While some may question their legitimacy and value, there are a number of reasons why it is worthwhile for lawyers to pursue industry awards and other recognitions.

As much as people like to say that industry awards are politically motivated or popularity contests, and to level various other criticisms at them –some of which are valid—a lot of good can come from seeking out and earning such honours.

Most obviously, it is a big confidence builder to be recognized, and we all know that confidence is key to success and business development!

Industry, community and sector-based awards are also effective tools to enhance name recognition, and are often associated with high-value networking opportunities which can provide you with access to other successful and inspiring people who you might not otherwise get to meet. These honours are also great material for website content and other online profile-building tools, and can provide an opportunity to tell inspiring stories that will motivate and encourage others.

There are several misconceptions about how lawyers are nominated and chosen for awards and rankings, however, so let’s clear some of them up.

People often mistakenly think that the recipients of industry awards are chosen by some secret process or because someone nominated them without their knowledge. This is the same misconception that drives people to think that stories relating to our sector appear in the media because a journalist found the story.

Nope! Most of the time this is actually not the case at all.

In fact, most stories about legal issues are written because a lawyer has taken the initiative to reach out to a journalist to provide her with the story. And most lawyers who win awards and honours do so because they have taken the initiative to ask to be nominated for them –often writing their own nomination materials or submitting the nomination themselves– or because they know someone like me who actively looks for honours and awards that they would be best suited for and creates a nomination package with them.

On rare occasions someone who thinks highly of a colleague might spontaneously nominate them without their knowledge and participation. But this is the exception, not the rule.

For the most part, lawyers get on the awards circuit because they want to be there and they have figured out how to sell themselves to organizations that give out awards. They also are at ease or at least have come to terms with nominating themselves, or they have a friend (or two) that they are comfortable asking to nominate them.

That said, there are recognitions and rankings in every industry that are created solely to make money, so I urge you to do some research before getting yourself or anyone else involved. You certainly don’t want your name connected with an association, award or ranking list that isn’t legitimate.

Once you identify the kinds of recognition opportunities you would like to be considered for, look into what the nomination entails and plan how you will go about putting together a nomination package, which may include reference letters or other documentation. Consider whether you have genuinely demonstrated the characteristics that the award is meant to recognize, or have reached the level of expertise and experience in your area of practice that you feel justifies your recognition. Then, create a narrative that shows how you fit what they are looking for.

I know that many people feel uncomfortable nominating themselves for awards. But you can use this as an opportunity for relationship-building.

Be intentional about using industry awards and recognitions as an opportunity to exercise your “giving over getting” mindset and nurture your professional relationships. Keep your eyes peeled for recognitions that honour attributes of particular people in your network and when you see one, take the initiative! Call them and collaborate with them on a nomination. Or go ahead and just nominate them yourself! It is the rare person in any of our networks that is generous and invested enough in their relationships to show this kind of investment and commitment in the success of others. Be that person in your networks.

This article was originally published in Canadian Lawyer.

One of the things that is most likely to catalyze people to call me is the appearance of an external pressure or demand on them to “build a practice.”

One of the things that is most likely to catalyze people to call me is the appearance of an external pressure or demand on them to “build a practice.” It may arise in the context of learning what they need to do to level up in their firms, or to support the amount of income that they want, or in some other context. But whatever the context, when this demand presents itself they generally feel that they have no choice but to satisfy it and they have no idea how to do it.

In most cases these lawyers have never before had to turn their minds to expressly identifying the things that they find satisfying about the practice or to envisioning what a fulfilling, satisfying practice would look like to them. They have gone about the work that they have been given, been successful at it, spent a lot of time at it and that is as far as they needed to go.

Moreover, because they have always defined their value by the technical aspects of the work they do, they haven’t thought about who their clients might be — who they serve — beyond a vague sense that their clients could really be “anyone” within a certain geographic area that has a problem or need that falls within their general sphere of practice.

So, when they come to me, they often don’t feel themselves to be in the best position from which to start building a business. And they are right. It extremely difficult to build a business if you are going to market with a vague mindset and an overly broad definition of who you are targeting. Moreover, any practice that you do manage to build on that foundation is unlikely to be one that will be satisfying to you and sustain itself over the long term.

You improve your chances of success significantly if you start with a narrower and more specifically defined focus. You can expand from there as time goes on, but starting with more specificity makes taking the action that you need to take more manageable.

The question then becomes how does one narrow the focus?

