Over-thinking at work 🤯

I was working with a senior associate recently, who was worried about time she was 'wasting' over-thinking decisions, with a constant fear of making mistakes. 

She’s not alone, so I thought I would share some of the things we explored.  

✅ Step One: We did a “Clean Evaluation” of a few decisions. Meaning we took off the table, any brain-drama about her being “too slow” and just looked at the facts, the risks and the outcomes. When I do this with clients, we’ll often find there WAS value in the time spent. So always worth removing the self-criticism, and seeing what’s left in terms of actual (business) problems? No doubt we can all work on efficiency, but it’s not always the giant issue we make it out to be. If lawyers never took time to consider risk….well. 🤷‍♀️️ 

✅ Step Two: We explored how to lower her FEAR of mistakes. Ultimately, it’s impossible to make CALCULATED decisions if you’re operating from fear. Fear will make you unwilling to take risk or paralysed with indecision. Fear MAKES SENSE in lawyers based on our training, but we can’t allow it to drive the show.  

✅ Step Three: We thought about some simple questions she could ask herself in the future to do a quick analysis of the risks and make a clean decision about approach. Not rocket science, and I’m happy to share those questions if you drop me a line, but all due warning ⚠️, this step doesn’t work if it isn’t done in tandem with Step Two.  

I hope that gives you some ideas if you're working through the same thing. At the very least, please know it's a common worry and I bet you're already doing better than your brain gives you credit for. 

P.S. Looking to feel better, perform with more confidence and progress quickly to more senior roles? CLICK HERE to learn more about my 1:1 coaching program for lawyers.