Where Are You Going? How Will You Know When You Get There?

Today, I attended a webinar by one of my favorite bloggers about the business of the Trenches, Lee Rosen.  Lee is an interesting guy.  He's a family law attorney whose passion is the business of the Trenches.  He has branched out into helping lawyers do the business better. As part of that, he gives seminars that focus on the nuts and bolts of improving your practice.  What he noticed, however, was that the folks who were attending his workshops were anxious to learn how to market better, use technology more effectively and streamline their practices.  The problem was that most of them hadn't taken the time to develop a vision for how they wanted their practices and their lives to look ten years down the road.  As the Cheshire Cat said to Alice when she asked:   "Would you tell me, please, which way I ought to go from here?" "That depends a good deal on where you want to get to," said the Cat. "I don't much care where--" said Alice. "Then it doesn't matter which way you go," said the Cat.   His point was that unless you have a vision for where you want to go, all the work on nuts and bolts will only take you so far.  You have to have a vivid picture of where you want to end up for everything else to be most helpful and life altering.

Let's just take that last paragraph and apply it to our clients here in the Trenches.  So many of them are like the attendees at Lee's workshops:  they know what they have isn't working and they want to change it.  Great.  I can help.  The trouble is that most of them have no vision for what would work better.  They haven't thought about where they want their lives to be in ten years.  They're standing in Baskin Robbins and telling the clerk they don't want vanilla.  Well, there are 32 other flavors, and they have no idea which one they want.  They may try some of the flavors other than vanilla, but whether they'll be satisfied with them is a matter of chance, not design.  That's too bad.  It hardly seems worth the effort to engage in change without direction.  They may never find what works better.  I worry about the future for those clients.  Here in the Trenches.