“What do I do when the person I am speaking to is boring?” 

In essence, business development for lawyers is all about building trusting relationships. The quickest and most sure-fire way to build trust is to spend more time listening than speaking. To be a good listener you need to be a good questioner and learn to ask about things that get people interested and speaking about subjects that matter to them. 

Or, as Mark Hunter commented in his Slaw column last week: ”ever notice that people do business with people they like?” Being a good listener is the fast track to being likeable. 

So what happens when you can’t listen? What do you do if you find your client or important contact boring?

Faking interest never works.  And just imagine being on the receiving end with someone looking at you with boredom. The natural reaction is to feel insulted and to then judge the person to be arrogant, aloof and yes, unlikeable.  

The answer:  It’s up to you to find what is interesting about the person. Push aside your judgemental inner voice and place your focus firmly on the other person. Everyone is interesting, your job is to uncover this.  Use questions to get the person speaking about things that are important to him/her.  Follow your curiosity. The goal here is to listen and discover, not to prove how interesting you are.  Some sample questions that can open up a conversation are:

• How did you get into being a …. ?
• What are you looking forward to this weekend?
• I’m curious, what made you decide to… (go to that school, travel to Palm Springs, etc.)

Another approach is to ask for advice when the opportunity arises. The majority of people enjoy teaching. 

Take me for example. I don’t golf. I have never held a golf club. What do I do when faced with an avid golfer?  Instead of getting bored and shifting the subject, I dig into it. I confess my general ignorance and then ask to be enlightened.  What are the best golf courses in town? Has it been good for business development? What’s the best age to start kids in the sport? What have been the best golf courses they have ever played on? What I discovered is that while I am not interested in the sport  I am interested in what people like about it and get out of it. 

The bottom line: it’s up to you to turn it around. It is in your power to turn boring into interesting. 

When you show you are interested and really listen to the person you will distinguish yourself from the majority of people who do not.  The end result is that the person will then likely become interested in you and it will be your turn to tell your story.

My favorite resource on all things to do with listening is Just Listen by Dr. Mark Goulston.   He reminds us all that we are responsible for our own degree of interest with this quote: 

“Boredom is what happens when I fail to make someone interesting.”  Warren Bennis, Founding Chariman, USC Leadership Institute

Tony Schwartz author of the book The Way We Work Isn’t Working, co-written with Jean Gomes and Catherine McCarthy, has concluded that to be top of our game, we need to integrate both intense periods of work and short periods of rest into the work-day.  Schwartz is featured today in a Globe & Mail interview “An R&R room at the office? It could be just what the company needs” by Wency Leung:

Q: Your book suggests it’s possible to get more done by spending less time at work. Can you explain?

A: I don’t think it’s so much about spending less time at work; I think it’s about shifting the focus from time to energy. The more continuously and longer you work, the less incremental return you get on each additional hour.

We are physiologically meant to pulse, and we operate best when we move between spending energy and renewing energy. We value spending energy and we are good at it, but we undervalue renewing energy, even though that’s a powerful way to improve performance.

I urge you to read the article and give this approach a try.  What is the impact on your effectiveness when you schedule in several periods for uninterrupted work during the day, with short breaks and periods for phone calls and email?

I am very excited about the new book Perserverance by leadership consultant, educator, speaker, author Margaret Wheatley, PHD.   I feel like this book is being released just when the world needs it most.

From Wheatley’s website:

“Perseverance is a day-by-day decision not to give up.  Wheatley does not offer the usual feel-good, rah-rah messages.  Instead, she focuses on the situations, feelings, and challenges that can, over time, cause us to lose heart or lose our way. When we feel lost, overwhelmed, betrayed or exhausted, we need to know we have a choice for how we respond.  And we have to nurture the rewarding times, when we experience the joy of working together on something hard but worthwhile, when we realize we’ve made a small difference. ”

I am going to immediately order three copies.

In general we might just guess that our contact is busy and get in touch again.  But in cases where there have been some bumps in the relationship or where someone doesn’t respond after a couple of attempts the assumptions come rushing in.

In verbal conversation we have the urge to fill the silent gaps in conversation with words.  In the communication that happens in email or through voicemail we fill the silence with assumptions.  When we don’t get a response to our first or second messages we start to make guesses about why we aren’t hearing back and these guesses feed on our insecurities.

“Why do we go to our insecurities? Because we know that people tend to shy away from communicating negative messages. If someone hasn’t called us, we think to ourselves, it must be that she doesn’t want to communicate something negative to us. Or she simply wants us to stop bothering her and go away. Also, we figure, if the person wanted to work with us, it would be in her interest to let us know ” she would have called.” Peter Bregman

If you want to learn how to handle the silent treatment check out HBR blogger Peter Bregman’s post this week.  He maps out the three vital steps to take and explains how to handle these silences with dignity and polish.

