Part 2: Business as UN-usual? Law Business in the Face of the Corona Virus.

Allison Williams: [00:00:00] About what we have to do in the world of unusual business. Business as unusual. So I’m glad that those of you that are here live, decided to show up with me live. I know for some of you in Central and Pacific Time, it is very early in the morning. We are going to be having a series which I’m going to talk to you about later, which is going to be throughout the day, so you’re going to have more opportunities not to be up so early. But for those of you that are going to catch me early, I appreciate you for being here with us.

 

Allison Williams: [00:00:28] And for those of you that are going to catch this on the replay, please. Hashtag replay. Let me know that you actually saw this. Let me know that this gave you some value. So let’s dive into the topic of the day, which is business as unusual. So as you’re coming in, please, please, please say hi. Let me know that you’re out there. Let me know that you’re awake and with me. I get energy from your energy. So if you are here, I am here. And this becomes a great opportunity for us. And I’m starting to see some morning, some good mornings. I see. Bob Goldstein, say good morning.

 

Allison Williams: [00:00:55] Hi, Bob. It’s nice to see you. And another couple of good mornings here. They’re not yet populating on the thread, but I will acknowledge you when I can actually see them as as we go through the program. So I wanted to talk about this topic because I know that we’re all getting ourselves ready for what is to come in the future. There are my other good mornings. I see Alita. Good morning. Nice to see you as well. We’re all getting ready for what is happening in our world. We’re all dealing with it in some qualitative way. And in particular, we’re dealing with what is going on in the outside world, outside of our law firms and how that affects us. Good morning, Sunshine. Hi, Tiffany. Glad you liked the orange. Yes, I wore the orange just for you guys. I was going to throw on some jeans and a t-shirt, but it was a day to get dressed up. So I was in the mood to be bright and sunny. So, many places, many states across the country have already started closing down the court system and limiting court proceedings to only emergent matters. Other places are not yet doing that. But we have heard from our president that we must engage in social distancing. We’re going to talk about what that means for our businesses. But for most of us, it means some form of virtual contact, meaning you’re not going to have clients in your office and you’re not going to necessarily have your staff in your office.

 

Allison Williams: [00:02:22] You might be working remotely and you might be engaging with people in a way you’re not used to. So I wanted to give some discussion about that, because one of the things that I think is problematic for us as lawyers is many times our brain goes to places that only the darkest people can understand. And it’s not because we are negative people. It’s because we live in the world of solving problems. So as soon as a problem confronts us or a problem is upon us, the first thing we do is our mind goes into all of the things that could go wrong, and we then start to address those problems. And I’m seeing more people come in, but I’m not getting comments on. By the way, as you guys are coming in, please do say hi. Please let me know you’re out there. If you have questions as we’re talking this morning, please do engage. I’m here to answer questions as well as to give you guys some support around this topic. So as we are preparing for what’s coming ahead. Hi DaAsha, we we are oftentimes taxed in ways that we don’t think about because our minds go to the negative place. We are thinking about ways that we can prevent problems.

 

Allison Williams: [00:03:34] Morning, Sylvia. We are thinking about ways that we can be proactive and in many ways that’s wonderful, right? Obviously, lawyers make the world go round. We are the glue of society. We are the fabric of society. And without us, there would be chaos. Good morning, Frechette. Good morning, Raquel. Glad to see you guys here. Thank you for stopping in. Thank you, for saying Hi. But one of the problems that I see a lot with us as lawyers, as a group, is that because our minds go to these very dark places, we oftentimes dwell in the very dark places. And this is not a lawyer attribute. It’s a human attribute, but it’s something that’s particularly focused in us, because that is the ways that we are often the best at what we do. The better the lawyer, the more proactive they are in contemplating problems, the better they are at solving problems. Hi, Lisa. Nice to see you. And you’re very welcome. I’m glad to be doing this for you guys as well. So our mind goes into these dark places and the question becomes, how do we not succumb to what’s happening? And I think that it’s important for us to understand what’s happening so that we can start to put some place… some proactive steps in place to avoid it from having a toxic impact on us as people as well as on our business.

 

Allison Williams: [00:04:50] So for those of you that have been here in the Law Firm Mentor Movement for any length of time, you know that I’ve been a live last year. That was all about how thought works and how thoughts work inside of us, meaning that every event that happens in our life is a circumstance, that we have thoughts about that circumstance that lead us to have feelings. And once we have feelings, we will take some action or fail to take action based on how we feel about what we are thinking. And those actions will ultimately lead to our results. OK. And for sure, we refer to that as CTFAR. Now, this is not mine. I give credit where credit is due. This is the innovation. The simplistic way of looking at it is the innovation of a life coach named Brooke Castillo. Now circumstances are what they are, right? They are neutral. They don’t have a value. It’s something that is universally thought to be true. Obviously, people can debate what’s true in the world of fake news, but more often than not, we can reach a conclusion to determine that something is a fact versus an opinion or a thought. So I want you to think about what we’re currently dealing with. Whether you refer to it as a pandemic, a health crisis, a life circumstance. Hi, Tukura. Very nice to see you. Thanks for stopping in.

 

Allison Williams: [00:06:12] Or you think of it as as as just kind of mental chatter that’s going on in the world. We know that there is this thing called the Corona virus, and we know that it is having an impact on our world. Whether that impact be that people we know are getting sick, that businesses that offer us goods and services are running out of those goods and services because of a mad rush for people to get things like toilet paper. Don’t know why we’re getting toilet paper, but that’s a whole other discussion for another day. And it’s a circumstance that our president has advised us to engage in social distancing as a result of the lack of clarity around this particular illness from an epidemiological perspective. Wow. Can’t believe I got that word out. But the World Health Organization and the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention are working on how to contain this and how to give us not only an antidote, but also treatments and some more information about the course of the disease, etc.. So all of that is circumstance, right? That is something that we can look at at each point and each data that I just gave you, each data point and look at that as a thing that simply it. And then for each of those items, we will start to… We will start to develop our thoughts about it.

