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Are you a lawyer who struggles with focusing on small issues? In this episode of the Maximum Lawyer Podcast, Tyson delves into the significance of perspective in problem-solving for law firm owners, inspired by a Mike Cernovich quote.
The quote is “The smaller you define your world, the bigger your problems seem”. For lawyers, little things can cause a lot of stress. This turns every small problem into a huge issue. If you take a step back and think about how that problem fits into your world, your mindset about little issues can really change.
One thing lawyers can do to overcome this is to think about how these issues affect your long term vision. Most times, these issues will not have an effect on where you want to go or what you want to accomplish. They will be small blips along the journey, so it is best to find ways to mitigate those issues. Mitigating can come in a few ways. One of these ways is to delegate tasks that are weighing heavily on you. Maybe intake is stressing you out or following up with some clients is time consuming. Delegate these tasks out to members of your team so you can feel less stressed and you can focus on other things.
Listen in to learn more!
2:40 The relevance of the quote in managing daily stress
3:48 How a narrow view can amplify problems
6:58 Reassessing current challenges
8:01 The importance of having a long-term vision
9:16 The need for delegation to reduce overwhelm and expand one's capacity
Tune in to today’s episode and checkout the full show notes here.
Resources:
- Run your law firm the right way. - The right way. - This is the Maximum Lawyer Podcast. - The Maximum Lawyer Podcast. - Your hosts, Jim Hacking, and Tyson Neutrips. Let's partner up and maximize your firm. - Welcome to the show. - And welcome back to another episode of the Maximum Lawyer Podcast. This is a Saturday episode, and I'm gonna be diving into something that I've been thinking about. It's a quote that I heard, and I wrote down a few months ago, I think, and I've revisited it, and I've been thinking about it quite a bit. I'm gonna get into that quote in just a minute. It's something that may get you to rethink how you view the world, we shall see. Before I do that, though, I wanna remind you about something that we've been doing, and that is, we've opened up the lines for submissions, for questions on all things, starting and running a law firm, so that we can answer those on a future episode of the podcast. Whether you're dreaming of launching your own firm, or your knee deep in the trenches, and could use a little help, or anything in between, we're ready to listen. All you have to do is go to maximumlawyer.com/ask, or text us your questions to 314-501-922. Two, six, zero, and I will get to them on the air, if I can. I would love for you to submit your submissions, because we can play them live on the air, I guess it's not really live, but play them on the air and answer them for you. So, let's get into today's episode. All right, here's the quote. I know it's from a guy named Mike Cernovich. I think that he is a political person, so ignore that fact, okay? When I first saw the quote, I had zero idea who the person was. Ignore that fact, but the quote is, the smaller you define your world, the bigger your problem's same. And when I first read it, it kind of hit me like a ton of bricks. The smaller you define your world, the bigger your problem's same. And I think when you start to think about it, and you make the mindset shift that you need to, when it comes to thinking about this, you can have a really profound impact on how you can manage your day-to-day stress. And I'm sure that many of you have had this where you felt overwhelmed by those day-to-day challenges. And so, this episode, I think, is gonna help you with that a little bit. 'Cause I kind of stepped back with this, and I'm gonna give you some ways of sort of dealing with the day-to-day when it comes to this quote. So, as law firm owners, we can easily get caught up in those little things. Could be a missed call, it could be a client that's not happy, it could be a deadline that's coming up that is getting a little bit too close for comfort. And it really sometimes feels like everything is on our shoulders. But when we define our world in really small terms like that, that's right, everything is on our shoulders. But if we step back, and so we get away from those minor problems that when they feel really, really huge, if we kind of step back a little bit, things can change a little bit. And when you change the definition of your world at that point, 'cause at that point, the world seems really, really small, but you just step back and think, okay, let's actually view my world. Let's view it from, okay, in reality, what is my world? And where does this fit in the context of my world? It does kind of, at least for me, relieve a little bit of stress. So, I'll give you a prime example. Just a couple of weeks ago, I had a client that we had resolved the case. We got a pretty good sum. We got it resolved at $250,000, which for her case was actually a pretty good result. Client wasn't super happy about it. And we were negotiating the release, and there were terms in the release that were not great, but it's not like it was gonna hurt her if she signed it. And so she was kind of given a fuss about that. And I've been putting off this call to her to discuss it. And it was just one of those things where I just could not make myself make the call. And it just felt like such a pain to do. And I don't know why. It was one of the things where I was defining my world so small. It was all about that one thing, and I just really didn't want to do it. I think if I had really kind of thought about this and stepped back a little bit, it would have helped me quite a bit. 