It starts with figuring out what you WANT to build, instead of trying to figure out what you SHOULD build, MUST build or what is EASIEST to build.

The secret to figuring out what you WANT to build lies in figuring out what drives you — what motivates you intrinsically. Why did you go into law? What do you get out of it? What lights your fire about it and drives you forward?

Contrary to what many people might think, for lawyers and others in knowledge-based enterprises that require creativity, problem-solving, decision making and higher-order thinking, your intrinsic motivator likely isn’t money.

With that possible motivator off the table, you have to look farther and wider to uncover your intrinsic motivator(s). The framework that I use to help direct this inquiry with clients is rooted in the thesis of a book called Drive: The surprising truth about what motivates us by Daniel Pink.

Though presented in a different context than the one addressed in this column, Drive expounds on the proposition that when people are engaged in knowledge-based enterprises, like the practice of law, their performance is best and their satisfaction is highest when their work provides them with a sense of autonomy, mastery and purpose — the motivation trifecta. If your work delivers those three things, you will feel more connection to what you do, and get more fulfillment from it.

Unpacking these terms, I think you will agree that a practice hallmarked by these elements would be satisfying indeed:

Autonomy — Independence; the ability to be self-directed in our enterprise. Autonomy causes us to pursue our work with a sense of personal commitment and engagement to it, rather than just putting in the time and fulfilling our obligation with no spark or passion.

Mastery — The compulsion or desire to continually grow, stretch and advance our knowledge and skills in an area that matters to us. Continued growth is a human need that is fundamental to our feeling of fulfillment.

Purpose — The knowledge that our work serves something larger than ourselves — a greater good. “Finding meaning in one’s work has been shown to increase motivation, engagement, empowerment, career development, job satisfaction, individual performance and personal fulfillment, and to decrease absenteeism and stress. [http://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S0191308510000067]”

While they are all important, the last of these may have the greatest impact on business development success for lawyer. When we believe that our work is contributing to a purpose or cause that has significance and is greater than ourselves, we enjoy the highest levels of motivation and fulfillment, exhibit greater resilience and grit in the face of adversity and will overcome more or less any hurdle thrown our way in service of contributing to an outcome that we care about.

The contrary is also true. It will be very difficult to maintain a sense of satisfaction and fulfillment in your practice, and overcome the challenges that are inherent in the practice of law, over the long term if what you are doing doesn’t motivate you naturally and you instead have to rely on external motivators — fear, money, rewards, recognition, status etc. — to keep you going.

Start as you mean to go on. Factor these three elements in when you are cultivating your business development mindset and choosing the strategies and tactics you will use to build your practice. This will help you pursue relationships and opportunities that will be connected to the people and values that are important to you and set you on a path that will give you the best chance of coming out with a business that excites and ignites you, that you feel inspired and compelled to grow and build and that incorporates all of the things about the profession and the practice that have meaning for you.

This article was originally published in Canadian Lawyer.

How do you get to the point where your contacts and connections become clients and referral sources? It’s a question that baffles us all.

How do you get to the point where your contacts and connections become clients and referral sources?

It’s a question that baffles us all.

We can get to the point where people like us, enjoy our company socially, etc., but they don’t hire us or refer their friends and colleagues to us professionally. Why is that?

The answer to that question isn’t simple and there isn’t a silver bullet that will remedy it.

Most lawyers approach the question of how we get hired as though it is a decision based solely on facts. They broadcast all the facts that support why they are the best candidate for the kinds of engagement they want and expect that to drive contacts and potential clients to call or refer them.

But the truth is that none of us actually makes decisions solely on facts. Our decisions are driven by what we “feel” is right. And what we “feel” is right is determined by a completely different part of our brain (the limbic system) than the one that considers and analyzes facts (the neocortex).

Facts are still important, because people will use them to justify the decisions we want to make. But, fundamentally, if you want people to want to hire you or refer their friends to you, broadcasting a bunch of facts to them isn’t going to do it. You will have to engage both their hearts and minds — make their limbic system and neocortex fire in your favour all at once — so that they “feel” like it is the right decision, not just “think” it is. And you can’t do that on facts alone.

That is all very esoteric and ephemeral, so while it is fundamental that you keep it in mind, let’s unpack it and identify some practical things you can do to create this “whole brain” experience that will inspire your contacts to go beyond socializing with you and hire you or refer others to you.

