making your life hard, making your life harder, 3 beliefs making your life harder, Dina Cataldo, Be a Better Lawyer podcast

#221: 3 Beliefs Making Your Life Harder

Three beliefs are in the way of you feeling more peace-of-mind every day in your practice and in your life.

Not recognizing these beliefs and changing them is costing you your peace of mind.

Our peace-of-mind is everything, but we undervalue it. We think that it’s a “nice to have” rather than a “must have.”

Without peace of mind, we feel tense and everything feels harder.

What you’ll have in your life instead are a bunch of unspoken frustrations and irritations that eat away at your peace of mind.

There’s…

  • deadlines you’re worrying about
  • conversations that need to happen with clients and peers in your practice that are completely ignored
  • autopilot behaviors creating irritation without you knowing it (I'll share one I bet you're doing)

What most people do is stay stuck in the three beliefs making their lives harder. Not you though.

In this episode, you'll learn:

  • the three beliefs that are making your life harder right now
  • one belief that will make your life easier
  • how uncovering my client's beliefs helped her find low-hanging fruit to give her more peace-of-mind

Listen in to take back your peace-of-mind and sense of control over your life.

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Thanks for listening, and I'll talk to you next week.

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3 Beliefs Making Your Life Harder (and One to Make it Easier)

This is gonna be a fun episode. I know I say that about a lot of them, but this one is gonna be so freaking good. This is gonna be about three beliefs that are making your life harder right now. And I'm gonna give you one, that's gonna make your life so much easier. So if I asked you, do you feel tense?

You'd probably say yes. Right? A lot of the lawyers that I talked to say that, and if I asked you why you feel tense, you might just say something like work and life stuff. But if I asked you when during the day you feel the most tension or frustration or irritation, you will give me more specifics. How do I know? Because I do this with my clients. So from there, I can ask you questions to find out exactly what's happening during your day. That creates that tension or frustration because it's never just one big thing. It's always the small things that add up. And in this episode, I'm gonna offer you a way to begin finding the low hanging fruit in your life, where you can begin making your life easier, releasing the tension and getting back some of your peace of mind.

There are three mindsets in your way of doing things in your life that I am gonna break down and I guarantee you, one of them is showing up for you.

And then you're gonna be able to be aware of when they rear their ugly heads. And then I'm gonna give you a mindset shift that's gonna help you move forward and start redesigning how you're living your life and get more peace of mind.

Before we jump into this episode, I wanna invite you to download the Busy Lawyers Guide.

It's your ticket to making your week easier. And I walk you step by step, how to set your week up for success by redesigning, how you approach your week and inside. I give you the questions to ask yourself, to begin rethinking and redesigning your life, to create more ease and more space to live life on your terms. If you're ready to take control of your time and your practice head on over to dinacataldo.com/busylawyer and download this guide.

No more telling yourself that you're gonna wait until the busy season is over. The Busy Lawyer's Guide is gonna help make this busy season easier and set you up for success right now.

Download the Busy Lawyer's Guide at dinacataldo.com/busylawyer.

Let's talk about finding and relieving that tension, all those frustration points in your life.

Why is this a problem? Well, you probably already know, right? Like sleepless nights, worrying over what's gonna happen tomorrow, whether or not you're gonna meet deadlines, spending precious time, being angry over a ruling, or you know, an associate or something that you did. So you're upset with yourself, adding layers of guilt and shame for not doing things on your calendar that you never intended to do in the first place or not following through with commitments that you don't really want any of the sound familiar. So this is what it's costing you not to start seeking out the low hanging fruit in your life, where you see frustrations and irritations and really paying attention to them.

It's costing you your peace of mind.

Your peace-of-mind is everything, but we undervalue it.

We think that it's a nice to have rather than a must have, but without peace of mind, we feel tense. And what you see in your life are a bunch of unspoken frustrations and irritations that eat away at your peace of mind. There's deadlines up in the air that you're worrying about. There's conversations that need to be happening in your practice with clients and peers that are completely ignored. There's autopilot behaviors that are never addressed, that are creating irritation in your life because you've never looked at them before, like commitments you made that you don't want anymore, but you keep doing them because you tell yourself that you've promised whether that commitment commitment was to yourself or to somebody else.

What most people do is one of three things; they have one of three beliefs.

What they believe is that either

  1. They Can't Change Anything

So they ignore the aggravations and the frustrations because they think that's just how it is. They don't think anything can be done about it. They believe life is just frustrating home. Life's just frustrating work. Life's just frustrating. That's just life. And so they take the stiff upper lip approach and they just think they need to deal with it.

