Lawyers tend to have big egos. Mostly, that’s a good thing. It’s what allows them to be successful. Imagine what it would be like if you constantly doubted yourself and your abilities.
In 10 Things Highly Productive People Don’t Do, item 4 caught my attention:
They are not realistic when it comes to their abilities
When it comes to your own skills and expectations; it’s better to be an illusionist than being modest or realistic. Successful people and high achievers are overconfident of their abilities. They believe that they can achieve anything and expect the very best to come. This is very important in order to be productive.
Holding such beliefs about yourself will make you (even if you are the laziest person on earth) tend to take actions in order to justify your own beliefs. It will lower your resistance against hard work.
If you feel incompetent, simply ask yourself if holding such a belief has ever helped you. If not get rid of it and get a new belief because at the end of the day a wrong belief that makes you feel good is far better than a more realistic one that makes you feel incompetent.
Now before you can say this is a recipe for malpractice, it doesn’t mean you should take on work you’re not competent to do and blindly do it. It means believing you can get the work done and that you can figure out how to make that happen.
In the early days of my practice, I often took cases I was nowhere near ready to handle. I believed that if some of the attorneys I’d met could do it, I could too. I spent long hours in the library. I hired experienced secretaries and paralegals. I asked other attorneys for advice. And when I was truly over my head, I associated with bigger firms, watched, learned, and earned.
If I didn’t believe in myself, I would have turned down the business and perhaps never learned what to do.
Successful people start with vision. They see themselves where they want to be, doing the things they want to do. They believe that they are able to do it, and that’s how they become able to do it.
