If you want to reduce stress, if you want to have more time with friends, if you want to make anything happen in your life, what it all comes down to is identity. And so today I'm going to talk to you about what identity is and so on. I'm going to kind of just let the training speak for itself, but listen in today and find something in it that resonates with you to take into whatever area of your life you want to improve on.
If you have your own practice, you likely want to increase your visibility to increase your impact. In fact, it's essential.
That's why I've teamed up as an affiliate for Selena So's Impacting Millions program.
I encourage you to increase your publicity IQ with her free guide, “7 Must-Haves to Get Featured on Top Podcasts, Websites, TV, and More!” You can get it here.
Here's the transcript for today's episode.
Hello, hello, hello. How are you doing today? So maybe you just got home and you're doing all the things you're making all the dinner, and maybe this is something that's going to play in your background or maybe you're still at the office, which I think is probably more likely.
It's five 30 in the afternoon on a Wednesday. You're probably still at the office. So let's talk about how we can not just make that time that we're spending at the office count towards our legal practice, but also how you can use that to grow your legal practice. Because you're probably doing all the things, doing all of your legal practice stuff. And then you're coming around and you're saying, well, I don't really have time to manage this in the way that I want so that I can grow my practice. So we're going to talk a little bit about today mindset and eventually shifting your identity. And we're going to talk about what identity is, why it is so important, how we can begin making shifts. And we're going to talk a little bit about how this is really impacting the growth of your firm and the ease of your firm.
If you're stressing out over your firm, there are so many ways that you can pull back in the areas that don't matter as much and push forward in really positive ways that are going to make your practice move forward the way that you want it to. This requires an identity shift.
So if you don't know who I am, my name's Dina, I am a lawyer and I am a coach and I'm here to talk to you about mindset. So when you show up, if you're watching the replay, I would love it if you would let me know if you are here. What kind of law you practice, where you're from. I'm trying to get a feel for the people who are really watching these trainings so that I can bring you more of what you want. And if you could tell me like what is it that you want to get out of these trainings? Like I'm talking about mindset and how you can really start making those shifts so that you can grow your practice and specifically using publicity. Then I'm going to tell you why in just a little bit, but is there any area of your practice that you're particularly struggling with and why are you showing up here? What is it that you want to get out of this?
Okay, so I'm just going to jump right into this. If you are here, chances are you listened to my podcast be a better lawyer podcast if you don't go and subscribe to it there I talk about mindset shifts. I talk about how to really be a better lawyer in the context of everything that law school fails to teach us. And one of the big things that no one teaches us is that everything in our life, everything around us, everything that we see in front of us, behind us, everywhere, it's all a reflection of our identity. It's a reflection of who we believe we are. Everything that we struggle with, the stresses that we have at the office with partners, with family members, day to day things. It's all a reflection of our identity. Every belief that we have about who we are, our identity comes from something that happened probably when we were a kid, right? Like 12 or under.
We were probably misinterpreting something that occurred in our life. It made an imprint in our brain, our subconscious brain, and we started playing things out in our life according to the rules that we believed were true. And I'm going to talk to you a little bit about a couple ways this showed up in my life and maybe you've seen this show up in your life. If this is something that you've already kind of like, yes, I understand this. This is something that has shown up in my life. I see it all the time. I would love to hear from you. And actually what I'm going to do right now, what I have here is my, Mmm, my Facebook page and I want to see if I can click on it to see if I can get any comments if they show up. Okay?
So what I want you to really think about are those things that you have in your life, the stresses that you have in your life. Maybe some things that you find annoying in your life and ask yourself where are they coming from?
If you are annoyed or you're angry about something in your life, it means that you're trying to control something. It's not going according to the rules that you have set up in your brain and therefore it's contradicting your identity, right? It's bumping up against your identity.
But I want you to think about this in a positive way. Not beating yourself up. Just recognizing, Hey, there are some areas in my life where I'm not succeeding the way I want to, where I'm finding annoyances, whether it's with employees or not showing up the way that you want to at networking events or not promoting your firm the way that you would like to.
All of those things are simply reflections of your identity right now.
The good news is is that you can change your identity anytime you want.
What is our identity made up of?
While you already know it's made up of those early thoughts that we had about ourselves and we kind of played them out through our lives. Whether it's a scarcity, maybe you have feelings like you don't have enough money, you have thoughts that you don't have enough money. It'd be that you don't have enough time, that everything's very stressful, that you have to work really hard to get anywhere in life. Those are all top two is at a very young age and it's imprinted on us. It's in our subconscious. I want you to think about your subconscious as kind of like the backup data plan for your computer. When you are first starting to do something in any area of your life, it is a little difficult.
