#274: Mindset Essentials Part One

Mindset Essentials, Part One

I initially started writing this episode as an episode that would be super basic for people new to the podcast, and it morphed into a Masterclass on Mindset that’s essential for anyone who’s a student of this work. So I decided to break this topic up into two parts.

These episodes work with each other so don’t skip this one if you think you know it already.

In the first part, we’re going to talk about mindset is and thought work including two common problems I see when people try to do thought work that hold them back from progress.

In part two, I’m sharing two key aspects of this work most lawyers miss whether they’ve been doing this for a while or are new to it.

If you’re not doing these two key things, you’re making your life and practicing law harder, so I want to help you clean that up.

My hope is that understanding these essentials will help you if you’re brand new to the podcast or if you’ve been listening for a while. I know a lot of people come here knowing the Model from Brooke Castillo and the Life Coach School, which is where I got certified and Master Coach Certified.

My hope is that these episodes help you skip all the hard work I did trying to figure this out.

The fastest way to get better results is hiring a coach, and the second-best way is to understand and to study the concepts I’m sharing here.

These concepts are the difference between living a conscious life and an unconscious life.

They’re the difference between being present and living on autopilot.

One helps you create your results intentionally. The other gets you unconscious results.

Let’s talk about what mindset and thought work.

Mindset refers to a collection of thoughts you have about a topic. Your mindset drives your decisions. And your decisions give you the results we have in your life.

Let’s back up one step. A thought is a sentence that your brain thinks. It’s an interpretation of the world. An opinion. Sometimes there’s evidence to support our opinion, but it’s still just an opinion.

Let’s say a lawyer comes to me — and this is a real life example — and they say, “I don’t want a practice where I need to bill hourly.”

I always want to know why. I want to know their mindset. What is driving this decision? Because that decision may or may not give them the results they want for the bigger vision they have for their law practice.

When they tell me the why behind their decision, it will tell me their mindset.

Coaching is like chess. You’re always thinking 10 steps ahead of someone’s thoughts, so you can help them get the results they want. What I’m doing is looking for what pieces may prevent them from getting what they want, and to do that I ask questions.

When I ask why, they may tell me:

“It’s a hassle.”

“I don’t want to tell my clients I’m billing them for calls.”

“I don’t feel good when I bill my clients.”
“In the past, I haven’t done a good job at billing.”

“I don’t have a great system for billing.”

“My clients aren’t going to like me if I bill them hourly.”

This tells me their mindset.

The thoughts they have about billing is their story about billing. Ultimately mindset is our story about a topic.

These stories come from all kinds of places: what a parent told us when we were a kid, what you observed happen with a friend, what a lawyer told you, your past experiences.

When I was a kid my dad constantly worried about money, so I picked that up as just what you do. I saw his habits around money, and I absorbed them like a sponge.

We want to look at these stories and decide if we want to keep them. We want to decide if they’re serving us.

Because these stories are optional.

What? Yes, they’re 100% optional. Our mindset/thoughts/stories about the world and our reality are 100% optional. We’ll talk more about that in a second.

Awareness of our mindset is important because each of our thoughts drives how we feel which in turn drives our behaviors/our actions that then create the results we have in our lives.

A really simple example that pops into my head is when the pandemic happened, some people thought, “We’re going to run out of toilet paper.” That thought created fear. That fear led people to buy lots of toilet paper, maybe they rushed down the aisle, maybe they shoved someone, they may have gone online and bought a ton up. That gave them the result of having lots of toilet paper in their home.

I have a distinct memory of this happening in Trader Joe’s that I’ll share with you in a little bit.

If you’re trying to do the work we do on the podcast on your own, you may make one of two common mistakes.

The first mistake is thinking you need to change your thoughts to get the results you want.

And that may work for a little while.

But because you haven’t addressed your overall mindset with thought work — and specifically these two essentials I’m going to share with you in the next episode — then you’ll likely revert to the old behaviors and get the same old results.

That’s because your mindset determines who you are BE-ing in the world. Your mindset shapes your identity.

Sometimes I’ll talk to a lawyer who says, “I’m just the kind of person who procrastinates.”

That’s their story about who they are. Their mindset.

There’s actually no such thing as a person who just procrastinates. There’s no “procrastination personality.” It’s the mindset that creates the behavior of putting things off.

This behavior of putting things off is driven by your stories. Our brain comes up with evidence from the past and ignores evidence to the contrary. It’s used to telling the old story that you’re a procrastinator. Then the brain gets stuck in a groove like an old record player needle with dust on it playing the same part of the record over and over again.

The second common mistake I see is trying to action your way out of your mindset.