 

Allison Williams: [00:07:43] Amy Cores. Hello, Miss Amy. Amy is saying she likes clean butts. Oh, OK. I guess that’s supposed to be like a play off of. Remember the guy’s name, the rapper? You know, I like big butts and I cannot lie. I guess this is I’d like clean butts. Right? I think we all like clean butts. Hope we all like clean butts. That’s the toilet paper conundrum. Hi Martha. Very good to see you this morning. So anyway, we all tend to have these thoughts about the things that are going on in our world. So if you just take a particular circumstance, let’s say the existence of this medical or this this health issue and you apply a thought to it, that thought can be positive or negative depending on how you are oriented. And for most of us, yes! Sir Mix-A-Lot. That’s right. Lisa, it is Sir Mix-A-Lot who likes big butts and is a because he likes clean butts and the rest of us also like clean butts. So you apply your thoughts to the circumstance of this this health crisis. And our thoughts often go in a negative direction, not because we are negative people, but because we are hardwired to think this way. So I’ve talked a lot about this in previous recordings about the subconscious mind and about how before we had conscious thought, which starts to form somewhere between ages 5 and 7, we are in the world, experiencing the world without the ability to process what is happening.

 

Allison Williams: [00:09:06] And we all know that children have a limited capacity to process based on their not having not only the collective experience that adults have, but also they’re not having having the brain development that’s going to allow them to think through what they are experiencing. They simply take information in. And before the age of seven, we tend to see that everything that’s poured into a child is simply absorbed as a message. They don’t know how to put it into context. They can’t say this is good or bad. They can’t reason about it. It’s simply given to them and they take it into their their being, their body, their mind, their thoughts, and ultimately the way that they start to form thoughts, is been shaped by everything that was poured into them before they were at the point of conscious thought. So when you are looking at a human being who is now an adult even before then. Particularly as an adult that we all are. We look at things and think that we are having a conscious thought about them, but we are often hardwired from our subconscious evolution to believe things in one way or another based on what’s going on. So if you were given a series of thoughts about life that were negative, you are more likely to evolve into a person who sees the negative and ultimately believes that logically, what you are seeing is truth as opposed to your perception based on the reality that you have that was formed in part by your subconscious mind.

 

Allison Williams: [00:10:40] I know that was a mouthful. So when we have these thoughts about what’s going on, we’re going to develop feelings. And for many people, having negative thoughts about a situation causes negative feelings in the body. And that includes things like a tightness of a tightness in your chest or shortness of breath or the inability to sleep, you know, excess energy in the body. And our mind just kind of goes and spirals. Right? And we all know that we can take a thought, especially good lawyers. OK. You don’t even have to be particularly brilliant to be able to do this. The mind can just go into all the things that can go wrong and you can get from A to Z of catastrophe in a matter of seconds. Right? Somehow we get from this thing exists to I’m going to die. And we have a lot of little steps along the way. And those little steps could be anything from. First, I think that, you know, that I’m going to encounter someone, that the next thought is that.

 

Allison Williams: [00:11:46] It looks like Siri has been decided to participate here in this live, so I don’t know why she’s doing that, but I decided to turn her off. Anyway. So you have your first thought. Your first thought is this is bad. The next thought is I’m going to contract this. The next thought is I’m going to feel awful. The next thought is I’m going to expose my child or my spouse or my parent to this. The next thought is they’re going to get sick. The next thought is I won’t have the physical resources to care for them because I’m sick. The next thought is one of us is going to die. And that linear thought that that progression of thought can happen in a matter of seconds. And oftentimes it happens at a very cellular level that we’re not aware of. So it’s not like we’re sitting in our office saying Coronavirus equals death. But the link between I have this thought about the circumstance and the outcome being something negative is something that plays in the background, almost like Muzak. If you’re in an elevator, you can just barely hear it. It’s kind of faint and just there. But you’re aware of the fact that all of a sudden there silence when you step out of the elevator because it was playing in the background. This is kind of the same thing.

 

Allison Williams: [00:13:00] And so I want you to think about this collectively and in terms of just neutrality. So let’s put Coronavirus aside for a second. Think about your life as a lawyer. Right? If you present a motion to a court and you argue that motion and the court grants your relief, the granting of the relief is simply a neutral right. It has no value in and of itself. You perceive it as positive because you got what you wanted. Your client perceives it as positive because he or she got what they wanted. But on the other side, there was a loser, right? There was someone who did not get what they wanted. So they see the judge granting your relief as negative. And the law of relativity says, you know, for every positive, there’s a negative. So you have an opposite in everything. And so the fact that you won your motion is not in and of itself a positive thing. It is only that the relief being granted has a thought for you that that is positive. The thought being I did well, the thought being I achieved what I wanted. The thought being I asked and I received. But you are seeing it a different way than someone else who on the other side hears and perceives and thinks. Judge granted my relief or judge granted adversaries relief. I’ve lost. I’m not going to get what I want.

 

Allison Williams: [00:14:20] I’m going to be obligated to do something that I don’t feel is correct. I don’t agree with the outcome. So there is a good and bad in everything. And our thoughts are very powerful and not only triggering feelings, but also triggering action that happens as a result of how we feel about things. So I want you to just kind of think about what’s been happening over a relatively short period of time. Just look at the last week and a half to two weeks that this virus has been on the move, if you will. We’ve been looking at it and we have been collectively having thoughts. That means one person has a thought and shares it with someone else. And in the world in which we live now, we have the mass media, which takes our thoughts and distills them into sub thoughts, if you will, components of thoughts, and then extrapolates. So when you watch the news, you hear the circumstance is the virus. The thought about the virus is, this is negative. And that thought derives from other circumstances, including that we are being told to take precautions that could impact our ability to work. We’re being told to take precautions that could impact our children’s ability to be educated. And all of these circumstances, children out of school is a circumstance, employer not being able to access their building is a circumstance. Employees having to go home and may or may not have accumulated leave time and thus be able to pay for, be paid for that time off is a circumstance.

 

Allison Williams: [00:15:56] All of those circumstances then trigger thoughts and continual thoughts about what is going to happen. And a lot of times the thought is not based on what the circumstances it’s based on all of the projections of future thoughts and circumstances that come from it. So the first thought we have is my child has to be out of school. That is a circumstance. And then our thought about that is, oh, my goodness, I have to find childcare. I don’t know how I’m going to be able to physically be home with my child and be productive for work. I don’t know if work will let me work from home. If I have to work from home, how am I going to get anything done. I won’t have my staff available to me. So it’s going to take me longer and I won’t be able to produce economic value, i.e. I won’t be able to bill hours or if I’m handling flat fee matter, I won’t be able to collect the full economic value of that file because somebody won’t be there processing alongside me. All those thoughts come to mind. And then we have feelings. And our feelings are oftentimes in the same direction as our thoughts. So the thought is negative. Our feelings about it is also going to be negative. Right? So, you know, when we think I’m not going to be able to work to capacity because I have a young child at home, the feeling about that is frustration, anxiety.

