The Company That We Keep

Allison Williams: [00:00:11] Hi everybody, it’s Allison Williams here, your Law Firm Mentor. Law Firm Mentor is a business coaching service for solo and small law firm attorneys. We help you grow your revenues, crush chaos in business and make more money.

 

Allison Williams: [00:00:26] Hi, everybody, it’s Allison Williams here, your Law Firm Mentor. And on this week of this week’s episode of the podcast, we’re going to be talking about something that I know is a touchy subject. But I wanted to cover it because I know a lot of people have struggled with the idea of growing in a business, not so much because they personally don’t want to grow or see the benefits of it, but because they know it’s going to cause interpersonal issues either in their romantic relationship or in their friendships and social circles. So I wanted to talk to you about that topic and give you some some strategies that you can use to actually start to wrap your mind around how your approach to this can be a both and, instead of an either or. Right. You can have both professional, financial business success and a healthy social relationship, whether it’s romantic, friendship, collegial with colleagues, etc., Or that you can certainly reconcile how to have those two things coexist if they can’t be completely enmeshed. So with that, we’re going to dive in. And I want to tell you first a little story about what prompted my personal interaction with this topic so that you know that this is something that most people will encounter on their journey to growing the law firm of their desires.

 

Allison Williams: [00:01:54] So when I first started working with a coaching company, I remember that I got really excited about all the possibilities that were ahead of me. Right. I was, I was kind of diving into to bringing my business under control. And a lot of, you know, the story. I’m not going to go into the details of the story again here, but I had a pretty traumatic start of owning a business on my own. I went out into a partnership with someone that was a poor choice for me, but my partner and I ultimately amicably split our businesses apart. And then I was on my own. And when I was on my own, I was terrified. I was overloaded. And I had by that time about 50 some odd clients and over worked my way to try to get a handle on everything because it never occurred to me to hire somebody. That’s that. I’ll just tell you kind of where my mind was. Oh, yeah, I can do this. I can get it under control. I got to get it under control before I bring someone into the chaos. Right. So I started working harder and harder and then fell asleep driving and almost died. So having that experience really put into my mind that I absolutely have to figure out how to get this done. And the first interview that came along when I was on my search for how to get it under control was the company I ultimately ended up going to as a client.

 

Allison Williams: [00:03:15] And I remember I was really excited about the prospect of getting my business not just under control, but I had already started to experience a lot of growth. And I actually left my former law firm because they were taking their sweet time with hiring someone. And then it was, oh, yeah, we’re going to hire someone, but you’ll still be an associate. And I was like, I’m bringing you five hundred grand in business and you’re going to keep me at the title of associate. Like that was just a little offensive to me. So I said, you know, I’m out of here and went to do it on my own. And it was a lot more challenging than I realized. But I started to get kind of a sense of hope when I started to feel that ease that came with actually progressively moving forward in my business. And I shared it with my best friend. My best friend. Amy, of course knows any and everything about me. So we have to stay best friends because, you know, she could definitely send me to jail. But beyond Amy, who is, who is always one thousand, one thousand percent supportive of me in new things that I want to try, even things that she doesn’t necessarily agree with. She’s always in my corner and rooting for my success. I have other friends that are similarly supportive and rooting for my success, but they will be much more vocal if they don’t necessarily agree with the choices that I’ve made. Right.

 

Allison Williams: [00:04:39] And and I was like, well, I don’t really know if I wanted to share it with everyone. Something had just told me. Maybe this is not the right thing to talk about until I’ve actually created the success that I feel is coming. At the time, I made a major financial investment well in excess of what I was expecting and well in excess of what I was acclimated toward. So I decided to keep it quiet for a while. But then one day I was having lunch with a friend and I told her that that she and I, you know… I talked to her about the business and she was reticent. But overall, she was relatively neutral. She was like, well, if that’s what you want to do. Sounds like you’ve made up your mind. You’re you’re pursuing your goals. Good for you, right? Well, at some point, we decided we were going to bring our associates together and we had about the same… At that time we both had hired by the time I went, I got to this stage and we both had an associate that was a couple of years out in experience. And my associate had started to step into doing more for herself, getting to know people. My associate, by the way, is now my partner, Victoria. But she had started to really kind of come into her own in terms of wanting to create outside of just having me give her work.

