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The Renegade Lawyer Podcast
I am more convinced than ever that nothing that traditional bar organizations are doing is going to move the needle on the sad stats on lawyer happiness ...
The root cause of all lawyers' problems is financial stress. Financial stress holds you back from getting the right people on the bus, running the right systems, and being able to only do work for clients you want to work with. Financial stress keeps you in the office on nights and weekends, often doing work you hate for people you don't like, and doing that work alone.
(Yes, you have permission to do only work you like doing and doing it with people you like working with.)
The money stress is not because the lawyers are bad lawyers or bad people. In fact, most lawyers are good at the lawyering part and they are good people.
The money stress is caused by the general lack of both business skills and an entrepreneurial mindset.
Thus, good lawyers who are good people get caught up and slowed down in bringing their gifts to the world. Their families, teams, clients, and communities are not well-served because you can't serve others at your top level when you are constantly worrying about money.
We can blame the law schools and the elites of the profession who are running bar organizations, but to blame anyone else for your own woes is a loser's game. It is, in itself, a restrictive, narrow, mindset that will keep you from ever seeing, let alone experiencing, a better future.
Lawyers need to be in rooms with other entrepreneurs. They need to hang with people who won't tell you that your dreams are too big or that "they" or "the system "won't allow you to achieve them. They need to be in rooms where people will be in their ear telling them that their dreams are too small.
Get in better rooms. That would be the first step.
Second step, ignore every piece of advice any general organized bar is giving about how to make your firm or your life better.
The Renegade Lawyer Podcast
Renegade Lawyer Marketing (Audio Book) – Chapter 4: The Power of Decisiveness
This is Chapter 4 of the free audio edition of Renegade Lawyer Marketing (Second Edition)—only on the Renegade Lawyer Podcast.
In this chapter, Ben Glass tackles a hidden productivity killer that affects nearly every law firm owner: decision fatigue.
Drawing on both personal experience and the work of psychologist Roy Baumeister, Ben explains how indecision, overthinking, and fear-based hesitation sap your energy—and cost you opportunity.
You’ll hear:
- Why you must stop trying to make the “perfect” decision every time
- How quick decision-making builds momentum (and protects your sanity)
- What “scripting” is—and how it can change your week overnight
- Why Ben no longer picks paint colors or chairs (and what that has to do with being a visionary)
- And how most lawyers are wasting their decision-making power on things that don’t move the needle
📘 Want the book + bonuses? Visit RenegadeLawyerMarketing.com
🎟️ Join us live at GLMSummit.com
Ben Glass is a nationally recognized personal injury and long-term disability insurance attorney in Fairfax, VA. Since 2005, Ben Glass and Great Legal Marketing have been helping solo and small firm lawyers make more money, get more clients and still get home in time for dinner. We call this TheGLMTribe.com
What Makes The GLM Tribe Special?
In short, we are the only organization within the "business builder for lawyers" space that is led by two practicing lawyers.
One thing we're sure you've noticed is that despite the variety of options within our space, no one else is mixing
the actual practice of law with business building in the way that we are.
There are no other organizations who understand the highs and lows of running a small law firm and are engaged in talking to real clients. That is what sets GLM apart from every other organization, and it is why we have had loyal members that have been with us for two-decades.
Hey everyone, this is Ben, and we are moving on now with chapter four out of Renegade Lawyer Marketing. If you'd like a hard copy of the book, we'll send it to you for free. You pay postage and handling. We've got three cool bonuses. Go to renegadelawyermarketingcom.
Speaker 1:If this is the first podcast that you've stumbled upon. Go back and find the first episode about the book. They have different images and I'll tell you what we're doing. Okay, chapter four decisiveness. Our lives are inundated with requests from others. Decide this. Decide that Successful people get asked to do a lot.
Speaker 1:Until we build a great team of confident leaders at our companies, we often find ourselves making all of the decisions. Making all the decisions was one of the really hard things when I started Ben Glass Law after working at another firm for about a dozen years. Everything what kind of copier, what kind of phone system, what kind of computer system, what about the networks? All that that was really exhausting. I thought that there would be a great market to have someone, for just 90 days, come and help set up all the logistics. Have someone, for just 90 days, come and help set up all the logistics up. Many of us continue that because we don't scale, we don't learn to delegate. We don't figure out that there's other people who would really do some of this stuff better than we do, and so we talk about this now in the rest of chapter four of Renegade Lawyer Marketing. That feeling of exhaustion is real. It's called decision fatigue. It's a term coined in 2010 by Roy Baumeister, who's a psychology professor at Florida State University.
Speaker 1:The decisions that business leaders make aren't simply decisions about how their businesses are going to be run. If you're running a small business, you're likely helping your customers, clients and patients, making important decisions, and whether you're selling a widget, creating a treatment plan or developing legal strategy, you're advising on or making hundreds of decisions a day. And if your hobby is something like soccer refereeing you're making a decision every 22 seconds during an 80-minute high school game. So I've been doing that for 51 years not all at the high school level, but I've been refereeing for 51 years, still doing it at the high school level. And these stats are absolutely right. And the parents the crazy parents are in the stands yelling out like the one thing, the one thing they think that I got wrong out of the literally hundreds of decisions I make once the game starts. Back to the book.
Speaker 1:It's important that you understand the toll that decision-making can take on your ability to make the critical decisions for your life. According to Baumeister, your ability to make decisions is finite. We get tired, and when we get tired, the quality of our decision-making goes down. Whatever business we're in, we aren't doing our jobs well if we make decisions for clients and customers when we are tired. Fortunately, there is a solution to decision fatigue. It comes with risk, though. The risk is that the faster you make decisions, the more some people will think you don't care.