Imposter Syndrome is “a psychological syndrome identified in the late 1970s by Pauline Clance and Suzanne Imes and expanded upon by Manfred Kets de Vries in a 2005 HBR article. It describes frequent feelings of incompetence despite all of the evidence to the contrary.”  Imposter syndrome is an apt term as people exhibiting the condition literally feel like imposters. 

As a lawyer coach I have encountered a significant number of legal professionals who grapple with an over-active inner critic.  The inner critic cannot be silenced but there are effective strategies for handling the doubt and negative self-talk and turning it into something positive.

This week the Harvard Business review blog offers an excellent article by Susan David on “how-to-deal” with your inner critic.  Click here to read more or download a copy of the attached article.  It’s time to start talking back to the critic!

(Article: How to Manage your Inner Critic)

“The Women Lawyers Forum held their Second Annual Awards Lunch on November 17th and it was as successful and inspiring as last year’s event. There were 175 in attendance at the Sutton Place Hotel and the feeling in the room was one of warmth and enthusiasm.

Two outstanding women lawyers were recognized – Kathryn Berge, QC received the Award of Excellence and Brenda Edwards received the first Debra Van Ginkel, QC Mentoring Award. Both women received standing ovations when they went up to accept their awards. The speeches by the nominators and the recipients highlighted how far women lawyers have come over the past decade and the power of mentoring. Brenda ended her speech by saying that when asked how she finds the time to mentor so many women, she said that “mentoring feeds my soul.”

The guest speaker was Carole Taylor who has recently joined BLG as a Senior Business Advisor. She spoke about her personal journey from a teenager working in broadcasting to Minister of Finance and all the stops along the way. She encouraged women to take the broad path in their careers not being afraid of accepting positions for which they may not feel entirely ready and to look at all the opportunities in the community and elsewhere that bring a diversity of experience. Too often we focus just on the next step along the promotional road and not what we can learn outside our jobs.

It was an inspiring event because of the outstanding women present at the podium and their openness is telling us about their personal career paths and how it lead to their success.”

As a coach I am often asked about what make the “best investments” of non-billable time.  As Carole Taylor underlined in her presentation – it is valuable to take the broad path.  The broad path means to look for opportunities to learn new things and broaden your horizons.  It is important to stretch a little beyond your immediate knowledge base and skill set.   

My thanks to Linda Robertson for sharing some of the highlights of the The Women Lawyers Forum Second Annual Awards Lunch with us.

As a lawyer coach I am a woman with a mission: To help make our law firms better places to work. One of the most powerful tools for accomplishing this is something called positive acknowledgement.

Positive acknowledgement is about giving the gift our attention by recognizing when someone has done something well. Positive acknowledgement works when you notice someone’s strengths or what they have accomplished and you tell them that you have noticed and why it’s important.

Whether you are a coach, partner, associate, administrator, or librarian, all of us in law firms have the opportunity to set off a simple but powerful shift in our law firm cultures with this one simple action.

Here’s my request for you ” start bringing rain to the desert. Make the determination to offer at least one piece of positive acknowledgement to someone you work with once a week. (To those of you who are already good at this my congratulations and please keep it up!) Read more

The word balance is misleading. It seems to indicate a quantity goal, with a focus on the amount of time being spent on either side of the work-life equation. The exact amount of optimal home time and work time will vary from person-to-person and day-to-day. I like to think that it is not so much a question of quantity but rather the overall quality of our entire life that is important.

What is the quality of our work life? What is the quality of our personal life? When both activities are fulfilling we have an abundance of energy. When one or both are draining we run into health issues and performance challenges.

Instead of work-life balance can we just talk about work-life enjoyment? 

For those of you exploring questions of work-life balance and enjoyment there’s now a CBA resource dedicated to it.  Thanks to Connie Crosby’s post in Slaw.ca for alerting me to this resource.  It’s packed with great articles, links and other resources. 

Ultimately, work-life balance is a personal matter.  Getting the work-life equation right is a key component of developing a productive, fulfilling and yes, successful life.  It’s not about being a slacker.  It’s about being a high achiever by creating the life you want to lead.

Paula invited me to take part in her special book launch promotion.  For the next 48 hours Paula Black will be offering an impressive opportunity to anyone who purchases The Little Black Book: A Lawyer’s Guide To Creating A Marketing Habit in 21 Days. Readers who purchase the book will receive The Smart Lawyer’s Toolkit, a compilation of advice from more than 30 of the most sought-after experts in the legal arena (including myself!). Click here for details.

I’m buying a second copy of the book today so that I can get access to all those great bonus resources!