How To Push Yourself To Excel Without Beating Yourself Up 495

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People share their struggles here in the Guild and we want to have space on the show today for people going through a struggle right now! BUT, while we empathize and encourage each other, we don’t want the work to stop there. We want high expectations and problem solving space made to work through the struggles as well. So let’s talk about holding these two truths here on the show today. Listen in if you are having a hard time running your law firm today.  

Episode Highlights:

04:11 When sharing your struggles — there is power into admitting you have a weakness. But let’s not lose sight of our goals.

06:18 Remember that social media is not real! 

07:13 It’s harder when you have young kids … 

08:53 There are fake coaches out there, that make business seem easy 

11:20 Getting the momentum going because you have so much going on you don’t know what to do first

13:34 How to push yourself BUT not be to hard on yourself …

16:14 Looking forward to the goal that you want to achieve and how THAT is tied to the daily tasks = you’ve got to think this through 

17:54 You need to prioritize what you are doing everyday and hack the white space …

Jim’s Hack: Social media isn’t bad and it’s okay to consume it, but why not use it as motivation to create a piece of content and post it … And THEN go look at social media Like a reward after the work.

Tyson’s Tip: Give yourself a pouting deadline – So if you make a mistake, if you screw something up, give yourself a certain amount of time to pout about it. And then once that time passes, you move on. Athletes use this in both wins and losses, so you can use this too. 

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Resources:

Transcript: How To Push Yourself To Excel Without Beating Yourself Up

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 ROI Podcast. I’m Jim hacking

Tyson Mutrux
and try some new tricks. What’s up, Jimbo?

Jim Hacking
Well, Tyson, we’ve had an interesting week. We’ve had an interesting month we’re recording this right at the end of January. My mother in law, my wife’s mother passed away. The firm kept going. The firm was very supportive of Imani and me. So it’s really something to be said, when the business can operate without you for a sustained period of time.

Tyson Mutrux
Yeah, absolutely. And obviously, thoughts and prayers go out to you and your family. It’s I know, it’s been tough on Amani, it was somewhat unexpected, as well. So I know it’s been tough, but it is nice that you’ve built a business that can run itself without the two key players. So that’s kudos to you. I know. It’s been tough. But kudos to you and Imani for, for building that?

Jim Hacking
I mean, yeah, it’s very instructive, because we say a lot of times all the different reasons why you want to make the firm bigger than yourself. But that’s this is one that now you know, my dad passed away in December of 21. And now money’s mom in January of 23. So 13 months apart, and the firm just kept going. So it’s a lesson for everybody. And it should be a real focus for people.

Tyson Mutrux
Well, and I also think it’s sort of instructive, the topic that you came up with today. And I wonder how much of the topic was sort of shaped by what you’ve been going through?

Jim Hacking
Well, it’s interesting that you raised that it’s probably true. But really where this topic came from today was a conversation that started in the guild over the weekend, where one of our members had shared with me some of the struggles that they were having. And then it just sort of opened up the floodgates where everybody felt that they could share problems that they were having vulnerability. And it was, it’s been a great time in the guild this last week. And it’s not because of any chest pounding, it’s much more the opposite, that there’s a lot of people sharing about their struggles. And so we certainly want to have space in the guild and on this show, and in the Facebook group for people to share their struggles. But I don’t want to then just give everyone a pass and not have high expectations. And that’s how I arrived at the topic for today.

Tyson Mutrux
I gotta say, I could not be prouder of the guild with this the way they rallied around this guild member over the last week. It’s quite incredible. I get several messages from people about like, wow, like, just amazing. But yes, so the topic, let me get to the topic, how to push yourself to excel without beating yourself up. If you don’t mind. I just want to kind of say something off right off the bat. Is it okay, and then I’ll kind of let you jump in a little bit more about your thoughts on this. But I want to start by saying like, I think that we need to start with the assumption that we’re going to fail at things, right. I think we need to start with that assumption. Now, I don’t think that should be your main focus. But I think we should start with the assumption that you’re going to fail at things. And not only is that, okay, I would say I would encourage failure. Okay, I would, I would encourage failure. Because the more you fail, the more that that is going to lead success. That means that you are if you go back to the Man in the Arena, quote, is really, that you are in the arena, that means that you are in the arena that you are taking the risks, that you’re actually fighting the fight, because the people that don’t fail are the ones that aren’t taking the risks. And so I think that we need to encourage failure, I think is a good thing. And I think it’s a positive thing. I don’t think it’s a negative thing, like most people do. So I want to start with that. And then I’m gonna let you go back to the topic of how to push yourself to excel without beating yourself up.