Contacts “convert” at the convergence of a number of vectors. The more of the vectors you satisfy for any particular contact, the more likely it is that you will engage their hearts and minds in the way that will inspire them to become a client or a referral source. Some of those vectors are:

1. Quality of your relationship – The goal is to cultivate your relationships with your contacts to the point that they are stronger and more loyal than are their relationships with others who do what you do. How do you do that? To summarize a number of my other columns, you identify their needs and fill them, you make promises and keep them and you give them the benefit of your knowledge, connections and emotional investment — over and over again.
2. Deep understanding of them, their businesses and their industries – In survey after survey, clients identify communication of specific insights and anticipation of relevant emerging trends and circumstances as key factors in their hiring decisions and as hallmarks of “value” in their legal services providers. If you demonstrate a deeper understanding of these elements than do their current lawyers, or anyone else they know, you will engage them more deeply.
3. Experience – Experience that is relevant and relatable to their issue on the part of the individual lawyers, the team and the firm all matter. That means not only experience with the particular kind of legal issue they have but also experience in their particular market sector and/or with other clients with whom they have something in common (industry sector, geographic location, cultural factors, etc.). The rest of the world doesn’t self-identify by subcategories of legal work.They identify by all kinds of other things. Fit yourself into the things that your contact identifies by when trying to articulate your relevant experience and it will resonate much more strongly with them.
4. Added value – Generally speaking, the things that one does to be perceived as “adding value” are outside of a work portfolio. When you are an incumbent lawyer hoping to continue to cultivate a stronger relationship with your client, added value lies in the things that you do that are over and above performing your best work. When you do not yet have a working relationship with someone, the added-value activities are those same things. It requires you to figure out where you can contribute something to your contact that is genuinely useful and valuable and not tied to any reciprocal benefit that you are hoping to get. What is valuable to any given person at any given time is totally subjective and situational. You have to turn on your empathy and listen actively to figure out what is “valuable” to the person for whom you are hoping to create value.
5. Proof points – Develop the stories and other means you use to communicate and give examples that back up your claims about all of the above to your contacts. Craft these intentionally, and with the factors that will engage your clients in mind, and they will be much more successful at communicating what is valuable and compelling about working with you than will a barrage of facts or bald, unconnected statements about how great your service is or how responsive you are.
6. Engagement – People persistently underestimate how important emotional engagement is to the creation of bonds between people. It is one of the three most significant things available for you to contribute to support the building of rapport and connection with another person. Sharing enthusiasm, celebrating, commiserating or empathizing, actively and authentically, are forms of emotional engagement that are compelling and often catalyze connections between people.
7. Pricing – Pricing is tricky. I do not advocate for racing to the lowest price as a means of distinguishing oneself, but there is no doubt that price is a necessary component of any value assessment. To put a fine point on it, the benefit given must exceed the price paid for there to be a perception of a value surplus in the mind of your contact and for you to successfully navigate this vector. However, rather than assuming that reducing the price is the only way to create the balance that you are looking for, think instead about what has value to your contact and increase how much of that you are contributing so that it is commensurate with and appropriate to the price you are charging.

Focusing on these vectors can work even if your contact already has legal counsel. There are many, many examples of lawyers unseating an incumbent lawyer or law firm when they were firing on all of these bases and the incumbent was not.

The Relationship Dance. It’s about the little things; over and over again. 

Imagine this: You decide to reach out to a member of your professional network and ask her if she’d like to meet for a drink after work one evening. You craft what you think is the perfect email: professional but charming, confident, not too pushy, eager but not desperate. You’re excited to see her and catch up, to share some of your ideas with her, and hopefully to develop a deeper relationship. You hit “send”, you smile to yourself, and then…you don’t hear back.

Not so hard to imagine, right? We’ve all been there. And we’ve all experienced the anxiety that comes next. 

Whether you’ve reached out to a client or co-worker, a member of your network, or even to a friend who isn’t in your line of business, most of us react to silence by questioning ourselves. Did I say something wrong? Did I offend her somehow? Those of us who are more prone to anxiety and insecurity, in general, might ruminate: Does she not like me? Does everyone else not like me? 

Now that I’ve made you re-live that icky feeling, I’m going to ask you to think about your to-do list. Is there someone you’ve been meaning to email or call back, for days or even weeks or months?

I’ll bet there is! 