Maybe you have some bumps in the road, but like anything, once you start to get used to it, a goes back into the recesses of your mind so you don't have to think about it as much. So let's say you're going to the office, your office for the very first time, maybe you had to plan a little bit, you had to figure out traffic. You gave yourself a little bit of extra time, you weren't sure how long it was going to take you, you weren't sure which side streets were the best streets. And so you kinda had to try something new and it was a little awkward. You didn't feel 100% comfortable. Maybe you had to take your GPS out. Then after you did it a few times, you started not paying so much attention to the streets that you were taking. You started to leave at the same time every day.
You weren't too concerned about being a couple minutes late, even maybe. But what's happened is once that habit begins to come into place, it goes back into the recesses of our brain. We no longer have to use our prefrontal cortex to do the heavy lifting, to really do that upfront work. And now all the works going back into the recesses of our brain, we don't even have to think about it anymore. That is what has happened with the thoughts that we have thought that have laid the foundation for our identity. All of those thoughts have created beliefs in our brain because we've thought them over and over and over again, and now they've become in the back of our brain. We don't even think about them. We're not even aware that they are holding us back, that they're maybe allowing us to be frustrated or upset in different areas of our lives.
We, we can't see it. And this is something that shows up for all of us one way or another.
Are you showing up for all the people who need you? Is your identity allowing you to?
There was something that happened to me recently. I was at a networking event. It was the elevation of chiefs, chief judge Kim Mueller here in the Eastern district in California. And she mentioned something about showing up, like she did not actually want to be elevated. She was thinking about all of the additional responsibilities that were going to take her away from her caseload. And she didn't want this added pressure, these added responsibilities of doing all of this administrative work that was going to take her away from that. But then when she had a moment to pull back and she had a moment to really think about it, she recognized that she needed to take her seat at the table so that she could then be someone that others could look up to, who could see themselves in so that they could see what was possible for them.
It's not that she wanted to do it necessarily, but she knew that she had had women mentors, people that she had looked up to that had laid the foundation for her to open her mind, open her beliefs to what was possible. And that is why she felt the responsibility to do the same for other women. And when she started talking about this, she also talked to mentioned a judge that was near me that I happened to know or names justice Elena dortay and she works with the mock trial competitions and she does this in Sacramento. She's fabulous. And she volunteers and she does the bench trials for the students. Now when she made the similar comment, justice worked. Dortay said, yeah, I feel like the need to show up and be there for these high school students and beyond the bench so that they can see what's possible.
In a, in a woman who she's Latina, they could see themselves maybe in her. And they even had a comment from, she had a comment from a high school student who said that to her mom, like, I didn't even know that Latinas could be judges. So I then thought about where I was not showing up in my life because I volunteer for the same mock trial competition for those high school students. But I go out of my way to avoid being on the bench. I get, you know, asked to be on the bench, but it's an added responsibility and it's something that I've shied away from because I have so many other responsibilities. But when I think about it and I step back and look at it in the context of showing up before you're ready, showing up even when maybe you are uncomfortable so that other people can see you and be drawn to you or you know, maybe see a little bit of themselves in you that looking at it that way, it made me want to show up in a different way and it made me see that the subconscious beliefs that I had not showing up is big.
Maybe not making other people feel bad, giving other people's opportunities where I'm not taking those opportunities for myself, that where I believed those things, they were impacting my day to day life and not just impacting me, but impacting how I show up in the world so that others can see what is possible. I want you, I hope you take away something. Take away from this that you can play bigger in your life and you can break through the subconscious identities that may have been having you play a little bit small. Let me tell you another story. So I have, when I first started doing Facebook lives, I have to say these were not my favorite things. Okay. I didn't know where to look at the camera. So I watched some videos and kind of saw what other people were doing. It took like a little mini online training.
I would memorize things like I would have little cards and I would memorize what was going on in them. And this was years ago, I would just get so nervous and so I'm anxious about it because I didn't like how I appeared on camera and I didn't. I didn't enjoy the idea of like, like right now, right, I am talking to one person. Okay. And that's normal for a Facebook live, but to feel like you're not talking to anyone, like you're not reaching anyone and just talking to a camera. It's a really awkward experience when you're trying it for the first time or the second time or the third time and it takes time to show up for yourself and just keep showing up even when it's uncomfortable and break through that subconscious identity that you have that you are not meant to be on camera or that you don't have anything important to say or that people don't want to hear what you have to say.
Your new identity: I'm the kind of person who shows up for myself and others.
