6 Behaviors Sabotaging the Success of Your Law Practice

If you've ever had one of those days where you were working all day long, but for the life of you, you cannot think of what you accomplished yet. You felt totally exhausted. Today's episode of be a better lawyer podcast is for you. I want to share with you six behaviors that could be sabotaging your success.

Hello, my friend, how are you doing today? So today I want to share with you the six behaviors, six of the behaviors that I've identified that can really sabotage our success. And this is something that I experienced when I was a trial attorney. And it didn't really make sense to me until I started to take a look at my behaviors and understanding how I was creating those kinds of days where I was.

Exhausted at the end of them. And I couldn't understand why, like, I couldn't understand why I felt so drained and I couldn't accomplish what I wanted to accomplish. And, you know, if you've been listening to this podcast for any length of time, you know, I always wanted more. I always felt like there was something calling me to be more, to do more in my life.

And at the time it was to create a business on top of my law practice. So it was really essential for me to understand my behaviors. And what I could do differently so that I could create a business on top of my law practice. And what I was seeing was, is that I was sabotaging my success, not only as an attorney, but as the business owner, as the person building a new business, because those same behaviors that I had cultivated over the years as a lawyer.

We're seeping into my business. And I see that happening a lot with lawyers who have their own practices or they're building their own practices. Let's say they've become partner and everything changes. Everything needs to shift in order to expand in order to grow the way you want to grow. But these behaviors can really hold us back.

So in this episode, I'm sharing six of those behaviors that can limit our ability to get meaningful work accomplished and create the success we want to experience in our lives. And they really slowly drain our energy and they can lead to burnout. And these aren't just little distractions like checking your phone or checking your email, you know, a lot, although those things can deplete our energy.

These things that I'm talking to you about today are subtle patterns that are ingrained into our daily routine because we've just become so accustomed to them and until we gain awareness around them, they can sabotage our success. All right. So today I'm going to walk you through those six behaviors, but by the end of this episode, what I want to give you are not only those behaviors, but actionable steps to begin helping you remove those blocks to help you become more productive, more focused, and more successful in your practice.

And if this is a topic that appeals to you, I want to invite you to my [00:04:00] latest masterclass happening this October, which is really the perfect expansion on this episode. As you know, productivity is an essential part of success. You can simply and effectively achieve your goals and deliver high quality work.

And when you're productive, you reduce stress and anxiety because you're not constantly thinking about all the things you need to do, because when you do that, you're draining the battery. So we want to create momentum that drives continued success. And that requires learning the skills to 10 X your productivity.

It's a compound effect over time. But we're taught so little when it comes to being truly productive in our practice without hustling and grinding day and night. And yeah, we know we need to plan and we need to prioritize, but there's so much more to true productivity, the kind of productivity that allows your practice to grow without you constantly working and thinking about work, which masterclass.

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Keeps you in a cycle of overwhelm. And what you really need is a different approach, a smarter way to manage your time, focus on the right tasks and reclaim your life without sacrificing your law practice. And that's what my new unlock productivity masterclass is all about. You can register now by going to DinaCataldo.com/October

That's DinaCataldo.com/October. It's happening on October 24th. So whenever you're listening to this, you're going to want to sign up ASAP to make sure you get in. All right. So let's talk about the six behaviors sabotaging your success. All right.

Behavior number one, focusing on everything all at once instead of prioritizing.

So here's what this looks like. Many lawyers start their day, maybe you're one of them, and you just take in the full scope of your work, the pile of briefs on your desk, the client emails in your inbox, the court deadlines on your calendar, and all those admin tasks that are just waiting for you.

And you attempt to tackle them all. In fact, your brain just says, Oh my gosh, I have so much to do. And you just want to jump in. And this leads to you feeling scattered. And when you try to approach work in this way, you end up finishing nothing of significance. In fact, you might be doing things that have no [00:07:00] significance at all.

And this is because you haven't asked yourself the crucial question. What is the one task today that if I got it done would make the biggest impact that I want to see and instead you're in reactive mode, letting your day get away from you really hopscotching around, putting out fires. So let me give you an example.

