Building A Winning Team

Allison Williams: [00:00:11] Hi everybody, it’s Allison Williams here, your Law Firm Mentor. Law Firm Mentor is a business coaching service for solo and small law firm attorneys. We help you grow your revenues, crush chaos in business and make more money. 

 

Allison Williams: [00:00:24] All right, everybody, we’re here for the Crushing Chaos with Law Firm Mentor podcast, and I want to introduce our amazing guest. I just had a phenomenal conversation with Mia Hewitt, and I’m going to share that with you in just a moment. But I want to introduce you to Mia and then talk a little bit about this episode in particular. So Mia is the founder and CEO of Allied Intelligence. She is the best selling author of Meant For More and an expert on the topic of human potential. MIA helps entrepreneurs and aspiring entrepreneurs who know they are meant for more to stop secretly struggling and to make six and seven figure leaps in their business using her aligned intelligence method. This methodology works consistently and predictably, to allow her clients the ability to coach themselves through any obstacles, build their dream businesses and feel fulfilled in their purposes. Mia is passionate about empowering, purpose driven entrepreneurs to live the lives they have always known they were meant to be living. And Mia was our special guest on this show. Now, you might be asking yourself, having heard that introduction, how does that fit with law firm owners? And what is there that I’m going to bring you from the perspective of this particular entrepreneur that is going to be a benefit to you as a law firm owner? So this is what I would say.

 

Allison Williams: [00:01:47] I was actually, when when I received a communication introducing me to Mia and ultimately we connected to have her on the show, I asked myself that question. I said, well, you know, she’s she helps entrepreneurs. I help entrepreneurs. And so both of us can help lawyers. But why would I have this particular person on my show? And what I what I was drawn to about Mia is first her book. Her book is fabulous. So I could definitely go out to get the book. But she talks about purpose. And I think there are so many lawyers that understand that they are doing a service and they are heart centered in doing so. We draw a lot of people that practice immigration law and criminal defense and family law and personal injury and those B2C services. I mean, we do have B2B clients, but a lot of our clients are are very much driven to help for a specific reason. And they don’t share that message with the world. They don’t bring that out in their marketing. It’s very, it’s very much about cookie cutter copying and pasting.

 

Allison Williams: [00:02:52] What they have heard from other successful law firm owners and media helps to talk about how not only with lawyers she she works with with entrepreneurs in general, but she has done this with lawyers. And she gives us some specific examples of how she does this with a particular law client that she worked with. But it by virtue of getting underneath the hood and really looking at oneself and optimizing one’s performance in not only marketing, but talking about business holistically and even with the people issues like we covered a lot of things that we covered how to deal with your team, how to assemble the right team, how to put your message out there. There are a lot of concepts that we talk about that are probably somewhat intuitive to a lot of us. But she puts it in a way that is digestible, easy to understand, and really engaging and entertaining. So I was thrilled to have Mia on the show. I’m sure that you’re going to enjoy the episode and now I leave you to do that. Mia Hewitt, thank you so much for joining us on the Crushing Chaos with Law Firm Mentor podcast.

 

Mia Hewett: [00:03:57] Thank you so much for having me. Thanks, Allison.

 

Allison Williams: [00:04:00] Yes. So you are an entrepreneur of entrepreneurs, right? So you’ve been at this for a moment. And we have a lot of people that I am sure are chomping at the bit to find out what’s in that brilliant brain of yours that you could actually tough it out for as long as you have. So we’re going to dive right into talking about some of those those deep unspoken about areas of entrepreneurship that I think you have really mastered at a very high level. So I’m really excited to talk to you about this.

 

Mia Hewett: [00:04:28] I’m excited to be here. We’re going to have fun.

 

Allison Williams: [00:04:29] Yes. So let’s talk about the secret of being who you are as an entrepreneur, because I think a lot of our clients, a lot of lawyers that listen to the podcast really have this idea that they need to package themselves a certain way and that might not be who they are. And then they feel like if I market who I am, I’m not going to get as many clients. So what can you say to someone who wants to really think strategically about how to be unapologetically themselves while still being successful as a marketing machine in their business?

 

Mia Hewett: [00:05:00] Absolutely. It’s such a great question. Well, the way I see marketing is all marketing is the willingness to be seen. To be seen. And here’s the problem that stops people every every single human being, is that we can’t think greater than how we feel. Like the way that we’re feeling is what limits our intellect. And so what happens if, what I have found, Allison, is if we don’t really heal that emotional side of ourselves that has been taking us out our whole life, what happens is we then try to be authentic. But that trying that you’re talking about, like we think we have to be someone different than who we are. We think we have to project a different way or I’ll speak for myself, like for me, you know, I used to think that my version of power was my father. Right? So I used to think that power looked like you have to be firm and you have to be like this and you have to be a certain way. And like, this is power. Right. And so, like, until, like, my entire office staff, like, had a coup on me and, like, walked out on me.

