Does this sound familiar? You have marketing tasks on your to-do list. You just can’t seem to get to them.
Something else comes up every day, and you keep moving the marketing things to the next day, and the next week, or the next month. Even as the tasks slide down the list you feel the urgency increasing because you know if you don’t do it, you’re going to get into a cash crisis. Still, the task slides and the pressure builds and the frustration grows.
What is getting in the way? It might not be the crush of other peoples’ demands, priorities, and distractions. It just might be you – and the stories you tell yourself that justify why it’s ok to push marketing down the list.
Stories like:
- You haven’t had to do this before. Things just have a way of working out.
- You don’t have two minutes to rub together to do the marketing.
- You wouldn’t have time to take on new matters anyway.
- You don’t like doing the marketing – it doesn’t feel right.
- You don’t know what to do, so you need to learn more first.
- You are not very good at it anyway – so why waste your time.
- You are a professional, and professionals shouldn’t have to market.
- You can just outsource it to other people – and let them do it.
- You can wait until things ‘get better’ or ‘calm down’.
Do any of these comfortable lies sound familiar to you? They do to me. I’ve told them to myself more than once over the years.
Believing these stories will keep you stuck and eventually cause you to fly your practice right off a cliff. And that’s bad.
The very first step to breaking the grip of these comfortable lies is to change your thinking – your beliefs. Because you will rise (or fall) to what you believe you can achieve. Here’s how:
1. Flip the Comfortable Stories. Write the opposite in your handy notebook in your own words. For example: “I have to do this now. Things will not work out unless I act”. There is extraordinary power in putting your thoughts on paper.
2. Create space in your schedule for Marketing. Your marketing and client acquisition activities need at least as much priority as your current client work and your court appearances. That means you need to put them on your calendar to hold the space to do the work. These blocks of time need to be first into the proverbial box, not last. Look at your calendar for the next week. Create 3 blocks of 45 minutes at a time when you are at your best – probably not 2 pm. Use that time to tackle any of the comfortable stories, and smash it on the rocks.
3. Make a Stop Doing List. You will probably find it hard to do step 2 unless you stop doing things that have been taking up your time. Making a “stop doing list” is one of the most important things you can do to identify and move away from activities that no longer serve you.
Have a great rest of the week,
-Doug
P.S… Saying “no” is hard. If you’d like tips on how to do that check out my guide: How to Say No Without Being Negative CLICK HERE to get your copy.