You have a court deadline for a motion due on Friday, but instead of dedicating focus time to draft it, you answer every client's non-urgent email. You accept last minute meeting requests from associates too, and by Thursday the motion is still half written and you have to pull a late night and then at that work is rushed.

And if you had actually had the opportunity to pause. If you'd actually taken that opportunity, then you would have been able to prioritize that motion earlier in the week. You would have been able to make the phone calls you needed to make. You would have been able to finish it with less [00:08:00] stress, and you would have had time for a thoughtful review.

So what I want to share with you here, if you see yourself doing this, is that You don't have to do that. And I was there. I, I understand because I would do that same thing, but what I want to offer to you is that you take 10 minutes every morning and you intentionally plan your day. Now I'm a big plan of.

I'm a, I'm a big fan of planning my whole week out because it helps me strategize better. I honestly know that especially if you have your own practice or you want to grow your practice, that's essential that you learn that skill. But if you're not there yet, taking 10 minutes every morning will help you.

And ask yourself, what's the most important task that I need to get completed today? And you get that on your calendar. You focus on it. When we focus our attention on what needs to get done, it's going to get completed much quicker and we're able to focus our attention [00:09:00] and block out the distractions much easier.

It's also going to let you make more consistent progress in your practice, whatever task you might have, whether it is building your business or, you know, you know, making sure that there's a certain contract that is completed, whatever it is. You can make that progress without feeling overwhelmed by the entirety of your workload, because the work's going to be there.

You're always going to have work. So we've got to, the work we have to do is focus our brain on what is most important. And the way to do that is to do that first thing in the morning when you're fresh and you can point your brain in the direction it needs to go without it being pulled in a million directions.

Okay, behavior number two, over-working and over-scheduling.

Here's what this looks like. A lot of lawyers think that working longer hours equals higher productivity. So you fill your calendar with back to back appointments and you work into the [00:10:00] night thinking that cramming as much as possible into the day is eventually, eventually going to lighten your workload.

I used to believe this too. But this constant overscheduling depletes your mental energy, leaving you less able to do high impact work. And when I say high impact, it's the work that's moving the needle on your law practice. So if you have a big presentation that you want to create for a client because you're selling, you know, your services, or you're creating a speech because you're marketing your services somewhere, you've got to be able to think.

And use your very best energy towards that work. So a typical week, let's say for you might involve checking emails, multiple client meetings, maybe some court appearances, phone calls, drafting work, and you barely have any time to grab a glass of water, much less have a full lunch. And by the time you sit down to do that high [00:11:00] priority project, you're just too mentally fatigued to really.

make it good to make any real progress. And then you might even tell yourself, well, I'm just too pooped. I'll do it later. And as a result, you're just like, okay, it's looming in the background. I've got this thing to do. And then you've got to stay up late the night before to get it done. So the quality of your work is going to suffer.

And the time it takes to complete that task increases. So I want you to think about. Those evenings when you stay late at the office, even right when you stay late, you're thinking, Oh yes, I'm going to finish that brief. I'm going to catch up on those admin tasks. There were evenings I found myself doing this, but what I would do instead is I would either stare at the computer or I would do these little menial tasks like checking email or cleaning out my inbox and organizing things.

Right. I knew what needed to get done. I knew what was most important, but I was doing these low value tasks instead. When we [00:12:00] force ourselves to work in this way, right? Because you might get some things done that night, but your effectiveness decreases over time, you might get a few menial things done, but maybe you keep putting off that big project you want to work on.

And when you do that, You are draining yourself. You begin to burn out because you're not giving yourself what you need. You're either working yourself to the bone, working, working, working, even if it's menial tasks or you're thinking about the project, but you're not giving yourself a meaningful break.

You're not telling yourself, okay, I got to stop here and then I'm going to pick up tomorrow. You're just trying to get something done because you want to feel good about the time you're spending at the office. But here's what I want to. offer you if you find yourself in this situation, because so many lawyers do, I want you to create an enough plan.

Okay. This is what an enough plan is similar to number one. You are [00:13:00] planning out what you're going to complete in your day. And you are going to say, this is what's most important, but you are also going to give yourself. a signal that you are complete with your work for the day. You are going to decide ahead of time what it means that your day is done.