I didn’t pose this question to make you feel guilty about failing to respond to someone. We’re all busy and we’ve all been overwhelmed. The point of the exercise is, in fact, to get you to feel a little bit better about the times when you’re the one left on someone else’s to-do list. 

Most of us have found ourselves on both sides of this scenario at one point or other. We’ve been both the person who keeps meaning to finally sit down and return an email or phone call, but never seems to get to it, and the person fretting over the lack of response. 

Keeping this in mind will help us navigate the often fraught matter of relationships. Because, let’s face it: while our lives turn on our relationships, they can be complicated and confusing. That applies to all relationships, personal and professional alike. 

In the latter context, our interactions with our clients, co-workers and members of our professional network can have a significant impact on how we feel about our careers.

Shades of Grey

People tend to think about their relationships in black and white. Evolution has wired humans to appraise situations as “good” or “bad”, so that we could act on opportunities or threats, respectively. This is why we instinctively assess our relationships in either/or terms: good or bad, friend or foe. We also see them as fixed, taking the “good” ones for granted, while writing off the “bad” without making an effort to repair them. 

The trouble is that human relationships –like humans themselves– are grey. They are complex, nuanced, and fluid, and they exist on a continuum of “closeness” or “loyalty”, moving up and down it as time and circumstances unfold.

The Relationship Dance

Relationships are made up of small gestures or behaviours, both conscious and unconscious. While each of these actions might seem insignificant in and of themselves, together they are the steps that comprise the relationship dance. Because relationships really are like a dance: you take a step, she takes a step, and each step, or misstep, can change the direction or character of the relationship. 

You rush into a meeting with a co-worker, late, flustered, and apologetic. She is understanding and offers to get you a coffee while you organize yourself. You feel relieved and grateful, and your meeting gets off to a great start, albeit a bit behind schedule. Your relationship has taken a positive step forward. Then you go back to your desk and read an email from another colleague that you perceive to be curt. Offended, you fire off a cool or chippy response. That relationship has just taken a step backward. 

Obviously not all behaviours are created equal. A raised voice might have a greater impact than a text message of a questionable tone. Holding the door for someone and smiling at her might have less impact than a thoughtful message after a meeting. But all gestures, however small, have the potential to shift a relationship. 

Another thing to keep in mind is that positive and negative actions carry different weight, with those that harm relationships being both easier to make and more powerful in their effect. Research has shown that the effects of “bad” interactions are stronger and last longer – 4 times longer and stronger – than the effects of “good” ones. So if you think that you’ve taken a step that may have set one of your relationships back, it will likely take more than one positive one to offset the damage. 

To complicate matters further, not everyone reacts to things in the same way. One person might react well to a colleague’s praise of his work, seeing it as a compliment, while another might view it as patronizing. In fact, the same person might even react differently to the exact same behaviour from one day to the next, depending on what else is going on in her life that day. 

While this might make you want to throw your hands up in frustration and never communicate with anyone again, there are few principles that I find helpful.

Consider the situation from the other person’s point of view. If you are the one stewing over an unacknowledged email, stop to think about what might be going on in the other person’s life. Personal or professional, we all have busy lives involving multiple moving parts. Most of us, at one point or another, have found ourselves barely keeping ourselves afloat in the midst of overwhelming responsibilities and obligations. It might seem backwards to exercise greater compassion toward others when we feel slighted by them, but it can be helpful in gaining some perspective or peace of mind. 

Also, keep in mind that the impact of that person’s silence on you does not likely correspond to an intention to hurt or offend you. To circle back to our first exercise, take a look at your own to-do list. You might see that you too owe someone a response, and in most cases, you will have to acknowledge that your failure to respond that other person is about you, and not him. That will really help put your own frustration in perspective, calm your anxiety, and keep the relationship from snowballing in the wrong direction. (It might even prompt you to finally sit down and send that darned email and knock it off your to-do list once and for all)!

Give people the benefit of the doubt.

Our behaviours are not always or even usually intentional. And with so much human interaction now occurring via text or email, inferring tone when you can’t see the person addressing you further complicates things and can lead to misunderstandings. Keep in mind that your own texts and emails can be misinterpreted just as easily as you might misinterpret the ones you receive. If your contact agrees to meet you for coffee but doesn’t sound that enthusiastic about it to you (this can be due to something as silly as her not using an exclamation point in her email where you would have used one), give her the benefit of the doubt and meet her with a positive attitude. If it’s something more serious, reach out and ask. It’s always better to communicate and get things back on track then let the relationship drift backwards based on a misunderstanding. 