 

Allison Williams: [00:06:14] Oh, my God. Oh, my God. There’s so many people that can relate to that story. But I just had, like, a little trauma moment of hearing it.

 

Mia Hewett: [00:06:24] I mean, I didn’t know any better. I thought. That’s right. And then I was like, oh, shit, that doesn’t work. Like, everybody left me and I really wasn’t… I thought I was doing what I was supposed to do. And so I had to, like, really re-examine, like, what is power? Well, where does power come from? Like, if that’s not so, the key difference is when I started to realize, like, force, right, has nothing to do with power. Like if we think in terms of like feel the gravity. Like, gravity just is. There isn’t like a force in it, it just is. And like when you can get present to every single one of us just has that just is authenticity like we just are. And like with being truly unapologetic, we don’t need to apologize for any of it. But there’s that certainty and that, that come from place of knowing who we are. And not using force, but really more about using like a allow, like allowing. Now, oftentimes people like when people when I say allowance, allowance is not passive acceptance, but it’s more about recognizing that there’s like a higher source, a higher power, a greater love that knows you better than you know yourself and is present, right, moment by moment. So allowance does not mean, though, to tolerate. Allowance is not passive or inactive, but rather actively choosing. This is how I describe allowance or the feeling place of it, but actively choosing to flow with life, by looking at all events as neutral. From innocence, curiosity, rather than obstacles or stopping points.

 

Allison Williams: [00:08:24] Wow, so that’s absolutely brilliant. And, you know, when you talk about the idea of neutrality, I think that resonates with a lot of people because I’ve heard so many people say I can’t just think positive thoughts when my entire staff walks out. (Yes!) When I don’t have enough money in the bank or when I get sued by somebody, I can’t think positive thoughts my way out of what I’m dealing with. And you’re not suggesting that. You’re suggesting to go to a place of neutrality to see things as they are without a judgment associated with it.

 

Mia Hewett: [00:08:57] That’s right, because the greatest the greatest tool any of us could ever learn is the tool of how to pull back from outside of ourselves, look down on a bird’s eye view, right. Like to really come out of our identity of what it is we think we are looking down on it. It’s that zoom out, zoom in, zoom out, zoom in, is what allows me my greatest power, because then I don’t get stuck in a detail somewhere, get lost in the weeds. Right. And not be able to see like the forest through the trees because I can pull back out and I can look at everything from a complete innocence and neutrality. And that’s what allows me my greatest power. Yes.

 

Allison Williams: [00:09:42] Well, and I think that neutrality principle can really help people that struggle with the idea of being seen, because they’re there’s you know, there’s there’s this tricky little little stream that runs through, lawyers in particular. But I really think it runs through everyone, but the audience that I serve is lawyers. And what I hear from them, what I see from them, is this idea that I have to be everything. I have to be perfect. I have to know everything. I have to have all of the answers. I have to present in a certain way. And I remember actually about a year ago we had, one of our signature retreats is Marketing for the Masters. And we did this exercise with video and the emotions that came up out of people when they had to actually witness someone else critiquing how great they were on their video. I mean, just like mirroring back to them. This is what I saw. I saw intelligence. I saw capability. I saw talent. I saw knowledge. I saw skill. I saw personality. They have a real struggle with that because they disconnect themselves from the idea that they are of value. So they struggle with that. And then when someone else parrots that back to them, it’s almost like a pain point. Like I don’t believe that.

 

Mia Hewett: [00:10:52] Oh, absolutely. And you know where this comes from. I’m going to go to the root of it because most people don’t understand it. I know that oftentimes we hear from experts well, from your childhood conditioning. And it comes from like, you know, you’re hard wired attitudes and your beliefs and perceptions and all this. And I’m not saying any of that doesn’t add to it, but what I have found in my direct experience personally and professionally of working with hundreds of entrepreneurs, what I actually found is this. It actually and I’m just going to do it visually, even though we’re audio just because it helps me be able to, like, speak truth to it. But what happens is when we’re born, we’re born whole perfect and complete. Right. There’s not one baby elephant that’s born with a self-esteem issue. Like not one.

 

Mia Hewett: [00:11:42] And then what happens, is we felt completely connected to everything and everything in us were run like we thought the whole world was our playground, like there was nothing we couldn’t do. And there was this coolness and connectedness and we trusted ourself, trusted others and the world. There was a harmony within. And then something happens. Right. I see the earliest amount of trauma is like it can be anywhere from eighteen months. It’s amazing. It’s really young, though. It’s not older traumas. The very first one is what I’m looking for, because what happens in the very first time it happens to us. It shocks us. Confusere.