And that can look like a lot of different things. So for example, I'm done when I write this brief today. I'm done when I check my emails, talk to this client and write this draft. And then at six o'clock I'm out, right? You can form this enough plan, however you like, but if you don't do an enough plan, your brain will just say, Oh, I should do this other thing.

I should pick up this other task. I should check more emails. I can do this. I can do that. Even though You know what the most important task is, your brain wants to do all this other [00:14:00] stuff. So if you can tell yourself, no, this is what it means for me to be done for the day. You can focus your brain in, you're reining it in and you're telling it when it can switch off.

So you can say at six o'clock, I'm switching off my brain. Done for me means that when I leave everything at the office behind, I go home and I don't think about work. I don't check my email. That's what an enough plan is. And that might not fit for everybody. That's why you've got to create your own enough plan.

Maybe your enough plan Plan includes one more check of the email before dinner, right? Or after dinner. Those are the things that you need to ask yourself. What does it mean for me to be done? Because we've got to put our brain to rest. We've got to give it some rest so we can recharge. We've got to let our brain know that it's okay to switch off.

And that gives us that opportunity to recharge the battery for the next day [00:15:00] or the next week. And this is going to help you increase your ability to concentrate and to focus, which means you're going to make better progress on your work over time. I saw this really strongly in my life when I was practicing law and building my business.

So I was doing those things at the same time. I was not giving myself a day off. I was not telling myself it was okay to take a break. I was not telling myself it was okay to take a day off or an evening off. Nothing. Instead, what I was doing was saying, Nope, you got to work. You got to do something.

You've got to work on your website. You know, when you get home, you've got to, you know, you know, check some emails. You need to do this. You need to do that. And when I was doing that, it was keeping me in this perpetual state of busyness, which was draining my battery and I was burning out. So I needed to give myself that permission to take time off.

And [00:16:00] the funny thing was, well, it's not funny now that I know the science behind it, but at the time I thought I was being more productive because I was getting a little bit done every night. But here's what really was happening is that I was. working in these prolonged stretches of time. So one task in the evening might take a really long time because I was mentally tired.

And so if you can just say, Oh, I want to do this one task and you takes like four hours, that's not going to be helpful. That's not productive. It's not helpful for me, you know, trying to charge my battery. But if I gave myself that Saturday off, I noticed that when I gave myself tasks on the, the weeknights that they were much shorter and I was getting much more accomplished.

And it's so counterintuitive that when we give ourselves those breaks, that we will actually see more progress. We just think, Oh, I need to be a robot. I need to keep working. But if you give [00:17:00] yourself that time to recharge and you don't, um, you don't overschedule yourself, you will see the difference. You have to create that enough plan and give yourself permission to take time for yourself.

Behavior number three, that's sabotaging your success, creating worry and fear.

So many of us do this. I have done this. This is something that, you know, I noticed too, I'll do. And it's so easy for us to do. I mean, especially if we spend a lot of time watching the news, which I don't anymore, because basically that's all you see is worry and fear in the news.

And it just, it just perpetuates Propels everything. So let me give you an idea of what this looks like. If this is happening in your, in your practice. So as lawyers, we're taught to think about all the what ifs, right? We're taught to think, well, what if opposing counsel decides to argue why? What if the judge doesn't let in this piece of evidence?

What if the witness says X instead of Y? And these kinds of [00:18:00] questions are really great. If you are in problem solving mode, which most of the time, when You know, I hear I heard myself asking these or other lawyers are asking themselves this they're in problem solving mode. They want to come up with a solution.

Their plan B, so to speak. But unfortunately, this really great quality that lawyers have is perverted. When we start using these, what if scenarios against ourselves, for example, what if I miss a deadline? What if I didn't cover every angle in that brief? What if the judge hates me? These kinds of questions are not things that matter, right?

Like they're not anything that's really going to have these, this huge implication, because if you're planning ahead of time, if you're focused on the present, you are able to ensure you don't miss a deadline. And if you do, you'll figure it out. Right. And then what if you didn't cover every angle in that brief?

Well, if you didn't, you'll figure it out. Well, what if the judge hates me? Well, if he does, then you'll figure it out, right? These kinds [00:19:00] of things are just creating worry and stress, and they're not actually actively problem solving for your case, right? It be different if you were asking yourself, okay. The angles that I'm covering in this brief are X.