'Cause the reality is, is that no single client interaction or any mistake that you might make, or even if you miss a deadline, God forbid it's a bad deadline. 'Cause sometimes there's deadlines that you can miss, and sometimes there's deadlines that you can't miss. That's just how it works sometimes. But even if that happens, that doesn't define your entire firm. It doesn't define you. It doesn't define your success. It's really about the bigger picture, okay? And all the things you do, all the people that you help, all of the great things that you do, all the great interactions, that you have all of the people that you help. So when you pull back and you expand your world, those seemingly big problems, they start to shrink in size quite a bit. So I really encourage you to sort of step back, and even while you're listening to this episode, maybe think about some of your own experiences that you're dealing with right now, some of those what seem like big problems, and maybe they're not. Maybe they're a little smaller than you think. Kind of look through a different lens at your world right now, and see if things change a little bit. A part of this though is we've got to develop that big picture vision. We talked about vision quite a bit. I'm not gonna talk about vision on this episode when it comes to like actually going through the whole vision, everything. But a big part of this too though, is remember that you do need to define your vision. And so sometimes to expand your vision, you have to develop your North Star. I've talked about that on the podcast before, where you come up with your long-term vision, that way you know where you're headed. You know where you wanna be in five years. You know where you wanna be in 10 years and 15 years. You have that North Star to guide you. So when you are defining your world, it does help you when it comes to dealing with what seem like really big issues. They're not so big whenever you think but in the grand scheme of things. How does this affect me achieving my long-term vision? Sometimes it has zero effect on it. And that's something that when you have that in place, it can't help you when dealing with those day-to-day issues. Let me give you another little tip on expanding your world a little bit. Something you may not think about. And again, I'm giving you a little bitty sliver of the things I thought about when it comes to this quote. But a way of doing of expanding your world is actually through delegation. If you really think about it, when you are taking on a bunch of those tasks that are really kind of weighing you down, you're probably, it's probably a sign for you that you have not been delegating very well. That is definitely something that fairly recently I was recognizing that I was starting to take on a few too many tasks that I had not been in previously. So if you start to feel your world getting smaller and smaller and you feel like you're carrying more and more in your back, it's a really good red flag for you. Hey, maybe I need to be delegating some of these things because you can't do everything. You just can't. If you try to control everything, every problem becomes your problem. That's overwhelming. That is not sustainable. So remember that you really need to build your team and delegate to your team to expand your world so it does not seem as small and it does not seem as big of an issue when issues do come up. So, focus on hiring the right people and which we talked about in other episodes, so I'm not going to go into detail about that, but hiring the right people and delegating. Another thing that will help with this quite a bit is getting your systems on point 'cause it's really easy to get bogged down on those repetitive tasks. So you do them over and over and over again. But if you have some sort of system in place maybe you can automate those or maybe you can, instead of people coming to you with a question, they know how to resolve those issues 'cause maybe there's a client that is upset because someone didn't call them back. Will you have a process in place for whenever that happens? That way someone's not coming to you to bring that issue to you 'cause in reality, they shouldn't need to. That's something that that's where you hire those people for to help you out and so it helps you expand your world and that way yours does not seem so small anymore. The reality is that when you have those strong systems in place, small mistakes don't have the same weight. Your systems catch a lot of those errors. They create consistency and they keep things running smoothly. So you have less and less of those little mistakes. But some of this is, it's an accumulation of many, many mistakes that are happening over the course of a short amount of time and when you have the systems in place that are on point 'cause and I'm not perfect in this either. Let me just say that when we were going through the big system shift over the last 18 months, there were times where things were kind of not falling apart but it was a lot going on in a short amount of time and it got very overwhelming at times. So you may not be in that position right now where your systems are on point. The whole idea of this is getting them on point so that all of these little mistakes, these little errors