Keep Your Head When All About You Are Losing Theirs - And Blaming YOU!

Welcome to LegalBiz Cafe! Digitally remastered with AI, in this podcast series, Attorney Shaune B. Arnold gives to frustrated professionals like YOU the tools and resources you need to make the LEAP to entrepreneurship so you can start, build or fix a business you will absolutely LOVE. 

What do you do when everything goes sideways—and everyone’s looking at you? Attorney Shaune B. Arnold shares real-life lessons on navigating entrepreneurial mishaps with calm, clarity, and confidence. Discover tools to breathe through the stress, troubleshoot with ease, and lead with grace—even when the tech fails and tempers flare. 

Transcript

Hey, now! Welcome, everybody …once again …this week and every week …to legal biz café. I’m your host, attorney Shaune B. Arnold. And tonight, we’re going to keep our heads about us, when everyone around us is losing theirs, …and blaming it on us. We’re gonna keep our cool. But before we go getting’ all ice bergy, let’s chat for a moment about what we’re doing here on Legal Biz Café. Here, we deal with your mindset as the entrepreneur. We give you those emotional and mental tools and resources that you need to build a solid business.

I also invite you to listen to my other podcast, Your Business, Accelerated! Over there, we take on the hardcore legal and business operations issues that can really wreck your business. Think about it. You get your mind right over here, and then go over there and get your business right, from an attorney with decades of experience. What could be better?

Today, I want to talk about what you can do when things go wrong. What do you do when things go haywire and people start to come unglued?

I had something like that this afternoon occur, and that sort of brought up the subject matter for tonight. A funny thing happened on the way to record Your Business, Accelerated! today. I logged on as usual, and I held the call as usual, and I have a habit of actually listening to the call while I'm queuing it up to send it out to my various listeners all over the globe. The call file was empty. I thought, boy, that's bizarre. I listened for about five minutes, and then I just heard a couple of people actually opt in on the line to listen to the call. I could hear them, but I couldn't hear me, and yet, 20 minutes was recorded, 20 minutes of dead air. And I thought, gosh, that's just bizarre. Well, maybe I had my mute on or something, because, I mean, from beginning to end, I never appeared in that recording. So I said to myself, this is hugely embarrassing.

Les Brown always says, when things go wrong, ...don't go with them. I decided I was not going to go with them. I just re-recorded the entire teleseminar, which was about 20 minutes long. 

I listened to it again. Lo and behold, it picked up about 45 seconds of my call and then blanked out the rest, absolute zero on the rest. Okay, now I’m “0” for two and I'm losing.

So, what do you do when things go wrong like this on YOU? ...I so wanted to go with them, but I'm going to share with you a number of techniques that I used today and techniques that I think that you can use going forward when things go wrong. 

Now, granted, this is something that is fairly small. It's a recorded call and I do these calls every single week. However, I did have some new callers on the line that I now have to send some special notes to, or maybe send them a special audio or something to get them to come back again to the show and to listen in.

When everything went bonkers, I thought to myself, rather than get upset about that, just breathe. You know, breathing is so important. It’s something that none of us really pay enough attention to. You can control your emotional state no matter how stressful the circumstance, just by controlling your breathing.

Try breathing all the way down into the bottom of your diaphragm, in through your nose and out through your mouth in a very slow, controlled fashion. If you can actually do that 10 times, you will probably find that whatever it is that is making you stressed is going to take on a lot less significance. 

…Yes, just breathe.

The next thing I invite you to do is to call someone who should know how to make things right. If your computer goes south on you, can you take it to the geek squad? ...Are you an operator or a technician? 

I know a lot of people who would venture to take that computer apart and try to fix it for themselves, but if you do not know a motherboard from an ironing board, my suggestion to you is that you call in a pro. Stay in your lane. This will ultimately cause you a lot less stress.

You can sometimes help others keep their heads screwed on tightly by communicating with them. Are you going to be late, even by just a few minutes? If you can, just send a text or voicemail to whomever is going to be waiting. Most people will understand.

Ask yourself, is this one in a long series of things that are going wrong in your business? Well, if it is, then I suggest that you check a couple of things, check your business processes to make sure that everything is operating the way it's supposed to be operating. Check your team to determine whether everyone is properly trained in order to carry out their jobs, and that includes you.

Are you familiar with all the processes in your business? Are you familiar with all of the technology? Is there more than one person in your business who can post to your social media? For example, if there's only one person that can do it, and they are out of the office, or they are on vacation, or, God forbid, they should go south on you and take your login IDs, then what do you do with something like that? You definitely want to make sure that you have more than one person trained on every key aspect of your business.

When looking at your team, are all of your team members in the right job for their skill set and for their temperament? This could be why things are going wrong. You and I have discussed this before on a previous episode of legal biz café. If you have good people in the wrong positions, then I suggest that you change their jobs as soon as possible. You don't need to fire them. But I would suggest if they're not a people person, they have no business answering the phone. If they can't speak English well enough to be understood by the public, they would be of more value to you in another position. This minimizes frustration and costs.

You need to be flexible when things go south. Solutions often require you to think outside the box. If the problem is with the team, you may need to back up to the point where things were going well, and everybody was on the same page. Start there ...and figure out what went wrong from there. Was it operator error? Was it miscommunication? Something went wrong. And if you go back far enough to where it was happening correctly, I bet you can figure out what happened.

Unraveling a mess requires patience. Sometimes things just don't work. Yes, it's frustrating, but I'm asking myself, is there a way for me to get around it? Can I weave that basket by hand until my team gets my machinery back up and running? That's the main question that I'm asking myself.

Finally, what can I do when I am trying to keep my head, when all about me are losing theirs and blaming it on me? I put it into perspective. Think about what is happening. If it's critical to your business operations, by all means, fix the problem. However, if it's not critical to your business operations, you may want to let it ride. The drama may dissipate on its own. You don't want to sweat the small stuff while growing an iconic business.

Ladies and gentlemen, …I really want to thank you for joining me on this week's episode of legal biz cafe. I am your host, Attorney Shaune B Arnold. I encourage you to follow me on Facebook, LinkedIn and Twitter X. My name in all of those places is Shaune dot Arnold. In the meantime, and in between time, I'm Attorney Shaune B Arnold reminding you, …as always, …to MAXIMIZE your competence to get the confidence you need to succeed.

I'll see you next week right here on Legal Biz Café. Bye-bye, friends!