Let’s face it.  The legal industry has had a rocky history in terms of work environments.  As a certified life coach for lawyers, I’ve seen that now more than ever, associates and partners are beginning to feel higher levels of stress and burnout symptoms than before.  The stress from the layoffs happening in large law firms and the volatile economy is affecting law partners and associates alike.

So, what can a law firm do to bring about an atmosphere of collaboration and collegiality?

We’ve all heard of positive psychology theory and research studies showing that employees who find meaning in their work are much happier and effective. This is so because they feel more control over their professional life. They see it as being in the right place, doing the right thing, with the right people.   This is a very common reason why law firms and lawyers individually hire a certified life coach for lawyers.

People that find meaning and professional satisfaction in their jobs are healthier, have more energy and focus, and miss less days at work.  Associates who find meaning in their work produce more and make more money for the law firm. Period.

Here are three tips from a certified life coach for lawyers that will help you create a positive work environment in your firm.

1. Be a leader. The first thing you need to do is to lead by example. In law firms, for example, people tend to go off into their own office to work on ‘their’ case.” This leads to isolation and disconnection from the group. It also feeds the competitive nature intrinsic in the legal field.
2. Put your minds together.  Partners should instill in associates and senior associates that they should work together. They can foster a feeling of collegiality by scheduling mastermind meetings in the office monthly or bi-monthly to focus on strategies that would best be applied to the cases they’ve got. If run correctly, these meetings can be incredibly effective in boosting production. Besides, such meetings often lead to innovative solutions to problems in cases.
3. Play together.  As a certified life coach for lawyers, I’ve seen that team building activities are a great way to foster team mentality, loyalty to the firm, and collaboration within the practice.  Many of the top law firms have been taking part in retreats and team building activities for years. They are a great example of what these activities can do for staff loyalty and the bottom line. Remember, you don’t have to spend very much money on these activities. Be creative and you’d be amazed at how many activities you come up with.

Fostering a team environment may be a lot easier than you think. All you need is some ingenuity and feedback from an outside source. Working with a certified life coach for lawyers is a great way to present team activities and to create new policies in your firm to foster collaboration. A certified life coach for lawyers can help you to identify new techniques for team building and in the actual implementation.

Sonia Gallagher is a Certified Life Coach for lawyers, an attorney, and consultant. She works with lawyers that are ready to find fulfillment in the legal profession, steer the direction of their professional lives, and create lasting changes in self-limiting behaviors and patterns. She is also a consultant to law firms that want to get more clients, more profits, and more free time.  Schedule a complimentary coaching session with Sonia today to experience the benefits of coaching first hand.

I'm really looking forward to working with you to reach new heights of success and balance in your personal and professional life! Sonia Gallagher, JD Holistic Executive Life Coach PS. If you are ready to be challenged, to steer your life in a new direction, and to achieve the goals you desire, I invite you to request a Free Coaching Session and Experience Coaching and How It Can Benefit Your First-hand!

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I recently visited a friend of mine who has her own law firm.  I was extremely happy for her. She took a huge and fruitful step in her career. She has a lot to be proud of. Yet, I was a bit concerned about her at the same time. She has only been out on her own for three months and already looks ragged, hardly sleeps, and is becoming very forgetful. She jokes about the amounts of stress she is under and how she has to take sleeping pills to get some rest.

She is a really good example of someone who should look into coaching for lawyers.  As a lawyer life coach, I quickly realized several issues that were affecting both her personal and professional life.