 

Allison Williams: [00:17:13] You know, there may be a little shortness of breath. There could be turning in the stomach. There could be any number of physiological effects that we have about that. But we have these thoughts. We have these feelings that follow our thoughts and then we take actions. Right? And in the context of the media, the action for the for the reporter is to be successful in their role by sharing the thoughts that are going to get more eyes on their screen. And so they proliferate the thought of look at all the people that are not going to be able to work productively. Look at all the businesses that are going to have to setup remote access. That’s additional costs for people. Look at all the ways in which we’re not going to be able to process our work the way we usually do it. So for the legal industry, that’s look at all the people that will be able to have their matters proceed efficiently. Look at all the people who are going to be denied access to the court system. Look at all the ways in which we’re going to have an adverse party who could act out because we don’t have the remedy of going to court for a lengthy period of time. So you have these thoughts that swirl around and then the media takes all of these thoughts and then shares them kind of on a loop. Right? Because if you think about it, we’re getting new information about the status of things all the time.

 

Allison Williams: [00:18:30] But the vast majority of what’s being shared has already been shared. So they kind of give you a past, present and future about the story. Right? The story is not Coronavirus because that’s old. Right? That’s kind of the past. The present is today the president made an announcement that there’s going to be a federal relief act bill that was proposed in the House by Nancy Pelosi. And ultimately, the president has indicated his intention to sign the bill that will give some economic benefit to people who have to be out of work for quarantine. So that sounds positive, right? Something else that we can look to and we can say, wow, you know, this is something that is a positive. But the the side of us, the side that if it bleeds, it leads, the side that the media is going to focus on is, wow, all these people that are going to have to be out. What if you have to be out for two months, three months? How long is it going to be? And the catastrophe thinking starts to balloon around the newest circumstance of the president making this announcement. And then those thoughts are consumed by us as the public. And we then take all of those thoughts that we’re receiving from the various sources, social media, from news outlets, from, you know, reading things online, from. From engaging with individuals. And we add all of those thoughts together.

 

Allison Williams: [00:19:54] Now, this happens on a regular basis, by the way. This is not something that is unique to our current circumstances. We do this with who wins the World Series. We do this when who is going to become our our next America’s Got Talent winner. We do this with where we are going to spend our vacation and who likes the best vacation resorts. Right? People conglomerate thought collectively because we as human beings are tribal. So we’re always looking for what the herd is pursuing because there’s a sense of safety in the idea of being connected with other people through sharing thoughts. So when you have the collective shared thoughts and your stories, your thoughts on a loop start to be rehearsed. Then your mind is better able to summon those thoughts when a circumstance that is similar to the last circumstance about which you had a thought comes to bear. So at the last thought that you had was something awful is going on.

 

Allison Williams: [00:21:02] And in the course of having those thoughts, your mind went to these are negative thoughts that I have about the circumstance and the feelings I have are bad. And that kind of ruminates a little bit. And then you share those thoughts with other people. The next thing that comes up is you start looking for other ways to mediate those feelings that you have inside yourself. Now, men and women do this a little bit differently. Women, when we have negative feelings seek to address the feelings. Right? So we tend to go into more emotional capacity. Men, when they have negative feelings, tend to try to produce extra additional thoughts. So if you’re looking for additional thoughts, they will oftentimes go into fixating on a different problem so that they can feel that they’re solving a problem. Now, that does not mean that women get in their emotions and men solve problems. So don’t hear me saying that. It’s just a different way of dealing with what for everyone is a negative circumstance and thus, or rather negative thought about a circumstance that’s causing negative feelings. So when you start to think about the fact that we’re adding our negative thoughts together, that’s how you get the snowball effect. And that tends to be what leads us down a path of saying, I have this negative feeling. I don’t know what to do with it. I’m going to go look for relief. So I’m either going to look for relief by trying to deal with my feelings.

 

Allison Williams: [00:22:37] So I’m going to try to release my feelings through exercise, through meditation. I’m going to try to process my feelings by talking to other people who can give me some sense of assurance and that talking oftentimes just conglomerate’s the negative feelings or I’m going to get into action and do something about the negative feelings by focusing on something differently. And any number of these strategies can be either healthy or negative. It depends on what your, you know, where your focus goes. But the real problem and what I want you guys to see about this is that the conglomeration of all of these negative thoughts is what leads to catastrophe. So think about it from the perspective of the easiest, biggest example we can look to, which is Wall Street and Wall Street functions very much on the conglomeration of negative thoughts and feelings or the conglomeration of positive thoughts and feelings. Right? A circumstance happens. That circumstance could be the announcement of a trade embargo in a particular country, or it could be the announcement of a civil unrest in a country that produces a lot of goods to be exported to other parts of the world. Right? When those types of events happen, there is almost always a trickle effect onto the Dow Jones. So we see the Dow goes up when we feel positively about some type of experience in the international world. And the Dow goes down when we feel negatively about the experience in the in the outside world. So, for instance, and this is not a political discussion. So I don’t want anybody to go in any direction politically when I say this.

 

Allison Williams: [00:24:20] But recently, the president made an announcement about things that the White House was doing in conjunction with Congress in order to help contain this problem and give people some assurance that life would go on. And following that announcement the very next day, the Dow precipitously dropped. And, you know, many people just upon reading the words on speeches, because, you know, presidents don’t just get up and kind of wax philosophical. They have speechwriters that conglomerate information based on who is what needs to be conveyed and what house it affects? So if it’s international, we’ve got international advisers that are going to go to the speechwriters if it’s domestic and it deals with a particular form of trade. Those people are involved in writing the speeches. But ultimately, the speech is written and delivered. And it’s not only the words, but it’s also the delivery of those words and the level of confidence we have in what is being shared to us that causes a ripple effect. And sometimes all of the negative thoughts that are kind of out there and swirling around are going to be added to what is happening, what the what the what the circumstances of the circumstance here would be. That the president has said something and he said something about a present event. So the circumstance is his speech. But then we have thoughts about his speech and our thoughts about his speech are going to go in one direction or another, depending on not only who we are as individuals, but who we are sharing our thoughts with and how those thoughts will conglomerate around what is being shared with us.