What do I think the defense or the opposing counsel is going to offer up? Did I cover those angles? That's a different question. That's a problem solving question. But if you're just constantly thinking about all the things that could go wrong, Without actively solving for the problem. These are not high quality questions.

So you don't want to create worry and fear because that's going to lead to an endless cycle of stress and overthinking. It just goes on and on and on and that drains focus and it drains productivity and it drains your ability to create more success in your practice. So let's say you have a court hearing again, and like, let's look.

In a, in a week, right? Let's you got a court hearing in a [00:20:00] week. You start worrying about every possible worst case scenario. What if I didn't prepare enough? What if the judge asks a question I can't answer? What if I forget what to say? And the more you worry, the less you're able to focus on preparing for the hearing.

You're focused on how everything could fall apart rather than bringing everything together. Right? So. If you notice yourself creating worry and fear, I want to offer you two suggestions here. First of all, you just got to notice what fear, worry, stress, anxiety, what they feel like in your body. And I know that this is not something that we are taught, but it's something that's essential.

If you want to create success, it absolutely is. It wasn't until I started getting in touch with those kinds of feelings in my body that I was able to help myself redirect. And I don't even want you to redirect it first right now. I just want you to notice [00:21:00] the feeling. I want you to notice it and be with it long enough so that you can then make better decisions.

I'm going to share that with you in a second. So I want you to be able to notice that feeling. And even if you can't name it, Notice if you feel tension in your shoulders, notice if your head starts to scrunch or you have like a headache, notice if your shoulders are hunched or if your breath is shallow, these are different signals that are telling you that there's something going on, anxiety, fear, overwhelm, those kinds of things could be happening.

So notice it and then try to name it. Try to, am I scared of something? Am I worried about something? What is that thing, right? That's going to help you create a little distance between you and the thoughts creating the feeling. Cause you know, all our thoughts are creating our feelings. So the second thing I want you to do after you've noticed and named the feeling that's happening in your body, [00:22:00] I want you to then take this breath.

Okay. It's a breath exercise. I love this breath exercise and it is going to help you reset your nervous system. It's going to help you reduce the cortisol and the adrenaline in your body. So you feel calmer and when you feel calmer, you're better able to make decisions. So I want you to do this. You notice the feeling, and then you're going to take a breath.

I like to put my hand on my heart because it just reminds me to connect with my heart and my breathing. So I breathe in for five seconds. I hold my breath in for seven seconds, and then I release my breath for eight seconds, right? Eight beats. And so when I do this, it feels amazing because you can feel all of those like chemicals, the cortisol and the adrenaline, they just release from your body.

And at that point, and do this as many rounds as you need to, as many rounds as you can. If you [00:23:00] know, if you're feeling this happening in your body and then you just ask yourself, well, what can I do right now? What's the best action I can take right now? And that will redirect your brain into the direction you want to go, need to go.

And you're going to notice yourself over time, making better decisions and having more energy to help you achieve your goals. This is an absolutely essential practice. I really, really, I want you to try this on because it's amazing. All right.

Behavior four that's sabotaging your success is not creating boundaries and mental space.

Here's what this looks like. So without boundaries, we're constantly pulled into other people's lives, emergencies, distractions, right? Whether it's, you know, you leaving your office door open and somebody walking in or you feeling the need to constantly monitor your email or maybe you agree to every meeting request, your ability to maintain that mental space [00:24:00] for deep work is eroded if you don't create boundaries.

So some lawyers tell me that they might leave their office door open to be more approachable But it leads to constant interruptions and then they become really frustrated because they can't do any deep work. So a colleague will drop by with a quote unquote quick question or your staff is going to interrupt you for approvals and each interruption pulls you out of focus and requires time and energy.

to refocus. So imagine you're in the middle of drafting a complex legal argument, your phone buzzes, an email notification pops up, someone knocks on your door. After each interruption, you spend minutes and minutes and minutes of your time trying to get back to where you left off. And by the end of the day, what should have been a three hour task has taken seven hours simply because your mental space was never honored.

