Sari Swears Podcast: Fear Is Not a Strategy with Coach K

What’s actually motivating you in trial? 🤔

Is it love for your client?

Love for justice?

Love for the craft?

Or is it fear?

Fear of screwing up.

Fear of missing something.

Fear of not being good enough.

In this week’s episode, I’m back with Coach K talking about why so many trial attorneys are fueled by self-criticism and WHY that strategy quietly burns you out.

We break down:

👉🏽 Why being hard on yourself doesn’t create excellence
👉🏽 Why replaying mistakes reinforces them
👉🏽 How fear-based motivation keeps you stuck
👉🏽 And what happens when you shift to love instead

Because fear constricts.

Love expands.

And what you focus on, you create.

Tune in NOW! 🎧

Love,
Sari

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“Whatever’s motivating you is what’s going to move you forward. If it’s fulfilling, resonant, exciting — that’s the energy you want behind your work. But if it’s beating yourself up, focusing on failure, working long hours until you can’t think anymore — that’s the wrong motivation. It’s going to drag you down. You won’t be fulfilled. You won’t feel joy. And it’s not sustainable.”
Coack K

Transcription

Sari de la Motte:

When we talk about taking that to its logical conclusion, it is, "if I'm not hard on myself, I'll get lazy. I'll miss something," so on and so forth. So why isn't that a good motivation? Why can't we be motivated by how awful and gross and horrible we are?

Coach K:

I think you just answered that.

Sari de la Motte:

I didn't. They think that that works. Why doesn't it work?

Coach K:

It doesn't work because it's going to grind you down to nubbin.

Sari de la Motte:

Which is where we find a lot of people when they come to us.

Coach K:

Yeah, it's not-

Sari de la Motte:

You're listening to, Sari Swears on the Sari Swears podcast. Well, welcome everyone to another episode of Sari Swears. Coach K is here again, again, I can't get rid of this guy. He's obsessed with me. But you do not have sperm on your shirt.

Coach K:

I don't. Yeah, I don't have a sperm on my shirt

Sari de la Motte:

Or any sperm on your shirt.

Coach K:

Yes.

Sari de la Motte:

Yeah.

Coach K:

No.

Sari de la Motte:

Because last time you were here, you had a T-shirt you were wearing with sperm on it. That doesn't sound good.

Coach K:

You cannot... Okay, it's a band shirt that had a drawing of sperm on it.

Sari de la Motte:

Yes. Well, today we're going to talk about how your motivation for becoming the best trial attorney in the world matters, and how most of the motivations that we've seen, at least pre-H2H and then post-H2H, have been the wrong motivation. And I hate to use that word wrong motivation, because there's no total right or wrong, but it's not serving our clients. So let's talk about that, let's get into that. So why do you think most attorneys are motivated to, for example, work hard or do the things that it takes to be a good attorney?

Coach K:

Well, I mean, I think hard work is important-

Sari de la Motte:

For sure.

Coach K:

... and it's something that they built on.

Sari de la Motte:

But what's motivating that?

Coach K:

What's motivating is fear.

Sari de la Motte:

Fear, yes.

Coach K:

Yep.

Sari de la Motte:

Yes. And so we find that a lot of our clients, because they are so fearful, will overwork and do all of those things. Talk to me a little bit about how your clients have viewed how they approach trial pre-working with you and how they approach it now in terms of motivation of why they work hard?

Coach K:

Yeah. I mean, what most of my clients, especially when I first meet clients and we first start talking, the motivation is that it's like beating yourself up, it's being hard on yourself. If you make a mistake, you really smack the shit out of yourself with that mistake, and that's the motivation that'll make you better.

Sari de la Motte:

Yes.

Coach K:

And it's part of overwhelm and what's dragging you down.

Sari de la Motte:

Well, and also overworking too.

Coach K:

Overworking, yeah.

Sari de la Motte:

Because I think a lot of young people are like, "Well, you need to work hard." But they have that as the holy grail of this is what's going to save the day. And what we find is that there's nothing wrong with hard work. I think we all work hard here at H2H, right?

Coach K:

It's a given.

Sari de la Motte:

It's the motivation for why. And so there's some very intrinsic beliefs that I want to look at today, that I think a lot of our trial attorneys hold without even knowing that they hold those beliefs. But let's talk about some of the intrinsic beliefs and how that is motivating the behavior, and how that's not serving our clients. So one of the things that we hear all the time is that, "I have to be hard on myself to be great." Why isn't that true? Why doesn't that work? Why isn't that a good motivator?