Jim Hacking
I had an alternative title, but I changed it. And that was how to shoot for the stars without shooting yourself in the head. But being sensitive to the fact that we have a problem with suicide in the legal community. I didn’t want to be that blunt about it. But yeah, I mean, it was a real ebb and flow because I was really, really glad that people were talking about their struggles. And, you know, one of my favorite talks I’ve ever given was when I talked about the fact that in 2012, I was broke, and I had to confess it to my wife and how I kept putting it off and how that admission really led to the firm that we have today. So I think there’s great power in admitting weakness, or you know, the step one and the 12 steps is to admit that you have a problem. And so I think that’s great, but I don’t want to also lose sight of our goals and our aspirations. And I think there’s a balance to it. And that’s really how I got to the topic. And, you know, I had sort of jokingly said that maybe on Fridays we need to have a loss of the week. And I’ve heard stories about people with their kids who Have dinner, either once a week or every day, just say, what’s one thing you tried and failed that today just to make it blend das normal to experience failure? And I think it’s a great mindset.

Tyson Mutrux
Yeah, I’m a little hesitant with with going that far with it. I’m a little hesitant about that the idea of celebrating wins is really to build the confidence up and to show like, hey, like, Yeah, you did something today, right? You did accomplish something today, because I do think that’s where a lot of the problems come with people, they start to beat themselves up too much. Right? Where all they do is they focus on the negative, right? And maybe with your point, maybe I wonder what Jason would say about this Jason self? Who would be like, if you were just to take a moment a day and say, Okay, what did I fail at? How do I get better? Like, because there is a part of sort of some of the exercises he that? He has me do where, you know, okay, what’s something I want to improve upon? And so it’s not like a loss, but okay, what’s something I want to improve upon? And then how to, then I affect that improvement, like, so I go through that exercise a little bit. So I’m not really saying, you know, what’s my loss, but I’m still saying, hey, I need to improve on something. So I don’t think there’s anything wrong with acknowledging our wounds, because I think that that is important part of the process. But I will stop short of saying we should maybe pick out a loss a day, I will say that Well,

Jim Hacking
I was thinking too, that a big chunk of this, I believe, in the big group in the guild, too, is that social media is not real,

Tyson Mutrux
not real at all, man, like, yes, not at all, gosh, it’s not real. So the

Jim Hacking
things that people are sharing while they’re sharing their successes, and those are great, and people are happy to hear about them. But as shown by this week, it was the power of admitting the weakness and admitting the struggle that really let I mean, people were making their own videos to the person that sent me that email, right, they were just going on and on about things that they had struggled with and trying to be supportive. I mean, the messages in the comments to our Saturday morning talk where we discussed this topic, were some of the best ones that we’ve had. So you gotta remember that people are only putting their wins on Facebook, they don’t put when they yell at their kids, hey, I yelled at my kids three times today. Right. And this particular member who raised the issue, that issue of kids, too, is so important, because I don’t think that I could have gotten my firm to where I am. Now. If my kids were still really little, I just think that there’s such a brain fog and such a focus on your kids. And rightfully so, when they’re very young, and they need a lot of help and support that. Anything you got going it’s bonus. It’s gravy, like, you know, just do your best and keep on going.

