Why Skills Aren't Enough

​Over the last couple of months, I’ve been outlining the path to mastery in the courtroom. First, you must recognize that jurors are hostages, but you also need to realize that you are a hostage too. Second, you need to understand that your role changes as the trial progresses, all leading up to the ultimate task of becoming the hero jurors need. Third, you must reckon with the fact that your nonverbal communication has a significant impact on how you step into those critical roles and that you must increase your nonverbal intelligence. 
 
But there’s something else; something beyond tactics and skills, beyond theory and technique. In fact, this something is so critical that if you don’t address it, all of your other work combined will never have enough power to get you to mastery.
 
And here it is: If you are not dealing with your mindset you will derail your path to mastery.
 
If you’re honest with yourself, aren’t there times in your life – big, small, in between – where there’s been a voice in your head that causes you to second guess, to doubt? A voice that says you’re not enough, that you don’t have what it takes? Of COURSE you have. We ALL have. 
 
But here’s the real kicker. Even though that voice in your head SOUNDS like you. It’s not. It’s not you at all. Would you ever talk to anyone the way that voice talks to you? No. That’s how you know it’s not truly your voice. It doesn’t fit within your character at all. So, why is it so easy to think that, contrary to your character, you would so easily talk to yourself in that tone? That’s right. It’s not you at all. 
 
It’s the voice of the saboteur. 
 
Within us all, over time, that super-personalized voice of the saboteur has taken stake of our minds and feeds us messages when it feels threatened. It hates change of any kind and wants to keep you comfortable and tame. 
 
Your saboteur is full of limiting beliefs that keep you in a frantic place; a place where you have to zoom from CLE to CLE, from book to book, from webinar to webinar, just looking for “the right way” that will help you finally achieve the greatness of folks like Gerry Spence and Nick Rowley. 
 
It’s time to call bullshit on that saboteur! Stop listening to that voice. Learn to listen to the voice of your inner leader instead. It takes nurturing and diligent coaxing to get that voice to be louder than the saboteur, or at least present enough for you to recognize it and give it the floor when the two are vying for attention. 
 
The saboteur must be put in its place in order for your inner leader to take the wheel and take you down the path to mastery.