Coach K:

Well, I mean just to get back to actual motivation, motivation's everything. And if you're-

Sari de la Motte:

What do you mean by motivation?

Coach K:

So I ask the question all the time, what's motivating that? What motivates this? What's the motivation here? Because whatever's motivating you, it's what's going to move you forward. And if it's something that's fulfilling, resonant, exciting, joyous, that's the motivation you want to move towards things, if you want to be the best or whatever it is that you really want these big results about. But the other way is the antithetical motivation, is you beating yourself up, you focusing on the failure, and that's why, and working long hours all through the night until you can't even think anymore, that's the way you win. That's the wrong motivation. It's going to drag you down. You're not going to be resonant, fulfilled, joyous. Like I said, it's the wrong motivation.

Sari de la Motte:

But we don't tend to think of trial work as resonant and fulfilled and joyous. It's so funny that you said that, because just before podcasting, I was doing our presentation skills call with the crew, and we were totally resonant and joyous. I mean, we were putting an opening together in both cases and it was so much fun when we're motivated, I think by how creative we can be in the process, we were coming up with such great stuff on our feet, and how collaborative we can be in the process and how cool this is going to be when we get it in front of a jury. And I think that's not an experience that most people have until they get to H2H.

They see this process either as they're behind a laptop by themselves pecking out word for word the opening that they're putting together, so that's not very joyous. And then when they get in front of the jury, they're trying to either memorize it or read from their notes, which is not a joyous experience for anyone. And they're beating themselves up, because they probably should have practiced it more, they should have done more, read more. And so the whole thing feels very devoid of joy. So what would you say to an attorney that says, "This isn't a joyous process. This is not... What are you talking about? This isn't actually what we're after here."

Coach K:

Well, it's all about what you say, Sari. What you focus on is what you create.

Sari de la Motte:

Yes, for sure. So if somebody is thinking that this is going to be this arduous, horrible, awful process, then that's the experience they're going to have, and that's how they're going to be as they prepare for the experience, that's what they're assuming. What I love so much that we hear from our clients is, trial is fun again, it's fun again. And I think that has to do with them being motivated by something different. So let's talk about that. Because I think when we're talking about this idea of motivation, it comes back to social science, and what we know says that as humans we are more motivated by loss than gain. So I think it's very normal. So I don't want to pathologize this and say, you guys are all freaks that you do this. I think it's very normal that we are motivated by the fear that we're going to lose something, right?

So if I'm motivated by fear and I think I'm going to lose, then that's normal, that's what the brain thinks. But I'm also going to act in ways that are not going to serve me or the client or even the jury. But if I change that to being motivated to be in service to my client, to be in service to the jury, to recognizing that my job is to fight not to win, that's going to change my entire experience. As you said, motivation matters. So how do they change their motivation? They're really going against their wiring in a way here, because again, as we said, we're motivated to avoid loss versus to gain something.

Coach K:

Yeah. Well, and our brains are wired that way, they want to keep us safe, they want to protect us. So if that's what's coming in, if that's the thought that's coming in this negative thought, that, "let's protect myself" motivation, well, in coaching, we just say, "Okay, well, hold on a second here." First, we do the saboteur awareness, like, "Okay, what is this thought? Where's this coming from? Is this a thought that's really going to serve you?" And then we start thinking from there, "Okay, well, what's the wiser thought, that neutral tone?"

Sari de la Motte:

"What do you want to think instead?"

Coach K:

"What do you want to think instead?" And then that swaps out the motivation. Because of course, I mean, I guess maybe you want to go back to the saboteur and keep pushing in that realm, but really what we want mostly is what's in here, this inner wisdom that comes up. So swapping that out with this motivation of the wiser part of you, the inner leader let's say, or inner wisdom, that is when you start focusing on that and noticing that, that is the motivation to swap out. That's what you start using instead.

Sari de la Motte:

Well, people say, "But you can't just decide that I believe this if I don't actually believe it." So how do you get to that point where people are out here and we really work on what you want to believe? And they have some resistance to that, "What do you mean what do I want to believe? I believe what I believe." But I think that you can change your beliefs, we've seen it happen time and time again. So what would you say to people who are like, "I don't know how to change that. How do I believe something I don't believe?" It's hard. You can say all day long that I'm amazing, but if I don't think I'm amazing, how do I get there?

