This week on the show we take a walk with Jim and Tyson get real and discuss the ways your mindset might be holding you back and the ways changing it could propel you to forward.
Hacking’s Hack:
Jim recommends the book Can’t Hurt Me by David Goggins. For David Goggins, childhood was a nightmare — poverty, prejudice, and physical abuse colored his days and haunted his nights. But through self-discipline, mental toughness, and hard work, Goggins transformed himself from a depressed, overweight young man with no future into a U.S. Armed Forces icon and one of the world’s top endurance athletes.
Tyson’s Tip:
Record a video and publish it – no editing – and watch the positive comments roll in!
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Transcripts: “Have a Growth Mindset” with Jim Hacking and Tyson Mutrux
Unknown Speaker
Run your law firm the right way. This is the maximum lawyer podcast, podcast, your hosts, Jim hacking and Tyson metrics. Let’s partner up and maximize your firm.
Jim Hacking
Welcome to the show. Welcome back to the maximum lawyer Podcast. I’m Jim hacking.
Tyson Mutrux
And I’m tasting matrix. What’s up? Give me oh, this
Jim Hacking
is our first ever actually, this is our first ever face to face podcast we’ve never recorded face to face heavily.
Tyson Mutrux
Now. That’s frickin bizarre. I never thought about that. This is our first one. Yeah, so
Jim Hacking
I’m down in Columbia. I drove down this morning. I didn’t fly out of lax. I actually drove. Here I am from St. Louis. I drove down to see Tyson this morning. We’re working on this app Athan and on the conference, we’re now taking a little break from our efforts. And we’re on a little walk.
Tyson Mutrux
Yeah, it’s pretty exciting. We’ve we’ve mapped out a big part of what we’re going to be doing for this Apatheia on and I think we’re there, I think we’re almost we’re getting close. So that’s pretty cool. We’ve got a lot of great topics that we want to cover. I don’t think we’re going to cover everything. But I think it’s an exciting time.
Jim Hacking
Well, for me, it’s it’s been eye opening. You know, we did a survey for all of the attendees. Now, I always am struck by what outliers, even all of our maximum lawyers are when you think about all the lawyers that are out there. And then you think about all the lawyers who joined maximum lawyer and want to improve their firm and are you struggling and striving to do better? And then you think about the ones who are actually willing to plunk down some money and learn something about software that they’ve never used before. I just find it very inspiring.
Tyson Mutrux
Yeah, it’s really cool. I think I’m more excited honestly about the fact that we’re gonna get to go out and learn as well. Oh, yeah, for sure. I mean, that’s gonna be one of the coolest parts, because we’re gonna have Kelsey Bratcher out there. And Kelsey is a freakin guru. And so it’s really cool. Just being able to learn but also being around like minded people that want to want to advance their firm want to learn about technology and implement it. Also, I think it’s important that we let people know what we’re doing, because we’re going to be breathing, breathing heavily, I think at some point, because we’re gonna be walking, we’re walking, especially my Fred. So we’re on the trail, Missouri has got a lot of great trails, and we’re on the Missouri, the MKT trail is what it is. And so it’s right next to our office in Columbia, which is neat, we can just kind of walk down the parking lot down to the trail and, and I get little little walk in meeting podcasts. And so it’s kind of cool.
Jim Hacking
Well, so I wanted to talk, I told you, I have something that I want to talk about. And I’ve been thinking about this for a lot lately. So like I said, we have some great people and maximum lawyer. And you and I have had the opportunity to work with people. I mean, I can’t think of how many phone calls I’ve been on. And you’ve been on talking to our friends and maximum lawyer about, you know, making their firms better making their practices better. And then in the guild, especially, we’ve had a lot of time, one on one time with people on the hot seat, where we’re talking to them about, you know, their practice struggles, you know, they all get a chance on the hot seat. And we all take turns given advice and chiming in. And, and that has been really productive, I think and I’ve really gotten a lot out of it. And like you just said just like it this app Athan, we’re learning a lot. I always learned a lot, hearing other people on the hot seat, because it’s so much easier to see problems for other people than it is for yourself. But putting that all to the side, I wanted to record this episode, because I’ve been noticing lately, more and more people in the group, some who have a closed mindset, and who really, you know, they are always saying, that won’t work for me, or that won’t work in my practice area, or that won’t work in my town. I was really struck the other day, I had a little back and forth with one of the members. Regarding this video challenge that I did that we started on January 1, where I said, Hey, who wants to commit to shooting one video every day and putting out on social and one of the members was coming back at me, you know, this is way too much work. We don’t have I don’t have time to do stuff like this. Now, first of all, no one said he had to do it. It’s an optional thing, right? And no one said he had to do it. But he decided that he wanted to shoot it down and say how hard it was. So then I pointed out that it doesn’t take a lot of time. And all you need is your iPhone. And then he talked about editing and all this stuff. And so I said, Well, you should outsource that. You shouldn’t be doing that yourself. Well, I don’t have the money to do all that. Right. And we have other members who I’ve had multiple phone calls with. And I’ve given them lots of good advice. And I’m just getting a little bit tired of people who have that closed mindset who are always looking for a reason to say no or why that won’t work. So I wanted to share that with you and talk with that. Talk about that with you today.
