I wasn’t ready

This is the story of the past 7 years of my working life. The time feels right to share it and draw a line in the sand.

It’s a 5-10 minute read so feel free to scroll on, but if you are interested, grab a brew and your favourite treat and read on my friends.

Big Ambitions

2016 marked the 10-year anniversary of setting up my own law firm and I decided that it was time to grow my team. By the end of that year, I had recruited or engaged the consultancy services of 10 other people to work with Your HR Lawyer.

It was a challenge taking on fee earners; trying to strike a balance between the income they generated and their generous salaries. It didn’t go to plan.

My primary role in the business was to lead the team and provide strategy and direction.  I worked closely with our BDM to refine our brand, vision, offering and business development strategy. She got it and shared my passion for success.

But something wasn’t working. We weren’t making progress at the rate I had anticipated, and I couldn’t understand why. I decided that it must be my fault; I clearly wasn’t doing enough or the right things to motivate the team to help me bring my vision to life.

I invested in business coaching and a mentor to help me with the gaps that I knew that I had in my knowledge and experience of growth. After kissing a few frogs along the way, I learned some new theories and habits, which I implemented, but things were not improving quickly enough, and we were headed into choppy waters.

I became consumed by the business. If I wasn’t working on it, I was thinking about it 24/7. I couldn’t sleep, relax and I was upset or stressed most of the time. I didn’t want my fears and disappointment to affect my team’s morale so played ‘90s dance music in the car on the way to work every morning and repeated the mantra ‘smile, you’re on stage’ every day as I stepped into the office.

I borrowed money to keep us afloat and made sure everyone got paid each month, except me. I leant on my husband to cover our family overheads and felt worthless and useless. My inner critic was having a field day!

I couldn’t keep the façade going and eventually shared my concerns and frustrations with my team. I cried during that team meeting, which I hadn’t intended to do, and pleaded with them to do all that they could to make us more successful. I knew that, if everyone played their part, we would have an awesome business very soon. I set achievable targets and incentives for each of them, but it didn’t work. Some left, some were dismissed and by the end of 2017, I was burnt out.

After taking a step back from fee earning for almost 2 years, I had to get back on the tools again and it felt like a demotion in my own business. I felt disillusioned, lonely, resentful, and burdened. I had failed.

It all felt so public as well. We had put ourselves out there to our network and competition and now it was time to hide to avoid the questions, ridicule, and judgement that I was convinced I would get if I ventured out. And so, I went in to hiding.

In Hiding

Hiding became my favourite thing. It kept my ego safe from the criticism of others; nobody could criticise my actions if they didn’t know what I was up to. With hindsight, I can see that I really was deluded, thinking that anyone gave that much of a shizzle about what I was doing!

2018 was my year of stability. I reconnected with my clients, worked with a smaller close-knit trusted team, and got the business on an even keel financially. But I was on autopilot. I had checked out and was bored and unfulfilled. I resented being a lawyer and felt trapped in my own firm.

In November, I came up with an idea to utilise AI in my business to automate some of the mundane tasks that I didn’t enjoy doing. I mentioned this to a business friend who then introduced to me to the directors of an online training company. They loved the idea and had the technical expertise to build the platform I dreamed of, and so we decided to collaborate on bringing my vision to life.

In January 2019, I set up a new company, Guardian Business Services (GBS), and my passion was reignited but by the summer, it became clear that my partners were distracted because they had too many fingers in other pies or were full of crap. I suspect the latter! I told them that they were off the project and began exploring angel investment and working with other developers.

The quotes to build and maintain the platform and BETA version of my bot, GABI (Guardian’s Automated Business Intelligence), were high and the strings attached to angel investment were undesirable, but I was undeterred. I believed that I would find a way.

I recruited new team members, engaged a professional branding consultant and a great coach, created a demo of my platform, and explored new associations with other lawyers and HR service providers, ready for when the project took off. This time it would be in a more measured and controlled way.

In December, I rebranded the law firm to Guardian Law, hoping to leave the demise of the Your HR Lawyer team behind me.

January 2020 was a fresh start and I felt optimistic for our future. And then Covid-19 struck, and we ALL went into hiding!

A Learning Experience

The lockdowns of 2020 created uncertainty but provided me with the opportunity to learn a LOT of new skills. If “they” could do it, so could I! I locked myself away in my home office and learned how to create bots, update my website, create a membership platform, build sales funnels, online marketing strategies and much more.

I was obsessed with making this work on my own without investment or the costs of development. Unfortunately, I wasn’t a nice mum or wife to be around. Every interruption to my work was resented. My primary school kids were trying to home school themselves whilst I stared at a computer screen in my own world of tech.

My husband, who works for a global company, was on video calls for at least 10 hours a day and did the lion’s share of running the house too ….. until my friend John snapped me back to reality with one statement: “wow, your husband must love you a lot to enable you to prioritise your work before him.”

Thankfully I took on board that comment and began to shut the laptop off and leave it in my office when it was family time. I became more tolerant, present, and kind to my kids during the working day too, even though I felt the burning hunger for success and my inner critic telling me again that I wasn’t going to achieve it unless I put all my attention on it.

The Big House And The Big Law Firm

As we were working from home with no end in sight for that arrangement, we discussed extending the house to create a better working space for both of us but soon realised that we had outgrown the house. We put it on the market and started to look for a new one. I saw one that was £400k over our maximum budget but had been on the market for a while. I arranged a viewing.