Coach K:

Practice. If you go back to a couple of episodes, Michael Cowan, a beautiful example of how he practiced and still practices every day, the mindset that he wants. He didn't believe it at first. Shit, he didn't even believe Sari at first. But he practices it, and looks at him now.

Sari de la Motte:

You mean he didn't believe me? I'm right here in front of you.

Coach K:

Yeah, he didn't believe you. He said, "Oh, she's full of shit," or whatever. You remember, he joked about that. It all takes practice. We need to rewire our brains. You got to build that new neural pathway. It takes practice.

Sari de la Motte:

It's so true, because Michael didn't just go and never try a case again, he went into trial and put it to the test over and over again. The judge is doing their best, the jury is trying to do their best job. And he just kept saying that over and over to himself until it became a new neural pathway that he could really work with.

Coach K:

And what he focused on, he created.

Sari de la Motte:

That's right. And he went on and has had amazing verdicts and is doing so great. And most important I should say, he's happier, right?

Coach K:

Oh my God, yeah. A beautiful story.

Sari de la Motte:

We started with one of the beliefs that all of our attorneys believe, which is, did I say that was the hard work one?

Coach K:

Yep.

Sari de la Motte:

Yes. Okay, but what about the, "I have to be hard on myself?" That's a big one too, which is, "I have to be hard on myself or I'm going to..." What? They never finish that sentence. They just go, "Well, I got to be hard on myself."

Coach K:

Yeah.

Sari de la Motte:

And when we talk about taking that to its logical conclusion it is, "If I'm not hard on myself, I'll get lazy. I'll miss something," so on and so forth. So why isn't that a good motivation? Why can't we be motivated by how awful and gross and horrible we are?

Coach K:

I think you just answered that.

Sari de la Motte:

I didn't. They think that that works. Why doesn't it work?

Coach K:

It doesn't work because it's going to grind you down to a nubbin.

Sari de la Motte:

Which is where we find a lot of people when they come to us.

Coach K:

Yeah, it's not longevity. It's not like Rick Friedman, the long view. There's no longevity in that. That's not sustainable.

Sari de la Motte:

Why?

Coach K:

Because it's very hard on your mind, your body. And if you think about why you even got into this, did you get into it for that reason? You got into it, probably a lot of my clients say, to help people, you want to make this kind of difference. And if you're coming from a place of just dragging yourself down, wearing yourself down, to what end?

Sari de la Motte:

Well, and I think too, it comes back to the fact that the body doesn't know the difference between the real thing and the fake thing.

Coach K:

Yep.

Sari de la Motte:

So we know when we hook up athletes to different things, and if we have them think about doing the serve or throwing the football or whatever it may be, that the same muscle fibers are firing and the same brain processes are happening, even though they're not actually playing the sport in the moment. The brain doesn't know any different. When you continually tell yourself, "I'm terrible, I suck, I better practice more, because I'm awful," all of that, that's what's going to come out, is your body is going to believe that and it's going to act accordingly. How do you think that you're going to show up in front of a jury when you're thinking those things about yourself? That's not an actual motivator that fuels you.

Coach K:

Yeah, it comes back to experience. You're creating that experience and you have control of creating your experiences, and that's all we've got is our experiences.

Sari de la Motte:

Yes.

Coach K:

So if you can take a handle of that, take control of that and create your own experience, well, that's all the difference. That's what makes our lives fulfilling, is our experiences.

Sari de la Motte:

Okay, so they think they're motivated by fear, "I got to over prepare or else I'm going to forget something, do something bad." They think they're motivated by being hard on themselves. Talk about this piece of, "But I learned from my mistakes. I'm going to rehash those until the end of time, because that's also a good motivator to really look at all the things I totally did wrong and make sure I never do them again." I mean, on some level, without my tone of voice, I was like, I'm going to look at my mistakes and make sure I never do those again. It sounds reasonable. Why isn't that good a motivation, to look at your mistakes and really focus there?

Coach K:

If you focus on mistakes, you're just going to have more mistakes.

Sari de la Motte:

Why?

Coach K:

Because if we go-

Sari de la Motte:

Won't you fix them if you focus on them?