Right. You didn't honor your mental space. So I want to offer [00:25:00] to you. That's exactly what you need to begin doing and do that by setting clear boundaries. And that's both physical and digital. This can include closing your office door during certain hours for deep work. I used to do this. I would put a sign on the door and say I was in a meeting or that I was in the middle of working on X project, right?

Because we had Files that needed to be taken care of, and it was really essential that people weren't walking in and interrupting me because I was on a timeline. So I would put a sign on the door and it would ensure that I wasn't constantly getting questions. So that's something you can do. And I think that people appreciate it because if somebody comes into your office, when you're in the middle of something that is maybe on a timeline.

you're looking up and you immediately have some attitude, right? Like that's how I would respond if I left my door open is, whoa, Hey, I can't right now. Like I'm, I'm shorter with the person than I would have liked to. I'm not as kind as I would like to be [00:26:00] because I was focused. And now I have this person taking me away from that focus.

And then I got to regroup. So it's important. For us to maintain our boundaries. It's not up to anybody else. We can't prevent anybody else from behaving the way they're going to, but what we can do is make it, we can communicate it very clearly what we need and communicate it in a way that makes it easy for them to understand.

So a closed door with a sign is really helpful for that. Additionally, if you have staff and you don't have weekly meetings, please, please, please have a weekly meeting. I have, uh, I have an assistant. We have this really great communication. We meet, you know, meet up once a week and everything is done within 20 minutes, sometimes 30, but 20 minutes is usually tops and we just go through the week.

If he has a question, he can email me and that doesn't even really happen that often because we usually address it in that 20 minutes. So if you start to have these [00:27:00] kinds of meetings that are going to help them come to you in a discreet amount of time where you can have that set of time. just for them and you're not doing other work, this is a really fabulous opportunity for you so that you can preserve your time, preserve your energy, um, and then communicate this, right?

You've got to communicate this and stick to it because if you just say you're going to have a weekly meeting and then you never have it, well, you're not doing it. Well, then they're going to interrupt you, right? So it's important that you do that for yourself, your sanity, and just creating that mental space is really going to help you with that focus and the creativity you need for that deep work.

Behavior five: Failing to regroup.

So regrouping is a term that really means to pause, reassess, and strategize moving forward. It's like calling a timeout in the middle of a football game. Lawyers don't really do it all that often, and it's really helpful when you're doing anything. You hit a [00:28:00] wall, you feel energetically drained, you feel overwhelmed.

It's so great to just regroup. I regroup all the time. If I notice that I'm Drifting off and I'm doing some other work. I, I stop myself and I say, whoa, whoa, whoa, hold on. Let's regroup for a second. Let me look back at my calendar. What was I supposed to be doing right now? Okay. All right. I refocus. I say, oh, okay, well maybe the timeline has changed on that.

Let's, let's regroup and then I can plan ABC. This is what I'm going to do. So regrouping is essential to your success. Here's what this looks like if you're not regrouping. So you might feel some pressure. Right, you feel pressure, you feel overwhelmed, but the reaction is to keep working through the work.

You know, you feel all of that like tension and you just like, you just, you just keep going and you keep pushing and you keep pushing. But the interesting thing about this is even though we're telling ourselves in those moments that we are getting things [00:29:00] done, this actually leads to mental exhaustion and mistakes.

And that can lead to burning out, feeling overwhelmed, all of the things. So I want to just, I just want to paint this picture for you. So let's say you are midway through a day, you've had meetings, you've been checking emails back and forth between counsel, trying to close a deal. You've got briefs that you've got due, you know, you're, you're feeling like you're drowning in tasks.

But instead of pausing to reassess, you just keep pushing forward. And by the time you get to the most important work of the day, you're mentally spent, right? You don't have any more in the tank for this. Or imagine this, right? You're working on a deadline for a deal that's closing. And every detail in that is important.

And you're trying to keep momentum on the deal going. You want to close it. Your client, you know, keeps connect, connecting with you, wanting to see what's going on with it. [00:30:00] And you're exhausted. But instead of taking a short break to recharge, you just keep grinding. You keep replying to emails. You keep like moving, moving, moving.

And then by the end of the day or the night, You're making careless mistakes. And what's worse, those mistakes now take more time to correct. You've got to go back. You've got to double check everything because now you don't trust yourself because you found this mistake. So here's what I want to offer you.

