The Smaller You Define Your World, the Bigger Your Problems Seem

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Are you a lawyer who struggles with focusing on small issues? In this episode of the Maximum Lawyer Podcast, Tyson delves into the significance of perspective in problem-solving for law firm owners, inspired by a Mike Cernovich quote.

The quote is “The smaller you define your world, the bigger your problems seem”. For lawyers, little things can cause a lot of stress. This turns every small problem into a huge issue. If you take a step back and think about how that problem fits into your world, your mindset about little issues can really change.

One thing lawyers can do to overcome this is to think about how these issues affect your long term vision. Most times, these issues will not have an effect on where you want to go or what you want to accomplish. They will be small blips along the journey, so it is best to find ways to mitigate those issues. Mitigating can come in a few ways. One of these ways is to delegate tasks that are weighing heavily on you. Maybe intake is stressing you out or following up with some clients is time consuming. Delegate these tasks out to members of your team so you can feel less stressed and you can focus on other things.

Listen in to learn more!

Episode Highlights:

• 2:40 The relevance of the quote in managing daily stress
• 3:48 How a narrow view can amplify problems 
• 6:58 Reassessing current challenges 
• 8:01 The importance of having a long-term vision 
• 9:16 The need for delegation to reduce overwhelm and expand one's capacity

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Transcripts: The Smaller You Define Your World, the Bigger Your Problems Seem 

Tyson Mutrux (00:02.238)
And welcome back to another episode of the Maximum Lawyer podcast. This is Saturday episode and I'm going to be diving into something that I've been thinking about. It's a quote that I heard and I wrote down a few months ago, I think, and I've revisited it and I've been thinking about it quite a bit. And I'm going to get into that quote in just a minute. It's something that may get you to rethink.

How you view the world we shall see before I do that though I want to remind you about something that we've been doing and that is We've opened up the lines for submissions for questions on all things starting and running a law firm So that we can answer those on a future episode of the podcast Whether you're dreaming of launching your own firm or you're knee-deep in the trenches and could use a little help Or anything in between we're ready to listen

All you have to do is go to maximlawyer.com forward slash ask or text us your questions to 314-501-9260 and I will get to them on the air if I can. I would love for you to submit your submissions because we can play them live on the air. I guess it's not really live, but play them on the air and answer them for you. So.

Let's get into today's episode. All right, here's the quote. Now, I believe it's from or I know it's from a guy named Mike Cernovich. I think that he is a political person. So ignore the ignore that fact. OK, when I first saw the quote, I had zero idea who the person was. Ignore that fact. But the quote is the smaller you define your world, the bigger your problems seem. And

When I first read it, it kinda hit me like a ton of bricks. The smaller you define your world, the bigger your problems seem.

Tyson Mutrux (02:12.782)
Waiting for the barking.

Tyson Mutrux (02:21.122)
Hey, get up there so that they're not barking. Okay, love you.

Tyson Mutrux (02:29.516)
i got a little one that's been on the stairs and was kind of moving around and the dog started barking so he's he's doing taking care of

Tyson Mutrux (02:42.958)
Hope you'll able to cut this in a good spot.

Tyson Mutrux (02:51.848)
And I think when you start to think about it and you make the mindset shift that you need to when it comes to thinking about this, you can have a really profound impact on how you can manage your day-to-day stress. And I'm sure that many of you have had this where you felt overwhelmed by those day-to-day challenges. And so this episode, I think, is going to help you with that a little bit. Because I kind of stepped back with this and I…

I'm gonna give you some ways of sort of dealing with the day-to-day when it comes at this quote. So as law firm owners, we can easily get caught up in those little things. It could be a missed call. It could be a client that's not happy. It could be a deadline that's coming up that is getting a little bit too close for comfort. And it really sometimes feels like everything is on our shoulders. But…

When we define our world in really small terms like that, that's right. Everything is on our shoulders. But if we step back and so we get away from those minor problems that where they feel really, really huge, if we kind of step back a little bit, things can change a little bit. And when you change the definition of your world at that point, because at that point, the world seems really, small. But you step back and think, OK, let's let's actually view my world.

Let's view it from, in reality, what is my world? And where does this fit in the context of my world? It does kind of, at least for me, relieve a little bit of stress. So I'll give you a prime example. Just a couple of weeks ago, I had a client that we had resolved a case. We got a pretty good sum.

So the case was, we got it resolved at $250,000, which for her case was actually a pretty good result. Client wasn't super happy about it. And we were negotiating the release and there were terms in the release that were not great, but it's not like it was gonna hurt her if she signed it. And so she was kind of a fuss about that. And I'd been putting off this call to her to discuss it. And it was just one of those things where like I just could not make myself.

