Everything you need to change any aspect of your life and make it stick
Everything you need to change any aspect of your life and make it stick
These days, many of my clients are changing jobs, changing careers, experiencing downsizing, illness, death, and loss. What I have been blessed to witness is that when my clients are able to change the way they think about those experiences, it dramatically alters their course ahead and their next successes.
Many of my clients embrace perfectionism in one way or another. Outwardly, they appear successful and confident but their inner dialogues are filled with self-judgments and whole host of “shoulds” — things they should have done better, perfectly. As we unpack those patterns of negative self-talk and begin redirecting our brains to more worthy thoughts, it opens up yet another opportunity for self-judgment. How can we leverage failures to overcome our perfectionist tendencies?
During our lives, many of get to a place where we just want to burn it all down and start over. We want out. We retreat. We want to start over and have it be better the next time around. We don’t want to do it any more. We just want to start again. Does starting over make sense for you?
In a profession where the only feedback you typically get is negative feedback, how do you keep those experiences from making you paranoid?
As my clients learn to take more ownership over their feelings and their actions, one of the challenges they face is how to address negative experiences. Their immediate inclination is to shift to a new thoughts to try and feel better about the situation. But reality is that sometimes things will happen in our lives that we don’t want to feel good about. So what do we do?
There are always those projects that we dread doing. We put them off and go out of our way to avoid doing them or ever thinking about them. I recently worked with a client who was tap dancing around her own version of a dreaded project and wanted to share the steps we worked through to de-escalate the dread.
Many of my clients struggle with being wrong because of what they make that mean about themselves. If they are wrong, it must mean they are not good enough, they aren’t cut out to be lawyers. But what if defensiveness had so much more to teach us?
Early on in my practice, I had a mentor who told me, “Never forget that it’s all about relationships.” He was trying to explain to me that there was no magic bullet to marketing—if the relationship wasn’t there, if the other person didn’t like and respect you on some level, you would never work together.
But it’s not just about the clients. The same thing holds true for my relationship with fellow attorneys and bosses.
Rules for playing well with other lawyers and co-workers…