That is how it works, right? So if you are watching the replay, I would love it if you told me if this shows up for you in any part of your life and like this and tell me, Hey, I'm here for you. I hear the same things. This is like something that impacts me. I would love to hear from you in the comments. So that is an example of where our subconscious identities really hold us back. And then we need to consciously start to open up. We need to start consciously looking at what is going on in front of us, right? And how we are responding to what's going on in front of us. Like if we are showing up to volunteer, are we showing up to volunteer as a judge or maybe just as a scoring judge, are we going to be on the bench or are we going to hit the sidelines?
Or if you are in a position of leadership already, like you know jet a chief judge Kim Mueller was maybe you step up from being a judge and you say, you know what, I will take on those added responsibilities so that I'm more visible to other people and they can see what is possible. So how does this play out when it comes to business? Why is this identity so important for when you are in business? If you have a legal practice and you are a solo small firm owner or if you own any business, right? You are an entrepreneur and being an entrepreneur means a few things and one of them means huge personal growth. If you want to grow your business, if you are up to the challenge of this personal growth, you will find that there are so many opportunities to grow. You get uncomfortable all the time.
Whether it's by doing videos, doing interviews, speaking on stage, maybe you're going to networking events. You are putting yourself in the position of being rejected or ignored. And that's okay. That just means that you have more opportunities to fine tune your message so that your people find you and they understand, they resonate with you.
You have to start somewhere. You've got to start before you're ready.
And when you have these subconscious identities of, you know, the, and the thoughts that create, that underlie these this identity. And you can have a lot of different identities, right? Like you can be a mom, a daughter, a wife, whatever it is. Your underpinnings can be preventing you from growing your practice. They can be preventing you from shining the way that you should be shining, right? I hate to use the word should, but if you are not putting yourself out there and you're waiting for business to come to you, that's not gonna work, okay?
That is not a recipe for success.
If you're ignoring the call to do more videos or doing a podcast or speaking on stage or going out and talking to people and telling them what you do so that you can just offer and serve and give; if you're being held back by this scarcity mentality that you don't have enough, you can't give enough, or you give too much, they're not going to buy from you; if you're held back by that kind of scarcity mentality, you are not going to draw people to you. The more you give, the more giving you are, the more you're going to attract people who are interested in you and what you have to offer. Now in as a lawyer, you're in a unique position. You are. You might be concerned that you're giving away legal advice and that's illegal.
Well, there are so many ways to offer help in this world than giving legal advice. And you can go out and you can help people and you may not have any control. In fact, I know this, you do not have control on how that will come back to you, but it will come back to you and you have to have faith in that. So you go out there and you speak, you go out there and you network, you go on podcasts, you get interviewed, you write articles, they get published and you offer what you have experienced in your life. You offer how you have shown up in the world and what progress you have seen in your life. And you may or may not be talking about you being a lawyer.
How lawyers can get seen and heard more outside the normal channels
But what will happen is if you go out there and you talk about what it means to be a working mom, and you get an article for that, you do a blog post for that.
You get it published somewhere and someone reads that article and they see you're in a state planner and they like you and they're like, Hey, I'm going to go check out her Instagram page, and they start by going there and they may start this show, this small relationship with you. It starts with social media. Then it starts with listening to your podcast. Then it goes to, wow, maybe I will go ahead and book a consult with them because I do need a state planning and I really liked her.
“I felt like I knew her when I read that article in Forbes.”
When you start showing up in those kinds of ways, when you start showing up in ways that resonate with you and you share from this space, then you will be opening yourself up to so many possibilities and that is why I'm talking about identity is because once you start breaking through those underpinnings of being someone who doesn't give because you feel like you don't have enough or you don't put anything out into the world because you don't feel like you have anything worthwhile to say or you don't want to continue trying because you're not getting the response that you want.
Well, if you don't have faith and you don't come from a place of generosity and you don't come from a place of abundance, then you will not make change. You will not be able to shift your identity and what you need to do if you want to make change in your life is shift your identity. That is what we're talking about here. That is why this is so important to me is because I needed to understand this fundamental shift of identity before I was able to do something like this. Doing a Facebook live or starting a podcast or getting interviewed in blogs or speaking on stage. These are all things that I needed to work on. Every single one of us has a place to grow and I'm bringing this to you because I'm talking about impacting millions soon and through all these trainings I'm going to be bringing it back to publicity and shining a light on yourself and showing up really big in the world because that is how you grow, not just your business but as a person.
And I believe like I fundamentally believe that business is the most amazing growth journey that you could ever be on. There's no better way to shift your identity.
