For almost 10 years, I have been blogging on and off. Well, mostly off if I am to be brutally honest. And while I have been (fairly) consistent over the years in producing my Rainmaking Recommendations for my email list (tips, tricks, tactics, and thoughts designed to be implemented immediately or reflected upon so that you can grow your books of business), I have been less consistent in blogging on other marketing, business development and mindset topics which would be of interest to the legal community on a continual basis.
Part of the reason why I have been blogging on an intermittent basis is that I have not been motivated to do so, even though I know the statistical benefits that blogging can bring. However, over the weekend, when I opened my email, I came across an email from Mark Manson, the author of The Subtle Art Of Not Giving a F*ck, with the subject line: “How to get off your ass and take action.” In it, he details the fact that the best thing that he ever did was get into the habit of writing (and it is a habit you can cultivate) because he has been able to make a great living from it. Now, I am not interested in becoming a professional blogger, but I do know that the more you blog the easier it becomes,and the more authority you can develop for your knowledge. This is why it is one of the marketing tactics that I suggest to my clients who are looking to establish themselves as the go-to-authority in their practice area and niche. (Of course, you can always use video or podcasts to establish your expertise, but this is about blogging.) In the spirit of full disclosure, I feel like a hypocrite suggesting that my attorneys’ blog on a consistent and constant basis when I wasn’t doing so. Yes, I was putting out 2 blogs per month, but as you can see from the statistics, the more you blog, the more traffic you get to your website amongst the many benefits.
In this email, Mark Manson provides a link to a blog he wrote entitled The “Do Something” Principle. He discusses “one of the most important ideas (he’s) stumbled across in my life: Action isn’t just the effect of motivation, but also the cause of it.”
As he details in this blog, most people (including yours truly) gets the idea of motivation wrong. We are waiting for inspiration to hit us so that we get motivation and we can take action.
Inspiration leads to Motivation which leads to Action
Instead, he argues that, while it is a continuous loop and not just these three steps, when you are in a situation where you lack motivation you need to apply the “Do Something” principle; do anything, no matter how small, and it will create the motivation and lead to the inspiration:
Action leads to Motivation which leads to Inspiration
He explains that it is often fear that stops us from being motivated to do what we need to achieve the goals we set. As a devotee of personal development literature, I have read this many times in many different forms but, for some reason, it struck a nerve this time.
What I have been fearful of is not producing content that would be of interest to the attorneys I would like to help. Let’s call it perfectionism. I didn’t want to put out content that wasn’t going to resonate with the readers, so I didn’t blog. However, you cannot get better at something unless you do it regularly. Practice makes perfect and all that junk.
So I have decided to try an experiment. I am going post a blog every business day for the month of November. This will include Thanksgiving. Some of these blogs will be short, some will be long and the Rainmaking Recommendations that I promise my newsletter list each month will count as two of the twenty. Some will be good and others only mediocre, but I will not let that stop me from taking action. Because I know that the more I write, the better these posts will become.
What does all of this have to do with lawyer business development?
In the 18 years that I have been coaching attorneys on how to develop books of business ethically, this is one of the reasons that many attorneys do not do the activities they need to do to grow their client base. They want to wait until they have the motivation to do something before they actually do it. As you will read in subsequent blogs this month, this isn’t so much a motivation issue as it is a fear issue – one of the most often asked questions I receive is “but what if they say ‘no”?” You can change “no” to “what if they don’t like it.”
According to Dr. Larry Richard, a leading expert on the psychology of lawyer behavior, the majority of attorneys are risk-averse:
“Lawyers continually look for the ways things could go wrong in order to protect their clients. The focus is on reducing risk and not on creating or developing opportunities.”
This aversion to risk, which as a lawyer myself I sometimes share, also leads them to not developing business opportunities as well. My job as a Rainmaking Trainer and Coach is to motivate attorneys to develop the skills, habits and the chutzpah to do what they need to become the rainmakers they would like to be (which is something I could always do for others but sometimes have a hard time doing for myself).
I am doing this as a challenge to myself as well as to see first-hand what the benefits may be to my clients (and my business). Look for a new blog every business day in November (beginning November 4 towards the middle or end of the day). At the beginning of December I will update you on what I discover.
Wish me luck! And keep me accountable.
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