Tyson Mutrux
So it’s funny because this this was my talk at max law Right, right. Stop the bullshit. It’s amazing to me because there’s so many talented people in the group. If you’re in the group, that means you want to get better right? That’s While you’re in the group, and I just don’t understand why people make all these excuses for themselves, for example, let’s say, our air, air buds weren’t working to record this, this episode, we just got on our on our iPhone and started recording as we’re walking, right? We didn’t have any excuses to record this podcast. And a lot of people, they want to start a podcast and they create all these excuses. And it’s a great idea for whatever the topic is. And they and I think that part of it’s fear. So it’s not, I don’t mean to harm people. So I think part is just, they’re afraid that whatever they do is not going to sound good, or it’s not going to look good. With a video. I mean, shit. The other day, I just shot a video for my iPhone, and I published it, you know, like, it’s, you don’t have to get all fancy with it, I think that we put up these walls, I think that’s a big part of it is is I had the same, I have the same problem we all do. Yeah, I put up these walls. And I want to look, I want to make sure that we look amazing, you know, and that’s, that’s normal. But you understand people don’t care about that stuff. They really don’t. They want to see you as a human being, you know, not just this attorney that’s not approachable. So let’s say you put up a shitty video every once awhile, who cares? You know, you’re a human being, you’re not going to lose a client, because you put up one bad video, you’re just not going to, they’re going to see you as a human being and more approachable. She’s like, whenever I wear jeans to, to a meeting with a client. I’ve never had a complaint about me wearing jeans, it’s usually a compliment, like, oh my gosh, I’m so happy you’re wearing jeans, it makes me feel so much more comfortable talking to you. You just have to get over those fears. And I think that’s what it is. It’s just a fear thing. And I also know there’s there’s nothing you want to address. But what you talked about is I also don’t understand of people shooting down other people’s ideas. I understand if it’s a constructive criticism, but it’s something you can’t do. Okay. I want I think you can get right around that you quit making excuses, because you can do it. But they’ll shoot out someone else’s idea just because you can’t do that annoys me.
Jim Hacking
Yeah. And I think that we all have our blind spots. And we all have issues that we’re working on. But you know, I love that book by Carol Dweck, about having an open mindset versus a closed mindset. An open mindset is sort of where you’re open to the possibilities. You’re, you know, you’re not going to say no to everything, and you like look for new opportunities. And then I think there are some people who have been telling themselves, this won’t work for so many times where they’ve been burned. I know that we’ve talked to a couple people in the mastermind who’ve been burned by particular vendors or associates who leave. And it’s easy to get in that space, where you just don’t trust anybody anymore. And you’d like you said, you get a you get afraid of the risk. And you just start saying no to everything. So I wanted to shoot this episode, so that we can encourage people to revisit those places in their practice, where they say to themselves, that won’t work. I mean, I had a great call with a fellow on the way down here, who’s getting ready to open his practice in two weeks. And we talked for 15 minutes. And there was no pushback there. And I’m gonna say everyone has to agree with me. And there were things that he took, that he liked and things that he didn’t like, and that’s totally cool. But there’s a difference between figuring out what’s right for you. And saying no to everything.