 

Mia Hewett: [00:12:24] Like we didn’t even know that that could happen. Like, what do you mean, right? Like what are you talking about? That that could happen. We then internalize it because as children we don’t know, oh, mom is just having a bad day. Oh, Dad just was having a bad day or teacher was just having a bad day or brother was. We don’t know these. We internalize it to give it a meaning about us or for that to happen to us. We must be what? Like wow! Wrong. Not enough. Some version of this. And in that moment that we experience that, we experience an emotional trauma. This is the trauma then. This one thing. This one fundamental shift in perception of self. Then from that day forward, every negative experience just becomes a deeper, bigger version of the same damn drama.

 

Mia Hewett: [00:13:19] So this is what’s happening to people like the reason why they’re afraid to be seen or why when you do this incredible, beautiful exercise that you just described. And when people start flooding them with positive, like really beautiful things that they’re seeing, they start crying because from that day, that moment of that trauma, they stopped believing in themselves. Everything from here on has been to survive what they think is wrong with them. So, like the way we come back, we have to come back into wholeness. Right. It’s like another way to say this, is from this day of when we were whole. And then this happens. This first experience happens. If you can feel it, it’s it’s not logical. It’s more emotional. But there was an inner split. There was this pull back on the inside. We disconnected from people. We kind of put up a wall around ourselves. And then it was like, I know for myself that was like, I’m not going to trust anyone ever again. And so then everything that I would do would be to defend or cope with that feeling that people were out to get me.

 

Allison Williams: [00:14:27] Yes. Oh, my God. Oh, my God. So this this tales in perfectly to what you said earlier about the idea of your team walking away. And I’ll tell you, that is like that abandonment fear is so prevalent in people. The number of lawyers that I talk to that will say, oh, yeah, I could hire somebody, but then they could make off with my clients in the middle of the night. And I have no business left. And they have this this pervasive thought that if they start to grow and they start to leave behind some power because being seen as inherently vulnerable. Right? Yes. Even somebody being in the office next to you, they’re going to see that you don’t have all the answers. They’re going to see that you don’t know exactly what to do in every situation. And there’s a fear associated with that. And then when you add to that fear, the risk associated with bringing in the wrong person in the wrong way and not leading them appropriately, that I’m not good enough feeling, that trigger is there. And so many people just stop and they they justify it. Right. Well, you know, I can’t afford the good talent on the market or there’s no good talent on the market or everybody that’s out there wants to work in a different practice area. Like they just they make up these stories. So what do you say to people? When you have this understanding.

 

Mia Hewett: [00:15:42] Yeah, because they have to understand where it’s all coming from. Right. Like like we could we can we could speak to symptoms for the rest of our lives and never solve anything. But we if we go to the root cause, we can solve it in an instant. Right. It doesn’t take time. The problem is they’re dealing in the symptoms of an underlying root cause. The root cause is the reason why they’re so afraid, is because before their original trauma, everything was beautiful. They were happy. And then it came out of nowhere, that betrayal that they felt. So they’re afraid that if I, if I put myself out there and I build this successful thing and it gets taken away, like that’s what happened to me. I was, everything was great and then it got taken away. I’m not going to go through that again.

 

Mia Hewett: [00:16:29] Like, this is all coming from emotional, not logical. That’s why I say to people all the time. You can’t think greater than how you feel because you you’re literally, your, the emotions take over. And then this isn’t anything that you’re saying isn’t logical, because here’s the if it was strictly logical, we would say this. Right. We would say, like I used to say to people all the time, people would say to me in my brick and mortar business, because now I’ve built two multimillion dollar companies. But in the very first business, it was a brick and mortar business. And we were known for, we created the most entrepreneurs out of that company.

 

Mia Hewett: [00:17:07] Most, the most people that came to work for us became entrepreneurs. And people used to say to me in my industry, they would be like, why do you do that? Like, you train people to be these amazing and then they’re going to leave you. I said, what’s, really hear what you’re saying? What’s the opposite? I hire someone who isn’t self-motivated, who isn’t self driven, and they bring my entire company down. Like, do I want to use the best talent for the three years that I know they’re going to give me and and they’re going to take this to a whole new level I can’t even see because they’re wanting to learn it for themselves to build their own company. Or do I want somebody that I’m going to have to constantly pull and push and beg and plead? No thank you. I’ll take the three years. I’ll take the three years because the return on investment for me, in three years far exceeds, right, that’s logical. 

 

Allison Williams: [00:18:03] Yeah.

 

Mia Hewett: [00:18:03] Right. See, the difference logical versus emotional.