As we drove down the road to the house, my hubby said, “you can forget this!” but an hour and a half later, as we left the house, he said, “I love it, let’s find a way to make it work”, and we did.

In November 2020 I was approached by a recruiter on behalf of a large law firm that was interested in acquiring my firm to establish an employment law team in Nottingham. I agreed to meet with them, primarily out of curiosity because I thought that it might be a way to escape being a lawyer so that I could focus on my shiny new business. The meeting went well, we began the due diligence process and discussed heads of terms for the purchase of my firm and a shareholding in GBS.

We moved to our dream home in March 2021. We had stretched to the limit to buy it, and both felt the financial pressure to pay the hefty mortgage repayments, but it was OK as I planned to join the other firm as a partner, bed in my team and the clients, support the firm’s HR team, get involved with business development and manage GBS. It was a big role (or more accurately several roles) and I believed I was ready to rise to the challenge….until the same person who had highlighted that my priorities were screwed up last year told me to “stop”.

I was giving him an enthusiastic tour of the new house whilst telling him about the new opportunity with the other law firm when he interrupted me and asked me to look at him, and when I did, he said “Wow, look at your home. It’s amazing. Why are you setting yourself ridiculously high goals, then raising the bar just before you achieve them without acknowledging what you have already achieved? You are good enough now. You are successful enough now. Look around you and stop chasing something bigger and better all the time, otherwise you will never be satisfied.”

It was like he had given me permission to step off the work treadmill and power down. And I did.

Procrastiplanting

2022 was the year I discovered ‘procrastiplanting’, wasting hours in my garden during the working day rather than getting on with work. I kept trying to force myself to focus on work but just couldn’t be bothered enough to do so!

I had lost my ‘mojo’, whatever one of those is, and no matter how hard I tried, it was hiding so well that I couldn’t find it.

I kept trying to find my ‘thing’ to reignite my work spark but ran out of steam before I finished anything properly, or I would convince myself that it wasn’t good enough and nobody would buy it anyway, so it wasn’t worth putting the effort into launching it.

I constantly questioned myself as to why I was sleepwalking through each day, without really achieving much. Was this middle-age, perimenopause, my comfort zone or was I a failure and there was no point in trying? I felt unfulfilled, lazy and a bit lost.

I decided to get in touch with my friend John. He had been instrumental in me losing my mojo and I thought that he might be able to help me find it again!  “You need to find a new way of working. You are resisting stepping back on that work treadmill because the old ways didn’t work for you, and you don’t want to go back to doing it that way. You need to find your joy.”

I thought about this a lot. The first part made sense; I didn’t want to be consumed by work in the same way again, but I did want to achieve at work. It was the second part that I struggled with. What did he mean by ‘finding my joy’? Did I have to change career or turn one of my hobbies into work? I didn’t want to do that, and I knew that I wouldn’t make enough money from gardening to pay my share of the bills either!

I planned to meet with John again and this time I wanted answers.

I wasn’t ready

After exchanging pleasantries with John, I told him that I wanted him to help me find my joy at work. He had known me for a long time and heard me moan about the struggles of the past few years many times. He paused then asked me why I was so scathing about my law firm. “What’s it ever done to you? What would you lose if you gave it up today? If your relationship with the firm was like a marriage, do you think it’s a healthy or abusive one?”

I blurted out a precis of the events of the past few years and my desire to move on. I told him that I had failed, and I wanted a fresh start. He said, “What if you didn’t fail and you just weren’t ready?” He let the words sink in. I felt dizzy and wanted to cry. He went on, “You’re trying to force things to happen when you want them to happen, and your impatience is not the energy that is going to make this work.” The penny dropped. I knew he was right.

I slept better that night, and the next, and the next. A weight had been lifted from my mind and I no longer felt the pent-up resentment of a frustrated child. I hadn’t failed; I just wasn’t ready. And my team at the time had not been ready either. I can see that now.

A Perfect Excuse

I made peace with what had happened but remained unmotivated at work. I still hadn’t found my joy. “So why can’t I finish anything and launch it John?” I asked my friend during our next conversation.

“That’s an easy one!” he said. “It’s because you are giving too much airtime to your inner critic who is telling you that it must be perfect before you risk putting yourself and your work out there again, and it will NEVER be perfect to them. Get it done and let it help others and your audience will tell you if you need to improve it. What makes you think your inner critic knows better than your audience? The perfectionism of someone whose opinion should not take priority is standing in your way.”

I’d been told that “done is better than perfect” many times but had convinced myself that it will be done, when it’s perfect. Another impossibly high standard that I was never going to reach! Damn you self-sabotage!

Perfectly Imperfect

Ok, here goes, it’s 2023 and I’m feeling braver. Over the next year, I am going to launch the Employer HQ platform, my bot GABI and some other products that I have created behind the scenes over the past few years; they won’t be perfect, and I will request and listen to constructive feedback and try to improve them (if I feel like it!).

I have products and services available right now and I am going to tell people about them because they might help employers in need. Some people won’t want to hear about them or like my style and that’s fine, we are probably not the right fit for each other.

I have over 20 years’ experience as an employment lawyer and nearly 17 years’ experience as a business owner and employer. I know that I can help others business owners and people managers facing thorny staff issues in their business with strategies that I have tested myself and with many clients. It’s time to stop being the employer’s best kept secret!

Richard, Jess, Jamie, Claire, Jayne, Dee and John, I just want to say sorry for being a pain in the ass and thank you for your unshakeable support and patience!

Thanks for reading.

Nickie x