Tyson Mutrux
Yeah, and I don’t remember who the guy was, it was an icon. We gotten to that conference a couple years ago, few years ago. And the guy he started his presentation by saying, Listen, I know a lot of you, you think you know everything about Infusionsoft. But instead of asking the question of what, what do I already know, what do I not know? You know, how can I improve using this product? And so I think if you go into some of these conversations with people, and instead of thinking, Okay, I know all this stuff, like thinking like, Okay, what do I not know, what are some things that I can take away from this, instead of shutting it down? Because I think sometimes that does that does happen. But I mean, another part of it is, is that, I think like a lot, I think a lot of its lack of confidence, too, which that drives me crazy, because I know that a lot of these people are talented. I mean, they’re really, really talented people. They have been burned. I know there are some people that we’ve talked to they’ve, they’ve been burned, so they don’t have that trust factor. They’ve lost that trust and people in general. I mean, I will tell you, I mean, just, frankly, Jimmy, you know, this I’ve been burned by a couple of good buddies over the last couple of years. And it sucks. I freaking get it. And I mean, yeah, get past it. You got to keep getting persistent. You got to keep moving on. You got to you got to have that that confidence in yourself that you can do so do things and like I said, the people that are in the Facebook group there, and all the listeners this podcast, you’re listening, you’re in the group because you want to get better and just know that you are talented. I mean, you are one of the top I’d say probably 10% of the population if not 5% If not 1% of talented people in this world you can do really good shit. You can and I mean, you’ve done something that is hard for a lot of people to do. And I think that us a lot of lawyers, they think that Okay, going to law school, you know getting education or law school or Getting a firm? Oh, that’s just easy. A lot of people have done it. But I think if you look at the general population, that’s not true. I mean, it’s it’s hard for a lot of people to do. And so you have to think about it, that you’re you are talented, you should have that confidence in yourself that you can do these things.
Jim Hacking
Yeah, that’s a great point. Because, you know, you see those statistics about, you know, 50%, or 70% of businesses fail within five years. I think next year at the conference, we should start off by having everybody stand who’s had their firm for more than five years, because that you’re right, as it compares to other businesses is a huge accomplishment. Thanks to our sponsor, Smith AI Smith AI is a superior receptionist service for law firms trusted by many maximum lawyers, including me at my immigration practice, the hacking law practice and this friendly US based receptionist respond to potential clients in English or Spanish screen and schedule new leads, and even take payment for our consults. The best part is that they don’t just handle these conversations by phone. They also have live agents and chat bots capturing leads on our website through their chat widget. They serve as our friendly gatekeepers, but my team and I work uninterrupted. We get new clients and we get work done. How awesome is that? If you’re in a solo or small firm, I know you’ll appreciate this plant started just $70 a month for calls and $100 a month for chats. They even offer a totally free chatbot so there’s no excuse. Try Smith AI today and see for yourself why attorneys like me say Smith AI receptionists are the secret to business growth. Smith AI offers a free trial and maximum lawyer listeners get an extra $100 discount with promo code Max law 100 That’s ma x l Aw 100. Sign up and Learn more at www dot Smith dot A I trust me when I say don’t let another day go by try Smith AI. I want to get back to the issue of video. I think video brings out certain special insecurities for people. And I totally get that now. When we get back to your office, I’ve been meaning to do this. I’m going to post Gary Vaynerchuk first Wine Library video. I don’t know if you’ve ever seen it. But it’s horrible. It’s horrible. It’s dark. It’s off center. It’s goofy. And you know, people’s first videos generally look like Proof of Life videos for when people are taken hostage. That’s okay, because you’re gonna get better. I mean, Mitch has been great. Mitch Jackson’s been great in the group so far, just encouraging people and reminding them that it’s progress, not perfection. And I think that video does bring out certain insecurities with people, we had one person who said to me, you know that they didn’t want to post a video because they looked fat. And I said, nobody cares about whether you’re fat or not. They just want the answers to their questions. So I think that video does bring out certain insecurities with people or, or fears.
Tyson Mutrux
It’s funny, you just made me think of something that too. It’s not about you. It’s about them. Right? It’s you got to think about it from their perspective, that’s such a good point you, it’s about them, it’s about their issues, about their questions about their concerns. And so maybe if you change in your mind, stop thinking about yourself thinking about start thinking about the people that you’re trying to serve. I think that that may help you get around some of those, I guess, those insecurities that you’re having about shooting video, and you know, I Paul yaki abiertas, he posted something this morning, either yesterday with his video and he said something like, you know, don’t let perfection get in the way of good because that could that I mean, that is something that stops a lot of us. We want that crisp style video, you know, we want that video that looks amazing. And I mean, let’s be honest, those videos, they’re just ego boosters, right? You that’s about that’s about those lawyers, it’s not about the clients, it’s not about answering those questions that the clients have. Alright, so Jimmy, we are about 30 minutes, and we want to start to wrap up, get get this off your chest. Oh, I think we got to talk about some more stuff. All right. What do you want to talk about?
Jim Hacking
Well, let’s check in how are you doing? How’s things with your firm? I don’t want to cut an episode shorter. 13 minutes.