 

Allison Williams: [00:18:07] Yeah, but you get to use both of them. And here’s the thing. I tell lawyers this all the time. You have to do that. You absolutely have to do that, because now, on average, once every four years, a lawyer is going to leave a law firm. Only once every three years a paralegal is going to leave a law firm. So no matter how good you are, how great you are, how brilliant the structure that you create, no matter how much risk aversion strategies we bake into your business. (That’s right.) You’re going to have people leave. And I would much rather have exceptional people add exceptional value that builds my brand and draws more people to me and gets me more clients because clients are drawn to the lawyer, but they’re also served by your law firm. Right. That’s a marketable asset when you have a high quality team member.

 

Mia Hewett: [00:18:51] I love it. I love it. Yes. And so all fear is a form of attachment. So all what that person is really saying at the core is I’m attached to whether or not, you know, I want to control every outcome. And I have an attachment to need to know how to control that or I can’t be free. Really? Where are you ever free? And not attachment. Like the like feel what we’re really saying. All fear is a form of attachment. When there is, when you have no attachment, there is no fear. I don’t have fear of people leaving me. I don’t have fear of people. And believe me, I used to when I didn’t understand all this, when I didn’t heal that drama that was inside me, I had fear about everything. Oh, my gosh. I couldn’t even get in front of, I couldn’t get in front of people and even talk without my legs convulsing like, trust me, because my whole trauma would come right back up, you know, like everything got hit again. So. 

 

Allison Williams: [00:19:55] Yeah. Because wherever you are. There you are. Right?

 

Mia Hewett: [00:19:57] Exactly. Exactly. That’s the thing. That’s the thing. That’s exactly. Really well said. That’s exactly right.

 

Allison Williams: [00:20:08] So let’s explore this power and force dynamic again, because when you talked about that, there was such a brilliance in the idea that power is not force. And I think especially in a male dominated industry, in an industry that that is adversarial in nature. And there’s kind of a fight that’s built in. A lot of people believe that the way that they are successful is to force and so that they do that in their professional life, they don’t know how to turn that off and be a different person when they come back to the office. And so they either, you know, they’re the exact same replica. Right. So I fight in court and I fight at the office or they’re the exact opposite. Right? I fight in court and I come back to the office and I let my staff run over me. And I don’t have any rules and I don’t feel completely accountable. And I’m just kind of here and I feel like a victim. So how do you, how do you help someone to understand the dynamics of those two and when to use each for your greater good?

 

Mia Hewett: [00:21:04] I love that. Love that. There’s so much juice in this. So the first thing I would say is in the difference between power versus force is, and it’s you’re going to have to feel what I’m speaking about here more than anything logically. But inside of, like the feeling plays. So can you feel like I like to say to people, you have all the power and none of the control. And it’s like, what? What do you mean? I have all the power, none of the control. But the way that it actually works based on the universal law of cause and effect. Right. This isn’t woowoo stuff. It’s literally inside of like who we’re being as a cause produces a ripple effect out in the world as an impact and then reverberate back to us.

 

Mia Hewett: [00:21:53] So inside of the universal law of cause and effect, what happens is when we are in our power, which all power is like this. So when we, let me let me back up one second. So how do we create a result that we want? This is every single person and you all know this. I’m just going to remind you of what you already know. So when, like wherever you are listening to this conversation, if you look around wherever you are, if you’re in your car or your home or wherever, and you look at what is around you, everything you see with your physical eyes was first created in someone’s mind. Held to an intention, right. Went from a thought to a thought form, to then, took consistent actions upon until you created it into reality. So really get what you’re what we’re saying here. Nothing has been created outside and everything, the entire world has been created inside out. How they created their law firms inside out. They created it from nothing. They didn’t have a law firm before they created it. Everything’s been created inside out. So how, where does power really come from? You were born with it. Let me tell you. Let me just break it down.

 

Mia Hewett: [00:23:15] Like very simply, you were born with an imagination. Nobody, you never went to imagination school. Nobody gave you, like, let me teach you imagination. You were born with that gift. Then you were born with feelings. Nobody gave you how to feel. You didn’t go to feeling school. Right. So now you’ve got the mental like the capacity to focus and hold an intention of what it is you want. Now you have your feelings, which are the guidance that tells you in every moment whether the thought you were thinking is either in alignment with what you want or out of alignment from what you want, and then you have the ability to take action. So when you apply the the focus, the intentional focus, the feeling place of what it is that you want and all that, and then you take action consistently in alignment, this is your greatest power. You create all of your results from that flow of momentum because you’re using and allowing the power of the universal law of cause and effect to deliver on to you your intended end result. You say X and X happens right now. You did it, Allison. I mean, you’re fricking brilliant. You’ve got two… look at you, you know, how did you do that? You know.