Step outside of the relationship.

Sometimes it’s hard to really see a relationship until we take a step back and try to look at it from an outsider’s perspective. One of the easiest ways to gain clarity is to imagine the advice that you would give to a friend in the same situation. We are often far more honest with others than we are with ourselves. 

Reflect on your relationships through journaling.

Journaling can have many benefits for our personal and professional lives, including helping us create deeper and more meaningful relationships. If one of your work relationships is troubling you, take some time to think about and write down the gestures, big or small, that you and the other person made toward each other in your most recent interactions. This might help you pinpoint where your relationship dance took a wrong turn. Over time, journaling can also help you to identify patterns in your relationships and the behaviours that tend to improve or harm them.  

While relationships can be frustrating in all of their complexity, the nice thing about the fact that they are so “grey” is that we can always work on them. Our relationships with our clients, our colleagues, members of our professional network, or new contacts who we’d like to add to our network, are dynamic. Every time we interact with someone, we have countless opportunities to shape and reshape the relationship. That’s a wonderful thing! Positive relationships can be nurtured and deepened, and negative ones can be repaired. With an understanding of the small steps that make up the relationship dance, we can build the professional relationships that we want. And that, in turn, can have a positive impact on how we feel about our careers. 

We have all heard that statistic that people remember just five percent or less of what they hear in presentations. When you think about how much information we are inundated with every day, that isn’t surprising. I think five percent might actually be optimistic!

So what can we do to help people remember what we say, or at least recall key ideas or concepts that we present to them, or actions that we ask them to take? 

If I asked you to think of the best presentation you saw in the last few years –whether it was business-related or personal– your answer would probably be the presentation that had the most hallmarks of memorability. 

But what makes something memorable?

Just as with cultivating habits, we can find some guidance in neuroscience or the study of the structure and function of the human brain. 

Once we understand how the brain processes information and what it needs to retain it, we can use this knowledge to create and deliver our own presentations that will rise to the top of our audience members’ “best” list. 

The importance of memory

Memory is at the root of all decision-making. If you think back to all of the decisions you’ve made in the past few days –big or small, important or trivial— you’ll notice that all of them will have been informed by what you remembered at the time you made the decision. There are known and categorized heuristics and biases, or cognitive shortcuts, that our brains use to make decisions, and a whole bunch of them –the availability heuristic and its associated biases– base decisions on the things that we can most easily bring to mind in that moment. 

But how do we create that memorability? 

The formation of memory

One of the reasons people forget is because a memory was not formed in the first place. This is often because they aren’t paying attention. 

We’ve all been there, sitting at a conference and realizing that we tuned out ten minutes ago and have no idea what’s going on. Of course we aren’t going to remember what was relayed during that time; we weren’t paying attention in the first place!

So how do we get people to pay attention when we take the floor? 

The first step is in understanding why the brain stops paying attention. Typically, the brain stops paying attention when it has habituated a stimulus, or when a stimulus does not change much and has become predictable.

In order to combat habituation, we need to add variety to a stimulus, or keep our audience members’ brains “on their toes”, so to speak. 

One example of adding variety to a stimulus is to pepper a serious presentation with a bit of humour. As soon as the brain is allowed to detect a pattern of information translation, that pattern is broken by the humour. This makes it harder for the brain to habituate, and “shut off”. 

Another way to combat habituation is to use a communication tool that research has proven is more memorable: stories. Add a story to your presentation and the odds are overwhelming that the story will be what people will remember when they leave — not the facts, analysis and statistics that you quoted to them.

Think about how to craft your slides or any visual aids you use in order to combat habituation. Going from bland text slides to slides with colourful, compelling imagery to video clips or slides that include motion, for example, will create a sense of novelty with each slide. You can use juxtaposition to create memorability in the slides that contain the most important points you are trying to get across.

Facilitating Recall

Forming memories in the minds of your audience members isn’t the end of the story. The next challenge is in preventing those memories from being crowded out by the thousands of other memories formed in your audience members’ brains around the same time. The creation of a memory is fruitless if that memory cannot be found among all the other memories that have been formed in the brain, and brought to front of mind. 

So, once you have facilitated the creation of memories, the next step is to add in elements that will help your audience recall those memories.  

There are several tools that can be used to assist in memory recall. 

