Confession From A Leader: I’m Addicted To Crisis Mode

Claudia King
Automio
Published in
6 min readMay 27, 2020

How I refocused my brain to use hustle mode for the greater good of my legal business.

I’m Claudia King and I’m addicted to crisis mode.

Most people crack under a once-in-a-lifetime event. Not me. I’m brilliant in a crisis. So when Covid-19 hit I was like I’ve got this. And I did. I absolutely owned it. I lead my team. I drove results. I thrived.

For a lot of law firm owners, the start of 2020 has been a wake-up call for how they’ve been running their law firms. It has meant that we’ve been in demand here at Automio. We’ve worked from home the whole way through the lockdown. We listened to our audience and we adapted as needed. As a parent, I led all this while having the kids at home and taking on guiding their education. It was an action-packed, adrenaline-fuelled time.

When we moved down on alert levels here in New Zealand, I went back to work and the kids went back to school and the pressure came off.

And with it, the adrenaline was gone.

  • I felt bored
  • I felt antsy
  • I questioned what we were doing
  • I picked at our processes
  • I wanted to kickstart new things to keep myself interested

I found myself filling the void that was left once we started to move out of crisis mode.

And at first, because I was feeling bajiggity without the immediate pressure, it caused me to pick at the seams of my life and business.

I started to see problems everywhere and I wanted to find solutions to them immediately.

I’ve always known there has been some brain-trash there around performing well under pressure or a crisis. So I started examining that and looking at how I could focus that energy in my day-to-day life (in an un-adrenaline junkie way).

Here is how I channelled that energy and used it for the good of my business and the benefit of my team (and you can too):

Crisis mode motivates me because I clearly see the pain-points or the problems and when it was over I found myself immediately looking for more problems to activate my brain (spoiler alert: turns out some of the issues I found weren’t even problems).

Step one: Write them down.

To harness that energy start drilling into the problems you’re seeing in your law firm. Put these down on paper and start thinking about them objectively.

To do this, I use a spreadsheet and pull all the problems out of my head and put them on one side of the page.

Solve Your Problems: Growing Your Law Firm Online

Step two: Understand the result you want

Now that you have the problems out of your head you need to ask yourself:

  • What is the result I want?
  • If the problem is a system or process not going how it should be, then how do I want it to be going?
  • What does this problem need to look like so it’s no longer a challenge in my firm?

Start mapping out the ideal results on the right-hand side of your problems. Each problem needs an end result.

By understanding the ideal result you want you can figure out how you, or your team, can make it a reality. If you have no end game to work towards you’ll continue to get stuck in the frustration zone. And, if you task these problems out to someone to resolve without a clear result for them to chase you’ll just end up creating even more problems because they don’t really understand what you want.

Solve Your Problems: Growing Your Law Firm Online

Step three: Figure out how to get from one point to the other

Now that you have the end result you can start to communicate that and move past being frustrated by the problem. You have a starting point and an endpoint and you can figure out the solution.

You can delegate this to your team. I’ve hired my A-Team of experts so I know that I can hand over these problems and the result I want and trust that they’ll create the solution to get us there where we need to be so these are no longer challenges within the business.

If you’re a sole practitioner, you’ll need to spend a bit more time in this area finding the solutions or experts to help you with the delivery of the solution.

Exclusive Download: Savvy Lawyers Report — The trends you need to know to grow your law firm online + real life case studies of savvy lawyers doing it right now.

Solve Your Problems: Growing Your Law Firm Online

Step four: The power of understanding

By doing this big brain dump and getting these challenges down on paper, I was able to figure out that some of the problems I was first fixated on weren’t actually problems and the ones that were I was able to act on and get my team to collectively work on.

A problem shared is a problem halved.

And, by having those problems clearly mapped out I’ve been able to harness my crisis-mode, boss-power to create positive action when the pressure is off.

We all have reactions or behaviours that can be turned into super-powers. As a law firm owner and a leader, you need to examine these within yourself and look for opportunities to play to your strengths. Doing this will allow you to scale your law firm faster and with greater success.

Tell me in the comments how you’re harnessing your super-powers to create growth in your law firm.

P.S.

Want to work with me to find your strengths, learn how to use them to overcome your problems and grow your law firm to 7-figures? Schedule a Strategy Session with my team. We will get on a call for 45 minutes and craft a step-by-step game plan for your firm, including:

  • Identify your current situation in regards to the economic uncertainty
  • Uncover the #1 thing holding you and your law firm back
  • Develop a 3-step Action Plan that will get you results ASAP

P.P.S

If you’re keen to learn more about scaling your law firm with online legal solutions, head over to our new Savvy Lawyers Facebook group. Join me and a community of entrepreneurial lawyers talking about how you can use online legal solutions to make money while you sleep.

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Claudia King is a legal tech entrepreneur and founder of Automio, the home of growth-focused lawyers. Automio helps growth-minded, entrepreneurial lawyers scale their law firms from 6 figures to 7 figures using cloud-based legal technology & world-class training programmes. Claudia has grown two legal business to 7-figures and her framework is supporting 100s of lawyers to create law firms that let allow them to be happy, rested, impactful, collaborative and rich (in every sense of the word).

Originally published at https://autom.io on May 27, 2020.

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Claudia King
Automio
Editor for

I help entrepreneurial lawyers scale their firms to 7-figures | 2x owner of 7-figure legal business | Automio founder