 

Allison Williams: [00:25:58] So to some degree, no matter what is shared with us, if we already have enough negative thoughts in the world that have not yet been countered by what is said in response from leadership, that tends to spiral downward in terms of how people are going to think about that and ultimately how they feel about that, and that then causes action or inaction. Now, when you’re talking about Wall Street, the inaction is the failure to reinvest or invest. When you’re talking about action, it is often the reaction of selling off all my stocks because I fear that I won’t have enough, if ultimately economic circumstances go negatively or a particular industry does not do well in the current times that we’re in. So we have thoughts and we react as a group with our thoughts. And so seeing the stock market as it is, that is kind of the quintessential example of what happens when negative thoughts start to snowball. And by the way, as I’m talking about this stuff, you guys, I know that some of you are there paying attention. I know that some of you are kind of getting ready, doing your thing in the morning if this is like hitting a chord with anybody. This is intellectually making sense to you. Please let me know if it’s not making sense to you or if it’s something that doesn’t quite resonate. Please also let me know so that I can make sure that what I’m delivering to you is something of value. So we talked about collective views breeding collective energy and breeding collective thought.

 

Allison Williams: [00:27:28] I want you to now, think about the idea that anxiety is something that is a thought about a future circumstance. And so as we are preparing our businesses for what is upon us now and what will happen in the future, something that we don’t know, but something that we have predictions about, we are starting to have our own series of collective thoughts and we are starting to have feelings about our thoughts as well as people around us who are gonna have their thoughts about the circumstances and feelings about those thoughts as well. Hi, Melaniece. I’m glad you’re finding value in this. It’s nice to see you. So I just want you guys to really think about the idea that as a leader, it is not just what we say, but it is how we show up for the people that are going to be impacted by the circumstance for us. And that means how we show up for our families, how we show up for our clients, and how we show up for our employees. And if we learn of a circumstance and then decide to have an immediate negative thought and decide to stay with that right. Allow that thought to educate us about what’s happening in the future. And then we add to our thoughts. We conglomerate our thoughts with other people who feel similar to us, which instinctually is what we do.

 

Allison Williams: [00:28:57] By the way, that thought is not something that we only do when we’re being intentional. That’s something that instinctually happens. Right? We all look for reaffirmation of the thoughts that we have and the feelings that we’re having. We look for validation. So if you are talking to someone when you are in a leadership capacity and what you share is your fear, your worry, your concern about potential future events, how is this going to affect my clients? How is this going to affect the economy? What’s going to happen with my client base? All of those thoughts produce energy. Those feelings are energy. And when our energy is cycling downward, we’re able to transmute that to other people and transfer that to other people even without an intentional component to it. Right? You can just be having what you consider to be a benign conversation. Your benign conversation can be that you’re uncertain about what’s going to happen in future. You don’t know what’s going to be the negative outcome or the positive outcome. You don’t know where things are headed. And you’re kind of clamping down, which we’re going to talk about in a minute. Then you can easily transfer those negative feelings that you have inside yourself to someone else. And part of the challenge that we as law firm owners must rise to the occasion of, is recognizing that when we transfer our negative feelings to other people, they take cues from that based on a lack of information.

 

Allison Williams: [00:30:29] So there are things that you know about your business, about your business’s finances, about the structure of your business, about plans that you may have made for your business, that are or are not going as you have expected, about who is going to be coming into your business if you have plans to hire or activities that you’re going to engage in if you have plans to change up your marketing. If you’re working with companies that are supposed to be helping you. So if you’re planning on altering the way that you put your message out in the world, you know, for those of you that are working with a business coach, you probably are doing a lot of things new and different that you haven’t done before. And when you encounter all of that new and different, your mind is already in a state of to some degree debating the righteousness of what you’re doing until you start to see the positive fruits of your labor. But when you are uncertain, which natural, by the way, this is, this is not in any way a criticism. It’s natural to be uncertain when you haven’t yet done something, if you haven’t established a faith and a faith comes typically through the act of doing something and seeing the positive outcome.

 

Allison Williams: [00:31:33] So if you haven’t had that yet and then you expose yourself to other people who don’t have all of the knowledge about what’s going on in your business, they don’t know what’s happening. They don’t know how solid the business is. They don’t know whether or not they will be employed in the future, paid in the future if they are going to advance in their career as they’ve expected. If they are in an institution that’s going to weather the storms and you have all of that uncertainty built into the pores of your being and you share that out even unintentionally, what you’re going to find is that people are going to absorb that message from you. And oftentimes they will take negative actions in response. The negative actions can be anything from not producing what you know, what’s required. So it could be you have a billable hour requirement and they are not producing what they’re supposed to. It could be that they are trying to get to everything that’s required, but they suddenly lose sight of what’s the priority versus not the priority. This is where having a written system for how your business should run is particularly helpful if you don’t yet have that. However, don’t fret. You can actually create something. And we’re going to be talking later this week about how to do that very quickly.

 

Allison Williams: [00:32:51] So you have all of this possibility in front of you, all of the question marks about the future. And if you don’t start to manage yourself and your emotions around what is happening and you allow yourself to perceverate over the negative thoughts. Not only is that going to have a negative impact on you, but it’s going to more likely than not have a greater impact, a greater negative impact on the people who are doing the work with you and for you. So the reason for that, as I said earlier, is the fact that when people are missing information, they don’t have the full picture. They’re going to fill in the blanks. And we all do this right? We all have seen those memes that are on Facebook where there’s an image and you don’t quite have the entirety of the image, but you’re able to just by virtue of seeing what your eyes see, fill in the blanks or some of the words like there are word games out there where there are no vowels at all in a written word. The word spaghetti is, I think, one of the one of the common ones. If you write down the word spaghetti and you take out all the vowels in it and you take out the first A then the E, then the I, you ultimately still see the words spaghetti, even without the vowels. Right?

