the more of an impact we can make in our world. And that's why I'm sharing it with you today. If we want to make an impact in this world, we must prioritize taking care of ourselves first. Now, I have distilled some bonus advice in a free download I've created called the busy lawyers quick start guide to getting five hours back each week. Not only will you get back your time, but you will create the foundation that you need to make the impact that you want to make the impact that you know you were meant to make. You can download it free dinacataldo.com forward slash busy lawyer.

That's Dina cataldo.com forward slash busy lawyer. All right, let's just jump right into this life changing advice, shall we? So the first person I want to bring advice to you from is Brene Brown. Now, if you don't know who Brene Brown is, she is a fabulous author. I'm going to link to each of these people that I'm going to mention to some of their work, so that way you can have some context. If you don't know who these people are, you get

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forward slash 86 so Brene Brown has not only written tons of books, she has done it from a place of vulnerability, and that's really how she launched her public career because she was a researcher and a storyteller and came from a very scientific background and had a really difficult time translating. Some of those scientific findings with the emotional side of things that we oftentimes ignore.

And she did for a very long time and she did a Ted talk on it and I talked more about her in a separate podcast, which I will link to in the show notes. But I want you to hear what she had to say about this. And this is paraphrasing it. People's opinions of you do not matter if they criticize you, chances are they're not in the arena trying to impact the world like you are. So don't bother listening to them. There are so many people who have opinions and in fact, every single one of us do. That does not mean that you need to take them to heart. It does not mean that you need to internalize them and prevent you from doing what you were meant to do in this world. And that took me a very long time to internalize because I was such a people pleaser.

I only looked at what other people thought of me. I only looked at how what I was doing was going to impact how another felt about me. So I hope that you can take this and internalize it and she has so many great books that I recommend every single one of them. If this is an area of your life that you feel like you're working on, that ability to show up bigger in the world, that ability to be vulnerable with the people who are closest to you. The second person who has a bit of advice that I would recommend to you is Selena Soo. Selena Soo is a strategist, a publicist, somebody who can help you play bigger in the world by making yourself known in media outlets and she's someone that I came to know a little bit when I joined her impacting millions program. Now, if you have been getting emails from me, you've probably heard that impacting millions is coming up soon and I am an affiliate for that program and I'm really proud to be an affiliate because she had such an impact on how I present myself to others through media outlets.

And it's something that is very near and dear to my heart because that is how I spread the word of what I'm doing. How I can impact other people. And she did a mastermind with another person that I love, who is Laura Belgray, a copywriter. And I went to her New York mastermind and she is absolutely fabulous. She is just the kindest person that you will ever meet. But the piece of advice that she gives is really to take that extra step to make yourself memorable and to make someone else's day. She actually gives an example of this and one of her blogs, she was on John Lee Dumas's podcast and when she was on that podcast, she also gave him a thank you and that thank you. Was a box of different ice creams and they were all these very different, unique flavors from a a manufacturer.

It was one of those small manufacturers and it was just this delightful little gift. And of course that made her more memorable to John Lee Dumas's because he got something incredibly special and unique from her. And she did it from a place of heart. It wasn't as if she was trying to get on his good side, you know she had nothing really to gain from it except that relationship. And she's really big on creating relationships, sustaining relationships, networking and so that is a big part of who she is. So take that extra step to make yourself just a little bit more memorable to those around you and you'll help make someone else's day to. The third person who has given me this bit of wisdom that I want to share with you is Marie Forleo and she is a coach. I came to know of her through her program B school when I was learning how to create my business online.

And she said, if it isn't scheduled, it isn't real. That is the most true statement I probably ever heard because if I cannot schedule it, it will not happen. If I do not make time for it and I write it down in my planner, it will not happen. And when I say my planner, I mean my Google calendar because I put everything in there and time block. If you have all these big ideas and you want to do something really big and you want to, you know, make sure you've cleaned out your inbox or you've cleaned out your closet or you've washed your car or you have made some sort of an appointment with yourself to make sure you get a massage, it's gotta be in your calendar or it's not going to happen. So make sure that you calendar every single thing that is important to you.

Number four, Brooke Castillo, she is a life coach and she is the founder of the life coach school as well as the life coach school podcast, which I absolutely love by the way, she is someone who really can help you get your mind right and I definitely love listening to her. I love learning from her and she basically has said nothing has to change for you to feel better in your life. And it's true. It really is true. You can have every single thing in your life go quote unquote wrong. There I am with my quote in quotes again, but you can still be happy. You can still have peace. It's all there for you, but it all depends on how you interpret your situations and I've always been a big proponent of this, but what she did is she broke it down very simply in what she calls the model.

I like to call it the thought cycle because it helps me see it more clearly, exactly what what's going on in our brain. So there's a circumstance, some kind of fact that's out there in the world, something that can be proved beyond a reasonable doubt and then we have a thought about it, right? Like we have an interpretation of what that thing in the world is, whether it's a person, an object, a thing that happened in the world, we have a thought about it and that thought then creates a feeling which then produces an action and that action leads to the results that we get in our lives and the results that we get in our lives are always going to reinforce the thought, that interpretation that we had about the world. Now I learned this in yoga. I learned this, you know, through every single self help book that you read.