1. Delegation. Delegation seems to be a bad word to a lot of lawyers. Let’s face it. A lot of us have controlling personalities that make it very difficult to delegate. On top of that, liability is an ever-present issue. Still, there are specific tasks that you can and should delegate to get more available time for yourself to do what you enjoy most or what gets you most clients and profit.  How are your delegation skills? What exactly do you delegate right now at your firm? You should look into coaching for lawyers to learn new ways to delegate.
2. Systems. A lot of law firms seem to re-invent the wheel every week. The partners at these law firms are prime candidates for coaching for lawyers. Their firms have very few databases and no policy manuals teaching their staff and associates what is expected of them and where to find information and resources within the firm. These firms tend to have unhappy employees and high turnovers.  Being given that little guidance, it’s no surprise that associates wouldn’t want to work in that type of environment for long.  What systems do you have in place right now?
3. Clientele.  To succeed as a Firm, you’ve got to have clients. A Law firm is a business just like any other.  To run it properly, you’ve got to implement business development strategies that work. The problem is we didn’t learn these business skills in law school. Coaching for lawyers is a very good remedy for this situation.

You’ve got to have strategies for client attraction and client retention.  Without these strategies, your Firm will not be in good health. It will not be a long term and successful endeavor.  Tell me, how do you attract clients? How do you retain them? Do you know what ratio of clients stay with your firm for longer than one case? Do you have specific strategies that have consistently worked for client development? How do you teach these to your staff and associates?

Simply focusing on the three issues above can catapult your Firm’s potential for success and long term profit. You can learn these techniques and more through coaching for lawyers and training for lawyers.

I'm really looking forward to working with you to reach new heights of success and balance in your personal and professional life! Sonia Gallagher, JD Holistic Executive Life Coach PS. If you are ready to be challenged, to steer your life in a new direction, and to achieve the goals you desire, I invite you to request a Free Coaching Session and Experience Coaching and How It Can Benefit Your First-hand!

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The most important things you can do for goal setting and creating change in your life are to write down your goals and visualize what your life will be like when you make the changes you want.

When making a decision, ask yourself: “Will doing this get me closer or farther from my goal(s) in life?”

Doing this on a regular basis is not only a constant reminder of what you want to achieve but it will also strengthen your motivation to get there. Most people not aware of the impact our daily actions and choices have on our overall life and goal plan. This is where life coaching comes in.

In order to get from the place you are in life right now to where you want to be, you must assess and comprehensively evaluate what you have been doing so far. As Albert Einstein said, “We can’t solve problems by using the same kind of thinking we used when we created them.” This requires a neutral third party to help us evaluate our goals, our actions, and how we can most quickly get to our goals.

Creating change and pushing yourself to new levels of success by going out of your comfort zone are very difficult things to do on your own and one of the most powerful ways in which people use life coaches.

A life coach gives you a neutral and honest perspective. They are trained to work with people to create change, overcome obstacles and self limiting thoughts and behavior, set manageable goals, and reach new levels of success in their professional and personal life. A life coach will hold you accountable, hold a mirror to you reflecting your strengths and areas that need development, and motivate you to move beyond your comfort zone to create the success you want to achieve in your life.

Bottom line is, they help you remain focused, stay on track, and follow through with a specific plan of action that you both create together.

Remember to reward yourself for goal milestones and be good to yourself.

Be patient and don’t forget to enjoy each stage of this ride called life!

I'm really looking forward to working with you to reach new heights of success and balance in your personal and professional life! Sonia Gallagher, JD Holistic Executive Life Coach PS. If you are ready to be challenged, to steer your life in a new direction, and to achieve the goals you desire, I invite you to request a Free Coaching Session and Experience Coaching and How It Can Benefit Your First-hand!

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Are you asking too much of your website?

Don’t get carried away thinking about the infinite possibilities of what a website can do.  Understand what your website should do for your business, and build it with that in mind.

Author Bio:  Bob Regnerus, “The Leads King”, is an expert at generating online traffic and converting web visitors into prospects and clients.  To learn more about how your website can be a successful, effective tool for your business, please visit www.TheLeadsKing.com.

Article Body:

The internet has no limits.  It contains billions of pages relating to millions of different subjects, some with written text, some with audio or video, some with animation, and some with a little bit of everything.  The internet is the largest collection of information in human history, and it gets bigger and more complex every minute.  Exciting, isn’t it?