 

Allison Williams: [00:06:06] So I wanted to encourage that. And I wanted to share what I saw as the light within Victoria. I wanted to share that with other people. And so we decided to get together and we brought our associates together for lunch. And I remember at some point in time, I don’t know why it came up, but business came up and growing in business, and we had just had our most financially successful month to date as of that date. And so I remember sharing that with my friend, separate and apart from our associates. And then when we got together, she referenced something about it and she said, Oh, but you’re in that cult. So I guess I’m not, so I shouldn’t be surprised. And it took me by surprise that she would say that I was like, you know, why would you refer to it as a cult? And she was like, well, you know, you do this and you do this. I mean, it sounds a lot like a cult. And she’s saying these things in front of my associate. And I was very hurt and I was very angry. And ultimately, she and I talked about it separately and we kind of mended fences about it. But it really gave me a perspective on someone who’s not in the experience with me, has a perspective based on what I’m sharing. And because I didn’t have a full range of understanding of what I was experiencing, I understood intellectually I’m meeting with people, I’m gathering information, I’m attending programs.

 

Allison Williams: [00:07:31] I’m I’m structuring my business differently. Like intellectually, I could convey those things right. But the transformation that had started to go on inside me when I started to conceptualize that hey, I can create a lot more money with this business. Hey, I can create a lot more profit with this business. Hey, this business can be a lot bigger than even I imagined when I went out into business. Right? I can, it can be a beacon of hope in the community. It can serve as a philanthropic organization. Like there were a lot of things that I personally wanted to achieve that I started to see possible through my business. And so when this, when this friend of mine kind of threw daggers, if you will, at, at the, at the organization that I was a client of, I my initial thought was that it was a personal attack. Right. Like, how stupid could you be to join this? And then when I kind of took a step back and took a few deep breaths and said, OK, this is my friend. This friend has always had my best interests at heart, why would she feel this way? One of the things that I started to really think about was that it really isn’t fair to expect someone who’s on the outside of the experience to truly have a frame of reference for the experience because it’s something so different, right.

 

Allison Williams: [00:08:50] It’s something so unique. And when you start to step into the the personal development world and by that time I had started to work with with more than just one coach, I actually. I found the coach that really transformed my life. And I started to work with him. And so I started to share some of his philosophical beliefs and shared that in conjunction with discussing my business. And so it was just, it was a very esoteric, ethereal sort of conversation. And frankly, I don’t know that anyone who’s not in it and immersed in it and really starting to shift the way that you are living and being in business could be able to convey it to someone else because it’s like the first time that you are being exposed to something. You still have your existing world view. Right. So you don’t necessarily know all the things that you need to convey in order to alleviate concerns and questions and in order to validate what you internally feel is the right decision for you. But you may not have the logical answer as to why the feeling is what you should be going with. So with that, I want to just having told you that story, I want to now kind of talk a little bit about what I consider to be the three primary stoppers, if you will, the stop gap between stepping fully into growing your business and having the the tools, the strategies necessary in order to keep yourself protected from the outside world. 

