#301: Your Mindset Makeover for Law Firm Growth

Your Mindset Makeover for Law Firm Growth

When I was practicing law, and I decided I was going to build a business on top of my full time career as a prosecutor, I didn’t know what I was getting myself into.

All I had was a work ethic and determination.

But I was slowed down by my mindset.

Everything took longer.

On today’s episode, you’ll learn 3 mindset that may be slowing your law firm’s growth down and how to overcome them.

When I started my first business, I thought, “How hard could it be? I’m smart. I can figure it out.”

I didn’t have any mindset foundation. I’d never heard of mindset.

Because I didn’t know anything about mindset and how it impacted my work, I procrastinated, talked to myself like was a jerk because I thought I told myself be working harder when I was procrastinating, and feeling exhausted and in a grind.

I questioned if I had the ability to do what I wanted to do.

As it turns out, that’s pretty normal for anyone starting business.

It’s even normal for someone who’s been in business for YEARS.

I lacked a plan. Direction.

What I wouldn’t have given for someone to help me think about what I wanted, and what I wanted my business to look like, and what decisions I needed to think about and help me think through them.

Yes, I had courses on how to build a website and SEO and all things social media, but I didn’t know how make a plan and to problem-solve that plan.

Planning is essential is because it gives us a reference point. It gives us something to turn to when our emotions are high.

If we’re in a high state of emotion – worry, overwhelm, fear, anger — our ability to make quality decisions and make the best decisions for ourselves and our businesses decreases.

When we’re in lower state of emotion — grounded, calm, open, at peace, neutral — our ability to make decisions improves exponentially.

Think about this in terms of meal prep.

Let’s say you want to eat salads 5 days a week. If you take a couple hours to buy the food, prep the food and have it ready in the fridge each week, your much more likely to stay on track with that goal.

You’ve planned ahead of time when you’re calm.

Then when you’re driving home from the office, and youthiuk, “Wow, it’d be really nice to grab some fast food,” you remember that you have an easy salad at home that doesn’t take much work. It makes it easier to redirect your brain and remind yourself that you have a plan and can more easily follow through on it.

You don’t even have to follow through 100% of the time. You just have to do it more often than not to get closer to achieving your goal.

I’ll say it in another way:

The state of your emotions determines your capabilities.

And our mindset determines the state of our emotions.

So when I help lawyers make decisions about their plan to grow their law firm growths, the biggest obstacle to making better decisions and implementing those better decisions isn’t time or money or ability to take action – because the people I work with are action-takers.

Their biggest obstacle is always mindset.

In this episode, I’m going to give you the most common mindset obstacles I see, give you what you need to know to see if these mindset obstacles are impacting your practice, and I’ll give you solutions to these obstacles.

You’ll learn:

• three common mindset mistakes that prevent law firm owners from making a plan to grow their practice
• The solutions to these mindset mistakes
• If you’re looking for help making a plan for law firm growth that doesn’t leave you burned out or overwhelmed, I’ll tell you more about my new course called Precision Planning for Law Firm Growth: Your Step-by-Step Process to Create Your most Profitable and Peaceful Year in the Law Yet

This has been so fun to create, and I’m looking forward to telling you all about it.

Okay, so let’s talk about mindset.

The first mindset mistake is…

Mindset #1: You’re confused about your offer.

HYKIY:

• you don’t tell people your price in the consult
• You feel tied up in knots when you talk about your offer to your clients in a consult
• If you’re an estate planner or someone who works with contracts or other documents, you give almost unlimited re-drafts without charging for your time
• You give almost unlimited phone calls to your client without charging for your time
• You feel resentment when you do work on cases where you know you’re undercharging for your work
• You think your client is taking advantage of your kindness

This all creates confusion, resentment and disappointment in your emotional state. We cannot create clarity from this state.

If you’re confused about your offer, there’s no clarity for you or for your client, so it makes sense that you you’d create confusion in your brain about how many calls someone gets or how many redrafts they get. Or that you’d feel tied up in knots during your initial talk with a client.

The solution to this is two-fold.

1. get clear on your offer

1. Get clear on the value that you’re offering them

Mindset #2: You think everything needs to get done right now.

HYKIY:

• you get upset with yourself if you don’t do something you told yourself you’d do even if it’s not something you put on your calendar
• You get upset with yourself if you don’t do something you told yourself you needed to do even if you took a step back logically and realized you needed to complete another task
• You have goals, but you give up on them partway through the month, the quarter or the year because you can’t see a clear path to accomplish what you’d set out to do.

All of this creates an emotional state of impatience and frustration and disappointment. This is not a place where you want to make decisions that will impact your practice. This is where it’s time to work on your mindset.