Sure, it’s exciting, but when it comes to your company’s website, don’t get carried away.  Many people make the mistake of trying to cram as much of the internet’s capability as possible onto their website, and the result is a mess:  too much design, too many tools, too many pages, too many different types on content.  Once you get started down that road, it’s not easy to stop—there’s always something new you’ll think you need to add, or that someone will say you need to add.

If you’re updating your site, or especially if you’re building a new one from scratch, stop and think about what that website is really supposed to do.  Is it supposed to sell products, or just convince someone to pick up the phone and call you?  Is it supposed to introduce your company to people who’ve never heard of you, or provide information to an established customer base?  Or is it supposed to do all of the above?  Once you’ve answered these questions, you’ll know how to build your site.

Let’s start with that last question first.  Proper organization is always important, but if your site caters to a wide audience, if it needs to be a lot of things to a lot of people, organization is absolutely critical.  If you have a number of different brands or widely varied services, consider using a separate website for each.  If that’s not an option, you’ll need to build different sections of your site for your different audiences, and you’ll need to make sure that anyone who goes to the site knows exactly what to do.  The front page probably shouldn’t do much more than identify your company and provide links for the different sections of the site.

To see this strategy in action, go to your health insurance company’s website.  Does it say much on the front page?  Probably not.  More likely, it just has a large graphic and some well-identified areas to click on– one for you, one for doctors and hospitals, and one for employers.  You’ll see this even more clearly on the websites of companies that operate in multiple countries— some of them won’t tell you anything at all until you tell them which country you live in or what language you speak.  Keep this in mind, even if you’re not running a billion-dollar corporation: you don’t want to risk alienating your customers by letting them get lost in a section of your site that doesn’t have anything to do with them.

If your site doesn’t need to do quite so much, focus on what you really do need from it.  If you’re in a business with a long buying cycle, keep that in mind.  You’ll need to provide lots of information about your company and your product, not ask your customer to “Proceed to Checkout.”  If you’re looking for leads, build a site that does the best possible job of getting people to contact you, or to provide you with their contact information.  Don’t try to close the sale on the second page of your site.  It won’t work, for one thing, and it will make you appear inexperienced and unprofessional.

If, on the other hand, your site does need to sell products, focus on that.  In most cases, customers who are planning to buy a T-shirt, a pair of shoes, or a tube of toothpaste don’t need to know a whole lot about the company they’re buying from.  They’ll want some assurance that you’re not a fly-by-night operation, of course, so let them see right away that you have the accreditations, memberships, or partnerships that lend you credibility.  Once you’ve done that, dispense with the formality and show them what they came to see.

I'm really looking forward to working with you to reach new heights of success and balance in your personal and professional life! Sonia Gallagher, JD Holistic Executive Life Coach PS. If you are ready to be challenged, to steer your life in a new direction, and to achieve the goals you desire, I invite you to request a Free Coaching Session and Experience Coaching and How It Can Benefit Your First-hand!

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Four Steps to Success!

by Jim Rohn

Let me pass on to you these four simple steps to success:

Number one is good ideas. Be a collector of good ideas. My mentor taught me to keep a journal when I was twenty five years old. I’ve been doing it now all these years. They will be passed on to my children and my grandchildren. If you hear a good health idea, capture it, write it down. Don’t trust your memory. Then on a cold wintry evening, go back through your journal, the ideas that changed your life, the ideas that saved your marriage, the ideas that bailed you out of bankruptcy, the ideas that helped you become successful, the ideas that made you millions. What a good review. Going back over the collection of ideas that you gathered over the years. So be a collector of good ideas for your business, for your relationships, for your future.

The next step to success is to have good plans. A good plan for the day, a good plan for the future, a good health plan, a good plan for your marriage. Building anything is like building a house, you need to have a plan. Now here is a good time management question: When should you start the day?