Tyson Mutrux (05:17.646)
make the call. And I just, it just felt like such a pain to do. And I, and I don't know why it was one those things where like I was, I was defining my world so small. It was all about that one thing and I just really didn't want to do it. And so it, I think if I had really kind of thought about this and step back a little bit, it would have helped me quite a bit. cause the reality is, that no, no single client interaction or any mistake that you might make.

Or, you know, even if you miss a deadline, God forbid it's a bad deadline, because sometimes there's deadlines that you can miss and sometimes there's deadlines that you can't miss. That's just how it works sometimes. But even if that happens, that doesn't define your entire firm. It doesn't define you. It doesn't define your success. It's really about the bigger picture.

and all the things you do, all the people that you help, all of the great things that you do, all the great interactions that you have, all of the people that you help. So when you pull back and you expand your world, those seemingly big problems, they start to shrink in size quite a bit. So I really encourage you to sort of step back, and even while you're listening to this episode,

Maybe think about some of your own experiences that you're dealing with right now. Some of those what seem like big problems and maybe they're not. Maybe they're a little smaller than you think. Look through a different lens at your world right now and see if things change a little.

Tyson Mutrux (06:58.998)
Part of this though is we've got to develop that big picture vision. We talk about vision quite a bit. I'm not going to talk about vision on this episode when it comes to like actually going through the whole vision everything. But a big part of this too, though, is remember that you do need to define your vision. so sometimes to expand your vision, you have to develop your North Star. I've talked about that on the podcast before where

You come up with your long-term vision. That way you know where you're headed. You know where you want to be in five years. You know where you want to be in 10 years and 15 years. You have that north star to guide you. So when you are defining your world, it does help you when it comes to dealing with these what seem like really big issues. They're not so big whenever you think about it in the grand scheme of things. How does this affect

me achieving my long-term vision. You sometimes it has zero effect on it. And that's something that when you have that in place, it can't help you when dealing with those day-to-day issues.

Tyson Mutrux (08:15.458)
back into the same thing in my notes again.

Tyson Mutrux (08:20.654)
Let me give you another little tip on expanding your world a little bit. Something you may not think about. again, I'm giving you a little bitty sliver of the things I've thought about when it comes to this quote, but a way of doing, of expanding your world is actually through delegation. If you really think about it, when you are taking on a bunch of those tasks that are really kind of weighing you down.

you're probably, it's probably a sign for you that you have not been delegating very well. That is definitely something that fairly recently I was recognizing that I was starting to take on a few too many tasks that I had not been in previously. So if you start to feel your world getting smaller and smaller and you feel like you're carrying more and more in your back, it's a really good red flag for you. Hey,

maybe I need to be delegating some of these things because you can't do everything, you just can't. If you try to control everything, every problem becomes your problem, that's overwhelming. That is not sustainable. So remember that you really need to build your team and delegate to your team to expand your world so it does not seem…

as small and it does not seem as big of an issue when issues do come up. So focus on hiring the right people, which we talk about in other episodes, so I'm not going to go into detail about that, but hiring the right people and delegating. Another thing that will help with this quite a bit is getting your systems on point, because it's really easy to get bogged down on those repetitive tasks. You do them over and over and over again. But if you have…

some sort of system in place that maybe you can automate those or maybe you can, instead of people coming to you with a question, they know how to resolve those issues because maybe there's a client that is upset because someone didn't call them back. Well, you have a process in place for whenever that happens. That way someone's not coming to you to bring that issue to you because in reality, they shouldn't need to. That's something that, that's what you hire those people for to help you out.

Tyson Mutrux (10:41.824)
And so it helps you expand your world. And that way yours does not seem so small anymore. I will give you…

Tyson Mutrux (10:57.198)
We get to that story in a second. Dang it. I almost got to I almost went to it You're gonna have a lot of editing on this one. Sorry. This one's not as well structured as some of the other ones. So it's just I'm having to muddle through it a little bit

Tyson Mutrux (11:17.752)
Okay.

The reality is that when you have those strong systems in place, small mistakes don't have the same weight. Your systems catch a lot of those errors, they create consistency, and they keep things running smoothly. So you have less and less of those little mistakes. Some of this is an accumulation of many, many mistakes that are happening over the course of a short amount of time.

and you have the systems in place that are on point. And I'm not perfect in this either. Let me just say that. When we were going through the big system shift over the last 18 months, there were times where things were kind of not falling apart, but it was a lot going on in a short amount of time and it got very overwhelming at times. So you may not be in that position right now where your systems are on point. The whole idea of this is getting them on point so that

All of these little mistakes, these little errors that pop up throughout the day are less and less as you fine-tune your systems as you go by. You fine-tune your systems as time goes by.