 

Allison Williams: [00:24:38]  Exactly what you said. Here’s the thing. There’s so many people that that don’t recognize that that’s what they’re doing. They they they have. Until you become aware of this, you’re kind of in this blind thought of, you know, we have a script for life, right? Most of us got a script for life from our parents, right? Yes. You go to school at a certain point, you meet a partner, you get married, you have kids, you start a career, you you build your career. And then you ultimately, if you are one of the risky people, you create a law firm. Yeah. That that trajectory, I don’t think a lot of people actually stop and think about how they are creating, because when you are in the business, if you don’t think about the fact that you are creating, then what ends up happening is you’re just looking at other businesses and saying, how can I copy and paste what they did to be successful? And what you are ultimately doing is you’re bringing in someone else’s creative force into your business. And if it’s not in alignment with what you want, the result doesn’t happen the same way. And so there’s a whole lot of people that think, let me just download the next free widget and I’ll go back to my office and I’ll plug and play and I’ll create something. But they don’t recognize that they either can’t create that way because that’s not how they are ultimately designed to create. Or if they do create, the results aren’t going to be the same because they’re not applying all of that same leading up to all of that cause. Right. You are at cause.

 

Mia Hewett: [00:26:03] Totally. I had a woman who came through, so I had a lawyer who came through my program. She she we healed her trauma. She thought her trauma was just so so like I want to say, this is a brilliant story. She thought her trauma was, she was kidnaped when she was a kid and held for ransom. Yeah. And in her country and before she came to the United States. And so she thought her trauma was the kidnapping. And although that’s very traumatic, don’t get me wrong, she thought she was going to die. They were going to kill her and and so forth. That was very traumatic. But that wasn’t actually her trauma. Her her original trauma happened when she was like two years old and she got really scared in the middle of the night. And she went into her parents room because she was scared and she was told to leave.

 

Mia Hewett: [00:26:52] And it was so traumatic for her that she thought, oh, my gosh, I’m really scared, like like I’m supposed to like you’re supposed to take care of me. I’m really scared. And she felt completely abandoned, right. At two. And so the reason and then she felt, I’m all alone, I’m on my own. I have to figure this all out by myself. No one is going to help me. I’ve got to do everything myself. Right. And so why I say this and I share this story is when she came to me, she was like her business wasn’t doing really well. The law firm wasn’t doing really well. She didn’t really know. She thought she wanted to be a motivational speaker maybe, and talk about the kidnap and help other people because she survived a kidnapping. Anyway, I said to her, listen, I can’t tell you what it is you’re going to want because it’s going to come through you. But we have to heal your trauma first, because once we we heal the trauma and get that out of the way, you’re going like what comes through you? Like, I don’t know what you’re going to tell me. Right. So literally, we heal her trauma. She was doing immigration law when she came to me. When she healed her trauma, you know what lit up for her? That she is now crushing it.

 

Mia Hewett: [00:28:02] She’s doing like personal injury. I’m like, what!? Now, I couldn’t predict that. I’m not a psychic. I just know that it’s like when you remove what’s stopping you, when she no longer felt like she needed to protect herself and abandonment, she was doing immigration to try to look good and be do good and be right. And like, well, that’s what I should do, right, because I’m a good person.

 

Mia Hewett: [00:28:26] She was like, once she was like, rip that off. She was like, no, I’m going to I’m going to have to be like, oh, my God. And I was like, oh, my gosh, isn’t that incredible? So you can’t ever know. Like, I feel that most people like what you just said about how they go to school and they get married.

 

Mia Hewett: [00:28:43] They do all the shoulds, but they’re not fulfilled because like when you should on that, all of that stuff, you end up doing all these things you don’t really want to do. It doesn’t really motivate you. And here’s the problem. You’re going out there in the world and trying to be seen against people who are lit up about things they’re passionate about.

 

Allison Williams: [00:29:06] Right.

 

Mia Hewett: [00:29:07] And and then you wonder why you’re not getting the results, because you don’t really, you’re not really passionate about what you do. And so if we just if we literally can just find what it is inside of you, each individual, what lights you up, what motivates you, what makes you want to get out of bed, what has you shine like, what is it that, what is the gifts you already have? And then use that as your brand story. You use that as your marketing, use that as coaches, use that now as the way she’s used that to drive traffic inside of her brand story, inside of like she uses the whole like the personal injury and kidnapping thing together, all together. But it’s all for her. Does that make sense?

 

Allison Williams: [00:29:52] It makes perfect sense and and it’s so ironic that you’re telling the story because this idea of changing areas, right. For her it was staying in the law. For some people it’s leaving the law all together. But it took someone reflecting that back to her to see what was potential for her that she didn’t see in herself. And I tell I tell this to my clients all the time that I don’t have to be you to see, you. 

 

Mia Hewett: [00:30:19] Nope.