 

Allison Williams: [00:10:20] And by protected, I mean that people who will have your best interests at heart will often say things and have a perspective about what you’re doing that is ill informed and not because they are ill informed, but because you are ill informed and not necessarily able to logically, logically rationalize what it is that you are doing in the growing of your business. So the first thing to understand is about the mindset, right? So most people, not all. Certainly some of us have very affluent friends who grew up with wealth. But the vast majority of people in this country did not grow up with wealth, even if they grew up financially comfortable. You can grow up in the middle class and not be wealthy. Right. So there’s a there’s kind of a baked into our culture. There is what I would refer to as kind of the paycheck mindset. Right. The the idea that when dollars come in, those are your dollars until you get more dollars. So if I get paid monthly on the first of the month, I have X dollars. That is a finite pool of resources that is not going to regenerate until the 1st of next month. And that belief system, even in small business owners, they will oftentimes start to recreate that belief system in the entity that they create. Right. So even though you’re an entrepreneur, you could very easily fall into the habit of thinking, OK, I’ve got X dollars this month in revenue, and that is a finite pool of resources that is only available to the extent that I have it allocated to expenses and I’ll have a little bit left over whatever, a little bit qualifies for you.

 

Allison Williams: [00:11:59] I’ll have something left over that can go into the bank that I’ll use to basically weather the bad months if we ever have a month where we dip down in revenue. And that mindset is still very much the paycheck mindset. Right. The idea of money being finite. But when you truly grow to be a business owner and not just the owner of a law practice, right. When you actually become a business owner, you evolve into having an earning capacity mindset instead of a paycheck mindset. And your earning capacity mindset will bring you to an understanding that money is not finite. Right. You sell a service if you want more in your business, you either have to sell more of the service that you’re currently offering. You have to increase the price of the service that you’re offering so the same service can generate more dollars or you have to scale back your efficiencies or scale up your efficiencies, I should say, so that you ultimately produce more from the same amount of effort. And I use produce more from the same amount of effort talking about really the context of either flat fee representation or time on desk as a unit for contingency practice.

 

Allison Williams: [00:13:13] Right. But there’s only so many hours in a day you’re going to work those hours and those hours are going to be worth something in dollars and you can make more dollars by selling more or increasing the price. Right. That’s the gist of how we produce in a law firm. And so when you realize that, then when you realize you don’t have enough or you don’t have what you want, then the easy answer. Right. The simple answer, I should say, it’s not always easy, but the simple answer is great. They’ll sell more service or go instead of sell more, go raise your prices on the service that you had or keep more of what you have sold. Right. And to keep more of what you have sold is really the savings mindset, which does have a place in the efficiency and cultivation of a sound business, even though it is not where we typically say you should start, because saving often comes out of a lack mindset that there won’t be more. Right. So as you are saving, you should also be producing more, because the time and energy that we often put into trying to save more pennies off of our dollars is often wasted when we could have just multiplied our dollars by taking that same amount of time into producing more or selling more. But either way, when we start to think about the fact that when you own a business, you have fungibility in your business, you have scalability in your business and your dollars are not finite. That mindset will inform just about everything else you do.

 

Allison Williams: [00:14:46] Right. It starts to inform the way that we look at employees as investments and not expenses. It starts to inform the way that we look at marketing as an investment and not an expense. It starts to inform the way that we look at coaching as an investment and not an expense. It starts to inform the way that we restructure things so that we can be more efficient, be more agile, create more easier. And sometimes that requires an upfront investment that is going to come out of today’s dollars in order to generate 10, 15, 20 times those dollars tomorrow. Right. But our mind can’t go there if we stay in the paycheck mindset, which says dollars that we received today are finite until we get more dollars. Right.

 

Allison Williams: [00:15:33] So that’s the first thing that you have to understand conceptually. And when you talk to people outside of your immediate world, if you if you talk to your spouse, your friends, your business colleagues, your your employees, when you start talking about the ways that money is not a finite resource that is depleted by spending it, but rather is increased by investing it, when you start to move your mindset into the thinking of earning capacity rather than the paycheck, that’s where the foundation of everything that you need to do, in order to create a sustainably high quality, profitable business that can run without you. That then becomes the educational piece that is typically missing.