The solution to this is to:

1. create a plan that makes sense for where you are in your practice – if you’re overwhelmed, you need to focus on calming the overwhelm and that requires managing your mind. A lot of people think it’s about surface level things like having the right calendar, but it’s actually about how you use the calendar you have. That topic is too big for this episode, so if you want time management tips, you can download the Podcast Treasure Map I created to get a list of best of podcasts where I talk about time management and many more topics at dinacataldo.com/map

Mindset #3: You think growing your practice is too hard or too time consuming.

HYKIY:

• you have an amazing idea, but then a few minutes later you discount it as dumb or too hard to pull off.
• You sit down to think about your practice, but you draw a blank and decide to check email or do some other small task instead
• You have a hoard of ideas for growing your practice, but you haven’t made any decisions around what to actually do out of those ideas
• You know planning for sustainable growth in your practice is important, but you tell yourself you don’t have time right now or you’ll do it later

The solution is to stop working from your circumstances. We can’t solve a problem at the level it was created. So you can’t solve your current circumstances at the level of your circumstances. You have to get outside of them.

Here’s a basic example. Let’s say you’re in your kitchen and you see your sink is full of dishes. It’s absolutely jam packed with dishes. You do not want to do them because it looks hard and time consuming. You’d much rather be doing anything else. This is very like what the brain does when it thinks about doing things it’s never done before like intentional practice growth like we’re talking about here.

There’s no one else to do these dishes but you. You don’t have a dish washer. You don’t have a maid to help you.

Do you just throw your hands in the air? Do you throw all your dishes in the trash and decide from now on you’re using paper plates? Probably not as tempting as that sounds. Instead you find the sponge and the dish soap, you roll up your sleeves, you get the water hot, and you pick up one plate, wash it then another and another. Sooner than you thought possible, the dishes are done.

In this example, you just broke down a larger project into small pieces and started tackling the project one step at a time.

That’s what we need to do when we’re planning for law firm growth too.

When we look at the larger project, it can feel overwhelming. But when we think about each step individually, it becomes much easier to complete the project.

Planning with precision requires efficiency. Efficiency is doing the right things in the right order.

That brings me to what I’m so excited to share with you: my new course Precision Planning: Your Step-by-Step Process to Create Your Most Profitable and Peaceful Year in the Law Yet.

Over the years, I’ve what it takes to build a successful law practice that makes room for a life you love and I’ve combined that knowledge into a course that gives you:

• clarity on your vision including the most important foundation you need to set for your practice to thrive moving forward
• Insights into setting achievable and strategic goals for the next 12 months
• How to prioritize based on your goals
• Momentum to move your goals forward
• The ability to bring your team into your vision
• The know-how to track your progress and evaluate when you may need to pivot
• Case studies
• And more!

By the end of this course you will have:

1. Nailed down your goal for the next 12 months: not only will you learn your sweet spot goal, you’ll create a plan that makes sense for the lifestyle you deeply desire.

2) Learn how to take your idea generating for growth quantum: New ideas sparks growth, but that’s not enough. You need the mindset to implement. You’ll get the tools you need to follow through on your plan.

3) feel grounded with purpose: The biggest misconception people have about achieving goals is they need willpower. Really you need focus. Focus requires sustainability. You’ll make a plan to help you focus even when life happens.

4) prioritize your most impactful actions and weed out the rest: One of the biggest causes of overwhelm is not prioritizing. That’s why you’ll get a step-by-step process to prioritize what’s most important to focus your time and energy on to grow your firm.

5) Create a non negotiable plan to maintain your well-being: You’re a high-achiever, so you’re used to hard work. But as time goes by, we can burn ourselves out. Growing a business doesn’t have to be at your expense. You’ll create non-negotiables to keep you feeling at your best.

6) have specific monthly actions set ahead of time to achieve your goal: We tend to overestimate what we can accomplish in short period of time and underestimate what we can accomplish in longer periods of time. That’s why in this hour you’ll run your plan through a filter. When you do, you’ll have a plan that allows room for the lifestyle you want to create for yourself.

But above all else…precision planning for law firm growth will give you the confidence to finally take action to create the firm and lifestyle you want while giving yourself freedom and security you crave.

If this sounds like a dream course to you, go over to dinacataldo.com/precisionplanning and join the waitlist.

The benefit of being on the waitlist is you’ll be the first to hear about new bonuses I’m adding to the course and celebrations I’m doing in the lead-up to this brand new course.

I haven’t seen anything like it online, and I think you’ll agree it’s one of a kind.

You can join the waitlist and be the first to know about everything as it happens at dinacataldo.com/precisionplanning

And if you’re ready to work with me one-on-one to end overwhelm for good and finally feel in control of your practice and its direction, book a strategy session with me. You can do that at dinacataldo.com/strategysession

As always, what you want matters. And it’s within your power to make it happen.