Tyson Mutrux (12:37.39)
All right, the last thing I want to get to is trying to adopt that growth mindset. That is something that I have been working more and more on lately. I'd say overall I've done a really good job, but about a year ago I started kind of getting to this not great, I don't want to say that, it's not 100 % true either.

Tyson Mutrux (13:06.498)
The last thing I want to get to is developing a growth mindset. Many of you probably already have it if you're listening to this. Some of you may not. That's completely fine. It is something you have to train your mind on over time. And I go in and out of it, right? Where I have a great mindset, very growth driven, rising tide's kind of a mindset. We all naturally will slip out of that. But the more you can stay in that growth mindset,

the more powerful ways you can expand your world. So I'm going give you an example. A week ago, I had a court appearance at a small town several hours away. And what I did is I flew my plane down there, got into the courtroom and the defense attorney wasn't there. And I was sent an email and

whenever I sent the email, I saw another email in my inbox that the hearing had been canceled and the date had not been removed from my calendar. And so what I, the way I took it, I actually was not mad, was not frustrated at all. Instead, I just said, you know what? It was a great opportunity for me to get the plane out. I was a little rusty. It had been a little bit since I'd gotten the plane out. And I just took it as an opportunity

to fine tune my flying skills. It was a court I'd never been to, so now I know how to get there pretty easily. know how the whole process from getting the courtesy vehicle to getting into court, all that. I found a nice little health food store down there that was really awesome in this tiny town, didn't expect it. So I was able to flip what could have been an extremely frustrating thing to, not an issue, actually.

I really enjoyed my day. It was pretty fantastic. It wasn't like I drove. It would have been a total of seven hours driving. It was a total of two hours with flight time and pre-flight, all that. So it wasn't like I lost an entire day. I lost part of my day. It wasn't like a big deal. I had fun doing it. I enjoyed myself. And I was able to knock some of the rust off when it came to flying. But that is…

Tyson Mutrux (15:35.022)
part of the power of having that, I think it's a positive mindset obviously, but that growth mindset, I looked at it as, this was an opportunity. This was not something that, a mistake was made obviously, and that was something that we had to, we addressed though in a manner that was not, wasn't angry, it was just something, hey listen, let's make sure we keep an eye on this, because it's not an issue that's coming up a ton.

whenever a court appearance is continued, let's make sure it's removed from the calendar. It was on me too. It was one those things where it wasn't just on the person that didn't remove it. Because we do have someone that's in charge of the calendar, but it's something I should have caught it too. And the reality is we're attorneys, we're law firm owners, and it is ultimately on us. So we have to take some ownership of it. that's the way I explained it to the person that missed it.

It is also one of those things where like I could have a I could have ruined my day, you know, I could have ruined my day, but instead had a different view of it. And so when you're going through it your day, think about that a little bit. Think about viewing your world a little differently, not so small. Think of it quite a bit bigger and it might change, might change the way you view things. All right, so just remember

The smaller you define your world, the bigger your problems seem. So work on expanding that perspective, building a team, focusing on your systems, adopting that growth mindset. They're all critical to keeping problems in check. I know that this was a little bit of a different, not as concrete episode. I understand that, I get it. It's probably a little bit longer than some of the other ones, but.

It was something that I've been thinking about and hopefully there's something in here you can take away where you can reduce a little bit of stress, lighten your day a little bit, and maybe not take yourself so seriously sometimes. Sometimes that can be beneficial as well. But just some action items you can take just as a reminder. Develop your big picture vision. So try to write that down. If you've not done so.

Tyson Mutrux (18:00.908)
We have other episodes on that. And I did an episode all by itself on vision. So go check that out. Work on delegating one task. So one of your action items is just delegate one task. So get something that's on your plate right now. Get it off your plate. So just start with one task and maybe that'll snowball into getting a bunch more. Audit your system. So go through and try to identify at least one area where you can implement or improve a system.

And then the last one is reframe a setback. So think about some recent challenge and how you can learn from it. So kind of like I had the mishap with the court appearance, try to reframe something that you're going through, some challenge that you have. And I think that that might help you a little bit in a lot of areas of your life, not just stress, but maybe moving on from things and kind of…

Helping you when it comes to your mindset a bit. That's all I have for you today. I really appreciate you listening. Remember to text me if you got anything you want me to cover 301-501-9260. Until next week, remember that consistent action is the blueprint that turns your goals into reality. Take care, everybody.