#315: The Power of Constraint

The Power of Constraint

Constraining what you do in your law practice and when you do it is a powerful tool to calm the overwhelm you may be feeling and accelerate progress towards your goals. Today I’m sharing how to apply constraint in your practice, so you can achieve your goals faster. Whether your goal is to grow your practice or to make it feel more organized so you can thrive, listen in to learn about the power of constraint.

Hello, my friend. Today’s episode is a must or anyone who has goals. Constraint it the number one action I practiced to begin growing my business faster, and it’s what helps me achieve any goal I want faster and with more ease.

We’re going to cover:

• what exactly constraint is in terms of achieving goals   
• The power of constraint and the impact it will have on achieving your goals  
• Why it doesn’t come naturally 
• How to think about your priorities, so you can know what needs to be constrained   

Before I dive in, I want to share something that will help you get the most out of Be a Better Lawyer Podcast. As you already know, there are more than 300 episodes of amazing content here, and I wanted to make it easier for you to access the episodes that are most relevant to you.

While I’m talking about the podcast treasure map, please insert the “podcast treasure map video” using the following clips from it. Please use these edit these two clips from the longer video together: 0:03 – 0:16, then 0:57- 1:16. Then please save these clips, so we can use them in future videos as needed. Clip the video as needed for this episode to be limited to the time I’m actually talking about the treasure map. Thanks!

So I’ve created the Be a Better Lawyer Podcast Treasure Map. Inside this guide, I’ve separated episodes by topics including money mindset, law firm growth, time management and more! Plus I’ve included links to each of the episodes, so you’ll be taken straight to the website page to listen to each of them.

You can download this guide in the show notes or at dinacataldo.com/map. That’s dinacataldo.com/map

This guide will make your life so much easier and save you a lot of time because you can a high level view of all the episodes and pick and choose the ones you think will benefit you the most.

Download it at dinacataldo.com/map

Alright, let’s dive into today’s episode and talk constraint.

What is constraint?

Constraint in the context of achieving goals requires limiting how we use our resources of time, energy and money.

When I applied what I’m sharing with you to growing my business, it made me see just how I was hurting myself by spreading my resources too thin and not constraining.

If you’re familiar with how to create a habit, you already know that trying to implement 10 different habits at once taxes your resources making it harder to make progress on any one goal.

That’s because of two reasons. One, creating a new habit requires energy, and if we’re spreading ourselves thin, we have a harder time creating new habits and are more likely to give up on it.

Second, to create a new habit, we must break an old habit. We already have a habit that’s been practiced over and over again, and in order to create a new habit, we need to focus our attention on the creating a new habit. For instance, if you want to work out each morning, you need to pay attention to the little things that will help you make that habit easier to implement like going to bed earlier, laying out clothes, learning how to catch your brain trying to sabotage your new habit and implementing the technique of talking yourself into working out each morning.

There’s a lot of little things that can go into creating a habit, so it requires constraining our habits one at a time or our energy gets taxed. Once we’ve created that habit, then we can implement another, and another, and so on.

But if you constrain and focus your attention on implementing one habit at a time, you’ll have much better success at implementing any habit you want.

When you think about constraint in terms of achieving your goals, it works in much the same way.

You’re focusing your attention on certain priorities you decide in your practice, and you use your resources just for those specific priorities. You say yes only to those priorities, and you say no to everything else.

This doesn’t come naturally to most of us, and I’ll talk more about that in a moment.

First, I want to give you an example of this at work.

Kobe Bryant is one of my favorite examples  when it comes to mindset because there’s so much information about his coaching and his mindset around his growth as a high performance player – really someone who was a top performer, and I had an opportunity to see the growth he had over the years from a young player to a seasoned player.

Kobe Bryant constrained to become a top performer in a couple ways.

One, when he was focused on becoming a great basketball player, he focused almost exclusively on basketball. He had other interests, but his focus was on becoming the greatest basketball player who ever lived. The beautiful part about constraint is you don’t need to want to become the best lawyer alive for this concept to work. It works for anyone when you apply what I’m giving you.

He was horrible at basketball when he first started. He shared that he went to summer camp and couldn’t score a single point when he was a teenager. Then he began focusing on the foundations of basketball and practicing 2 hours a day, and he could run circles around the other kids on the court within two years.

That’s another factor I want you to hear: constraint plus time equals success. You must be patient with yourself, but honestly, when I applied constraint, I saw a difference in how I felt immediately, but I saw a difference in the growth of my business within 90 days. Then when you apply it to years, it’s exponential.

The second way Kobe Bryant constrained was by his practice area. He practiced basketball. Period. I’m a big fan of having multiple interests, so I’m not advocating that you only practice law. I was a lawyer, and I built a business on top of my law practice, and I was working at a yoga studio for a time. I had a co-worker who was a lawyer and a kick-boxing trainer and a city councilwoman. You don’t have to pick one thing. But when you choose, choose wisely and manage your resources.