 

Allison Williams: [00:34:08] Because your mind has been accustomed to filling in the blanks where there are pieces of information that you would logically expect to be there that are not there. You still see them anyway. Right? And the same thing happens when we start to create thoughts around circumstances that we have not encountered before. We have the circumstance of this particular illness and how it is impacting our country. And we haven’t experienced that before. And some of us have, some of us are old enough to have lived through the polio epidemic and and the SARs epidemic and the Ebola epidemic. And some of this, by the way, I’m getting or what was maybe the first 10 minutes of the debate last night before I fell asleep. But, you know, there have been other health crises in our lifetime. And so some of us have have a very linear path. First this happens, then this happens that we actually studied it, thought about it. But for most of us, I’m going to wager most of us, we have only a general knowledge of something similar in the health world having occurred in the past. We don’t have a frame. So when we don’t have a frame, we fill in all the blanks with what is missing in information. And how many how many of you. I know that you guys are still out there with me. I can see you guys are still out there.

 

Allison Williams: [00:35:23] How many of you have actually experienced this before where you, you don’t have all the information, but you kind of fill in the blanks, whether it’s positive or negative, whether you’re right or wrong, but you fill in the blanks with the stuff that’s kind of happened in the past. Right? You know that A leads to B, and B leads to C. So even when you see A and C, you assume that B is in the middle. Right? How many of you done that before? You know, just kind of like drop a you know me. You know, I’ve done it into the comments. Let me know if this is something that you’ve experienced before. So if you have had that type of experience, just know that that is going to be happening in the future. That’s not that’s not something that we stop doing. Right? And because it’s not something that we stop doing because it is instinctual. You have to be very intentional not to do it. You have to be intentional not to fill in the blanks. OK. So part of the ways that we do that, there are some strategies. Good. I’m seeing Tiffany is raising her hand. Jo Ann is raising her hand. I know that there are others of you out there. I can see you on the scene, even though you’re not responding to me. Hey, Regina.

 

Allison Williams: [00:36:26] Regina’s been there. Jennifer’s been there. You know, we all have been there, right? We all have. We all have had that experience of A leads to B, B leads to C. So therefore, A leads to C. It’s like a classic syllogism. Oh great! Theta! Theda’s there, you know. So we all we all have had that right. And so the natural instinct of people is to fill in the blanks. That’s how the mind works. Right? Because if we had to think through every single thing that we had to do every single day, right? Our minds would be so exhausted by the time we even got to work that we couldn’t function and we’d need to rest. So think about brushing your teeth. Right. Most of us don’t sit there and think through. Now I have to pick up the toothbrush. And then I have to pick up the toothpaste. And then I have to remove the lid from the toothpaste. And then I have to squeeze out just the exact amount squeezing at the bottom versus the middle. That’s a thing for me. Whatever you like to squeeze you squeeze, get it onto the toothbrush. Then you have to lift the brush to your mouth. Maybe you maybe you turn on the water first. Maybe you run the brush under the water. Maybe you don’t. You put the toothbrush into your mouth. You start to make a movement inside your mouth with the brush. All of those steps. Right? I just gave you like six or seven steps. There’s a lot more to it. And just things that are kind of under the surface, like our hand movements and being able to lift and using our arm and the level of force we’re gonna use. All of that micro activity is running in the surface behind everything that we do, and when our minds get overloaded with intentional thoughts, the micro activity is there in the background, designed to allow us to still function so that we can take in new information and use our conscious thought on things that require our analysis.

 

Allison Williams: [00:38:06] And for activities like this, when we are trying to deal with the information overload of what to do with our business, what to do with making sure we’re still in business, and what to do with our client matters, what to do with the court system, what to do with our kids, what to do with our parents, what to do with our money, what to do with our day to day activity. But a lot of the micro activity that gets lost, that stuff that’s kind of just happening in the background instinctually in us, a lot of that activity swirls. Meaning. It still happens, but it happens kind of on a hyperdrive. And we start to create some level of automaticity in the things that we are doing daily that are new.

 

Allison Williams: [00:38:53] We start to create patterns and systems around those things even without knowing it, because there is still more new things that have to happen. Right? So day number one, I’m learning how to make my law firm virtual and shout out to those of you that have already registered. But we have a webinar coming up on this exact topic tomorrow at noon Eastern Standard Time. I am presenting a webinar with Neil Tyra, The Law Entrepreneur who is a lawyer who’s gone from being a tech person, to a lawyer, and then ultimately had to put those things together, as well as Elise Buie. One of my favorite attorneys out there, she’s from Seattle. So she’s kind of been at the epicenter of this for a while. But Elise actually went through the process of having to virtualize law practice based on her experience having survived Hurricane Katrina and having to leave her home in New Orleans and then move on to another location. And then also Jan Roos, who is a legal marketing expert who has learned how to capitalize on getting messages out to people in times of distress. So Jan is also going to be talking to us about some ways that we’re going to make our businesses virtual and keep our businesses virtual as long as we need to and perhaps even longer.

 

Allison Williams: [00:40:08] Right. So we’re only talking about that tomorrow. And shout out to those of you that are already registered for that. If you haven’t, I will create a link in the comments for that so that everybody can get access to that, because whether you attend live or not, it will be available on replay. We’re almost at two hundred people registered as of this morning, even though there are 100 live seats. So the comment, though, the thought that I wanted to really impress upon you is that we have a responsibility to ourselves in business, but also to everyone who is reliant upon our businesses, our families, our employees, et cetera, to keep ourselves out of the negative swirl of all of these messages. And so I want you to start to put some healthy practices in place that are seemingly very small. Right they’re, these are not cataclysmic activities. They don’t require a lot of money. They don’t require time.

 

Allison Williams: [00:41:01] They are things that you can do now that can give yourself some shoring as we start to work through this process together. And by the way, I’m going to be live every day this week talking about this issue and how we are going to be able to make our businesses stronger as we go through this process together. Because I want to be with you as we are creating virtual law firms as well as keeping ourselves emotionally and psychologically healthy through this process. There are lots of things that you can do, and I’m just gonna give you bits and pieces of it day by day so that you can start to build the foundations and make yourself better through this process and to keep your business healthy. So the first thing that I highly recommend is that you limit your access to the media.