 

Allison Williams: [00:30:19] And there’s so much of what we do when we’re helping to look at someone. And, yes, it is about strategy and tactics. If you’re building a business, there are some very concrete things that you have to do, but you are at the center of it. And so what always has to happen is you have to optimize the person. But in order to do that, they have to be willing to peel away those layers. And that’s usually where people stop right after they get so scared of, oh my God, what’s underneath here? I don’t I don’t want to. And they try to, they try to cookie cutter that way their way into the next best version. They try to take that one step instead of that quantum leap.

 

Mia Hewett: [00:30:54] I so agree. And like I know you see this in your business as well. And my heart goes out to everybody because I’m really compassionate about this as because we, inside of our trauma, when we felt all alone, that’s when we became at a do it yourselfer!

 

Allison Williams: [00:31:10] Yes!

 

Mia Hewett: [00:31:11] Right. And then we don’t let them in… Like this because like, you see, I have to like I’m doing the same thing, like, you know, people are like, you know, they’re all guarded and they’re like, but this is what I say to you, even to this woman, the woman that I was just speaking about, like she said. But me, I have, what do I do with this immigration law? And I said, I’m not saying get rid of it, but who do you have in your team that could then, you could bring that up and allow them to run that and you stay in your zone of genius of the PI of what you really want to do. And now you’ve just built something really amazing. Right? Like, you don’t it’s not like I’m saying stop one and do another. You can do both. But staying in your own zone of genius.

 

Allison Williams: [00:31:53] Yeah. And owning your zone of genius.

 

Mia Hewett: [00:31:55] Yeah.

 

Allison Williams: [00:31:56] Right. Because so many people don’t do that. They don’t they don’t say I have a calling on my heart to do something else. (That’s right.) And they run away from fear. And so this I’ll use my own story as an example because it’s long before I was aware of it. It tells the story so poignantly. (Yeah.) So my practice area is family law. And for 18 years I have helped families in varying different forms of putting themselves together and taking themselves apart. And the one that I’m most known for is child abuse and neglect. I represent parents and family members involved in the child welfare system. And I remember when I first had an interest in that, it came from a broken place. I looked at the system. I saw how it treated this poor woman whose husband died, who became an alcoholic, whose child was severely autistic and was going to have to be institutionalized and she fell apart. And the system aided her in falling apart, not aided her in helping put herself back together again. And that morally offended me. And I wanted to fight for her. So I did. (Yes.) And I remember the more I started being drawn to that work, the more I kept getting these messages from the outside. You don’t make money at child abuse law. People get paid fifty bucks an hour to do that. You can make so much more as a divorce attorney. It makes so much more doing something else, use your talents for something else. And I kept being drawn to this and I turned child abuse into a multi-million dollar enterprise, you know. And not it didn’t take a whole lot of time because I was following what was in me. I had to find a way because (that’s right) You have to be committed to say there is a way. You may not know the way. There might not be a book out there that tells me this is the way. Step one, step two, step three. But there is a way, if you accept that what you are desiring is something that you should be pursuing.

 

Mia Hewett: [00:33:42] Absolutely. Absolutely. And that’s why I really believe to me what I have found in my direct experience of doing this with hundreds of people is I have found that it’s always inside of their trauma, like their their mess becomes their message, like… If you were to jump me, because it’s always going to come from that. Like I grew up poor. So, like, my my favorite thing to do is help people like, you know, once we heal the trauma, let’s make some money. I’ll never be poor again! I love helping people make money. But that comes from my trauma.

 

Mia Hewett: [00:34:19] Like I, I it’s like if I only healed people it wouldn’t satisfy me enough, because even though that is my intention to heal that trauma and free them, that that’s like a half of a piece for me. Because the other fulfillment is when people make a lot of money. So whatever your mess is, is your message. If you just look inside of what has been your biggest traumatic event, I promise you, everything that you need is on the other side of that. And the fulfillment that you want is right there. It’s it’s all already here.

 

Mia Hewett: [00:34:52] People often come to me and say, well Mia, like, how do I find my purpose? And I always say to them, the really cool thing is it’s not something you go find. It’s actually something you uncover. Like you actually don’t need to go find it. You need to remove the layers that are in front of it so that you can feel connected to it, such that you then shine your light through it and then you’re just a beacon of light of the world. And boy, the world needs more of us like that. Right, that are just saying be you. And that’s a really cool thing because I can feel in your heart, Allison, you’re just like I am in the sense of, I never wanted to go to a coach who they constantly like… When I would go to these different coaches, they would be, they would try to make me mini versions of them.

 

Allison Williams: [00:35:36] Yes.