 

Allison Williams: [00:16:24] When people talk about things such as, hey, I’m growing my business now and I’m going to spend X, the first thought comes, Oh, no, you can’t spend X because then you’re going to have less dollars, right? Instead of, OK, how long is it going to take to get a return on your investment and what do we need to do in order to get to that point? Right. So I just want you to think about that, because the mind set piece is always the foundational piece of any conversation that really goes into the heart of growing a business and most importantly, transforming a life. All right. Number two, when we talk about the company that you keep, that’s the title of today’s podcast. I want you to think about the fact that when you say or have an experience of, quote, my spouse won’t let me. That that is indicative of a problem in your relationship. OK, now hear me out, I know a whole bunch of people probably heard that and got triggered, so I hope you haven’t turned off this podcast yet. Right? There’s a whole lot that goes into how two people decide to structure their lives. Right. And I hear this a lot when I talk to different people who have wanted to step into growing a law firm.

 

Allison Williams: [00:17:41] But they’ve said, oh, I can’t really do that because my spouse would go crazy if they knew this cost X dollars. Or my spouse and I agreed we weren’t going to spend any more money on X, Y, Z, or I didn’t even complete the last thing that I did. My spouse would go nuts if I were to come home and say, I want to now do this. Right. So the first thing is just, you know, I have to comment on this because I just, I find it such an amazing phenomenon, even in twenty twenty one, that I only hear this when it is a woman business owner talking about how she’s going to spend money in her business. I don’t, I’ve never heard from a male business owner. I don’t think I can do this because my wife won’t let me. Or when I go talk to my wife, this is going to be a problem. Typically, it may be. Yeah, I have to let my wife know this is something I want to do before I just go do it. But it’s never a I need to get my wife’s OK for this. You know, gender relations being what they are. There’s a whole host of reasons for why that particular arrangement is what it is in many relationships. But I comment upon it not to denigrate women that choose to ask their husbands permission before they spend money, but because I really want, I want to share with people the insight that comes from hearing it and recognizing patterns that I see when that is the answer that people will give.

 

Allison Williams: [00:19:02] So typically when the when the the spousal objection, if you will, comes up to the idea of investing in a business, a lot of times what comes up first is that your spouse has your best interests at heart and except in the most toxic and apparently abusive relationships. That’s very clear. Right. So it becomes a challenge to confront someone who, you know, has your best interests at heart. And in fact, if the person is in an intimate relationship with you, they have power and influence over you just by virtue of being that close to you. Right. They know you better than anyone else. And so they know what sorts of things will work to influence you versus not. And it is often the case that when a person who does have your best interests at heart, like a spouse says, you know, I don’t think this is a good idea because you don’t you don’t take that from a perspective of this person is out to harm me. This person is jealous. This person is insecure. This person is being protective of their own interests and not my interests. You are typically going to start with a mindset that says this person has my best interests at heart. Right. So it becomes a more nuanced challenge than simply a person saying you’re not good enough for this or I don’t want you to do this because the impact on me, because a lot of people don’t have that type of blatant shoot down from their spouse.

 

Allison Williams: [00:20:31] The second thing is that for most people, especially when you have two working spouses, whatever those vocations are, most times two working spouses have shared interests in both parties being successful in whatever way they are currently choosing to contribute to the relationship. So if one party is a business owner and the other has a quote, nine to five, right. Most professional jobs are now no longer just nine to five. But we’re going to call it nine to five so we can conceptualize it as the paycheck roll. Right. If you have a business owner and a nine to five worker and they are together in a relationship, the business owner inherently realizes and typically so will the employee spouse realize that when the business grows, that provides opportunity for everyone in the family, including the employee spouse. So the business owner spouse making more money has more money available to bring into the household, to support children, to fund the lifestyle, to fund retirement for the benefit of everyone in the family, including the employed spouse.

