Your legal career comes down to a choice between two paths. One feels safe, the other fraught with risk. One lies within the comfort zone, the other outside of it. One requires conformity, the other originality. One leads away from fear, the other straight toward it.
Author Steven Pressfield refers to the fear we all feel as the “resistance.” The resistance is what leads us to make decisions based not on what we desire, but rather what we think others desire of us. Pressfield decries this mindset as it robs us of our authentic self: “Our job in this life is not to shape ourselves into some ideal we imagine we ought to be, but to find out who we already are and become it.”
The first thing that a lawyer who aspires to build a strong personal brand needs to come to grips with is this: To make an impact you need to start caring more about what potential clients think, than you do worrying about what your colleagues may think. That’s because the pressure to conform in the legal industry is strong.
But to grow you need to change. And to change you need to grow.
TO LEARN MORE HEAD OVER TO ATTORNEY AT WORK
Attorney at Work recently published an article I wrote that deals with issues of fear, change and personal branding. Check it out and let me know what you think. Click here to read the article.