 

Allison Williams: [00:41:44] Now, you might say, well, I connect with my friends on social media and I’m already having to do the social distancing. I don’t want to have to disconnect from people. The reality is, if people are giving you negative messages, they are not helping you. They are contributing to your demise. And I say that not to catastrophize, not to make any one wrong. We are all doing it ourselves to the extent that we are posting endless arrays of messages about updates of this is what’s happening over here and this is what’s happening over here. If you can’t be in the presence of that data and just have it be data, meaning it’s just the circumstance. It doesn’t trigger any thought other than OK, that’s something that we will have to deal with in the ordinary course of business. And you have an emotional reaction, you know, a feeling, a tightness in your chest, a shortness of your breath, a thought fifteen miles ahead. I’ve got to do this. I’ve got to do that. Oh wow Lisa Guerra is saying that she went silent on Friday. It’s awesome. Yes, Lisa. You know, it is awesome.

 

Allison Williams: [00:42:56] You know, you have to give yourself that respite. Because when we are consuming those messages on a loop, remember just going back to the very beginning of this recording. And for those of you that have either come in in the middle of it or as you are absorbing this information, if it’s new to you and it doesn’t sound instinctual to you, I would highly recommend that you go back and watch this video over and over again. But, you know, just going back to the initial thought here, if the circumstance is the data, right? The circumstance is the post on Facebook. Right? That is what it is. We can agree that someone posted a story about X and your thought about that then has already been hard wired to be negative because human beings fill in the gaps. Right?

 

Allison Williams: [00:43:39] So if the circumstances, one that is now associated with something negative, your negative thought trigger is going to be there whether you think it or not. Now, this doesn’t this doesn’t change in an emotionally healthy person versus an emotionally unhealthy person or a person who’s done thought work versus a person who doesn’t do thought work. It doesn’t change until you have hardwired yourself to think in a more positive way. And by the way, I will tell you, I can speak on that from experience, because I used to be the queen of being negative.

 

Allison Williams: [00:44:12] And I made, a part of the reason why I was such a very good lawyer when I was actively litigating cases all day, every day, because I was a very negative person. I was always thinking of what was going to go wrong. So I was always solving problems before they got here. However, having now completely revamped the way that I think about the world and the way that I experience the world, I have not lost any sleep over this situation with Coronavirus.

 

Allison Williams: [00:44:37] I have not gone into catastrophe thinking of, oh my God, am I? I have now two businesses. Are they going to fail? You know, I had a client literally e-mail me yesterday that they are at the point of renewal and they said we we have to deal with this cCoronavirus thing first. We can’t we can’t re-up right now. And my thought wasn’t, oh, my God, all of my clients are going to start running away. They’re not going to they’re not going to see a value when I’m offering them. They’re going to leave me. Once upon a time, that would’ve been my thought. And having talked to a lot of lawyers, I know that that is also their thought. And Sandra, Sandra’s saying, that’s me. So I have to imagine that Sandra is talking about the fear of I’m going to lose my clients. Right? We’re going to be talking about some hard strategies to avoid that, by the way, over the course of this week. So I want you guys to show up. Whether you show up live or you show up on replay, please do show up again so that you can get the value of that. But if you start consuming those messages and your mind goes to that negative place, that doesn’t mean your mind has to stay there. Right? I want you guys to get into the habit of thinking about the neutrality of circumstances, because a circumstance can be positive or negative depending on how you use the circumstance. OK, now I’m going to give you an example that has a negative connotation so that you can see it in the negative.

 

Allison Williams: [00:45:58] And also see it in the positive. Right? I posted, I shared with you guys a post by Jay Henderson. Jay Henderson, friend of Law Firm Mentor. Jay is in the group I know. Jay owns a company, Real Talent Hiring. He does employment assessments. And Jay posted a picture of toilet paper with a sign on it. It was wrapped in gold in the signs and three thousand nine hundred ninety nine dollars. And oh yeah, by the way, if you buy the toilet paper, you get this diamond ring, one carat diamond ring for free. And if you think about it, it’s brilliant. And Sandra, thank you for acknowledging that you’re anxious all the time because a lot of a lot of people are. And there’s no, there’s no sin in that. There’s no wrong in that. But I want to try to give you guys some reframes and some ways to think about what we’re going to be doing and the action items that can get you more comfortable with where you are so that your mind doesn’t go ten steps ahead to that place that’s causing anxiety. But the post that Jay posted that I shared with you guys was, you know, it was funny, right? Who’s going to spend four grand on toilet paper? Well, I was in the hair salon over the weekend. You know, shout out to my hairstylist because she’s fabulous. She showed me a picture of something on Amazon that was like, I don’t remember what it was.

 

Allison Williams: [00:47:26] It was like some some regular product. You know, health product, cleaning product, whatever. And it was like a few thousand dollars. And and I was I was that I was like, that’s got to be a joke. That’s gotta be a mistake. And she said, no, no, no. I actually I searched it, you know, on Google to see if I could find it someplace else. And I couldn’t. And so Google. Amazon is capitalizing on this now. I am putting that out with the caveat, because if somebody shares this with Amazon, I’m not trying to get sued. Right? I can’t tell you what the product was, I can’t even assure you that it was Amazon. And so it’s allegedly right now. But, you know, people are capitalizing on this moment as an opportunity. Now, I don’t want you all to think that I ever suggest, promote or endorse the idea of taking advantage of a circumstance like this to benefit yourself to the detriment of someone else. So if you would charge a thousand dollars for a product, I don’t suggest you hike it up to $10,000 dollars because it’s in high demand, that you become exploitative. And by the way, the federal emergency edict that hasn’t been passed down by the president protects us against some of those price gouging activities. That also happens at the state level. Just about every state I think every state now in the union has antitrust protections that will prevent against price fixing and price gouging and things like that.

 

Allison Williams: [00:48:55] So a lot of those emergencies, were not really about emergency. They were about automatic protections of the public in what could become a crisis. But we have all of these activities in place. If all of these elements of protection in place, because we as the public tend to react in the way that we are currently reacting. So our negative thoughts lead to things like our wiping out grocery stores of hot dog buns and our running the toilet paper market out of the world. And somebody told me yesterday I was talking to a woman in the grocery store, she told me, well, the toilet paper craze is about the fact that toilet paper is manufactured in China and we’re going to run out of it. And I reminded her that it is also accessible in Canada. And she’s like, oh, you’re right. So I don’t know why people kind of freaked out. And I said, well, you know, one person freaks out and then the next person says, oh, my God, that person over there is freaking out, you know? Am I wrong for not freaking out? We immediately go into the self judgment place of am I doing this wrong because someone else is doing it differently.