This is what you learn. But the way she said it made it so simple, she really simplified it. And that was something that was amazing to me. So nothing has to change in your life. Absolutely. Nothing has to change for you to feel better in your life. You just have to look at how you're interpreting things and then change your interpretations accordingly. All right, so Seth Goden is my number five pick for giving you some words of wisdom and he, I love him. So he has this podcast called akimbo. I will link to that in the show notes and it's really insightful. He talks about marketing and what it means to be an entrepreneur. And he does it in a way that is very thoughtful. He has a way with words and a way of articulating things that make so much sense. He just thinks so clearly, and he has practiced thinking.

You know, it's one of those just amazing, fun, delightful podcasts where you were really using your brain and you're seeing things from another perspective. He said, we overvalue keeping busy and undervalue connection and putting something in the marketplace that's impactful. Every time I hear myself or someone else say, I'm so busy and we use it as a term of, you know, kind of creating that status for ourselves as being busy. We are undervaluing that connection. And I talked about that in a podcast, but he just says it so eloquently. But when we say that we're busy, we're actually disconnecting from the people who are around us. When we say we're busy, we're totally undervaluing the connection that we could have, but not just with the people around us, but also with what we're putting out into the world. Like whatever we're doing, whatever service we're providing for people, if we are overvaluing that over stimulus of just being busy and doing busy work and not taking the time to stay grounded and make that connection with those people that we want to serve in the marketplace, then we're missing our priorities or where we don't have our priorities placed.

Right? So we overvalue keeping busy and undervalue connection and putting something into the marketplace that is impactful. All right. Number six comes from Sara Blakely and she is the founder and CEO of Spanx, which if you don't know what Spanx is, it is a woman's undergarment distributor, manufacturer. She's the inventor of them. It's fabulous. It's a, it's a really great company and she puts her personality behind it. So it's really fun. You know, she has an Instagram account. She's, she's super fun and she's very inspiring. It's a $1 billion company and she has grown into her role as CEO. It's really fun to watch her, but she tells a lot of her stories starting out. And one of them that really struck me was that when she would come home from school is her dad would ask her, how did you fail today? And that is just such the opposite of what we're taught, right?

Like we're taught, we shouldn't fail, that we need to get all A's, that we need to be perfect, that we need to get everything just right. That to fail is wrong. But what her dad was teaching her is that that's how you succeed in life. And really when you become an adult, you recognize that that is what it takes to succeed is to actually fail and fail a lot and do it publicly sometimes. Like you've got to fail a lot. And so when she told this story about her dad asking her every day, how did you fail today? I loved that because it put more value on getting out there in the world and failing, doing something that maybe wasn't going to work. And I think that we need to place more value on challenging ourselves to do things that are outside of the box and that maybe won't work.

And that is how we learn to be successful. And you never stop failing. You always keep failing. It is such a foreign concept for us because that is something that we're taught is wrong, but I really, really believe that that is the key to success. All right. Tony Robbins is in the number seven spot and he says something, if you're not familiar with Tony Robbins, he is a personal development coach. He's a business coach, is just this amazing rock star of a coach who is incredibly inspiring. I've done a podcast on him as well. I will link to that in the show notes. But what he says is if you want to feel better, like if you're down, if you feel like you know you've got nothing left, then focus yourself on serving others rather than receiving. It's impossible to feel bad when you're focusing on how you can help someone else.

And he weaves that in with lots of his personal stories. And one in particular was as he was totally down on his luck, right? Like he had zero money. I think he had like a few dollars or something and he went out to eat and he felt just awful. And he saw this young boy who took his mother out to dinner and he had just a little bit of money left and he gave the money to the little boys so that he could take his mom out to dinner. So it was just like the sweetest story. But he said that that just completely turned the way he felt around. He didn't need any money. He could just be walking down the street. But giving that money to that young boy just made him feel so good. It made him feel amazing when he had just come from feeling so horrible about himself.

So I know that this is true in my life. Whenever I'm feeling that you know, sorry for myself or I don't, you know, I didn't get what I want, whatever it is, once I turn my attention towards serving somebody else, then I instantly feel a difference for the better. So this piece of advice is something that I constantly turn to. I constantly, you know, recognize, Hey, you know, if I'm ever feeling down, I need to just turn that around and start serving because serving others is really where we show up as our best. All right, so this last piece of advice is from my dad. All right? So my dad, he was a very smart man and you know, when I was a little kid, maybe I didn't understand this so much, but he basically said, the person you are around will influence the kind of person you will become.

And I believe that's still true as an adult. So that's why I think it's so magical that we have the ability to have these podcasts where we can kinda hang out with people who we see as more successful in certain areas in their life and that we emulate or we aspire to become more like, and it's really amazing that we have the ability to spend more time with these people in what feels like a very personal way, getting to like just have them in our ears. Right? So he didn't say this, this fact that people that were around will influence the kind of person will become, he didn't say that in so many words, but that's really what he taught me all the time by making sure I didn't spend time with the who were troublemakers, you know? It's also something that elite coaches, like Jim Roan taught his clients, which was that we're the sum of the five people we spend the most time with.

That's why I believe these podcasts are so amazing. We get access to people that we would have never had access to before the internet. So just recognize what a gift that is and that you have the opportunity to find the people who are right for you and get to connect with them in a way that just wasn't possible not too long ago. Did you find one of these bits of advice inspiring? If so, I would love it if you shared it with me on Instagram. Tag me in your stories. Let me know what touched you the most. I'm at Dina dot Cataldo. If you want to learn more about these incredible people, you can learn more about

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forward slash 86 and there you can also download my free busy lawyers quick start guide to get five hours back each week. All right, I will talk to you soon. Bye.