Tyson Mutrux
Okay, well, let’s keep going. It’s fun. And we’re gonna keep walking, we get we’ve got this nice little loop too. So, um, things are going great. I’ve added my wife as the marketing director and things have been taken off really well. We’ve doing a lot of cool things. You know, we’ve got the Missouri Aska layer group, which is, which is working. I know, You’ve had your doubts about it, but it seems to be working. It’s pretty cool. It’s a good way of getting a lot of leads. And what we’re doing is we’re just answering questions of that people might have and I’ve gotten a lot of my good friends like you in the group. Now. There haven’t been any immigration questions yet. But if an immigration question comes up, you’ll be the first to answer it, I’m sure but we signed up more cases in 2019 than we’ve ever signed up before and the revenues are higher than they’ve ever been before. So it’s all been good. I mean, it’s I still have the same stresses I’m probably more stressed out now than I was two years ago just because they’re the growth has been kind of insane. What stresses you out. Just getting all the work done. I think that’s the biggest thing is whenever you anybody that’s In the growth phase right now understand that you I mean, you’re still going through a growth phase where you’ve got all these new clients and you don’t anything to fall through the crack and make sure you have enough staff. And I mean, I’m already at the point where I’m hiring again. So it’s that constant hiring is difficult. It’s, you want to make sure you’ve got the right people. I made three bad hiring decisions in 2018. And I don’t want to repeat those. That mean, they were two are terrible. One was one was, it was actually not a bad one, just the, unfortunately, she had to leave the firm early because of health issues. But it was just, it was it’s a strain on the firm, you know, how does whenever you hire someone, you’ve trained them up, and then they leave. That’s that’s sucks. So I think that’s the biggest thing is just all the growth problems that the same growth problems that everyone listening to this is probably having. What about you?
Jim Hacking
Well, first of all, you guys can’t see you didn’t see this, but Tyson just kept me from stepping out in front of a bicyclist. So he might have had a new personal injury case here in a minute probably would have been 100% liability on Jim hacking. So that part’s good. So anyway, for us, 2019 was a good year for sure. We are 12 years old now. So we’re heading into our teenage years and the growth is there, you can see the maturity at the firm. We are now now we have four paralegals. And we had one of our associates leave in November with eight days notice, she was carrying a caseload of 100 cases. So that was a little bit stressful. But we’ve been working with a coach. So showing that we believe in the value of coaching, we’ve met with our coach twice in the tail end of 2019. And we’re really implementing some things that I’m excited about. And the biggest thing for us has been to commit to doing less. So we always have these grand meetings, especially with me, the ideas guy, where we just come up with all these great ideas, say we’re going to do all of them. And we ended up doing none of them. So we have three, each of our leadership team members have one project for the quarter. And we have a group project for the quarter. And just being able to say no to everything else, for me, is a huge relief. So lots of good things. We’re excited about 2020. I’m excited about maximum lawyer, we’re heading towards 2000 members in the group, which is mind boggling. And they’re still all these people coming in who don’t even really know that we have a podcast, which makes me laugh. But the group has grown, the group is getting more mature. I think that things like this app Athan and the Guild are showing sort of sort of how we can help more on a micro level. And that’s that’s really where I get my energy, my favorite thing to do is to talk to other lawyers about how they’re handling their firm, I learn new things for myself. I hear things from them that let me see what I’m doing wrong. And so I just this energy that we have coming off the group to me is great.
Tyson Mutrux
Yeah, and I think just maximum lawyers changed so much over the last few three years. It’s really, really interesting. Just the group dynamic has changed. Not a bad way in a good way. The group dynamics changed. But I mean, you and I have, we have technically one employee but we were Annika God loose key has been amazing helping us out. And we’re going to bring her on soon to start paying her to help us out. And so we were building this really cool team, we’re doing all these really cool things. I think the guild, it’s it just every time we do the guild, I It reminds me of whenever we were sitting in a room with, you know, other people in St. Louis, and just doing our mastermind, then right you hear the same struggles that everyone else is going through. And we tried to help solve some of those problems. And the Facebook group is maybe the most valuable tool that is in the legal profession for small firms. And I truly believe that it’s, it’s incredible what’s in that group, the knowledge is in there. And just the tools that people share. I mean, you could probably go the Facebook group and learn anything you need.
Jim Hacking
Well, it’s for me from a selfish perspective. It was great the other day, we are switching our bookkeeping service. And so I just I said, I’ll figure out where to go. And I’ll ask everybody in the group, and we had 30 responses within an hour and like 20 of them were for gussto. So I didn’t have to do much more than that Adela did our due diligence. But that was enough for me to hear so many good things from so many members. So, so it’s benefited us as much as it’s benefited. Anybody else?