Answer: As soon as you have it finished. It is like building a house, building a life. What if you just started laying bricks and somebody asks, “What are you building?” And you say, “I have no idea.” See they would come and take you away to a safe place. So, don’t start the house until you finish it. Now, is it possible to finish the house before you start it? Yes, but it would be foolish to start before you had it finished. Not a bad time management idea. Don’t start the day until it is pretty well finished — at least the outline of the day. Leave some room to improvise. Leave some room for extra strategies, but finish it before you start it.

And here is the next piece that is a little more challenging: Do not start the week until you have it finished. Lay it out, structure it, then put it to work. Then the next one is a little tougher yet; do not start the month until you have it finished.

And finally the big one, don’t start the year until it is finished on paper. It’s not a bad idea, toward the end of the year, to sit down with your family for the family structure plans, sit down in your business for the business plans, sit down with your financial advisor for your investments and map out the year… properties to buy, properties to sell, places to go with your family, lay out the year. I finally learned to do that. It was also helpful for my family to show them where they appeared on my calendar. You know I used to have my business things on there and I used to have my lectures and my seminars all laid out on my calendar, and guess what the children said, “Where are we on the game plan, please show us our names on the game plan.” So you need to do it for your children, for your spouse, for your friends.

Now, here is the third step to success, and it can be really challenging. Learning to handle the passing of time. It takes time to build a career, it takes time to make changes, so give your project time, give your people time. If you’re working with people, give them time to learn, grow, change, develop, produce. And here is the big one, give yourself time. It takes time to master something new. It takes time to make altered changes and refinement in philosophy as well as activity. Give yourself time to learn, time to get it, time to start some momentum, time to finally achieve. It is easy to be impatient with yourself. I remember when I first tried to learn to tie my shoes. The shoe strings, it seemed like it would take me forever. Finally I got it and it didn’t take forever, but it seemed like for a while I’d never learn, I’d get it backwards; the bow goes up and down instead of across. How do I straighten that out? Finally I got it, it just took time.

Mama taught me a little bit about playing the piano. “Here is the left hand scale”, she’d say. I got that, it was easy. Then she said, “Here is the right hand scale.” I got that, that was easy. Now she said, “We are going to play both hands at the same time.” I said, “Well, how can you do that?” Now one at a time was easy… but at the same time? Looking at this hand and looking at that hand, finally I got it. Finally I got where I could play the scales with both hands. Then I remember the day she said, “Now we are going to read the music and play with both hands.” I thought, “You can’t do all that.” But you know, sure enough I’m looking at the music, looking at each hand, a little confused at first, but finally I mastered it. It took a little time to read the music and play with both hands. Then I remember the day she said, “Now we are going to watch the audience, read the music and play with both hands. I thought, “Now that is going too far!” How could you possibly do that? But see adding them one at a time and giving myself time to master one before we went to the next one; sure enough I got to where I could watch the audience, read the music and play with both hands. So the lesson here is: Give yourself time, you can become a better pro, you can better master the art of parenting, you can better master the art of managing time, conserving resources, working together as a partner. Give yourself time.

And here’s the last one; learning to solve problems. Business problems, family problems, financial problems, emotional problems, etc. — challenges for us all. Here’s the best way to treat a problem: As an opportunity to grow. Change if you have to, modify if you must, discard an old philosophy that wasn’t working well for a new one. The best phrase my mentor ever gave me was when he said, “Mr. Rohn if you will change, everything will change for you.” Wow, I took that to heart, and sure enough the more I changed the more everything changed for me.

So learn to master good ideas, have good plans, handle the passing of time and solve problems, and you will be on your way to more success than you could ever imagine!

To Your Success,

Jim Rohn

I'm really looking forward to working with you to reach new heights of success and balance in your personal and professional life! Sonia Gallagher, JD Holistic Executive Life Coach PS. If you are ready to be challenged, to steer your life in a new direction, and to achieve the goals you desire, I invite you to request a Free Coaching Session and Experience Coaching and How It Can Benefit Your First-hand!

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