If you see yourself in these situations, when you feel overwhelmed, when you notice yourself in this busy, busy, busy mode, I want to, I want to offer to you to take a 5 to 10 minute break and step away from your work and regroup. And if you can, step away from your desk, but at a minimum, ask yourself, look, I need to take, ask yourself what's most important.

Okay. That's the question you need to ask yourself. Is it most important for me to do this or this? And your answer is going to differ depending on the stage of the work that [00:31:00] you're in, in that moment, that that's, what's great about having this opportunity to regroup is you're no longer, you're no longer ping ponging all the work you're now able to refocus yourself.

So maybe what's most important in that moment is that you not. continually update the client and instead you work on an amendment to a document for them. Okay. Maybe you just, you know, you write them an email and you say, Hey, I'm going to spend time on this amendment. So if I don't respond to your emails right away, just know that's what I'm working on.

If that's something that you want to do, right. Cause so often we're just not communicating what's happening. And then our brains worrying about what the client is thinking about us. Don't, like you just make decisions around this and then you make things happen. So the next thing that I want to share with you is maybe the most important task is, you know, letting your client know that everything is underway and that you're going to contact them [00:32:00] early tomorrow morning.

So that way you can go home and you can get some sleep. Without thinking about all the additional emails that maybe the client is sending that evening, you've let them know, you know, I will, I will connect with you in the morning, or maybe it's getting up and just getting something to eat. get something to fuel you.

So this regrouping allows you to reset, refocus, and then the most important thing you focus on gets completed and you can successfully complete it and take care of yourself and move your practice forward. It's a beautiful thing. Please use this skill. All right.

So the final behavior that is to be Sabotaging your success is overthinking decisions.

So becoming a quick decision maker is essential to creating a successful practice. This is a successful business. You really can't dilly dally on decisions because you don't have time to, you don't have the energy to, right? You don't want it to take up mental space. The more mental space you take up, the more drained [00:33:00] you're going to feel, the less productive you're going to be.

So on and so on and so on. So here's what this looks like. Every time you defer a decision by saying something like, I'll think about it, or I'll do that later, it adds mental clutter. And these unresolved decisions just sit in the back of your mind, draining your energy, creating anxiety, and preventing you from moving forward.

And it's like having your phone on all the time or like on that bright setting, of course the battery is going to drain faster. So for example, you're thinking about whether to hire a new associate, well you go back and forth weighing every possible pro and con, but you never commit. Meanwhile, the extra workload continues to pile up and the unresolved decision to hire that person nags at you in the background, taking up all this mental energy that could be better used elsewhere.

This habit of overthinking doesn't [00:34:00] just apply to these big decisions, right? It can happen with everyday tasks too, whether it's replying to an email, choosing a software tool for your practice or deciding how to structure your day. Every time you say to yourself, I'll get to it later, creates a mental backlog that slowly drains your battery without realizing it.

So here's what you can do about this. Train yourself to be decisive. Right now I am preparing to move and I am making lots of decisions about what to keep and what to purge as I'm packing things. And I have simply had to decide, I have decided that this is the decision is that I am purging as much as I can.

Right? I am purging as much as I can. Is it possible that maybe I purge something that later on I think back and say, Oh, I wish I hadn't have gotten rid of that. Yeah, sure. But what I've decided is that I'm not going to lose sleep over it. I've decided that I'm really good at making decisions [00:35:00] and if I really need something, I can just buy it again.

Those are decisions that I have made that allow me to make quick decisions, right? So when it comes to making a hiring decision, for instance. You can prepare for what you can prepare for. You can prepare questions. You can understand the culture of your company and who's going to be a good fit. You can make decisions around those things.

You can make decisions around, uh, what you were going to require of an applicant to show that they have attention to detail, those kinds of things you can make decisions about. And those decisions are going to allow you to then put out an ad for this person and then create interview opportunities. You just decide, okay, I'm going to have a day where I'm just going to take all of these interviews and you take the interviews, you talk to these people, and then at the end of the day, you look at the information you have and you make a decision.

Simple as that. But what we do is we tend to [00:36:00] overthink it and we think, Oh my gosh, what if I make the wrong decision and what could happen? This is one of the earlier behaviors that we talked about. All the what ifs that are unproductive. What if this goes wrong? Yeah. What if it does? Yeah, it's possible.