I had a client who was running her own law practice, but on the side she was also working at a yoga studio and running a dog sitting business. Because her resources were spread thin, she didn’t have the bandwidth to organize her practice and help it grow. When she started saying no to some things, she began seeing how she could use her resources to focus more on creating a practice that felt organized instead of chaotic.

Constraint is a powerful tool for growth and moving faster towards your goals.

For me, when I first started building a business, I thought I needed to be on every social media platform, I needed to be working all the time, I needed to do a podcast, an email every week , and that maybe I needed to be doing more of all of the above. It felt overwhelming thinking this. And I always thought I wasn’t doing enough because — surprise, surprise — when you don’t constrain, you have less energy. When you have less energy, your efforts are weaker. When your efforts are weaker, your results are going to be weaker.

When I thought I needed to be all places at all times to promote my business, I didn’t have focus. That lack of focus was reflected in the quality of the work I did. So for instance, maybe a social media post wasn’t as valuable as it could have been. That’s an example of quality versus quantity. When something is valuable, people respond to it and want to share it. When it’s not as valuable, it gets ignored.

Einstein said that literally everything is energy. That means that everything we do has an energy behind it. If that energy is unfocused, it’s going to shine through no matter what form it takes whether it’s in a hearing, social media content, a call with a client, a conversation with a loved one, the other person is going to pick up on your energy.

When I constrained my marketing to just three things — making valuable content with clear offers on Instagram, the podcast, and in my weekly emails — my business catapulted.

Because I had more energy and it was cleaner energy — meaning it wasn’t anxious or overwhelmed energy —  I was able to think more clearly about the content I was creating in my social media posts and emails, and they appealed to more people. I also was able to address an issue I didn’t realize I had, which was I wasn’t making offers and inviting people to book a consult with me.

Another example is one of my clients who wanted to focus on growing his income. When we began asking some of the questions I’m sharing with you at the end of this episode, it was clear we needed to look at how he was spending his time.

First, as we looked at his practice, it was clear that he wasn’t focusing his time in a way that allowed him to grow his income. He spent a lot of it entering billing information and sending out bills when that needed to be delegated. That took up about 20 hours a month, and he had a $250 hourly rate that could be spent on billable work.

Second, he was taking on cases that were unrelated to his main practice areas. He cut those out and found homes for those cases, so he could devote his attention to the cases he wanted to take on.

Third, he was taking on smaller clients he didn’t necessarily want because he was charging so little for them. He experimented with raising his rates for those cases, and people kept signing up, and he decided he was willing to keep that area because it contributed to his overall goal of increasing his income.

Can you see the impact of constraining to one goal to create a domino effect that makes it more achievable? Implementing just the first part would get him $5,000 closer to his yearly income goal each month. That’s $60,000 over the course of the year.

Another superpower of constraint is that it calms everything down in your life and in your practice. When you feel more focused, and you’re focused on what matters most to hit your goals, not only do you accelerate your progress, but you calm your nervous system. You calm the overwhelm. You feel less anxiety.

You’re not worried about the cases you don’t want to take on because they’re no longer on your plate. You don’t feel overwhelmed because you think you have to do everything because you’ve made conscious decisions about what you do and don’t want to do and how to communicate those desires to other people. You have more time to do things well, so you’re more proud of your work product and how you’re serving your clients. You have more time overall, so you can make time to enjoy the things you want to do outside of the law too.

But constraint doesn’t come naturally to most of us. It definitely didn’t for me.

As lawyers, I think after about a year of practicing, we go into survival mode, which is brought on by high levels of stress. We start feeling anxiety, some of us even become depressed, and it shows up in snapping at people, not wanting to work, not trusting others to help us and feeling guilty that we’re not working more. This is actually a trauma response that you can read about in different neurobiology studies. I’d use trauma with a little t here, but it’s still trauma response.

One of the responses I see is believing we need to do everything all at once because our brains believe that when we get it all done, then we’ll have more time and then we’ll have more money. And when we have those two things, then we’ll feel happy and feel secure and we’ll be safe. At least that’s how I see a lot of lawyers’ brains processing information, and that’s how my brain processed information too.

This is a fallacy.

Let’s turn to the idea that everything has to be done. A lot of lawyers tell me that every scrap of paper needs to be filed, every call needs to be returned, every email needs to be responded to in order for them to feel more peace in their practice.

Hate to tell you this, but that’s never going to happen. If that’s what you believe is required to feel calmer in your practice and banish overwhelm, it simply doesn’t work.

You will answer an email and two more will come in. You will finish a case and two more will land on your desk. There is no such thing as “catching up.” But there is such a thing as constraint.

Constraint helped me calm this trauma response of believing I needed to do everything all at once.

Another way I think of constraint is prioritizing. That’s why I’m always advocating for using a calendar the way I teach in the Busy lawyer’s Ultimate Time Management Guide. And if you haven’t downloaded it, you can download it at dinacataldo.com/busylawyer

Using a calendar requires you to constrain. It requires you to think in terms of priority and managing the resource of time.