 

Mia Hewett: [00:35:36] But I didn’t want to be one of them. I just wanted someone to help me be me. And there’s like, just see me and tell me what is it? And I can feel in your heart, you’re exactly that same way. Like, I’m not looking to make little cookie cutter people like I, whatever is in your heart. Let’s open up what’s behind that, like where the wall is. Let’s break through that and let’s let you shine, because that is that is who you are. That is…

 

Allison Williams: [00:36:02] Moment of complete candor here. That was such a challenge for me when I first launched the coaching business because I very much wanted lawyers to be drawn to create their best law firm. Right. However, I also knew that having that message was not going to appeal to people who had such a block around themselves that believed my best is only fifty thousand dollars more a year or my best was being able to take off on Fridays. Like your best is much more than that. Yeah. So there’s, there’s a part of it that is, you know, you sit up on an altar, you stand in front of people, you’re on kind of a pedestal and people look up to you and you have to both be someone that they aspire to that they look up to, as well as someone who is down in the trenches with them, who can guide them and hold their hand and let them know we’re all in this human experience together. I’m not better than you. I have just learned something that you haven’t learned yet. And they have to be willing to accept that. And then once we get them to the point of accepting that, that’s when we crack them open and then the real dream pours out. It’s like this happened that we’ve just had our Thrive Tribe Tactics Retreat at the end of last year. (Yeah.) And one of my clients, she’s a commercial litigator out in Arizona and she has a remarkable practice. But one of the things that she said was, we started the exercise on day one. I want you guys to really vision for yourself. What does ideal look like for you? OK, how many hours are you working? Are you working in the business at all or are you just a shareholder? You know, what are you spending your time on? And we kind of went through this exercise. And then by the middle of the day, number two, she went from working like fifteen hours a week to she’s like, fuck it, I’m going to be like, you know, once a week stopping in. And I only want to do it. And… 

 

Mia Hewett: [00:37:48] I love it. I love it.

 

Allison Williams: [00:37:50] This is a completely different firm than we had yesterday.

 

Mia Hewett: [00:37:53] That’s right. That’s right. That’s right.

 

Allison Williams: [00:37:55] Just from saying I am willing to say this is what I want.

 

Mia Hewett: [00:37:59] That’s exactly. 

 

Allison Williams: [00:37:59] You have to first let people see it’s possible for them to have something better and then they get to that point of dreaming out loud and really allowing themselves to dream. And that’s where they create big things. 

 

Mia Hewett: [00:38:10] So huge, so huge. It’s always like that, right? It’s like it’s so it’s like I always say to people. Success is counterintuitive. In order to go big, you’ve got to first go small. Like we have to actually go into that, like where that is, and then everything comes through that way. Like you, I know we can often hear like it’s small hinges that swing big doors. It is these little things that then turn into huge things and that the way, it’s not time. Like the biggest thing, you know, because I know everybody always used oh, I don’t have time. I don’t have time to learn. No, it’s not time. It’s not time. I just feel that most people, because they are coming from that trauma and they’re stuck inside of like being a do it yourselfer I like to use the analogy of like I want you to consider that a heart surgeon would never try to do his own heart surgery. Like, really think about that. Like for the do it yourselfers. It’s like it’s not that there’s something wrong with you. I want you to consider that if you need guidance and you need somebody to see on the outside, to show you something that you can uncover for yourself, I want you to consider it’s not that there’s something wrong with you that you need that support. It’s because you can’t be both the patients, the patient and the practitioner at the same moment in time. That’s like a totally different viewpoint. So when you can really start, when you can get with someone like yourself, Allison, like who has like really, you know, people can trust you, that you can you know, that you have their best intentions at heart and you can see them for what it is that they really, really want.

 

Mia Hewett: [00:39:50] And then how to apply that. Like the best thing you could ever do is get with one person that you really feel comfortable and that you trust and go all in on it. Because I find that for most people, because they don’t trust anyone, then they, what they do is they try to piecemeal it with a bunch of different people.

 

Mia Hewett: [00:40:11] Right? But the problem is they’re getting half ass solutions that don’t make sense to the whole of where they are. So, like, if we think of this in time, in terms of like if A is where I am and B is where I want to go, but I’m getting all of these different information from different sources that don’t even realize where I am. So nobody understands where I am. And like, as you know, I’m in the United States. So like, for instance, if I’m in Boston and I want to get to California, but I get all of these people talking to me. And so some people tell me to go to Florida and then some people tell me to go to the U.K. and then some people tell me to do this. But I’m trying to get to California. I then I don’t understand why I can’t get anywhere. It’s like, well, you got to go.

 

Mia Hewett: [00:40:57] If you’re if you’re in Boston, you want to go to California, you got to aim west sister. You’ve got to go that way and stay going that way and don’t go right. Don’t go left, go directly that way. I just feel like that happens so much because I get a lot of people who are like I have tried everything and I’m like, yeah, you tried everything, but you didn’t try what you needed from where you were and then only took action on the next best thing right there. And then the next best step and then the next step. Because when you break down the journey into these small bite sized pieces, the journey becomes quantifiable.

