In my last article, I asked what’s holding you back? Often it’s the way we perceive the world around us. If we think that it’s difficult to grow our business, then our brain looks for ways to confirm this belief. We want to do great things but our “yes, but” mechanism kicks in and we’re left feeling defeated and hopeless. So in this article, I want to look at ways to deal with negative thinking.

A few years ago, a lawyer mentioned to me in passing that in her opinion, every lawyer or consultant’s greatest fear is “being found out” - that our clients will discover that we’re a fake and not value our work. I see this fear come up again and again with virtually every client I work with. There’s an underlying assumption that “Why would these types of clients want to work with me? Why would they find my services valuable when they can go with a number of other firms out there?”

In other words, instead of starting with the positive notion that “I offer a valuable service that makes a difference in people’s lives and that there are a lot of people out there who will want to find out more about my service,” they fall into defense mode.

Moving Passed Avoidance and Negative Thinking
When you think about it, it’s not unreasonable that lawyers think this way. After all, they spend 3 years in law school learning this thought process and countless years afterwards defending themselves and their clients against every conceivable attack. They have to build up thick skin just to make it. If they made everything personal or reacted emotionally, they’d be miserable.

So it’s not surprising that lawyers shy away from activities like marketing their services, asking for referrals, calling past clients or conducting client satisfaction surveys. Lawyers are judged by the work they do, by how many wins they have, by how many clients they bring in - it’s always results, results, results. But deep down, there’s a nagging fear that their work just isn’t good enough to make partner or to get that new account. And if they ask past clients how they did, there’s a possibility that they’ll learn they were only “so-so” or that they didn’t meet their client’s expectations or worse - that there’s a nagging sense of failure looming over the horizon.

How do you deal such negative thinking?

1. Recognize that negative thinking won’t go away on its own. Even if you try to resist or ignore it, it will continue to loom in the background and affect how you perceive yourself and your business.
2. Become more aware of negative thinking in your every day actions. Positive thinking feels good. You feel excited to get started on that new product or work on that client’s case. Negative thinking makes you want to avoid the situation - you won’t call that client because you’re afraid he’ll be disappointed or will argue about the bill. You don’t want to work on that case because there’s no way you’re going to win or that nothing you do will be good enough.

In the final part of this series, I’ll build on these two key concepts and address 7 steps for dealing with negative thinking.

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