Episode 64-Building Your Practice and Your Management Skills with Mindful Communication

Being a great communicator is essential to your success as a lawyer. Whether you are counseling a client, managing paralegals or associates, giving a presentation, or just trying to cultivate relationships that might lead to business, effective communication is everything to your success. If you are like me, in law school, you learned to think like a lawyer.  You cultivated your legal research and writing skills and learned to interpret the law.  When you entered the real world, you soon learned that you need a whole different set of skills to succeed.  And a lot of that has to do with how you communicate whether it is with clients, referral sources, colleagues, and other lawyers. In this episode, I speak with Donna Mac who has a lot to say on the subject of effective communication. Donna is founder and President of iVoice Communication and trains current and emerging leaders to create new, healthier communication practices so they can become influential, resilient and speak with confidence.  She teaches mindfulness techniques that her clients can use to be more present and more successful in delivering a message. I met Donna through my business networking group ProVisors and since that time I've had the chance to speak with her about my own challenges in communicating with difficult people (including family members and clients).  I’ve also heard her give great presentations on communication at the New York Public Library speaker series.

Om Podcasten

Counsel to Counsel is a periodic podcast produced by Stephen Seckler of Seckler Attorney Coaching (www.counseltocounsel.com). It addresses important career, marketing, and leadership issues facing attorneys. The target audience is associates, counsel and partners at law firms of all sizes; but the podcast also addresses issues that are relevant to in-house counsel, law students or any lawyer who is looking for career insights inside or outside of the law. Counsel to Counsel is aimed at individual lawyers who are looking to increase their own career satisfaction and build their marketing and leadership skills. The podcast features interviews with leading consultants, career professionals and marketing experts who advise attorneys on careers, marketing, law firm management and related issues. The guests are also a roster of successful attorneys who have found career satisfaction inside and outside the law. Counsel to Counsel is a direct outgrowth of the blog Counsel to Counsel which Stephen Seckler has been publishing since 2005. Since graduating from law school in the late 1980s, Stephen Seckler has been advising lawyers on career and marketing issues and working with a broad mix of law firms and corporate law departments. He began blogging when legal blogging was in its infancy and his blog Counsel to Counsel was named to the ABA Journal’s Blawg 100 in 2007 and 2008 (the first two years that list was in existence). Steve has written extensively on career and marketing issues and he has spoken at many law school, law firm and bar association events. He served on the Boston Bar Association’s Standing Committee on Work Life Balance and was Vice Chair of the Law Practice Management Section of the Massachusetts Bar Association. He is active in the Senior Lawyers Division of the American Bar Association, the ProVisors business network, and has been quoted frequently in the legal and business press.