One such tool is a cue, or an association that you can create for your points that will help with recall. For example, if you associate your content with a specific object, like a truck, the next time one of your audience members sees a truck, she might be reminded of that content. Cues only work well, however, if there is a strong connection with the content and if they stand out. So, if that audience member sees hundreds of trucks every day and trucks are associated with many other concepts, a truck might not be the best cue for her to recall what you presented. But the right cue –one that somehow connects to your content and is a bit more unique—will make your presentation more memorable.  

In his book Your Brain at Work, David Rock creates a cue out of the visual image of the small footprint and high energy usage of the stage in a theater, relative to the rest of the footprint of a theater, to illustrate one of his many points: how tiny and energy inefficient the brain’s conscious processing capacity is in comparison to its massive and very energy efficient subconscious processing capacity. Now, every time I see reference to a stage or a theater, it brings to mind his point. 

The key to creating and delivering a memorable presentation is in keeping your audience engaged so that they form memories of your main points, and then facilitating their recall of those points after the presentation is over. In understanding how the brain forms and recalls memories, we can work toward producing some of those “best” presentations that people talk about!

Imagine this: It’s the beginning of a new day, and you’re ready to face it head on. You have a list of things that you need to do, and you’re prepared to tackle each and every task. You’re organized and motivated. But before you can even get to the first item on your to-do list, you’re called into an important meeting. The entire day is one interruption after another, and before you know it, the day is nearly over. 

It’s probably not hard for you to imagine at all. We’ve all been there. 

And sometimes it’s not just a meeting or a bunch of phone calls. Sometimes it’s something much more serious that throws us off course, like the loss of a major client, a partner’s sudden retirement, or your firm’s request that you relocate. 

How do you handle it? 

Does it send you into a mental and emotional tailspin, or do you have the ability to pivot and adapt efficiently and effectively? 

If you answered the former, you’re not alone. Many of us find that obstacles –even small ones— can frustrate and overwhelm us, and prevent us from achieving our goals. 

The good news is that adaptability, or our ability to respond positively to changes and challenges, is a skill that can be learned. And, when honed, adaptability is a skill that can help us become better leaders, more creative and effective problem solvers and, ultimately, more successful lawyers. 

What is adaptability?

There are a lot of things that we won’t be able to control in our careers. A client may react poorly. The dynamics of a firm may change. Or, you might just have one of those days that’s simply…crap. 

What we can control, however, is how we react to circumstances. 

Adaptability means having a flexible mind and a growth mindset. It is not just about tolerating change, but thriving in changing circumstances, or turning a challenge into an opportunity. It is about not just getting through that difficult day, but being able to seize it. 

The Importance and Benefits of Adaptability

I strongly believe that adaptability is critical to lawyers’ ability to thrive in practice, particularly in its current state of disruption. The ability to change –or be changed—along with our circumstances has never been more important than it is in today’s professional climate. It is no longer a “nice to have” competency, but has become a crucial skill. 

Some of the benefits of adaptability include the following:

You will gain trust from colleagues and clients. 

Being adaptable will help you maintain a calm demeanor when things don’t go as expected. Your colleagues and clients will be grateful for this and intuitively place more trust in you –  looking to you to take the lead during challenging time.

You will become a better problem solver

People who can solve problems are good people to have on your side. To be a problem solver, however, you have to be able to think creatively in the face of challenging circumstances, and this requires adaptability. The more you are able to adapt, the more your mind will have the flexibility it needs to solve the problems that will inevitably arise – no matter how inflamed the circumstances.

You will have the opportunity to stretch and grow

Everyone reaches plateaus in their careers, but you aren’t meant to stay on a plateau forever. Change and challenge can lead to growth, but only if you are adaptable. When a challenge arises, will you maintain the status quo, or will you adapt and take that opportunity to grow? 

How can you become more adaptable?

Becoming more adaptable is not something that is going to happen overnight. It takes time, effort, and commitment. It starts with a willingness to keep an open mind, to consciously embrace change and challenges, and to let go of habitual actions and responses that are not best serving you in achieving the goals and objectives you have for your career.

A couple of tips:

1. Engage your brain on this project.  Every time you gain new information about something, your brain changes and it will start to apply that new information in the decisions and actions that you take going forward.  Use that naturally wired tool to help you upgrade your adaptability by reading articles and books and listening to podcasts about building adaptability, mental agility and a growth mindset.
2. When you catch yourself responding to a change or challenge by doing something the way you always have, or resisting the opportunity to respond differently, take some time to consider if it’s really working or if you’re stubbornly clinging to what worked in the past. If it is the latter, try something different.  It sounds simple, but it isn’t easy.