Tell me if this is true. Does this sound true to you? Do you feel like you have learned more as a business owner, you know in a, in a short period of time than you had ever learned in your entire life? Because that is my truth. That is what I have experienced. So I know that there are others of you out there who were experiencing the exact same thing. So I am a proud affiliate. I say this all the time. I am a proud affiliate of Selena Sue's impacting millions program and she's got a free training coming up. I'm going to tell you more about that when it's open, but it's not open yet. But I'm going to keep offering you these free trainings because I want to bring you value and I want you to understand these mindset shifts because they are necessary.
Now, Selena goes through how to publicize, how to shape your story. She has this amazing team of people working with her who help you actually shape your stories in order to pitch them to magazine. So you know when I was mentioning like if you're a state planner or a divorce, divorce attorney or you know, business attorney, whatever kind of law you practice, you can bring the personal side of your life to these articles. In fact, that is what you need to do. You're not going there to sell anything. You're just going there to show up big as who you are. And if you are trapped in this identity of not having anything to say of value, if you really think that that's true, you won't put yourself out there. You won't make the pitches and Selena in the her team are so great at helping you make that big move to do that and when you start doing it, it's a snowball effect.
People will start coming to you and asking if you want to be on their podcast or if you want to write an article for their blog or if you want to be interviewed for their blog, it will start coming to you. So I want to put this out there. I want you to think about where you might be holding yourself back, where you might be telling yourself that you don't have something to say or that nobody's really watching or cares because I have news for you. There's somebody out there, there is somebody out there right now watching you and I don't want to sound creepy or anything, but they are watching you and they want to know what you know. They see you are a step ahead of them and they want to go after it the way you're going after it. And there are people out there who need what you have to offer.
Any service that you have to offer, but they just need a little peek into your world in order to get to know you. They need to have like that little sense that, Hey, her life is like my life. She has a husband that doesn't take out the trash too or she has a child who, you know seems really stressed out about their homework and I don't know what to do about it either. Right, and using that in context of what you do a living and bringing out what you have to share with the world, that is what's going to connect you with the people that you want to connect with as is what's going to help you grow your practice in the way you want to grow your practice and connect with people who are in your tribe, like your people.
I mean,
How many times have you worked with clients and you're like, “Oh, I don't know if I really want to work with them, but they're paying me.”
Why do that? And then you regret it later because you're like, “Oh my gosh, that was so much work. I didn't even really want to work with them.”
“I swear I just, I'm just going to take this one last client and this time it's going to be the last time I take somebody who you know says X , Y, Z. Next time I'm only going to go after the people, I'm only going to work with the people who fit me that are my kind of people. Because I know that they are fun to work with, that they're easy to work with.” Whatever the description is for the people you want to work with. Okay. So I hope that that has given you a little bit of a peek into identity and how you can begin seeing what's going on with how you're playing, whether it's big or small.
I say that in like this general term like playing big and playing small, but you know, right? Like, you know, if you're holding back, you know if you are feeling those feelings of being meant for more and you're ignoring them. Instead you are sitting on the couch eating potato chips or you are watching Netflix or the news all night. Okay, you're the one who knows. So I want you to take a look at where you might be spending your time in a way that's not helpful and start asking yourself why? Why am I doing this? Why am I procrastinating? Why am I not putting myself out into the world? Why am I not showing up in a way that can connect with people who might be my ideal client? Why am I not doing that? And then start asking yourself, what kind of thoughts are you having?
Like is it because you don't think you have anything to offer to the world or do you think you have no time to do it? That's a big one, right? Like I'm a coach who works with lawyers who are overwhelmed and feel like they don't have time. Like that is a common thought that they have. And my job is to work with them and get them to see why that thought is an underpinning of their identity and how they can break through that and start shifting their identity. So that is all for this week.
Make sure that you tell me in the comments if you're watching the replay, if you're here right now, tell me what you practice, what you want to take away from these trainings that I'm going to be doing. If you want to be reminded of Selena's free trainings cause she's going to do this whole training on publicity and she talks about the publicity pyramid and she is just, she's amazing.
Just if you, even if you're not interested in doing the impacting millions program, I would totally stick around to get those free trainings. You can click the link that's in here, Dina cataldo.com forward slash remind me and you can sign up for reminders for when that free training comes up and you'll get reminders of when we do these free trainings too. Each week we'll be doing these for the next five weeks. I'm super excited about it, and they're going to be on Facebook. So go to Dina cataldo.com forward slash remind me, and I will remind you when the next training is up. I hope you have a wonderful night and I will talk to you soon. Bye.