When I work with lawyers, this is the key to their success. They learn how to constrain. They don’t even have to learn how to use a calendar “perfectly,” they just need to begin making decisions about what’s most important to them, seeing how they make decisions about what they say yes to and the impact that has on what they say is most important to them, and they begin to make changes.

A lot of lawyers feel stuck when moving towards their goals, and it’s not because they’re not working hard; they are. It’s because they’re not focusing on the most important things that will take them to the next level. They’re stuck because they’re in the weeds in their practice instead of looking at the fundamentals that will make it easier to accomplish their goals.

That brings us to possibly the most important part of what I’m sharing here with you…

How to think about your priorities, so you can know what needs to be constrained.

To constrain requires us to think about what we truly want and then design our lives around creating that.

It sounds simple, but it’s not easy.

Most of us never think about what we want, and those of us who do don’t always put our attention on what we want. I notice myself being attracted to the shiny things that take my attention, and I need to refocus them before I spread my resources too think on chasing the squirrels I see.

Think about a mint plant. If you don’t already know this, mint plants will spread out fast if they aren’t in a container. So if you want a mint plant, it’s important to keep it in a pot, so it doesn’t overtake your whole garden. Then you can watch it, and if you want it to expand, you can replant it into a larger container. So you’re constraining growth to ensure the growth doesn’t overtake the way you’ve laid out your garden. Then you’re consciously allowing the plant to grow by giving it a larger pot.

You want to consciously think about what you’re doing in your practice in a way that allows conscious growth instead of just random growth that you may not even want.

That’s what I see when a lawyer comes to me with 7 different practice areas. They never really thought through what they liked to do or what they wanted their practice to look like, so the practice just kept spreading like a wild mint plant. Then they come to me feeling overwhelmed.

At first, they come to me trying to figure out how to manage their time with all these practice areas, and I help them with that, but then they begin realizing they’ve created a Frankenstein practice with too many legs and arms, and it’s not really the life they want.

Sometimes a lawyer will come to me who feels stretched thin in their position at a firm, and that lawyer will learn after working with me that the reason they feel so stressed out is because they’re saying yes to every project and yes to replying to every email immediately and yes to board position, and they’re not communicating what they want or what they’re capable of because they’ve never taken a look at the limitations of their resources.

They realize those actions or inactions aren’t taking them in the direction they want to go, which is showing their boss that they’re a top performer and getting promoted or making partner. You may say yes to show the boss you’re a team player, but if you say yes when you’re only going to get a couple hours of sleep, how are you going to perform tomorrow? Not too well, right?

Here’s what you need to ask yourself:

• what do I want my practice to look like? That includes asking yourself, when do I want to get to the office, when do I want to go home, when do I want to take breaks, when do I want to work out during the week, what practice areas do I enjoy?
• Next you want to ask yourself potential actions you can take to make it happen: do I want a calendar? Do I want to delegate more? Do I want to communicate to others my availability? Do I want to say no to people who want to hire me but I don’t want to practice that area of law? Do I want to focus my attention on promoting my favorite practice area, so I can bring more people into it and close out others?
• Finally, you want to make choices about what actions you want to take to achieve your goal. Remember, I constrained to 3 channels to market my business and grow it. If you’re in that same boat, what 3 channels do you want to use to market your practice? Or maybe you’re feeling stretched thin, and you want more time. Look at your actions and pick 1 are where you can help yourself do this. For example if you want to delegate, that might mean focussing on creating standard operating procedures for your assistant, reviewing them with your assistant, setting up weekly meetings with them and tweaking those SOPs until they work smoothly in your practice.

One final word on constraint: Constraint is not a one and done concept. The impact of constraint is how it compounds with time. It’s essential to watch how you’re thinking about your practice and your goals because if you don’t, it’s easy to stop constraining and begin spreading your resources thin again.

It’s not always easy to see where you need to prioritize, and even if it is, it’s not always easy to implement it. I can help you with both. The beautiful part about the way I do things in my coaching practice is that I help you implement in a way that works for you. I think one of the things that I was concerned about before I asked for help and hired my first coach was that my coach might kind of finger wag at me if I didn’t do something I said I would during our calls. I didn’t want anyone saying anything to me that made me feel worse than I already did about not following through.

But coaching — at least coaching done well in my opinion — isn’t supposed to be like that. It’s supposed to be a collaborative environment where you feel open to telling me exactly what’s going on in your practice and your life, and we work together to figure out how to implement what you want to implement. I’m not there to be a drill sergeant. I’m there to support you each step of the way. I really believe that being in supportive environments leads to faster and more sustainable growth over time. I see it time after time with my clients and with myself too. And that’s what you’ll get when we work together.

You can book a Strategy Session at dinacataldo.com/strategysession

Alright, my friend. I hope you have a beautiful rest of your week.

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