This person's not going to work out. Of course, this person has their own life and they could make a decision themselves that they want something different. That one day they're going to leave, that is a possibility, right? That is, that's life. And if we make these decisions, life and death, that can feel paralyzing and then we never take action on those decisions.

So we've got to get out of this habit of overthinking decisions and simply make them. Decide that you are good at making decisions. Even if you don't believe that right now, like you're listening to this and you're telling yourself, Oh my God, I'm so bad at making decisions. I want you to tell yourself that anyway.

And I want you to find evidence that you are good at making decisions. I want you to go back [00:37:00] into your, your life, your memories right now. And find all those places where you have been really good at making decisions. You made a really good decision about a friend, a really good decision about adopting a puppy, a really good decision about buying a house, a really good decision about going to law school.

Whatever those decisions are, I want you to catalog all the amazing decisions you've made for yourself. Because when you start to trust yourself more, you're going to be able to make better decisions over and over and over again. And that's one of the reasons why I can make fast decisions is because I trust myself.

That's one of the reasons why I was so skilled at negotiating cases as a, as a DA is because I was able to make decisions quickly and I was able to have to like show myself, Oh wait, I know how to do this. I'm good at this. And I had that mindset going into it. So. That will help you if you don't believe you're good at making decisions, start showing your brain all the places where you're really good at making decisions.

Okay, we've covered a lot here, so let's do a quick recap on the behaviors that could be sabotaging your success right now.

Behavior one, focusing on everything all at once instead of prioritizing. Really bring the focus in, think about what's most important for the day, and in fact, even plan 10 minutes every morning to get yourself focused on what needs to get done.

Behavior two, overworking and overscheduling. Give yourself a break. Give yourself some space to do what you need to do and create an enough plan so that your brain has permission to switch off around work. At least one day a week was my necessity.

Behavior three, Creating worry and fear going into all of those what ifs and doing the what ifs that are not problem solving, but are really starting to create that tension in your body, that pressure that doesn't allow you to calmly make decisions to calmly move your practice forward.

Behavior four, not creating boundaries and mental space. That means not closing your door, not communicating what you need to your staff, not turning off your email when you're in the middle of deep work. That's something that we have to do in order to move the needle on our practices.

Behavior five, feeling to regroup, not noticing when we're feeling stressed and overwhelmed and not taking that moment to pause, bring ourself back to center, take some breaths, do that five, seven, eight breathing that I shared with you, and then ask yourself what's the most important thing that needs to get done.

And behavior six, overthinking decisions, not thinking through or not deciding what needs to get decided. Such as what are my decisions around my culture, my decisions around who I want to bring into this office, my decisions about what I want as an employee, for example, if you're hiring and you're overthinking it, and then just making the decision and going with it, not regretting it, deciding that you're really good at making decisions and that you are able to handle anything, no matter what comes up, you'll be able to handle it.

All right. So taking action on what you learned in this podcast, I just wanted to let you know this because when I started taking action, it really freed up so much mental and physical energy to help me gain traction on my goals. I mean, that's the reason why I was able to build my business on top of my practice and then build like I've made multiple six figures in my business over the years.

And I was able to do that only because I had this focus and now I'm making six figures within the year. more like, so I just want you to know, like, this is possible for you. You are able to grow so much faster when you take the actions that I shared with you in this episode. So if you're in that a similar position where you're doing the work as a lawyer, but you also want to grow your practice, You just have to look at, okay, [00:41:00] how do I want to grow my practice in a way that feels good, is not burning me out and allows me to expand, right?

So I want to share with you, it's entirely possible. You do not have to kill yourself to do this. And if this is Episode resonated with you. I highly encourage you to sign up for my new masterclass in it. I am diving even deeper into specific techniques that are going to help you 10 X your productivity.

You're going to see yourself making real progress in your law practice without burning out. It's happening October 24th, and you can sign up at Dina Cataldo. com forward slash October. That's Dina Cataldo. com forward slash October. Thank you for listening. I mean, you. I know your time is valuable and I appreciate that you come here each week to gain insights, to further your personal growth, and to further the growth of your practice.