Tyson Mutrux
You mentioned on Saturday, it’s like you’re in a fog, because it really I mean, and I brought this up to like Monday, right? We had taekwondo. We had Cub Scouts, and we had gymnastics all on one day, right? And that’s after working a full day. And it is, so you’re like coordinating schedules. And like I had these intentions of getting some work done. And I didn’t get anything done. I didn’t get anything done. After five o’clock. It was all family time, which is completely fine. But I thought I was gonna have all this time. At the end of the day, I was sad. I just like laid in bed. I’m like, Okay, I’m not trying anything. I’m just gonna go straight to bed. And that’s okay. They do think it’s okay. But it is, especially people with kids. It is tough. It is really tough. And it’s also easy to look at some of the people without kids and like seeing oh my gosh, they’re doing all these amazing things. But again, remember, like they don’t have kids. It isn’t Adam yet. It is interesting to watch people on social media, if you like kind of like look at their progression of like before kids and then kids, and how things change quite a bit. And it’s almost like the brakes get put on a little bit. We’re like, Oh, thanks. Thanks. That used to be but and that’s okay. That’s how life is. And we were talking about this before how I want to dress this too, because I you see these coaches, right? And they talk about oh, you got to maximum performance, yada yada yada, they talk, they try to make it sound like it’s so easy. And 99% of these coaches, 99% of them have never run a law firm. They’ve never run a business. They decide, oh, I want to be a coach. I want to be the coach. And I want to I want to tell these people that are actually in the trenches how to do it, and they’ve never done it before and that that drives me nuts because they tried to oversimplify things. And it puts added pressure on law firm owners, it just puts unneeded added pressure and unrealistic pressure because you’ve got these Yahoo’s that are trying to they try to make themselves gurus they don’t what the hell they’re talking about. They don’t know what it’s like to be in the trenches. Yeah, their experience

Jim Hacking
is advising law firm owners how to run a law firm and they’ve never done it themselves. Yeah, I think that’s a good point. But I also think that point you made is a good one, that there’s just that fakeness and, you know, when you’re looking at a screen and you’re scrolling through, your brain is just getting all these hits of things that you shouldn’t be thinking about or saying, oh, I should be doing that I should be doing that I should be doing that. And then you just start beating yourself up over it. So I think that, you know, a slightly better approach might be to ask yourself, what do I want? What do I want for me? What do I want from my family, which I want my firm to look like. And I love Jason’s example, at the conference where you know, what’s one little step and so, on Monday, I was really encouraging people for their one thing to think small to like, what you need to get some momentum, you know, when you’re in that stuck place where the number was, that’s a really, really hard place to be. So I’ve actually been texting them everyday, this week, just talking to them about little bitty things, just little bitty improvements, because it’s so hard to see people that you perceive to be ahead of you. And you want to compare, you know, comparison is such an insidious thing, especially for certain personality types, you know, we’re sort of a hard charging, we’re going to make an outcome occur, mentality with lawyers, a lot of lawyers sort of operate that way, I’m going to make something happen. And they can do it really well in their cases. And then they don’t see it transferring over immediately in the running of the firm. And then that just allows that self doubt to creep in. And then it’s just a bad spiral.

Tyson Mutrux
To that point, we talked a little bit about getting that momentum on Saturday. And I use the example of Dave Ramsey, because where he teaches a you’re supposed to start, like with the small debts and build the momentum, right, which it’s actually counterintuitive. What you’re supposed to do logically is start with the big debts and pay those off, right and get those done. But he says to start with the small debts, so you can build that momentum. I think it’s called like a Debt Snowball or something like that. I don’t know. I don’t know the exact term that is work. And is also what you’re talking about. It’s a little opposite from what we normally talked about when it comes to Okay, getting your vision in place and make sure you get your 10 year goal, your B hag, okay, and what are your quarterly rocks and focusing on those, it’s a little counterintuitive to that. But if you are struggling, I think it makes sense to get that task Snowball or whatever you want to call it started, start with some small things, build up the momentum, start from that place, it’s far better to do that than it is to not do anything. And because there’s that paralysis that you’ll face. And we’ve all been there, you know, you’ve been there. I’ve been there where you’ve got so much going on that you don’t know what to do, right. And so sometimes you just stepping out of that for a moment and say, I’m just going to put one foot in front of the other one step at a time. What’s the one thing I can do right now to help make this better? That’s adjacent something. So what’s the one thing I can do right now just put one foot in front of the other and start, it doesn’t have to be a big thing. Just start on something small like you’re talking about? I think that that’s a really important thing. But once you’ve got that momentum going, it’s time to transition over to the bigger stuff and focusing on the bigger things, but you’ve got to get it going

Unknown Speaker
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Jim Hacking
You’re listening to the maximum lawyer podcast. It’s a solo episode just Jim and Tyson, we’re talking about how to walk that line between pushing yourself and not being too hard on yourself. And speaking of transition, let’s transition to that very question. Tyson. How do you walk that line?