Tyson Mutrux
Absolutely. Yesterday, so we had two new leads and two new cases. And they were both injured in St. Louis. But it just happened that one lives in Kansas City. One lives in Jefferson, Ohio, I put out a message and I get people that can they can they can get treating doctors and imaging centers in a matter of an hour. I mean, it was it really is helpful. And if that’s something I can tell my clients, I’ve got this network network of lawyers that I that I deal with all the time and they I can get you the best treatment possible. That’s that’s a good selling point. But and then, I mean, the maximum will you’re the maximum media, we’re gonna I mean that’s gonna be amazing this year too. And Annika is helping us a lot with that. And then the conference. I mean, I mean, Jesus, I mean, the conference is at a much bigger venue this year, we expect to have a lot more people. I mean, the number and then the quality of the speakers. It’s amazing. We’ve got we’ve got the breakout sessions, which is, which has caused a I wouldn’t say a scheduling nightmare. For us, it’s just much more difficult than when we’re just in a room scheduling for one, you know, yeah, one at a time, it changes the dynamic completely, because you don’t want to put, you know, two presentations on at the same time that are competing with each other for the same people that want to go to that presentation. So making sure that we don’t do that. It’s difficult, but I never would have guessed that maximum lawyer is what it is three years ago,
Jim Hacking
right? For sure. And so I’m really excited about that. We’re excited about seeing everybody with the breakout sessions, you might think about bringing someone else from your team, to the conference, because you’re not gonna be able to see everything. We’ll be recording everything again. But as you know, it sometimes takes us a while to get those videos out. So hopefully, if you’re thinking about coming, you should come. If you think about bringing someone else you should do it. It’s gonna be it’s gonna be a great time. Are you ready to wrap it up? Wrap it up. All right, so you want to get my hack of the week. Go ahead. All right, so are you still working with that? Coach? Yours? Yeah. All right. So your old coach was sort of a hard ass and I don’t generally respond well to the hard asses. Um, you know me, I’m sort of more of a softer guy. I like that touchy feely stuff a little bit more.
Tyson Mutrux
Like this. Stop the bullshit approach. Probably.
Jim Hacking
It was alright. It served its purpose. I I’ve said it to myself many times since last year. But I got a book on audio. I don’t remember who recommended it to me. You might have read it. It’s called can’t hurt me. Did you read that book? Oh, my God. All right, so I got the audio version. So it’s by this guy named David Goggins. He was a Navy Seal, and an Army Ranger. He’s also a ultra marathon runner. So he runs these 100 mile races. He also holds the Guinness Book of World Records for number of pull ups in one day. You know, how many did in one day,
Tyson Mutrux
in one day? 24 hours.
Jim Hacking
3040 300. Wow. It was like, it was like five a minute, every minute for 24 hours. Oh, my God, it’s insane. The book starts out with his father just beating the crap out of him. And his mother fleeing from his father in Buffalo, New York. And it goes downhill from there. So until he builds himself up. And so it’s a very macho book. There’s lots of cussing. It’s military lingo and military language. So if that stuff offends you, you might not want to read it. But it gave me hope, with my weight. And with my life. It was a book, it’s a life changing book, I can’t recommend it enough. And do yourself a favor, get the audio version. And that’s what I did. The audio version has ghostwriter that what they do is they go into a recording studio for five days to record the book. But after about a third of each chapter, they stop. And then he interviews David and David talks about what he just read in the book. So it’s really powerful. It’s really great. I think you’re really gonna like it. That’s
Tyson Mutrux
really good. And what’s the name of it again,
Jim Hacking
can’t hurt me. Love it. All right.
Tyson Mutrux
So my tip of the week, I’m gonna give you two of them. One of them is, if you’re with someone that you’re meeting with, and you want to take a little break, take a little walk break, like what we’re doing, I think it’s, it’s a really good way of meeting and we got, we’re actually being very productive by doing we’re recording and upset. The other thing is, here’s my challenge to you, this goes with Jim’s challenge. Just record a video with your cell phone and publish it. Don’t do any editing to it, just, you know, trim the end from the beginning, because you’re not gonna want to show yourself you know, pushing the record button. And just, I want you to feel how good it is to just post something and not worry about being too perfect. And then I want you to watch all the positive comments that you get about it. I promise you will. You’re not gonna get a bunch of people that are negative nancies you’re not you’re gonna be people that have people that are very supportive. So shoot a video just clip the damn video and post it. Alright, that’s my that’s my job.