There was a study that found about 9% of people stick with their New Years’ Resolutions and 43% of people who make resolutions quit by the end of January.

That makes sense.

91% of people don’t give up on their resolutions because they’re lazy or incapable of following through or are lazy.

They just haven’t addressed the mindset they had before taking action.

They had stories they hadn’t addressed for doing it.

It’s like telling yourself, “This is the year I finally bill hourly,” but you still have all these mucky thoughts about billing being a hassle and you don’t feel good about it.

Those thoughts don’t just go away.

They need to be addressed and cleaned up or you’ll revert to the old behavior.

That’s where Thought Work comes in.

So let’s talk about thought work. I also call it mindset work interchangeably just in case I say it both ways.

If mindset is a collection of thoughts we have about a topic, then thought work is looking at those thoughts objectively and discovering whether we like those thoughts.

How do we tell if we like those thoughts?

We find out by asking ourselves if we like the results we’re currently getting.

Look around you to see what results you’re getting.

It’s the amount of money you’re making right now.

It’s the number of and the kind of clients you have right now.

It’s the kind of relationships you have right now.

It’s the environment you’re currently living or working in.

Those are all easy ways to see the results you’re getting in your life.

Every result we have in our lives is there because of our mindset; the way we think about the different areas of our lives.

The results also show us our current identity.

Let me give you a stark example of this.

70% of lottery winners go bankrupt within just a few years of winning large lottery jackpots. I got that stat from the National Endowment of Financial Education.

As I found out, there’s a lot of people who win the lottery who have a bad experience who believe there’s a curse around the lottery. There is no curse.

What makes more sense is that the mindset they go into winning that kind of money with isn’t conducive to keeping the money.

They may have grown up thinking they don’t have enough money or they’re bad with money or they’ll never make big money except by winning the lottery, and then they prove themselves right. They may not have addressed their thoughts about boundaries and saying no to people around them who now want something from them.

Then they lose all the money. The result will always prove the thought true. That’s what our brain does. It wants to create what you think about.

Those 70% haven’t built the mindset to keep that money or build that money on their own.

I actually saw this with my dad when I was 19. He used to gamble at a casino, and he won $100,000. That money was gone in like a year. And I saw the way he handled that money, so it didn’t surprise me.

Now let me give you a polar opposite example.

If you’re familiar with Grant Cardone, he’s a multi multi millionaire who’s made his money in real estate, online training programs, speaking engagements and more.

He went on this reality program where he was dumped in the middle of no-where, with only an old SUV and I don’t even think they gave him any cash. And he wasn’t allowed to tell anyone who he was. With those resources, he was given 90 days to make 1 million dollars.

This program was fascinating because you saw him go through ups and downs and make relationships with people even though he looked like this down and out guy because he only had jeans and a shirt and a jacket. That was it.

That and his mind. He was continually doing mindset work. When a deal didn’t go through, he felt disappointment then he talked himself through it and kept going.

By the end of that 90 days he had made a deal for more than $5 million dollars.

This wasn’t an accident. He had a mindset — a collection of thoughts — that helped him recreate success.

He had thoughts like

“I know how to make money,”

“I can figure it out,”

“I will figure it out,”

“Ask for help, and people will help you.”

“Keep going.”

“What do they need? How can I help them?”
“Thank you doe this. I’ve got one step closer.”

These thoughts generated feelings like:

Commitment

Determination

Resourceful

Humility

Gratitude

Curiosity

Then he generated the results that reflected his mindset about money.

The good news is that if we don’t have what we want, then we get to do thought work on it.

That’s how I found coaching. I was like, “Oh, there’s a solution to me not having what I want? Let me do that.”

What I didn’t realize when I started getting coached by different coaches was that there were two things I wasn’t paying attention to. They may have told me these things, but they went in one ear and out the other because I was so focused on the two mistakes I mentioned earlier. Mainly in mistake #2, which was trying to outwork and out hustle the thought work.

And when lawyers work with me, I’m looking for whether they’re making those two main mistakes and if they’ve adopted the two key pieces of thought work which I’m going to talk to you about in the next episode.

Because these two pieces are essential to making change and will make change faster.

Period.

So in the next episode, I’m sharing these two essentials, so you can have an easier time of getting the results you want.

And if you know you want to take this work to the next level, you know you want to elevate your life and transform your practice, let’s work together.

Book a Strategy Session with me at https://dinacataldo.com/strategysession

When lawyers work with me they take control of their practice, enjoy their practice more and intentionally build businesses that fit the lifestyle they want.

During your Strategy Session we’ll dig into what you want, and see if we’re a good fit.

All right, my friend, I will talk to you next week.

Bye.