A PROUD MEMBER OF THE ACCOUNTABILITY CLUB HELPING ONE ANOTHER SUCCEED
How do you stick to your goals? It’s not easy to do, especially when you keep your goals to yourself. I’ve found that if I can tell someone else about what I want to do, I am so much more likely to stick with it and achieve my goals. Welcome to the Accountability Club. It began with my friend and colleague Scott Snellings. Scott and I started having quarterly meetings, sometimes lasting all day, where we’d check in on where we were on our quarterly goals. We talk about everything from where we are in our workouts to the books we want to read and even trial lawyer matters. During the meeting, we come up with one thing we want to accomplish over the next quarter. It keeps us consistent on our path to bettering ourselves. This has spilled over into keeping ourselves accountable as a firm and business. Rosie, Ashley, and I do weekly leadership meetings, and we all get to bring up things the other people may not have known or thought about. It allows us to keep pushing the ball forward
from a firm standpoint. Each week, we can circle back to the agenda and stick to it. These meetings keep us working toward our overall goals. Because education is a BLF value, we’ve also created an internal book club. From the moment I brought up the idea, everyone was 120% in, and it’s been awesome to see how we’re all so interested in what our coworkers have learned. Every quarter, we each read a different book. Then we meet to go over what we each learned from our book and how it’s
helped us. It’s been a really fun experience, and it keeps us all improving.
Creating accountability to ourselves and our team not only makes us better individually, but it also makes us stronger as a team and able to provide the best to our clients. If you don’t have an accountability partner yet, I encourage you to reach out to a friend or colleague to help you on this journey. You’ll be amazed at how much accountability contributes to success.
BLF BOOK REVIEW: MASTER THE ART OF ‘PERSUASION’
For anyone who wants to up their communication game, you need to check out “Persuasion: Convincing Others When Facts Don’t Seem to Matter.” Written by Lee Hartley Carter, wordsmith president of a language strategy firm, the book shows you how to approach any situation with the tools to fuel collaboration so you can go after goals together. “Persuasion” was recommended to our attorney Ashley by another attorney out of Florida. After he raved about it, Ashley downloaded it on Audible and discovered what he had been so excited about. “It’s something that almost anyone could benefit from,” Ashley says. “It’s not just written for lawyers. I loved it.” Carter’s tactics help you find out what your audience needs you to do so you can work together to accomplish your goal. “It’s even helped me in communicating with my husband,” Ashley says. After reading the book, she realized if she wanted his help cleaning out the garage, for example, she had to think about why it would be beneficial for him. “We’re
humans; we’re interested in our own gains. We have to think about things from the other person’s point of view: How can I frame my proposal in a way that he wants to hear it? It’s not going to be the same as for me — I have
different reasons for wanting something done than he does,” Ashley explains. For example, she may just want a cleaner garage, but for her husband, a cleaner garage would enable him to get the deep freezer he really wants. “Persuasion” gives the reader easy takeaways and strategies you’ll be able to start implementing in your daily life. “It comes with a really clear, step-by-step plan,” Ashley says. “That’s the easy part. You also have to make sure you’re taking the time to think the strategies through. Depending on how complex the situation you’re dealing with is, you may need to take more time putting together your argument.” Now, Russell has read the book, and we’ve even taken some of Carter’s strategies and used them in our approaches in the office. “You learn to put everything into a formula that helps you uniquely look at your audience’s point of view,” Ashley says. You can check out “Persuasion” on Audible or Amazon and at your local bookstore.
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