 

Allison Williams: [00:21:45] So just knowing that those two tenants are almost always there and in healthy relationships, palpably clear, makes it a more challenging conversation when someone disagrees. Because you intellectually understand, my spouse is not disagreeing because they don’t value me. My spouse is disagreeing because my choice is either putting them at risk or our family’s finances at risk in a way that ultimately could harm our interests, our family, our children. They’re right to be concerned. Right. The fact that someone is right to be concerned doesn’t validate what they are saying as their objection to what you want to do. But it certainly means that you should handle them and their perspective with care or else you’re going to alienate them. So that could harm your relationship. But more importantly, it’s not going to do much for your future if you decide to move in variance to what the objection is. Right. So you’re not going to, you’re not going to do yourself a favor to have hostility in your household because you made a choice that your spouse disagrees with.

 

Allison Williams: [00:22:53] OK, so just knowing that going in, I started off by saying that when your spouse disagrees with your choice, right, when you say my spouse won’t let me and your spouse disagrees with your choice, that indicates a problem in your relationship. Some people would say, no, it doesn’t. That just means we disagree. Right. It has nothing to do with a problem in the relationship. But what I meant by the fact that there’s a problem is that if the way in which you and your partner communicate about choices that you want to make in whatever sphere of life, whether it’s your business, your health, your emotional well-being, if you are making any change in your day to day experience, that, of course, is going to impact your spouse.

 

Allison Williams: [00:23:41] And if the answer to there will be some impact on my spouse is my spouse has veto power or the ability to say, no, you shouldn’t do that, because that does not give you the ability for you to be self actualized. Now, that doesn’t mean that you can’t still be happy if you default to whatever your spouse’s preferences are for your choices. But much more often than not, when you deny what it is that you desire in deference to your partner without having your partner be fully on board with all of the information, all of the experience, all of the knowledge, all of the emotional connection that you have to whatever your desired outcome is, whatever you’re pursuing, whether it’s you’re pursuing a new business or you’re pursuing a new marketing idea or you’re pursuing a new hire or you’re pursuing coaching, whatever it is. Right. If you’re pursuing something and your spouse is not on board and you don’t have a conversation with them to try to get them, all the things that are running through your head, that doesn’t mean that they are necessarily going to change their mind as soon as they have all the knowledge that you have, but at least gives them the opportunity to see how important it is to you that you be self actualized. And if not, moving yourself forward in growth is going to thwart your self actualization.

 

Allison Williams: [00:25:11] That concern should be as significant to your partner as the concern with whatever it is that you want to do, not just because your spouse should want to make you happy, but because when you as an individual are not being self actualized, when you are suppressing who you are and your partner is, at least in some way influential in your decision to suppress who you are. Right. Because your spouse, I guess, can’t theoretically stop you from making the choice. But obviously loving partners care about what their, what their partner thinks. And you want to, you want to.. You know you’re a unit, so you make decisions together. When when those two things are at odds. Your self actualization and the desires of your partner are at odds if you simply give in to them rather than try to bring them to an awareness where you’re reaching your self actualization is not a question mark. The how may be a question mark, but the outcome is not a question mark. There is in that, there is a tendency for that to erode your relationship over time. In fact, I can’t tell you the number of people that I have had conversations with where spouse said no, and the outcome on the other side was, OK, I’m not doing this now because spouse said no. And then you hear from them months, years, sometimes later. And that saying no to yourself has become a pattern, right. Because it’s easier to go along and get along than to fight.

 

Allison Williams: [00:26:47] Now, if you conceptualize that, either you get what you want and that comes from a fight or you give in to have peace, then of course, at some point you’re going to have to, quote, pick your battles. Right. But the goal would never be to bring conflict into a relationship in order for you to be self actualized. It would be to bring conversation and communication so that when you are having those conversations about this is what I desire, you feel heard and empowered and supported through that conversation that you and your partner have together. And you reach the point where whatever decision is made, you are at peace with the decision. Right. But what happens a lot of times is people get to the place of peace with the decision because they see that as the lesser evil than the fight that will ensue. If you were not to simply give in. If you were to say instead, OK, I’m going to get what I want, then you have two people that are unhappy. And typically there’s going to be resentment that builds up in the relationship in that instance. But people don’t experience the immediate resentment of, my spouse said no. They experience maybe a moment or a fleeting thought, and then they go right back into life as usual. They go right back into working. They go right back into child care responsibilities. They go right back into relational responsibilities. And life fills the time. So you’re not thinking about it.

