Free Standalone Toolkit to Document your Brilliance ®
Having taught, coached and mentored nearly 7000 lawyers since 2003 I have found these exercises particularly useful in enabling them to achieve their goals.
These taster stand-alone exercises provide a boost to your clarity and purpose which will enable you to plan your next steps and identify what you need to achieve these. As these exercises are very about you, where you are, where you are going and how you are going to get there, they are relevant whether you are a Student, Trainee, NQ, Solicitor, Partner and/or Legal Business Owner
Each standalone exercise will refer you to any relevant blogs, courses and sections in my book for you to expand your understanding of the topic and take you further in the directions of your dreams.
Where to start? Documenting Your Brilliance ® with a mindset for success
The first place to start is at the beginning! And where you are now is the beginning of the next step – hence the first two exercises are for you to reflect on where you are and where you want to go with the skill set and opportunities you can see at the present. Just click on the titles below to access the exercises.
Going forward, in order to develop or hone your mindset you will need to change your Inner Critic to Inner Cool ™ and understand what your self-confidence looks like in various situations.
Having a mindset for success includes being able to be resilient and use techniques to release stress not only in a tumultuous time but also for the daily highs and lows.
Where to start? Personal Branding - Documenting your Brilliance ®
Many lawyers really struggle with selling themselves properly. The most articulate orators and the most convincing negotiators can easily fall flat when faced with the challenge of describing their unique qualities and positive attributes.
In order to serve more clients, lawyers need to raise their profile in two areas. Internally, particularly where you work for a medium to large firm with your colleagues. Externally in your professional circle and marketplace in which you deliver your legal services.
What you know about yourself and what others perceive you to be, is your personal brand. To be clear, your personal brand is all about you not about the services or the firm.
It is said ‘people buy from people that they trust’ so having a clear idea of your own brand and how it is perceived is fundamental to standing out in this crowded marketplace. (as at February 2021, there are just under 190,000 legal professionals on the Law Society Database alone).
Therefore, developing and honing your personal brand is crucial to your success in law.
Prerequisite to developing and honing your personal brand is a knowledge of:
- You (qualities, values, skills) and
- how you are currently perceived by clients and colleagues.
Where to start? Documenting your Brilliance ® as a Leader
Leadership starts with you.
These exercises allow you to examine the ‘personal’ factor of leadership. The first exercise asks you three fundamental questions to help you determine what kind of leader you are. The second one then provides a leadership competency grid, allowing you to review your progress in developing different aspects of leadership.
The next two exercises focus on planning your actions and recording your successes.
All of these exercises are designed to assist you in developing effective leadership techniques, wherever you are on your career path.
If you are a junior lawyer, you might think leadership is only relevant to the later stages of your career. But this is simply not the case! Leadership can be required of you at any level, even if you are not officially in charge – and developing these professional skills can never come soon enough. To find out more about this, please read my blog How do you lead when you are not in charge?
Where to start? Documenting your Brilliance ® for understanding your clients' experience
People often instruct solicitors at bleak and difficult times in their lives; divorces and disputes, injuries and injustice. Even more positive events, like buying a house, are often stressful occasions. So, no lawyer expects their clients to be queue of rosy-cheeked jokers grinning from ear to ear.
But are they happy with you? Are they satisfied with the work you’ve done for them and, just as important, the way in which you have done it? These are vital questions for a legal business – and they form the focus of my latest blog: Is your business giving clients the right customer experience?
It is important to consider your client experience unflinchingly and on a regular basis. This is why I have added two new helpful exercises below so you can 'walk in your client's shoes'.
With these exercises, you can take the first crucial steps to analysing the experience your clients have using your services. The exercises then go on to offer suggestions about how to use this analysis This type of analysis can be instigated at any time and should be reviewed on a regular basis to learn what is working for you and what is not.
Where to start? Documenting your Brilliance ® to increase effectiveness
Following some recent Zoom workshops on ‘Self-confidence in Setting Boundaries’ and ‘Boosting Resilience in times of change and uncertainty’ it has become apparent that setting boundaries and saying no has become really important to ensure that you are effective in the workplace and outside.
Being effective means that you need to be able to set boundaries and say no to ensure that you stay top of your game and don’t end up in burn out.
So, let’s start with setting boundaries, I include a link to a blog with suggestions for creating time boundaries at work.
Even though most lawyers can see the value here they are extremely reluctant to set well-being boundaries and say no. Hence the blog "When did you last say 'No' to your Boss?" and the impact of not being able to do so.
To support you on this journey, here are two exercises to assist you on setting boundaries and saying no. I have also added some suggestions for when you feel you have to say yes!