Coach K:

If you go back to motivation, that's what you're focusing on, you're creating, so you're just going to create the mistakes again.

Sari de la Motte:

Yeah. It's funny to me that people don't get that, that they really want to go back and look at all the things that they did wrong and play it in slow motion. Because they're doing this, you know they're doing this at three in the morning, and sometimes for years, by the time our clients get to us. There's years of that, where they're replaying it over and over and over again. And what they don't recognize is their programming.

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Sari de la Motte:

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That's programming. You're making those neural pathways slicker and slicker and slicker, so that becomes the default that you will make those mistakes over and over again. It's like manifestation work, and some of you may not believe in manifestation, and that's fine, and that's your choice, and I don't know that I believe in it either in terms of I think of Mercedes and suddenly there's one in my garage, although, if I did that right now, there is one in my garage right now. But I think of it more as an opportunity to see what you want to focus on. But even there, they say, even if you're like, "I don't want this, I don't want this," the brain doesn't recognize the word don't. It just sees the thing you're focusing on.

And I know I did a whole podcast on looking at the research of do we learn more from mistakes than we do from success? And I was surprised to find, because this is again, another holy grail of trial lawyerdom, that we don't. We actually learn better and can perform better by repeating successes and going over, how did I do the thing well? Not that we never look at mistakes, but we learn more from success than we do from failure. I thought I was floored when I saw that. Because I had an inkling just from our experiences here, we don't ever grind people into the ground about mistakes they're making, we always focus on the success and how to repeat it, and we see how that has helped our clients. So anecdotally, I thought, "I wonder if we learn more from success?" So I was very happy to find out. I'm right, as you know, I love being right. But how does this work with you and your clients when you introduce this concept of, you don't need to be beating yourself up all the time and focusing on your mistakes?

Coach K:

I was just thinking about the word growth itself. I mean, success is expansive and failure is constricting, right?

Sari de la Motte:

Oh, yes. So sure. Yeah.

Coach K:

So growth, why wouldn't you be able to build on something that expands, right?

Sari de la Motte:

Mm-hmm.

Coach K:

But I was just thinking about-

Sari de la Motte:

Yeah, you can't really go anywhere with mistakes.

Coach K:

No.

Sari de la Motte:

It's like, "Well, don't do that."

Coach K:

You're stuck.

Sari de la Motte:

Done, instead of, "Do this and more of this. Oh, and you could build on that and build on this and build on this." I love that concept. Thank you.

Coach K:

Yeah. Well, and stuck, I just said stuck, but when you think about it too, it's not that you're actually building any kind of new neural pathway or anything when it comes to failure, that is the old wiring. That's what our brains want us to believe.

Sari de la Motte:

Oh, so true.

Coach K:

They want us to keep safe. They want us to keep small, not take risks. So that's-

Sari de la Motte:

So that's one of the reasons why we're doing it.

Coach K:

It's already so slick. You don't need to do anything to make that more slick. It's there, right?

Sari de la Motte:

You know how to make that mistake, done.

Coach K:

Exactly. So that's why it takes so much more work to focus on what we said, Michael Cowan focusing on this success and believing these things and then creating that. It takes so much work, because we're going against our old wiring that's already been there.

Sari de la Motte:

Well, it's like what I said in I think the first podcast of the year when I said, "If you really want to make change, you got to change your identity." And it's not just about deciding who you want to be, you have to prove it to yourself with small wins. And Michael Cowan is such a great part of that. It's not like he just decided that he loves the jury and the judge, he went in there and he kept having these small wins, where he's like, "When I thought that I felt better. And when I thought that I acted differently, and when I thought that I got better results, not always, but most of the time." And so he's proving it to himself over time as well. But I love that concept of the reason we don't focus on mistakes is we already know how to know those. Let's focus on the things that we want to learn how to do. Which brings us now to this concept of the fixed versus growth mindset. So you and I have both read a book by, what's her name?

Coach K:

Carol Dweck.

Sari de la Motte:

Carol Dweck, called Mindset: The Psychology of Success. And we love that book. And in there she talks about the difference between a fixed mindset, which means whatever you got, that's what you're born with and you can't develop anything more. It's like everything's innate. You either have talent or you don't. You're born with it or you're not. Or a growth mindset, speaking of growth, which is, "I can develop the things that I need to develop." How do you think this concept of fixed mindset in terms of, "This is who I am as an attorney and I'm in this box and that's all that I can ever be," also gets in their way in terms of motivation?