Speaker 1:Now, case in point and I also write about this in no BS Time Management for Entrepreneurs, which I co-authored with Dan Kennedy, case in point, my wife Sandy and I have been married since 1981, and while we are certainly different individuals, there aren't a lot of things that we think differently about. We're aligned on the big things child raising, money matters, who is responsible for different parts of our large household we have nine kids and how many nights a week I can go out and referee soccer games. That's been negotiated over the years, and at one point that was a source of disagreement for a significant period of time, but we got through that. There is one way in which we think about the world differently. Decision-making Sandy is deliberate. She will research her choices and then invite the opinions of friends and family members for everything from household renovations to vacation spots, to things like do you think this picture goes better in the family room or the living room? I'm exactly the opposite. I make decisions quickly and this can be frustrating to a deliberate thinker. Let me just say that again Someone who is a quick decider can be frustrating to someone who is a deliberate decider, and you gotta figure out the two different styles and you gotta work through that. Here's the frustration.
Speaker 1:Sandy will bring me a decision she's been pondering. She's spent perhaps hours researching and gathering the opinions of others, and when she brings a question to me and asks me to choose between A or B, I will often immediately announce my decision. She doesn't take this as bold decisiveness, but as an uncaring attitude about all the time she has spent pondering the issue. But that's not it at all. It's me using this standard. It's three steps here. Number one a wrong decision on the matter will not be fatal, and not. Number one a wrong decision on this matter will not be fatal, nor likely permanent. Number two you, sandy, are much more qualified to make this decision than I am anyway. Number three we are both going to be a lot happier if we go with your decision, because I know that point one and point two are both true.
Speaker 1:So the principle is to understand that you can make faster decisions once you get your ego out of the way and think that the world needs you to make the best decision. Every time you're called upon to make a decision, it doesn't Like good is good enough for most of what we do in life. For 80% of the decisions you are called to make, the world will pretty much go on. Whether you make decision A or decision B, or you don't make any decision at all, no one is going to notice much, so just get over it. What you're supposed to be doing is getting the most. What you're supposed to be doing is getting most of the big, important decisions right. You're going to get a lot of the big decisions wrong anyway. It's just not that big a deal. Have you set a model for your life that requires you to make the best decision possible all the time? If that's the model you've been following and running the business in a law firm, I guarantee you're not as successful as you could have been if you'd just gotten comfortable with not being the one making most of the decisions necessary to run your business and then screwing up a certain percentage of even the most important ones. Note if this is not your current reality and you believe that the highly successful people you know got there by making hundreds of correct decisions a day, then you need to get into a mastermind group of people who are further along the business success curve than you are. In a group run by an experienced leader of masterminds, you'll soon see that everyone has a history of making bad decisions, again, most of them not fatal nor permanent. We see this all the time in the mastermind groups run at Great Legal Marketing.
Speaker 1:The next section was about the art of scripting. Here's a weekly business memo I sent to my lawyer members where I described the practice of scripting to alleviate decision fatigue. Scripting is a strategy that my friend and mentor, dan Kennedy, has taught for years. So our members, every Monday, get a weekly fax, which actually used to be faxed to people but now it's emailed as a PDF with my thoughts inside baseball reminders about things that we've talked about, things like that. Every single week is a part of membership. Here's what I wrote.
Speaker 1:As lawyers, our days can be absolutely filled with decision-making from what should I be working on all the way to what word can I choose to use in this brief to have the most impact on my reader? We are asked to make thousands of decisions a week, yet only a few will actually move the needle of our lives. Your job as the leader of a law firm is to be on the lookout for, and then ready to make, those few game-changing decisions that really matter to you and your law firm or to a particular client's case. You need to be ready to make those decisions. I found that a great way to reduce the total number of decisions I make in a day, thus saving my power for the important stuff, is by using the tool of scripting.
Speaker 1:Each weekend I spend about an hour looking over my calendars and lists and begin to assemble the week ahead. I do this by prioritizing stuff on a clean sheet of paper and then assigning work to certain hours over the following week. Then I schedule that time on my calendar. No one can interfere with that time. My team must insert meetings and calls that they or clients want around my pre-planning. I've placed the big rocks into my future. See, I've placed the big rocks into my future, and if it wasn't a big rock on the weekend, then there's little chance that it's even going to make it to my calendar for that week. At best, it's a decision that's in play only next weekend. I keep that list of possibilities for next weekend's planning Now. I don't have to wake up and decide what I'm going to do Monday through Friday, because it's already there. By the way, workouts are scheduled in advance too, with rest days finding their way into the meeting. By the way, work days are scheduled in advance too, with rest days finding their way into the calendar alongside CrossFit and refereeing. Daily eating is scripted too, though that's done early each morning.
Speaker 1:One more thing I'm really good at not deciding a lot of things. In our recent move and expansion into much larger office space, I decided nothing in terms of colors, furniture, layout. I was consulted a bit on the size of the offices and on the training center we embedded into the space. The same goes for major and very expensive renovations made at our house. I'm pretty much out of deciding anything but go no, go on a project, happily leaving the details to others. That's actually what a visionary does. That's exactly the description of a visionary Sound, regimented, it is. Know what. I'm not, at the end of the day, exhausted from decision making, so try it.
Speaker 1:My final point for this chapter is this You'll never learn as much about business from reading a book or attending a conference as you will about making a decision. My final point is this You'll never learn as much about business from reading a book or attending a conference as you will about making a decision, putting that decision into play and seeing what happens. Just go out there and do it. Learn, adjust, repeat, do it, Don't procrastinate. Okay, next chapter, chapter five banned by the local bar. How a local knucklehead bar leader wanted to come after me after he found out that his group had invited bad old Ben to his meeting, to his meeting, to talk about marketing. That's next time, all right, we'll see you then.
