Step back and look at the big picture

October 19, 2017 by
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Yesterday, after my walk, I was cooling down in the park, and saw a bird perched near the top of a tree. I watched him move higher until he was sitting on the highest branch where he sat and actively looked around.

I wondered what he was looking at, or for. His mate? Scouting for predators? Searching for food? Or was he just enjoying the view, naturally climbing higher because his instincts told him that this was the safest place?

From his higher perch, he could survey the land and decide where to go and what to do next. I thought this was an apt paradigm for a human life, that is, the value of periodically stopping and looking at the big picture.

We need to get our nose out of books and away from our devices. We need to hang up our phones. We need some time and some distance from our routines so we can assess where we are and where we want to go.

I do a lot of thinking on my walks. But they aren’t long enough to explore much more than my day or my week–what I’m working on now or what I need to do next.

No time to asses what I’ve done this year, or contemplate what I want to do next year or in the years to come.

Maybe a longer walk would help. Maybe a retreat. Or a few days off at a resort (with room service) where I can think and plan.

I know some folks who take a couple of days off every year to decide on their goals for the coming year. It gives them clarity, they say, and allows them to focus, plan and manage their future.

“The Getting Things Done” methodology talks about the need to look at your life from the 50,000-foot level, and all the way down to the “runway” level where we work and live day-to-day. Other methodologies do something similar, having you first determine your long-term vision and then working backward to map out your yearly and then monthly goals, and finally your daily activities.

However you go about it, it comes down to stepping away from the minutia of daily living, to look at the horizon, asses the threats and the opportunities, and decide where to go next.

Make sure you also have a marketing plan

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Filed Under: Goal Setting, Personal development Tagged With: ,

You think you’re so smart. Good!

August 7, 2014 by
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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.

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Filed Under: Personal development, Productivity Tagged With: , ,