2. They should wait and see.

The second mindset that I see is they believe that they should take the wait and see approach. They believe they should wait to see if things get better or wait to see if this is really a big enough problem to do anything about it. It or wait to see if it bothers them enough to do anything about it.

3. They're doing it wrong.

Or the third one is that they believe that they are bad for not doing something like having a hard conversation that they know they want to have or doing something that they decided to do two years ago, without thinking about it and have shame around not doing things that they think they should be wanting to do.

And they tell themselves that there's something wrong with them, that they just need to figure out what's wrong with them. And then they'll do the thing. And I'm gonna give you a real life example of this. And I guarantee you, there are a lot of you listening right now who do this.

There's a fourth option.

And that's what I'm offering you here today. Find the point of frustration and question. If it needs to be that way to do this, it requires that you believe that things can get better. This mindset requires you to get curious about what the status quo has been in your life, so you can change it. And I use it to help my clients release the tension and find peace of mind. I ask them what is frustrating you most right now? And they're gonna tell me something. And then they tell me why it's not really a problem that can be solved using one of those three mindsets, right?

Because that is the way that they are used to thinking. That's how they've been thinking up until this point. So one, they ignore it because they think it's not solvable. Two. They're waiting to see if it gets worse or three. They think they should be themselves up because that'll make it more likely that they'll do the thing, right? They think there's something wrong with them.

Usually what they tell me is a combination of two of those things. And they're really committed to that mindset, that story, that belief until they say it out loud, and then they start to wonder why they've been telling themselves this story. And then I can help them find a solution that works for them. So you see how that mindset shift, that things can get better. That these are solvable. Things sounds simple, right? It's not easy. And that's why most people don't do it.

But when I'm with somebody for 50 minutes, I have the opportunity to really suss out what's going on. And then you can start making changes.

So this is how it showed up with a client.

Recently, my client told me that she generally felt tension during her day. And when I asked more questions, we found three easy places to help her release some of that tension.

I know that there are these easy places for you too. If you ask yourself, what are the low hanging fruit, you'll be able to find them too. What's easy to change. Okay.

Here are the three things my client discovered in a nutshell.

One, she was worrying throughout the day about having assignments turned into her in a timely manner to reach deadlines.

This was something that would just eat at her throughout the day. It would be in the back of her mind, she'd be worrying about it.

She'd be looking at her calendar constantly, just like letting her brain go and go and go. And that takes energy and it doesn't feel good. So that was one thing that we found.

Another thing that she found was that she was frustrated at night, that she couldn't get everything done with her kids and make time for herself.

She would be running around. She had a very strict calendar for herself that she needed to, like she told herself that she needed to really be in and follow exactly in order for her to be successful at night.

Finally, we found something I know a lot of you do.

The third thing that we found, and this is one we just stumbled on as we were talking. And I know that there are at least a few of you who do this. She had this alarm on her watch and it told her on her alarm that she needed to take five minutes and be mindful.

She didn't even remember setting this alarm, but it was on her, her watch for as long as she could remember. And every time it went off, she looked at it and she got upset and she turned it off and she didn't do it every time she didn't do it. She felt ashamed.

She felt really bad about herself because she wasn't doing it. She thought she should be doing it. And that if she were better, that she would be doing it. So she added this whole other layer of shame onto her day, every single day, at the same time, just with this alarm setting. And if you're doing something like that question, it is that what you really want.

What my client decided with this newfound information

So when we did a little bit more work together, she was able to find an easy solution to manage the assignments that worked for her. She realized that she could release some of the thoughts she had that were preventing her from asking her husband for help with the kids at night.

And she decided immediately to turn off that alarm that was on her wrist. And she decided on a ritual that worked for her to transition her from her Workday into her home life. So these were the low hanging fruits that she had that could help her make her life easier. And that was just in a shift of mindset to help her because she recognized like, oh, this is just something I haven't looked at before. And I can change things. She got so much peace-of-mind back knowing that she could change things for herself. And this was all in one session.

I guarantee you that you have some low hanging fruit that you can pick too.

And if you're ready to start having more peace of mind and more control over your life, book a call with me, peace of mind is a must have. It's what allows us not only to perform at our best, but to feel really good about how we show up in our life and who we are as human beings.

If that appeals to you, book a call with me. You can book a call at Dinacataldo.com/strategysession.

Alright, my friend. I hope you have a wonderful rest of your week and I will talk to you again soon. Bye.

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