Tyson Mutrux
Well, to me it is a consistency. I think it’s a Hollaback consistency is what it is. And it’s starting and doing putting the vision work. And figuring out those big things, those the big things that we want to accomplish as a firm as an individual. So figuring out my vision, figuring out the B hag for the firm, and then as a firm, figure out what our quarterly goals are. And then once I’ve got that, then I know what I’ve got to do every single day to hit those and just be consistent. And it’s I talked about this a lot on Twitter and LinkedIn. Consistency is boring. But consistency is how you win. And just being consistent. The podcast, our podcast, we’ve been consistent for seven years or eight years, whatever it is, I don’t know what how many years it is at this point. Right? We have been consistent. There have been podcasts that have come and gone. It was inconsistent, right? And I think that above all else, whether it’s good or bad, right? You could do mediocre work, but if you’re consistent, you’ll win as you just have it so I think success has a lot to do with just being consistent.

Jim Hacking
You know, I love I love the whole mindset there that you just displayed. I also think

Unknown Speaker
that you have to have a go All, push yourself

Jim Hacking
towards that goal, do everything you can to get towards that goal, but humbly accept that the path isn’t going to be the exact way that you’ve outlined it like there’s going to be fits and starts, there’s gonna be times where you’re in a state of flow things are going, there will be times where things really suck. I mean, I say, I say all the time in the guild about how hard it is to run a law firm and how hard it is to grow a law firm. So you have your TrueNorth, you have what you want to work on, you do your best, and you let go the results to me, that’s the thing, you’ve got to let go of the results. You can’t say to yourself, if I do this, x will happen. You have to say, if I want x to happen, I’ll do my best to get there. I don’t know exactly how I’m gonna get there, I hope to get there. If I don’t get there, I want to get really damn close. But, you know, always be forward looking. So many people go into the future, looking in the rearview mirror and thinking about all the things that came before, I think you just do your best. And then you take your kids to Cub Scouts, and to Taekwondo, and then you go to bed, and then you get up the next day, to your point about consistency. You just do it again. And I know it’s easier said than done to just not think that way. But I think that there has to be some humility here. And there has to be some letting go.

Tyson Mutrux
I think your point is extremely important. And I want to tie these two together. Now, this is a good segue, because looking forward right at those goals that you have, like is really, really important, and making sure that they’re tied to those daily activities that you do every single day. Extremely important. And one of the mistakes you see people make is I want to make a million dollars this year, right? They say I want to make a million dollars. Okay, well, great. That’s fantastic. How are you gonna do it? Right? What are you going to do every single day, every single week, every single month to get to that million dollars? How are you going to do that, because you can look at that million dollars, and not change anything else, and nothing’s gonna happen, you’re not going to get to a million dollars, and you’re gonna get extremely disappointed by not accomplishing that goal. And it’s because you’re not tying your daily activities to it. So you’ve got to think this through this is not something that Jim and Tyson can tell you what you need to do on every single step. These are things that you need to be doing, you know, if you’re an estate planning attorney, you probably need to be doing webinars, or you probably need to be doing, I don’t know, if SEO works for estate planning attorneys, it probably does. But you need to maybe be writing a blog post every day, or you need to be doing a video a day, there’s a billion different ways of getting cases, right. So doing one or two things consistently, every single day will get you those cases, you got to do those things. And so you got to figure out what those things are, tie that to the million dollars and do those every single day and do them. If you miss a day or two, that’s fine, that’s completely fine. Again, like we talked about before failures, fine, it happens, you get exhausted you some that emergency pops up, but get back on the horse and keep doing them. But tying that end goal looking forward, have make sure you have that because that’s important, but also tying it to your daily activities. Super important as well.

Jim Hacking
I also think it’s really important to understand that you can’t do everything, and you have to prioritize. And so, you know, speaking of that humility piece, you know, there’s only so many hours in the day, there’s only so much you can do. And if you spend all your time scrolling through your phone, looking at all the other cool things everyone else is doing. Number one, it gets you off your path and off your goals, too. It’s a waste of time, and three is just gonna, especially if you’re like many of our members with either diagnosed or undiagnosed ADHD, you’re just going to be looking at that shiny object and saying, Man, I should be doing that, man, I should be doing that. And then if you put on top of that, oh, I’m bad for not doing that. Then it’s just it’s a fait accompli? You’re screwed.

