The gift of thanks is precious.  This morning I had the opportunity to listen in on a thank you voicemail message from a client to a lawyer I know.  The lawyer had sent over a holiday gift basket to the company and a senior member of the executive called to express his thanks.  His voicemail message was truly inspiring and reminded me about how an adeptly delivered thank you takes little time to give and can bring great happiness to the recipient.  Here’s what he did:

• He picked up the phone and made a call.
• He spoke slowly and told a story about how the gift basket was received and how everyone on the team appreciated it.
• He expressed sincere thanks.

The lawyer was delighted by the message.

In these pre-Christmas days many of us working in the legal sector are sending and receiving gifts.  Often times in the interest of expediency we will send a quick email of thanks and certainly that is sufficient to check the proper etiquette box.  I encourage you though to take just an extra moment and make a phone call instead.  Happiness is contagious.

Anne is a good fit for her corporate legal practice and could really enjoy the work and her colleagues but she is constantly in fear of making an error.  Joanne is at the office long hours and yet her billings are low because she under rates her value as a lawyer.  Sue is a smart and talented mid-level associate who lacks confidence in her abilities.  There are many challenges for women in legal practice and one important one is an internal challenge: lack of self-confidence.

In their blog post for the Harvard Business Review,  Four Ways Women Stunt Their Careers Unintentionally, Jill Flynn, Kathryn Heath, and Mary Davis Holt discuss the small shifts in thinking and perspective that can help women professionals:

“What we’ve found in our work is that career momentum for women is not about adding job skills but about changing everyday thinking and behaviors. We don’t think the majority of high-performing women need to make major changes. Small adjustments in how they think and act can improve not only how confident they seem, but how confident they feel.”

I couldn’t agree more.  Coaching is an effective tool for surfacing confidence challenges and addressing them.  Lack of confidence is not something women just have to “live with”.  If you lack confidence then I urge you to work with a coach or other related professional to help you grow your appreciation for your strengths and attributes.

Remember that old Maxell tape ad?  The commercial with a guy sitting in the armchair with his hair blowing back from the intensity of the sound waves? Well that’s pretty much what I look like these days as I move through my weekly schedule. Abundance is great and abundance can be a challenge. For those of you who are in a similar state, here’s a simple practice that will help keep your priorities on track. I call it the weekly meeting with yourself.

Schedule a meeting with yourself.

Go somewhere where you can be undisturbed.  If you stay in your office turn of your email and blackberry.  Work on your project-list, to-do list, and calendar, and spend time reviewing what you finished in the past week.  Treat this meeting with the respect you would give to a client meeting.  Put it in your calendar and don’t book over it.  This ritual is very effective for being mindful of how you are spending your time.

Here’s a Harvard Business Review blog post with great additional information:
How to Stay Focused on What’s Important by Gina Trapani

Best wishes for a productive September!

Practice number 3 we talked about the concept of Good Enough as a tool to battle perfectionism and practice 4 addressed using the time management skill of Beat the Clock to support Good Enough. Our next practice is about Waves. The world around us ebbs and flows. You would be very hard pressed to find anything that remains constant and static, and we are no different. 

Our brains and bodies work in rhythms. We are physically designed to work best by cycling between periods of energy spending and renewing.

Fact: “Research in the 1970s showed that 90 to 120 minute ultradian rhythms (ulta dies – many times a day) account for the ebb and flow of our energy throughout the day. Physiological measures such as heart rate, hormonal levels, muscle tension and brain-wave activity all increase during the first part of the cycle. After an hour or so, these measures start to decline and the body begins to crave a period of rest and recovery. Signals include a desire to yawn and stretch, hunger pangs, increased tension, an inclination to procrastinate.” – The Power of Full Engagement, Jim Loehr and Tony Schwartz

Fact: Your brain can only operate at peak capacity for periods of up to 90 minutes.
“Ninety minutes appears to be the maximum amount of time that we can bring the highest level of focus to any given activity. The evidence is equally strong that great performers practice no more than 4 ½ hours a day.” – TheEnergyProject.com, Tony Schwartz

Work intensively for up to 90 minutes at a time with brief ten minute periods of recuperation to walk around the office, stretch, or fill a glass of water. Notice the impact of this practice on the quality and effectiveness of your output.

Sandra works three times as long as she needs to on her files, checking and re-checking and going through countless drafts. She is driven by her fear of making an error. Sandra works long hours in the office but rarely meets her billable target because she consistently edits down her time.

Mary is unhappy. While she enjoys commercial litigation files she is stressed all the time. The partners provide her with positive feedback as do her clients but every time she makes any kind of error she takes it as a sign of failure.

Do any of these scenarios sound familiar?

Some might say the answer is simple. Sandra just needs to take a different approach. Sandra needs to do fewer revisions, record all her time and let the partners decide what needs to be written off.

As for Mary, shouldn’t she just pay attention to the positive feedback from the partners and her peers and realise that she is good at her work?

If only it were so simple.

Sandra and Mary are each in the grip of their inner critic and it is obscuring their judgment.

To learn more about dealing with your inner critic please visit my article on the Canadian legal weblog Slaw.ca.

Hopefully you have had an opportunity to work on and implement the Morning Ritual and One Thing at a Time practices and they are already having a positive impact on your day and how you approach it. If you haven’t had an opportunity don’t be discouraged just recommit to working on it and you will get there.

The next things we will look at is knowing and understanding when perfection is not required, or sometimes attainable, and how time management is important to stay on track.

Practice Three: Good Enough

Not every piece of work requires the same painstaking care and attention. Mastering the ability to recognize when the job is good enough is a vital way to gain back portions of your work day. 

Sandra was a perfectionist who was doing multiple drafts of simple letters and memos. The time she was investing in these was taking away from the time she had to spend on more complex work. As a result she was not recording chunks of time and was always fighting deadlines. Since she began integrating a Good Enough strategy into her practice she has caught up on her backlog of files. Now she will do a quick first draft of her letters and her veteran legal secretary polishes the draft and sends it to her for her signature. Her clients appreciate the shorter memos that get straight to the point.  And she has more time for the complex legal work she excels at.

The principle of Good Enough is especially valuable for you perfectionists out there – save your painstaking eye for detail for the projects that most deserve it.

Practice Four: Beat The Clock

Related to the principle of Good Enough, rationing time is a strategy for maximizing the ability to plough through a to-do-list in less time. For the smaller and simpler tasks such as reporting letters and memos, assess how much time each project is worth then work to complete the task within the allotted time.

I have been using this strategy to manage the amount of time I spend preparing for presentations. I used to endlessly revise my presentation slides and speaking notes. The time that went into each presentation was excessive. Now I manage my time carefully and give myself a time budget for investing in the preparation of each presentation. The result is that my work is focused and I often finish ahead of schedule. The overall quality of my presentations has improved.