WHY CAN’T I WORK MY GOALS?

Sorry, I missed yesterday.  I know you are all waiting with bated breath (that’s holding your breath in fear. I just looked it up) for my new blog.  So here goes:

I asked myself as I coach more and more attorneys, what holds back attorneys from working their goals.  You have to understand that as a collaboration, the client and I set goals that are derived from what he or she wants to accomplish.  That is the client’s decision in coaching.  So if he or she and I have an agreement that working those goals will make the client richer, happier, more successful, have more leisure time, or whatever else they want, why doesn’t the attorney work them?

What happens time after time, that many clients have some reason that the goals are not even started.  Not to instill guilt because that is not healthy, but I ask myself what the heck is going on?

Now, we do know that some people don’t really like to set goals. The Myers/Briggs Temperament system can spot those people and we can work with them a little differently.  However, still if a person is scattered and not focused , it is extremely difficult to be successful.  For example if a solo is trying to practice in too many areas of the law, this can be not only unsuccessful but very anxiety producing.   Think of all the different target markets to solicit and all the different laws to learn.  It is a disaster waiting to happen.

Good time management needs to be leaned and used.  The discipline to plan a calendar out the week before seems overwhelming to some but is the bedrock of getting a lot done without a great deal of anxiety. Everyone who is a lawyer found a way to get through law school and pass the bar.  This took the same kind of time management. So why are many attorneys so resistant to learning and using time management on a consistent basis?

Probably the answer comes in very personal ways, such as:

  • To be held accountable for accomplishing something in a given time produces anxiety when its not done. Better to never start at all.
  • Better not to start something that they might not finish.
  • Better to keep putting goals off to do when there is a “better time”.
  • Better to fail so that people can’t expect more.

These are just a few of the answers I’ve come up with.  I’m sure there are plenty more.  Do you see yourself in any of this?  If so, let me know.  I can help. 

SHAME CAN BE REALLY ANNOYING!

So, there I was in front of the ATM.  I put my card in as instructed and then it asked me how much cash I wanted.  I punched the button for $50.00 (a modest sum) and the MACHINE told me that there was no money in the account!!!

Now, I know that I have bank  underdrafts, overdrafts and between drafts and that I had made a healthy deposit early in the week, so I knew this MACHINE was LYING.  I thought about trying again but I was so debilitated by the experience, I slunk away hoping that the people in line behind me didn’t see the transaction.

I felt such SHAME! Of course, when I thought about it, I knew that was silly because it wasn’t true and no human knew about the incident anyway.  So instead of taking the healthy alternative and forgetting about it, I avoided ATM machines for the next few months and got my cash with use of my card at Safeway…

We can all laugh at this now but I bet a lot of you reading this can relate.  I notice that even today I feel shame for the people ahead of me in the checkout line at Safeway who give items back because they can’t pay for them.  I have looked in the faces of these people and not one time could I say they were feeling shame.  Certainly the clerks didn’t say anything and everyone but me acted like it was a very normal occurrence. So I did restrain myself from offering to pay for the items they couldn’t afford but here I was feeling a feeling that they weren’t even feeling.

How dumb is that?  There are probably enough real shame producing actions in the world.  Like really hurting someone on purpose or cheating old people with a Ponze Scheme.  I guess this all starts pretty early on in life when your parents said “You should be ashamed of yourself” or something like that. It comes from a feeling that you have done something wrong.  So I guess in order to fight it, I need to first understand that what I did didn’t rise to the level of the kind of wrongness which should produce SHAME.

So come on…..does this make sense?  Are there a bunch of others out there feeling this useless feeling? If so, let’s admit it and start using our resources to get it out of our life!