Tyson Mutrux
Yeah, that’s a good point. I mean, social media, you stay off of it unless you’re using it for business. I think Becca put it the the the other day when we were talking or we’re all texting, she said something to us about, like used to basically should only be on social media. If you’re posting something or if you’re doing research as all you’re doing. Like if you’re doing like marketing research, that’s the only reason why you should really be on it. Because otherwise, it’s a total time suck. And someone else I use this as a tip a few weeks ago, I think is where like attacking the whitespace where inevitably meetings will will end short, right? That meetings will end faster than what your than what you’re expecting, or you’ll have additional time. So instead of getting on your phone and scrolling, don’t do that, use that time to have a little side checklist of things that you can knock off. And let’s say that you gym, you’ve got you’ve got to write an email to a teacher for one of your kids or something like that, right? Okay, that’s on your kind of side list over here. They’re not like super important things, but they’re things you got to get done. Okay, attack that whitespace on your calendar, and knock out that email in that free time instead of getting on your phone. So things like that, where you tack that whitespace you’re not going to be wasting your time on the phone because many of the disappointments we all face is because we wasted time on something. So stop wasting the time and try to keep your time focused. And for the people that do have the ADHD or the Undiagnosed ADHD. Having that as a backup plan is what I think will be really, really helpful for

Jim Hacking
you. I don’t know where I heard this. But somewhere along the line I heard if you’re consuming social media content, you’re losing money. If you’re creating social media content, you’re making money. So you know, if people spent as much time creating content as they did consuming it, they’d be a whole lot better off.

Tyson Mutrux
I like that. That is excellent. That is, I don’t know who said it. I think I heard that too. I don’t know if you said it. You might have even come up with it. I don’t know. But it was. That’s really good. Hi, Jimmy. I think we’ve talked about this topic enough. Hopefully, we’ve given people some little tidbits that little takeaways that they can use to be a little bit more efficient with their schedule, and to really get track of their goals, get on track of their goals and know that failure is fine. It happens. It’s okay. But to stay on track. But before I wrap things up, I want to remind everyone to make sure you go to the big Facebook group. Join us there a lot of great information being shared always. And if you want a more high level conversation, can’t stress the guilt enough Max law guild.com. Check it out. This last week, one of the best weeks ever, if not the best week, credible week, rallying around a member. That’s what it’s about great community. And then while you’re listening to the rest of this episode, if you enjoy this podcast, if you get something from it, we hope that you will give us a five star review to help spread that love. Jimmy, what’s your

Jim Hacking
week? Well, we were talking about social media. So my hack is related to that. And that is this that social media isn’t bad. It’s okay to consume social media, I don’t want to be like a Puritan or something. But what you could do is say to yourself, Okay, before I go look at social media, I’m going to create a piece of content. And it doesn’t have to be high tech, it doesn’t have to be super complicated. Just pull your phone, make it tick, tock, put it up there. And then go and look at social media like sort of put the reward after the work, sort of like having dessert after

Tyson Mutrux
dinner. I like it, I’m going to use this tip of the week for because it’s related to our topic is put a deadline for your pouting. Okay, so if you make a mistake, if you screw something up, give yourself a certain amount of time to pout about it. And then once that time passes, you move on. And I think it’s a good little trick you can use to get over it, you know, I mean, just get over it. until five o’clock tonight, I’m gonna give myself a chance to kind of just digest what just happened. And after five o’clock, I’m moving on to the next thing. athletes use this at something both in wins and losses, too. You can do this with wins too. So you don’t you’re not celebrating a win for too long. Where like in a loss or winning a football game, they’ll say, you know, we’ll give ourselves so tomorrow and then after tomorrow on to the next game. And I think it’s a valuable little tool you can use to just get over it and move on. I Jimbo, as always, it’s a pleasure. love talking to you. This has been one of my favorite episodes. To be completely honest with you. I think it was a it’s something people need to hear. And so I enjoyed it. Good stuff, brother. Alright, see Jimbo.

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