Remember that it is only when we go outside of our comfort zone that we grow.

A few months ago, I talked about the neuroscience behind cultivating the habit of following up, or using neural processing to overcome the barriers that we often face when reaching out to new connections. As you might recall, creating the habit of following up with new connections –or any habit, for that matter—involves three critical elements:

1. Intention: consciously making the decision to cultivate the habit of following up
2. Commitment: expressly telling the people you meet that you would like to continue your conversation with them
3. Action: exercising a bit of courage and discipline by putting that intention into practice and following through on your commitment

Before long, your brain will automate this process, and following up will become second nature.

You might be thinking “Easier said than done!” or “But I’ve tried all this before!” So let’s delve a little deeper into how this might look in practice and discuss some tools to help make the process a seamless one.

Find a reason for following up with your contact…other than getting their business. 

The first trick is to change your thinking around following up.

We all want to find new clients and get more business, but this should never be your reason for following up with a contact you have just met, unless they specifically invited you to do that (something which is, and should remain exceedingly rare at a first meeting.)

Instead of thinking about how they might be part of your growing business, even in the future, flip the script and focus on how you can provide value to them and make this the basis of your follow-up. Do you have a business contact who you think could help them achieve a goal that they mentioned? Then maybe you are following up to facilitate that connection. Did they express interest in a subject that you are knowledgeable about? Perhaps you are following up to send them a copy of a recent article you wrote or read on the subject. Did they tell you that they are going to be travelling to a place that you know well? Then maybe you are sending them some information about great little-known gems in that location.

Your first follow-up should be about finding ways to explore the connection more deeply to see if there is a real basis for building an authentic relationship – on in which you could create value for them – not about making a sale.

When you change the way you think about following up, from what they can do for you to what you can do for them, or from “selling” yourself to developing a relationship, following up will feel less awkward and intimidating, and will become something you no longer dread but look forward to doing.

Get social on social media

Face-to-face interactions are the gold standard for creating rapport and making connection, but there is no reason why you can’t use your favourite digital platforms to get the relationship off the ground, or to maintain it in between face-to-face meetings. 

Social media platforms like LinkedIn are a great way of keeping up with what is going on in your contact’s life, and staying apprised of news related to their businesses and industry sectors. Did your new connection or her company just win an award? Send a congratulatory note, an email or, better yet, pick up the phone and congratulate them! It’s not pushy, it’s thoughtful. And it does provide an opening and a point from which to get the conversation rolling. 

Get technology working for you

To help you manage your network as it grows and still be able to follow up when the number of people in your network grows past what you can manage with raw human memory, consider using tools like an Excel spreadsheet, a CRM or your Outlook calendar or tasks, to keep track of your contacts and facilitate continued follow-up at an appropriate frequency. 

The more often you express your intention to follow up to the people you meet, the faster following up will become a habit, and the faster following up becomes a habit, the easier it will become and the more effective you will be. Use the tools that we are so lucky to have today to help you organize your contacts, prompt you to follow up, and stay in touch. And try to think about following up as truly reaching out – to help, to uplift, and to build relationships, as opposed to what it can do for you. Before you know it, you will be enjoying the fruits of a diversified portfolio of interesting, rewarding and exciting professional relationships that will be supporting the growth of your business in ways you can’t yet imagine.

Disney is recognized as one of the world’s leaders in customer experience. Their seventy percent return rate for first-time visitors reflects that.

Walt Disney believed that the key to creating magical experiences and memories was factory-precision processes that create a consistent positive experience for everyone, every time. Every employee is trained, and every aspect of the park cultivated so as to create that experience, and there are processes in place that ensure that certain standards are met.

In order to maintain and improve these processes, feedback is crucial. The Disney Institute classic handbook Be Our Guest: Perfecting the Art of Customer Service demonstrates the importance of feedback and how Disney uses it to improve the customer experience.

For example, customer feedback exposed that visitors were becoming frustrated when leaving the park on trams because they couldn’t remember where they had parked their cars. Disney implemented a solution whereby tram drivers now keep a list of what rows they work each morning, which is distributed to team members at the end of the day. Guests relay what time they arrived, and the tram drivers will know where the guest parked. Problem solved.