 

Allison Williams: [00:50:05] So the next thing I would highly recommend after stopping the media is to distance yourself from endorsing the thoughts of others. OK, and this is very difficult. This is one of the greatest challenges that I work with my clients on in Law Firm Mentor. It’s one of the greatest challenges that I work with my team on in my firm. It’s one of the greatest challenges of human beings that we oftentimes because we are tribal, because we look for what the herd is doing, we are always looking to follow instinctually, even those of us that are natural leaders. We still look to follow the curve. We look to see what everyone is doing because that feels safer. Right? And so when we go looking for what other people are doing, what oftentimes becomes a problem for us is other people are doing things that other people are doing. Right? It’s not like there is some intellectual accuracy or emotional integrity or rightness in what a person is doing. What they are doing is oftentimes the byproduct of them following the other people.

 

Allison Williams: [00:51:09] Sweet potatoes. OK. I don’t know why Dana is posting sweet potatoes. Dana, if you could elucidate that for us, that would be helpful. Talk to me about why sweet potatoes is on the thread and I’m happy to talk about it. But you know, it’s an idea. Right?

 

Allison Williams: [00:51:27] It’s the it’s the idea of kind of having things handed down to you or just absorbing the messages that around you and saying, oh, well, if forty thousand people are saying it and I’m the only one out, I must be wrong. But I want you to think about this because I was listening to the podcast the other day. And by the way, if you guys haven’t checked out The Crushing Chaos with Law Firm Mentor Podcast, I highly recommend you do that. I’m not working this in for a plug for the podcast, but I really am like now… I’m highly recommending that people replace the media that’s negative with positive media. Aah. There we go. Dana, thank you for clearing that up. There was a run on sweet potatoes at the store. Yes. Yes. Because people in the point of crisis absolutely have to have their sweet potatoes. And yes, I saw that Dana did post something saying that she only needed two sweet potatoes and there was only one at the store. She’s like you people really jacked up my sweet potatoes like, you know, it wasn’t that serious. Apparently it was serious. So. Oh, podcast. Yep. So I was watching. I was listening to a recording of Russell Brunson, who was the founder of Click Funnels, and he was talking about, he had actually kind of collected some information about the history of businesses and a lot of behemoth businesses, very successful businesses were actually created in times of recession.

 

Allison Williams: [00:52:50] And if you think about that, you know, it really is just kind of amazing, really, that people in an economic downturn find a way to create out of that and create what people need in a way that they can consume it and make themselves into a popular brand. And then ultimately that that loyalty, that that kind of we’re in it together that happens in those circumstances causes the businesses to thrive afterwards. Yeah. Billy, it really, it really is very interesting. And I thought about that and they said, you know, that if you really think about that, it makes perfect sense because, you know, for those of you that are not movie buffs, you might not remember this, but there was a movie, Speed with Keanu Reeves and Sandra Bullock. And, you know, it’s it’s such a amazing demonstration of the fact that, you know, when we’re in this toxic, negative, terrifying place together, we we cleave to each other. And that’s when, you know, of course, love happens. And it might be love between two people that would never fall in love, ever. But for the fact that they are in this circumstance together, kind of like the movie Queen and Slim, also a very recent example of that, where two people went on a date not feeling each other at all. She was like, get away from me. You’re not my type. But they have a circumstance with a cop. They encounter a police officer and then they they take off after they shoot the officer. And as a result of that, they then are on the run together and have to cleave to each other.

 

Allison Williams: [00:54:25] So that demonstrates how when people go through these circumstances together that we’re in a negative circumstance together, the leader is the one that ultimately comes out on top because we start to look for leadership when we are in times of what we feel like is crisis. So Billy asks, what do you have to lose at a time such as this? Well, that’s that’s exactly right. You know, it’s kind of like, you know, the idea that we have to hunker down, hide, protect ourselves, you know, grapple with being, taking deep breaths and praying and and just hoping for the best. We oftentimes go into that space, whereas if we step boldly into the future, i.e. I am going forward, I’m going to show up no matter what doing what I do, I’m going to get my fabulous hair done. I’m going to wear my favorite orange dress. I’m gonna meet with my wonderful cloud. The people that I love to be in front of, you guys. I’m gonna do what I do because there’s no reason not to. When you have that attitude, it sets you apart from people that are hiding, people that are running inside themselves. And by the way, the energy of stepping forward and showing up also gives you a level of future thinking that is positive, that negates the future thinking that’s negative, i.e. what’s going to happen. Am I gonna lose my business? Is the economy going to tank, etc.. Right? So we’ve covered some action items of limiting access to the media that includes social media. Also not endorsing the thoughts of other people, right, so I’m not taking what someone else says or does in the circumstance and adopting it as law.

 

Allison Williams: [00:56:05] The third thing I would recommend is that you stop the process of thinking about this situation. Now you might say, how can I do that? Right? As a business owner, I have a responsibility to ensure that my clients’ interests can still be protected. I have a responsibility to make sure that life goes on and business goes forward. And I agree with those things. Right? That’s not what I’m talking about. Right? Getting into action so that you can create the solutions that are necessary to protect yourself and to protect others from what is upon us. Right? That is different than thinking about what you are thinking about. The swirl. When you find yourself in this swirl, when you’re just kind of just rounding the bend, your swirling the drain about the catastrophe that’s out in the air. One of the things that you can do is stop being very intentional, being very forthright about stopping, thinking about the problem. When you focus on the problem, it grows. Right? Where we put our attention is where calamity happens. And here’s a perfect example of that. One of my good friends posted on social media the other day that she was traveling to a location to be with an elderly relative of hers, and she got some flak about it. But at the end of the day, she said, listen, I’m a nurse and this person has limited access to health care in a rural area where they are. And I want to be there for them. And I’m not going to allow the catastrophe in the air to stop me from being there.

 

Allison Williams: [00:57:43] What was that brought up for me was the fact that doctors and nurses usually end up being the least affected by health crises when they occur. So you might be saying, well, that’s because they’re there. They have access to medical care. They have access to resources. They have the greatest ability to protect themselves. And I would suggest to you that that’s not exactly true, because, you know, when you start thinking about the malaria outbreak or polio or even leprosy. Right? People used to segregate themselves from lepers, but doctors still treated them. Now, how do you think it was that doctors and nurses were able to treat the most infirmed. Right? We had no way to get those people segregated from us, whether we put them on an island or put them in quarantine or put them in hospitals. We had no way of getting those people away from us without having someone to care for them, to get them away from us. i.e. someone to segregate, someone to get them into their own space. And that tends to be doctors and nurses. But doctors and nurses have the lowest mortality rate of any group of people when we are talking about major health crises and that is statistically sound and that’s been found through every type of health crisis dating back to the eighteen hundreds. Billy says I work full time in health care, how do I implement this fully? I am part of the planning team so I need to redirect my attention even though it’s my professional environment. Got it. Yes.