 

Allison Williams: [00:28:15] But then the next time something comes up that you want to step into and you have to have another conversation and that that that remembrance of the last conversation where you were told no, comes to mind. That oftentimes can trigger resentment that you weren’t even aware, was there. Right. It unearths the latent resentment and the number of people that I have either coached or had private conversations with as a as a divorce attorney or in in in varying different relationships where psychology is something that I have had to utilize in order to help people. I have seen this pattern happen far more times than I would like to see and far more times that I think even most people are aware of in general. So I just I want you to be mindful that having conversations with your partner is a part of having a partner. But it should not be that when your partner is on the fringe of your decision making that you convey what you think you can convey about the decision. And if they say no, well, you two just have a difference of opinion and someone has to win. And since this impacts them, it’s not really fair from your perspective that you say yes to yourself when you would ultimately be saying no to them. Right. There needs to be a framework developed in your relationship where both of you can have a powerful say over what choices are made, but that the outcome of those conversations is never a default to one party winning because they have a stronger personality.

 

Allison Williams: [00:29:55] Or if one party is going to be impacted by a decision of the other, that they get to essentially have the say right. There needs to be not just compromise, but there needs to be collaboration in terms of how. And one of the things that I love with seeing with my clients is when we have coaching conversations and they understand that they were putting a limitation on their opportunities in life by asking, can I, rather how can I? Right? If they ask the question, can I? It’s a yes or no. And if you get to no, you stop thinking. Your mind shuts down. If you ask, how can I? You look for opportunities, you look for options, and you start to create from a place of seeing what is available for you in life. OK, all right.

 

Allison Williams: [00:30:44] Final thought I want to give you about the company that you keep is, this is another one, where I think a lot of people have probably had some thought about it, but probably not in this particular way. So I want you to just consider that you can only rise to the height of your lowest ceiling. OK, I’m going to say that again. You can only rise to the height of your lowest ceiling. Now, you might be saying, well, that kind of makes sense because, you know, the ceiling is what the ceiling is, but I want to flesh that out a little bit so we can really put a frame on this when we are talking about our opportunities in life, when we’re talking about growing our business in particular, because that’s what we help clients do here at Law Firm Mentor. When we’re talking about our business,

 

Allison Williams: [00:31:42] I want you to think about the idea that if you have created an artificial ceiling on your business, that’s capped at your level of comfort, which is something that a lot of lawyers do instinctually. Instinctually, our profession is one that is a risk mitigation profession. Right. We’re always looking for the least detrimental position that can be taken, the most aggressive but least costly opportunity that can be pursued. We’re always thinking about things from the perspective of how can we get what we want while also not doing too much that can put us at risk. Right, whether it’s us or our clients. So that that balancing act that we have as attorneys will oftentimes cause us to be thinking about the least dangerous option. Right. The lesser of two evils. What will give us the least, the least risk associated with anything that we want to pursue? And the problem with that line of thinking is that there is inherently risk in everything that we do. We just don’t see it because we adapt to it. Right.