that pop up throughout the day are less and less as you fine tune your systems as time goes by. The last thing I wanna get to is developing a growth mindset. Many of you probably already have it if you're listening to this. Some of you may not, that's completely fine. It is something you have to train your mind on over time and I go in and out of it, right? Where I have a great mindset, very growth driven, rising tides kind of a mindset and we all naturally will slip out of that but the more you can stay into that growth mindset, the more powerful ways you can expand your world. So I'm gonna give you an example. A week ago, I had a court appearance at a small town several hours away and what I did is I flew my plane down there, got into the courtroom and the defense attorney wasn't there and I was sent an email and whenever I sent the email, I saw another email in my inbox that the hearing had been canceled. The date had not been removed from my calendar. The way I took it, I actually was not mad, was not frustrated at all. Instead, I just said, you know what? It was a great opportunity for me to get the plane out. I was a little rusty. It had been a little bit since I'd gotten the plane out and I just took it as an opportunity to fine tune my flying skills. It was a court I'd never been to so now I know how to get there pretty easily. I know how the whole process from getting the courtesy vehicle to getting into court, all that. I found a nice little health food store down there that was really awesome and this tiny town didn't expect it. I was able to flip what could have been an extremely frustrating thing to not an issue. Actually, I really enjoyed my day. It was pretty fantastic. It wasn't like I drove. It would have been a total of seven hours driving. It was a total of two hours with flight time and pre-flight all that. So it wasn't like I'd lost an entire day. I lost part of my day. It wasn't like a big deal. I had fun doing it. I enjoyed myself and I was able to knock some of the rust off when it came to flying. But that is part of the power of having that, I think it's a positive mindset, obviously, but that growth mindset, I looked at it as, hey, this was an opportunity. This was not something that a mistake was made, obviously, and that was something that we had to, we addressed though in a manner that wasn't angry, it was just something, hey, listen, let's make sure we keep an eye on this 'cause it's not an issue that's coming up a ton. Let's, whenever a court appearance is continued, let's make sure it's removed from the calendar. It wasn't, and it was on me too. It was one of the things where it wasn't just on the person that didn't remove it. 'Cause we do have someone that's in charge of the calendar, but it's something I should have caught it too. And the reality is, we're attorneys, we're law firm owners and it is ultimately on us. So we have to take some ownership of it and that's the way I explained it to the person that missed it. But it is also most things where I could have had a ruin my day. You know, I could have ruined my day, but instead had a different view of it. And so when you're going through it your day, think about that a little bit. Think about viewing your world a little differently. Not so small, think of it quite a bit bigger, and it might change the way you view things. All right, so just remember, the smaller you define your world, the bigger your problems seem. So work on expanding that perspective, building a team, focusing on your systems, adopting that growth mindset. They're all critical to keeping problems in check. I know that this was a little bit of a different, not as concrete episode, I understand that, I get it. It's a little bit longer than some of the other ones, but it was something that I've been thinking about and hopefully there's something in here you can take away where you can reduce a little bit of stress, lighten your day a little bit, and maybe not take yourself so seriously sometimes. Sometimes that can be beneficial as well, but just some action items you can take, just as a reminder, develop your big picture vision. So try to write that down. If you've not done so, we have other episodes on that. And I did an episode all by itself on vision. So go check that out. Work on delegating one task. So one of your action items is just delegate one task. So get something that's on your plate right now, get it off your plate. So just start with one task and maybe that'll snowball into getting a bunch more. Audit your system, so go through and try to identify at least one area where you can implement or improve a system. And then the last one is reframe a setback. So think about some recent challenge and how you can learn from it. So kind of like I had the mishap with a court appearance, try to reframe something that you're going through some challenges that you have. And I think that that might help you a little bit in a lot of areas of your life, not just stress, but maybe moving on from things and kind of helping you when it comes to your mindset a bit. But that's all I have for you today. I really appreciate you listening. Remember to text me if you got anything, you want me to cover 301-501-9260. Until next week, remember that consistent action is the blueprint that turns your goals into reality. Take care, buddy. (upbeat music) - Thanks for listening to the maximum lawyer podcast. To stay in contact with your host and to access more content, go to maximumlawyer.com. Have a great week and catch you next time. (upbeat music) (upbeat music)
