Whether you are working to improve your marketing strategy or how your firm operates, these tips will help boost your creativity.
Creativity can be a powerful tool used to solve complex business problems. Yet, it is often one of the least discussed and most misunderstood assets at your disposal.
Some of the most successful lawyers embrace and harness their inner creativity, look holistically at the situation, and deliver appropriate, relevant, and often more innovative solutions to the challenges their firm’s face.
Follow this article to learn more about four great ways to encourage, cultivate, and drive creativity. Then use these new skills to get more clients, improve how your firm operates and build a more successful and profitable law firm.
1. Think Simple
While many believe “outside the box” thinking spurs creativity, that isn’t always the case. In most situations, the most simple option is the best option. While a crazy and wild out of the box idea is very enticing, that doesn’t guarantee that it will be a success. Then when it fails you will find yourself back at the same place you started. Try to keep things simple and don’t stress on trying to discover the next big original idea. You will thank yourself when you realize how much time and effort you saved with more simple solutions.
2. Recognize Energy Sucking Distractions
Energy is fundamental to not only creativity but connectivity. When you’re are in creative mode, distractions that pop up block energy and divert thinking. These distractions can be things like your office environment or even things like phone calls and emails. But even more disruptive are the internal distractions like doubt, clutter, conflict, fear, labeling, stress, etc.
The best thing you can do is recognize what distractions are taking up the most energy and then approach each individually. This way you can feel more confident in putting your energy towards tasks that require that freedom and creativity.
3. Build your Perfect Workspace
People are hardwired to pay attention to their environment. This may have helped our ancestors to avoid predators more effectively, but in the modern world, it can be a drain on productivity. The article “It’s Not About Time, It’s About Focus” gives this advice:
“Create a designated work space. Place only one task at a time in that space and work on it. This eliminates the effect of peripheral vision, which extends 120 degrees in all directions. Whether we realize it or not, we “see” everything stacked up around that work item. That causes mini-distractions that increase our stress and reduce our focus.”
This can be especially challenging for the solo law firm that operates from a home office. It is all too easy for your home environment to bleed into your office space. If you are finding it difficult to be creative from a home office, a shared office space may be the answer to your issues.
Shared office space is an affordable option that provides additional amenities to help you focus on running your firm more effectively and creatively. Plus working in an environment of like-minded peers will help you to exchange ideas and build creative solutions to problems based on the experiences and recommendations from those that have already encountered and solved the same problems as you.
4. Start or Join a Mastermind Group
One of the best ways to discover creative solutions, is to share some that you already know/use with others. Bringing lawyers together for a presentation on practice management or even to just discuss new ideas will make them feel as if they received something of value out of the event, even if they didn’t meet any new referral sources. The best way to do this is by establishing or joining a mastermind group.
A mastermind group is a group of people brought together by a common purpose. For example, you could create a mastermind group exclusively for solo and small firm attorneys striving to run a successful law practice.
The group can be as small as 3-5 people or as large as 20 or more people. The main goal of the group is to create a support system that can help participants set goals, come up with creative solutions to problems and hold each other accountable.
Everyone in the group should meet on a regular basis to exchange advice and ideas. You can arrange for a guest speaker at your meeting or agree to all read the same ebook and discuss what you found useful.
Although you might be meeting with the same lawyers every time, you’ll be having meaningful interactions with each other and providing mutual support. Eventually, you’ll build deep trust and rapport with the members of your mastermind group, which in addition to creating an incredibly creative environment, will also lay a foundation upon which the best referral relationships are built.