 

Allison Williams: [00:32:50] I’m sure you all have seen the visual or heard the story of putting the frog in warm water and slowly turning that heat up until the frog ultimately cooks to death versus if you drop the frog in boiling hot water, the frog will jump out because the frog immediately sees risk. Right. He perceives that he is in danger. So he immediately removes himself from that danger. And I want you to think about the fact that that is exactly what law firm owners do when we see danger. Right. When we feel that hot water, we jump into the hot water and we immediately jump out because we perceive, nope, that’s change. That’s different. That’s unusual. That’s uncommon. That’s not customary. That’s not something familiar to me. That’s not something I have a plan for. That’s not something a whole bunch of other people haven’t tried and done. I’m going to stay where I am and that’s what we do. That’s the constriction that we bring into our lives when we allow ourselves to put ourselves into hot water situations. And then instead of staying in the hot water until we acclimate to that, realizing it’s going to be uncomfortable, realizing that it’s new and different and therefore scary. But if you have that trusted advisor, that trusted guide with you on the pad, it actually is less risky for you to be in the hot water than it is for you to be in the dull ache of the warm water that gets hotter and hotter and harder because the reality is staying where you are staying, in the place where you are not making enough money, where you are not happy with the business that you created, where you do not have freedom of time and energy and money and resources and people around you. 

 

Allison Williams: [00:34:33] Staying in that mediocrity is a risk in and of itself. It’s a risk that you’ve allowed yourself to put into your subconscious mind and kind of put out of sight. Out of sight, out of mind. Right. It’s there. But we allow ourselves to escape the idea of the pain of it because we’re not focused on it anymore. But when you put yourself in the hot water, here’s the thing that happens, right? You have to learn pretty quickly how to cool things down. Right. Or you burn to death. So how do you cool things down when you put yourself in the hot water? Wow. If we’re putting this in the context of growing a law firm, you do things like very quickly, systematize your law firm very quickly, hire the right people, hire the wrong person, fire them, move on, hire the wrong person again, fire them and move on. Third time around. You have some knowledge under your belt. You have some experience under your belt. You start to formulate systems and processes that work for you. You start to get guidance around how your system is not working. You start to have critical thoughts applied to everything that you’re doing.

 

Allison Williams: [00:35:36] You start to apply those critical thoughts into every area of your business from how you’re managing your money, to how you’re marketing, to how you’re selling through consultations. Everything then becomes the amalgamation of the new thought process that you are developing as you are getting yourself out of that hot water. And what you find is that as soon as you start to get that place of comfort where it gets warm, then we turn the heat back up and then you go further, right? Because now you have to have new developed thoughts, new ideas, new structure, new systems, new supportive beliefs to get you to that next level that you want to go to. And that’s ultimately how you reform yourself into the business owner that has the business that you truly desire.

 

Allison Williams: [00:36:22] All right. So today we have talked about the company that you keep. And I want you to really do an audit of those in your life, OK? Now, I am never a proponent of immediately ejecting people from your life when people are disagreeing with choices that you’re making or when they are pursuing options that are at variance with what you want to do. But this is what I will tell you. If the people in your life are not supportive of your beliefs, if they’re not supportive of you doing what’s necessary for you to get yourself out of that mediocrity, that malaise, that sense of frustration that comes with not earning enough and not having enough time, then those people need to be held in a certain place in your life.

 

Allison Williams: [00:37:05] And holding them in a certain place in your life is something that is an ongoing experience. That’s something that you will perpetually have to work on. And that’s something that we can help you with here at Law Firm Mentor. So if you need help with putting a protective shield around you so that you can desire and create from your desire the law firm of your dreams, then ultimately reach out to us. We can help you here at Law Firm Mentor. All right, everyone, I’m Alison Williams, your Law Firm Mentor. We’ve discussed the company that you keep. Have a wonderful day.

Allison Williams: [00:37:55] Thank you for tuning in to the Crushing Chaos with Law Firm Mentor podcast. To learn more about today’s guests and take advantage of the resources mentioned, check out our show notes. And if you own a solo or small law firm and are looking for guidance, advice or simply support on your journey to create a law firm that runs without you, join us in the Law Firm Mentor Movement free Facebook group. There, you can access our free trainings on improving collections in law firms, meeting billable hours, and join the movement of thousands of law firm owners across the country who want to crush chaos in their law firm and make more money. I’m Allison Williams, your Law Firm Mentor. Have a great day.