All service professionals can learn from Disney, including lawyers.

Gaining client loyalty through exceptional client experience 

In your law practice, you want everyone who works with and for you to be on the same page, delivering the same consistent service. You want to have processes in place for all contingencies so your clients know that no matter when they call, or who they speak with, they can expect the same exceptional service. And when something isn’t working, finding ways to get honest feedback and incorporating that feedback is critical to providing that next level of service.

Tell people that your goal is exceptional service

On their first day of training, every member of the Disney team is told that their job is “creating happiness”. Every person on the team, at every level, feels empowered to make sure the visitor’s experience is one that creates happiness. You can do this too, by making sure that your team and your clients both know that your goal is to give exceptional service, and empowering everyone to seek and provide it.

Genuinely seek feedback and use it to improve

Ask your team and your clients for feedback, letting them know that you are trying to reach the standard of exceptional service and that their feedback will be invaluable in helping you achieve that. This gives both your team and your clients a stake in the success of your practice.

Use the feedback you are given to evaluate if you really are providing exceptional service, and to help you continue to innovate and grow in your service offering.

Obviously getting legal service isn’t the same as riding Space Mountain or enjoying breakfast with Mickey Mouse and his friends, but client service is surely no less important, and arguably more important. So why not take some time to see how you can incorporate some Disney-inspired client service theory into your legal practice today?

One great place to start is with something called Shine Theory.

Shine Theory was developed by best friends and podcast co-hosts, Ann Friedman and Aminatou Sow. The theory stems from the principle that if you invest in a core group of people, and they invest in you in return, everybody wins. Shine Theory is about collaborating, not competing. It means changing your thinking from “I need to outshine you” to “I don’t shine if you don’t shine” or “Together, we can shine even brighter”.  

How it works

Shine Theory is about investing in others. It is about helping others share their stories.

Suppose one of your professional contacts approaches you with a problem, and while you don’t think that you can help her, you know just the person who can. Tell her story!

Shine Theory isn’t networking or simply passing out referrals. It is about forging connections. It is real intentional emotional investment, primarily with a core group of people because of the amount of time and effort required to implement it effectively.

Take a little time to think about who is in your professional circle. Who can you invest in? Who can you be a mentor to? Explain that you’d like to nominate them, do something that makes their world better. With that single action, you’ve opened the door to building a relationship –by being valuable—and you’ve made the world a better place by helping her to tell her story to others that can benefit from it.

To do this, you need to have enough confidence in yourself to be able to promote others. I know that that can be hard. The feeling that we need to compete is ingrained, even if we’re not aware of it. But the great thing about Shine Theory is that by investing in others, you will grow your own confidence. We all know that you won’t get your moment in the spotlight because you scream and shout for attention. But when you shine the light on others, some of it can’t help but reflect back onto you. When we implement Shine Theory, we lift each other up, and we ALL go further.

 Do you want to make a difference to the people around you? Invest in them. Shine a little light on them. It’s one way that you can make the world a better place, starting today.

This is a great interview video and worth the watch for many reasons.

The challenges he talks about – addiction to technology, the consequences of our society’s evolution toward instant gratification on all fronts, the impact of the resulting impatience that is being cultivated in all of us – are not limited to millennials.

Most of us, at all ages, now cannot let go of our cell phones. If we do, it is only to put them down on the table between us and the people we are with.

It is no longer the case that there are a few empty minutes before the start of any meeting, in which those in the room actually take the opportunity to talk to each other. Instead, we all sit like zombies staring in to the little screens in our hands, oblivious to what is going on with any of the people who are sitting in the room with us!.

Most, if not all, dinners, coffees – meetings of all varieties – include cell phones on the table ringing or dinging and the magnanimous statement “I’m not going to answer that” being offered by the owner of the offending device – as though that will remedy the impression that the person you are with only has moderate importance to you, which was left by the presence of the phone on the table in the first place.  Just to be clear, in my experience, it does not.

It isn’t just millennials that need to think about these things.  Relationship building skills are becoming more and more rare, and it is hurting us in lots of ways, including but not limited to weakening our capacity to build businesses that fulfill us and have a positive impact in the world.

I encourage you to watch this video, save it, think about it, watch it again, figure out what aspects of it are impacting you and those around you (millennials in particular) and what you might be able to do in your own lives and practices to help turn the tide.  For one thing, absent some serious potential emergency, let’s all put our phones away when we are socializing or meeting with other people.