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Scott Benton: Hey everyone, Scott Benton here. How are you? I’m the host of the Classroom 2 Courtroom podcast, where we help you easily transition from a law school student into your professional career as an attorney, and where we happen to make the practice of law fun. And today, in terms of when it comes to putting together your to do list and performing your legal services, we’re going to take a quick look at building momentum through celebrating small wins.
Small wins.
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Scott Benton: Today, in order to help assist your overall use of the success cycle, which is what we talk about on this podcast, to help you really learn and perfect the actual practice of law, a subject that is not taught in law school, we’re gonna take a look at building momentum through celebrating small wins.
Now, in law, it’s easy to get caught up in celebrating big wins, such as landing a high profile client, maybe, or securing a large settlement. But the reality is that big wins are often the result of many, many smaller, more incremental victories. And besides, the big wins really don’t come along all that often.
It’s going to be Every now and again, you’re going to [00:02:00] have a bigger win while it’s nice to celebrate big wins. Your goal really is to celebrate wins frequently and even every day because believe it or not, the more that you celebrate your wins, the more you increase your motivation and your efficiency that ends up informing and streamlines your legal work.
So it’s a loop. By celebrating small wins, you can build up that momentum, you can boost your confidence, and ultimately you can achieve far greater success. Let’s start out by talking about why small wins matter.
Small wins are those incremental achievements that might seem minor or insignificant or completely unimportant. But when you put them all together, they create a massive snowball effect that surprisingly propels you forward. Now, in litigation, for example, a small win could be something like successfully filing a motion to compel, or getting a crucial piece of evidence admitted, or even meeting a tight deadline for a complex brief. This might notseemm like [00:03:00] much individually, but don’t forget that each one is an important step towards your big win, your big goal. They provide a sense of progress and accomplishment, which is essential for maintaining your motivation, especially when you’re in a long and drawn out case. One of the more effective strategies for building momentum through small wins is to break down bigger tasks into smaller and more manageable steps.
So let’s say you’re working on a case with multiple stages that might include research and discovery and depositions and pre trial motions. And then, of course, there’s the trial. Now, if you only focus on the end goal of winning the case, Then the journey is going to feel overwhelming and probably completely insurmountable.
Instead, break the process down and set smaller, more achievable goals. Now in this example, your first goal might be to complete the legal research within two weeks, let’s say. Once that’s done, you then move on to the drafting of the [00:04:00] motions, and then you’re preparing for depositions, and so on. Each step becomes a small win that builds your confidence and it keeps the momentum going, more importantly.
Now let’s talk about the importance of celebrating small wins. It might seem unnecessary to celebrate the completion of a draft motion, for instance, or for successfully arguing a preliminary hearing, but these moments of recognition are absolutely vital. Celebration doesn’t mean necessarily throwing a party.
Although, if that’s your style, don’t forget to invite me. But it could be as simple as acknowledging the achievement, taking a short break, going for a victory walk, a victory lap, or sharing the success with your team. You really want to recognize the progress that you’ve made and use that as rocket fuel to keep pushing forward.
When you celebrate small wins, you’re not just boosting your own morale, you’re really reinforcing the behaviors and the strategies that led to that success.
This reinforcement helps establish a pattern of success that [00:05:00] makes it much more likely that you’re going to continue to achieve your goals in the future. If it becomes a habit, then you’ll celebrate wins automatically.
When celebrating small wins finally graduates into a routine, it’s going to help you manage the items that go onto your to do list or what we call the G sheet in our success cycle model. It’s kind of the same thing.
G sheet stands for get it done sheet, which equals the to do list. So G sheet equals to do list. I hope that’s clear. Once your to do list is done, you then have plenty of time and energy left over to perform those legal services. So this is what you might call a virtuous cycle in that the positively charged loop that you’ve created streamlines your entire system for completing legal services and for billing for your work.
And doing all of that with an increased sense of confidence.
And when you’re confident, you’re more likely to take decisive action, you’re more likely to manage your time effectively, and also [00:06:00] maintain a positive attitude that reflects onto everyone.
This in turn helps you to achieve more and keep the momentum going. So in order to start celebrating small wins, here are a few practical tips. You want to break down bigger goals into smaller, more manageable steps.
You want to track your progress.
You want to keep a record or a checklist or a journal of your achievements, no matter how big or small they are. And by the way, they all count and they’re all important. Then you want to celebrate your wins. You want to acknowledge each small victory, which could be as simple as giving yourself a pat on the back or actually treating yourself to something special.
Go ahead and buy that WaveRunner. And most importantly, you want to learn from each win. You want to sit down and you want to reflect on what you did right and how you can replicate that success in the future and use each win as a critical learning opportunity. I’m Scott Benton. I’m the host of the Classroom 2 Courtroom podcast. Thank you so much for joining us on this episode.
If you like this podcast and you’d like to [00:07:00] get more information about us, you can always go to our website at classroom2courtroom.
com That’s classroom, the number two, courtroom. com where you can send us a message to keep in touch or you can even inquire about our seasonal associate programs that we have available for law school students. You can come and work with us. And as always, don’t forget to like, share, and subscribe to stay on top of all of our newest episodes.
And until next time, we hope you’ll join us in making the world a better place, one client at a time.