 

Allison Williams: [00:59:16] So there’s a lot of things that medical providers and I’ll answer your question more specifically in a moment Billy. There are a lot of things that medical providers do to take precautions, right? We all can take precautions. But at the end of the day, what really makes the difference between a nurse or a doctor who is in it all day, every day and is not able to get into this world, is that they don’t have time to catastrophize the way that everybody else does. Right. The doctor does not have time to sit and think about, oh, my God, what if I lose this patient? What if I don’t find a cure for this? What if we do? What if we run out of beds? Right. They are running from crisis to crisis. So they’re moving to solutions to solutions. The solution, they are spending far more of their time and energy mentally on the solution than they are on the problem. So when you start to stop yourself from thinking about the problem, what is going to go into the place of the problem, but the solution. Right? So we know, and I referenced it in the description to the slide, that there is a thing called the law of polarity. For those of you that are not familiar with it, the law of polarity says that there is an opposite and an equal and opposite in everything in existence.

 

Allison Williams: [01:00:28] You cannot have an up without a down. You cannot have a high without a low. You cannot have poverty without abundance. You cannot have warmth without cold, etc.. And that’s not the law of relativity, by the way, that is talking about equal and opposite. So when you when you are in the space of existing with these types of problems, it’s important that you be thinking about the solutions. Right? If you spend your energy on the problem, the problem will grow and the problem will grow and affect you directly. When you think about the solution, you’re going to be a part of creating in the direction of the solution. Our mind grows in the direction where we focus it. So if you start focusing on the solutions, you start to become oriented toward the solution. You’re always looking for ways to improve. You’re always looking for ways to grow. You’re always looking for ways to prevent. You’re always looking for the next step in the right direction. And then finally, the last step, the last tip that I would have for you and I know we’re going a little long today, but I think it’s worth it. The last tip that I would have for you is to write down your thoughts. So as all that stuff starts to swirl around inside. Sometimes the only way that you can truly release it is to get it down on paper.

 

Allison Williams: [01:01:41] When you start to get it down on paper, the easiest way for you to allow those thoughts to stay on the paper and not continue to regurgitate negativity into your mind is to debate the thoughts on paper. OK, so that means if I write down, you know, as a result of this health issue, I’m going to have to close my office, which is going to cost me money. Debate that. Look for all the ways that that is false. OK. And you’re going to do that for every thought that comes up about the circumstance. You’re going to look for the opposite. There is a positive to every negative and a negative to every positive. But it’s a choice which one we choose to focus on. So circling back to Billy, when you ask the question, how do you implement this fully because you work full time in health care. You’re part of the planning team. So this is what I would suggest and this is something that actually I’m doing this morning, ironically enough. You have to talk to people about what’s going on. But not everybody is going to understand the full array of thought work. Right? If I tried to sit down and coach my employees from beginning to end, everything that I’ve learned about how to manage my thoughts and how they should also manage their thoughts, they would be ineffective because they would not have a frame.

 

Allison Williams: [01:02:58] Right? I have been absorbing this information and learning it and institutionalizing in myself for the past five plus years now. But one of the things that always provides strength and benefit to other people is to give them a sense of security that they don’t have for themselves. So in other words, if you can’t believe in your own ability to do this. Believe in my ability in your ability to do this. Right? I have the faith in you. So believe in my faith in you. If nothing else. And when you give a person that type of shoring. Right, you give them something to hold onto. You give them a sense of, I’m going to be OK. Because someone else says I’m OK. You allow them to believe in something besides the negative thoughts that they have in their minds. Right? So you can walk them through the process of first recognizing that their thoughts are not existing, separate and apart from circumstances, that circumstances are what they are. They are truth. You can also then help them realize that from those circumstances they are having thoughts. Those thoughts are not truth. They are not absolute. They are simply thoughts. They can be just as right as they can be wrong. They’re going to have feelings as a result and then they’re going to take actions from those feelings.

 

Allison Williams: [01:04:10] And if they want to change the outcome that they’re experiencing, they want to change. Being up all night, they want to change feeling awful. They want to change the potential consequence of bringing into their being the unhealthy event that they are fearing then they have to get into the habit of debating their thoughts and getting their thoughts to a place where those thoughts are, if not positive, then at minimal, neutral. They cannot be negative thoughts. The conglomeration of negative thoughts are what is going to tank our economy. It is what is going to tank our health care system. It is what it’s going to take people’s lives. And I say that without any trepidation whatsoever. I am not saying that to stir your negative emotions or to create fear in you. I’m telling you this because I want you to be empowered to do something about it. Yes, Kristin, I absolutely. I own the fact that I help people to see that things can be OK, and I firmly believe that things are OK. You don’t hear any wavering in my voice. There is no lack of sleep. I really, really, really, really believe this and believe firmly that we have the ability to do amazing things even as things are falling down around us if we use our mind in the right direction.

 

Allison Williams: [01:05:27] So Billy said she needs those thoughts. So for those of you that actually found value in today’s program, I am going to have it transcribed. I will make the transcript available here in the Law Firm Mentor Movement. And I hope that you will show up with me tomorrow at 8:00 a.m.. We do have the webinar at noon. OK. So I’m going to post the link to the webinar. The webinar is absolutely free, but it’s about how to create your virtual law firm. For those of you that have elements of paperless and tech and all of that, we’re gonna be talking about making sure how we put it all together so that you can be up and running literally at the end of the program. OK, so that is tomorrow at 12:00 p.m. noon Eastern Standard Time. I will put the link in the comments and the transcript will be available tomorrow as well. But separate and apart from that, just to continue to keep our minds healthy, we’re going to be back here tomorrow at 8 a.m. to talk more about different strategies you can use to make sure that you keep yourself well and keep your business thriving in the current state of affairs dealing with C0VID. OK, everyone. I’m Allison Williams. Your Law Firm Mentor. Have a wonderful day.