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Don’t leave it to chance – how to make your return from the summer break different this time. By Cath Brown
‘It will be better when….’
How many times have you told yourself that it will be better next term, or when this case is over, or when you become a silk?
And yet somehow things stay the same. Work expands to fill every working hour and your resolve to play tennis twice a week becomes a distant memory.
So, how can the return from your summer break be different this time?
How can you work smarter? More efficiently? And get close to the longed-for balance?
I am not doubting you are busy. It is hard to spend any time at all with a barrister without them telling you that they are busy.
You may even think it isn’t possible to work any harder.
But I do wonder if you could work smarter to free up some more time.
Some of the following tips may be in your toolkit already but see if there are any you could usefully adopt:
Your next challenge for this new term fresh-start is to ensure that any increase in productivity leads to the freed up time being beneficial which, for most of my coaching clients, means ensuring a greater balance or blend between the time and energy spent on the professional and personal aspects of their lives.
Here, the main strategy which works for me and for my clients is: Saying ‘no’ more.
Speaking as a former barrister, I know how hard it can be to say ‘no’. The self-employment aspect feeds a myth that saying no somehow means we will never work again.
But – pay attention – this is important: That simply isn’t true.
I sent a ‘no’ to a company I do some associate work for recently, after some soul-searching and hand-wringing and imagining of bankruptcy.
They replied quickly to thank me for letting them now and they sent another offer of work within a matter of days.
Some of us are programmed to say ‘yes’ by default. It can be a hard habit to break.
Therefore, it might be that saying ‘no’ is too big a shift in your behaviour, too much of a leap to achieve in one go. The easy first step is simply pausing before your default ‘yes’.
Pause, take a breath and, preferably, say you’ll come back to them with your answer by a given point. Depending on the question, you might also want to ask for further information (why do they need it in 24 hours, for example).
Gradually, this will become your natural response instead of a ‘yes’ that you immediately regret.
It will change your life and people will still instruct you. I promise.
Once you have mastered this in your professional life, apply the same principle to your private life – do you have commitments that come from obligation or a knee-jerk ‘yes’, rather than coming from a genuine wish to be involved?
Can you eliminate those? Or at least make sure that you do not add any more of those drains on your time?
When you have succeeded in freeing up some time for yourself, the key then is to protect that time to pursue the activities that really light you up.
The hard-working, over-achieving psyche runs deep. The gravitational pull of work is strong. You need to resist allowing all the liberated time to fill up with work and you need to do so consciously. Do not leave it to chance.
I actively carve out time in that diary for social commitments and, very importantly, I also carve out time for myself without having a specific social or family commitment.
Indeed, I have frequent diary entries which say ‘Safeguard for Self’.
Of course, sometimes I have to change those personal commitments, just as I sometimes have to change professional commitments. Any system I deploy to help me out has to be flexible to be workable.
The key is to have rules around flexibility and my rule is that I have to change non-work diary entries I replace them on a different time or date in the near future. They are not lost, merely postponed.
Unfortunately, none of these strategies promise a quick, easy fix. There isn’t a switch you can flick to ensure that your productivity and your work-life balance remain perfect forever. Or, if there is, I have not found it.
This is an ongoing process, which requires effort, awareness and, possibly, some external accountability.
All I can promise is that the effort is worth it, and the results can be life changing.
Cath Brown runs her own boutique coaching and training company www.skilfulconversation.com which draws on her 15 years’ experience as a civil barrister. As well as coaching individuals on all aspects of life at the Bar, she also provides in-house and online training on various topics including ‘How to Mentor and Be Mentored’
‘It will be better when….’
How many times have you told yourself that it will be better next term, or when this case is over, or when you become a silk?
And yet somehow things stay the same. Work expands to fill every working hour and your resolve to play tennis twice a week becomes a distant memory.
So, how can the return from your summer break be different this time?
How can you work smarter? More efficiently? And get close to the longed-for balance?
I am not doubting you are busy. It is hard to spend any time at all with a barrister without them telling you that they are busy.
You may even think it isn’t possible to work any harder.
But I do wonder if you could work smarter to free up some more time.
Some of the following tips may be in your toolkit already but see if there are any you could usefully adopt:
Your next challenge for this new term fresh-start is to ensure that any increase in productivity leads to the freed up time being beneficial which, for most of my coaching clients, means ensuring a greater balance or blend between the time and energy spent on the professional and personal aspects of their lives.
Here, the main strategy which works for me and for my clients is: Saying ‘no’ more.
Speaking as a former barrister, I know how hard it can be to say ‘no’. The self-employment aspect feeds a myth that saying no somehow means we will never work again.
But – pay attention – this is important: That simply isn’t true.
I sent a ‘no’ to a company I do some associate work for recently, after some soul-searching and hand-wringing and imagining of bankruptcy.
They replied quickly to thank me for letting them now and they sent another offer of work within a matter of days.
Some of us are programmed to say ‘yes’ by default. It can be a hard habit to break.
Therefore, it might be that saying ‘no’ is too big a shift in your behaviour, too much of a leap to achieve in one go. The easy first step is simply pausing before your default ‘yes’.
Pause, take a breath and, preferably, say you’ll come back to them with your answer by a given point. Depending on the question, you might also want to ask for further information (why do they need it in 24 hours, for example).
Gradually, this will become your natural response instead of a ‘yes’ that you immediately regret.
It will change your life and people will still instruct you. I promise.
Once you have mastered this in your professional life, apply the same principle to your private life – do you have commitments that come from obligation or a knee-jerk ‘yes’, rather than coming from a genuine wish to be involved?
Can you eliminate those? Or at least make sure that you do not add any more of those drains on your time?
When you have succeeded in freeing up some time for yourself, the key then is to protect that time to pursue the activities that really light you up.
The hard-working, over-achieving psyche runs deep. The gravitational pull of work is strong. You need to resist allowing all the liberated time to fill up with work and you need to do so consciously. Do not leave it to chance.
I actively carve out time in that diary for social commitments and, very importantly, I also carve out time for myself without having a specific social or family commitment.
Indeed, I have frequent diary entries which say ‘Safeguard for Self’.
Of course, sometimes I have to change those personal commitments, just as I sometimes have to change professional commitments. Any system I deploy to help me out has to be flexible to be workable.
The key is to have rules around flexibility and my rule is that I have to change non-work diary entries I replace them on a different time or date in the near future. They are not lost, merely postponed.
Unfortunately, none of these strategies promise a quick, easy fix. There isn’t a switch you can flick to ensure that your productivity and your work-life balance remain perfect forever. Or, if there is, I have not found it.
This is an ongoing process, which requires effort, awareness and, possibly, some external accountability.
All I can promise is that the effort is worth it, and the results can be life changing.
Don’t leave it to chance – how to make your return from the summer break different this time. By Cath Brown
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