 

Allison Williams: [00:41:33] Yeah. 

 

Mia Hewett: [00:41:34] Right? I mean, it’s like, oh, my gosh, like don’t do that to yourself, like, I feel like that is such a misunderstanding because they don’t have clarity on where they really are. They think they’re some place, but they’re really somewhere else. And then they’re using this misguided information and it just doesn’t work. You’ve got to apply it in the right order, in the right way, with the right strategy, right tactics, using the right information consistently. And you’re going to get there in no time. It doesn’t take time. (Yeah. Yeah.)

 

Allison Williams: [00:42:03] So Mia like. You’ve just given us like so much amazing value. But before I let you go, I have to ask you about your book. So, you know, you’ve written, you know, you’re a bestselling author of Meant For More: Stop Secretly Struggling and Be A Force To Be Reckoned With. And I love that title, but it encapsulates so much. So tell us about what Meant For More is, what it means for a person who would pick it up and why it’s so phenomenal that Jay … actually wrote one of the reviews of it.

 

Mia Hewett: [00:42:34] Yes. Yes. So, so good. So good. You know, it really is. I told it in story form. So here’s here’s what I want to give everyone. I did it. I wrote the book in a way that I could most like if I were to, because it’s my message to the world. Right. I may I you know, I grew up poor and when I was 13 years old, my dog died. And because our house was so infested with fleas that they literally sucked the blood out of him. And I remember that day when I’m crying, my mom’s crying, everybody’s crying. And I remember saying, I don’t know what this is. I don’t know how life works. I don’t know how to, like make money.

 

Mia Hewett: [00:43:12] But I’m going to figure this out and then I’m going to give it to the world. And so this book is what I feel that I wish somebody would have given me at birth as my manual and said, here you go. Here’s how life really works, not what you’re going to be told it works. This is how you really work as a human being, not what you were going to told that your work. And I wrote it in a story format so that, and asking questions. So I wrote it from my, I call my younger version of myself Sue, just to not be like little Mia, said to big Mia. Big Mia… You know, I don’t wanna confuse the reader.

 

Mia Hewett: [00:43:48] So I have Sue is the the person that Mia is coaching and takes her through this journey of self discovery and unraveling of how she’s still sabotaging her entire life and she really knows she’s meant for more, but she can’t get out of her own way and she doesn’t know what’s stopping her. And so everything, everything in that book is a journey to take the person on the journey to see how they created the trauma, how their original trauma happened, and then how to self free themselves through the questions such that they unravel it, such that they become who they were always meant to be. And that’s the that’s the book. That’s what the book is for and why I wrote it. Yeah.

 

Allison Williams: [00:44:33] Wow. So, so powerful. So amazing. I want everyone that is listening to this podcast to go out and get your book.

 

Mia Hewett: [00:44:39] Oh, thank you so much. It’s an amazing book. I get people all over the world saying, your book changed my life, which is like that is like every time somebody says that, like, I feel like, you know, that bell rings and an angel gets his wings. (Yeah.) Yeah. Like I did good, I did good. I, I fulfilled on my promise. I’m a woman of my word.

 

Mia Hewett: [00:45:00] I just feel like that because that’s it’s really what I want. I wish somebody would have told me this a long time ago. I’m fifty three. I mean I like somebody could have told me this. I’ve been working since I was 13 years old and if somebody would have given me and I’ve been into personal development since I was a teenager because I’ve been working for so long. If somebody would have given that to me. Oh my gosh. What how different would my life have been from there? So that’s my wish for everybody, is that they they get it. They get the information they really are looking for.

 

Allison Williams: [00:45:29] Yeah, well, everyone, I know that you have gotten a lot of value out of this conversation. I certainly have. I always love having guests on my show, but I particularly love to hear from someone who gives me a perspective that not only do I share, but another way to look at all of the immense information that we share here at Law Firm Mentor with our clients about being authentic with you and some of the things underneath the hood that are going to make you more successful in life. So, Mia Hewitt, thank you so much for being a guest on the Crushing Chaos with Law Firm Mentor podcast. Everyone, I am Allison Williams. Your Law Firm Mentor. Have a great day.

 

Allison Williams: [00:46:16] Thank you for tuning in to the Crushing Chaos with Law Firm Mentor podcast. To learn more about today’s guests and take advantage of the resources mentioned, check out our show notes. And if you own a solo or small law firm and are looking for guidance, advice or simply support on your journey to create a law firm that runs without you, join us in the Law Firm Mentor Movement free Facebook group. There, you can access our free trainings on improving collections in law firms, meeting billable hours, and join the movement of thousands of law firm owners across the country who want to crush chaos in their law firm and make more money. I’m Allison Williams, your Law Firm Mentor. Have a great day.