Coach K:

Well, I mean, the main thing is you're not going to try anything new and you're going to just be convinced that it's uncomfortable, it's inauthentic.

Sari de la Motte:

We get that sometimes here, don't we?

Coach K:

Oh, yeah, we get that a decent amount. And then that just keeps you in a stuck place.

Sari de la Motte:

I think that's another message of the saboteur, right?

Coach K:

Mm-hmm.

Sari de la Motte:

So you're here and we're asking you to use a different voice pattern or try to gesture in a different way, and automatically it's, "Well, that doesn't feel authentic." And our answer to that is always, "Yeah, because it's uncomfortable. That doesn't mean it's inauthentic, it just means that you haven't done it before." But I think the fixed mindset says, "That's not me. Everything that's me has already been reloaded. I've never used that voice before, so I can never use that voice." Where a growth mindset is, "Ooh, cool, another tool that I can use to emotionally connect with the jury or convey that I'm commanding," or whatever the things that we're sharing with them.

Coach K:

Well, it all takes practice. You got to practice that like we've been talking about.

Sari de la Motte:

Yes.

Coach K:

So just like you've practiced anything to become the attorney that you are today, this is something you need to practice.

Sari de la Motte:

So we're talking about motivation. We don't want to be motivated by the fear of not being prepared or the concept of, "I got to be hard on myself or I'm going to be lazy," or mistakes and focusing on those are what's going to save the day. What motivation is really fueling, do you think?

Coach K:

The motivation that's fueling is the motivation of your success, your wins, the things that you can build upon.

Sari de la Motte:

I would say that the motivation is love.

Coach K:

Ooh.

Sari de la Motte:

Because everything... Those are the two emotions, the two main things. Everything that we do, I think, is that humans are motivated by fear or love. Fear, as you said, to use your metaphor, is constricting and love is expansion. So when we love what we do and we love the jury, and we love the process, and we love the creativity of it, and we love working with other people, that is sustainable. I think we have to have love. It's not even about success, because I think that's often a result of love for ourselves and our clients in the process, but it's not always. So that's not sustainable either, success. What do you think?

Coach K:

Well, what came to my mind is the fact that I've grown so much as a human being, having loved you.

Sari de la Motte:

Oh, that's lovely. Why do you say that?

Coach K:

Because I mean, I was just talking to my-

Sari de la Motte:

Because I'm so hard to love, and that took a lot of growth?

Coach K:

No. Well, that's your saboteur. I was just in my session with my coach and we came to love and that state of being and how much that is so important. I mean for you and I as just humans, I mean love is such a big part of our business and the way that we approach our clients. But I've grown immensely every single moment that I've been with you, because of that love and that consistent love, that growth. There's so much growth that's come out of it. I hope the same has happened for you.

Sari de la Motte:

Absolutely.

Coach K:

Yeah.

Sari de la Motte:

Absolutely it has. Because you're very hard to love, so that's cool, no. But I think people are sometimes taken aback. We tell them we love them even when we've just met them.

Coach K:

And we mean it.

Sari de la Motte:

They've been here for two days. But because everything we do here is about love. And we have found that when you are motivated by love, really falling back in love with trial work and with who you are and what you're capable of, the sky's the limit. And that's the true motivation. Love of justice, love for making the world a better place. It's all about love in my mind, that's the motivation. And when we're focused on mistakes and being hard on ourselves and all that, that's just noise that's getting in the way. It's also how our brain is wired. We're wired to avoid pain. We're wired to... Although we keep giving it to ourselves, we somehow think that's going to lessen our pain in the long run. But I think the work we're doing here is trying to rework and rewire our brain to be focused on love, and we've seen that has worked. And people like Michael Cowan and Tim Whiting and Tom D'Amore, and the people who have completely been changed by focusing their motivation on love versus on all these other things.

Coach K:

Yeah. And if we go back to what you focus on, you create when you're focusing on love, you're creating love.

Sari de la Motte:

Love, that's what I think all trials are about.

Coach K:

Yeah.

Sari de la Motte:

Yeah. Well, thank you for being here and talking about how motivation matters, because it absolutely does. And we will talk to you next week.

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