FHTH Ep #250 - Holy Shit! It’s My 250th Episode!

Holy fucking shit! IT’S MY 250TH EPISODE! 🥳

It is because of YOU that we have made it this far.

So, from the bottom of my heart, THANK YOU.

Tune in to find out the 4 beliefs hindering your potential as a trial attorney.

Xo,
Sari

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"That's what I mean, is that there's a belief that it has to be hard. You read and reread all of the documents, due to your fear of missing something and missing out on something. You're overprepping. You are doing things yourself that you can be delegating. That's what I mean by you are making it hard or you think it has to be hard. You don't trust it when it's easy. What I'm here to say is, using the podcast as an example, it doesn't have to be hard to get great results."
Sari de la motte

EPISODE #250 TRANSCRIPTION

It's my 250th episode, y'all, and holy shit, 250 episodes. Speaking of shit, that's what happened yesterday. I was supposed to be doing this yesterday, meaning podcasting, and I came down here to do it and on my way, I shit my pants. I shit you not. Yeah, I haven't done that since chemo. I'm wondering, is this a sign of old age? What is this? It happens to my dad from time to time, but he's 88 fuckin' years old, so a little concerned. I think I overdid the magnesium that I take every night. Kevin changed the thing that we used to measure it, and I probably overmeasured, so this is actually Kevin's fault.

The reason I'm sharing that with you is, one, it gave me a title for this podcast, and two, if I can tell my thousands of listeners, my staff, and basically everyone else that I shit my pants, you can fuckin' stand in front of a jury and try some of the things that I'm telling you to do. Okay? I went first. Hopefully you were not eating as I shared this tidbit with you. But now, we'll always remember the 250th episode, as the episode that Sari talked about shitting her pants. All right. You know I go first. I do this for you.

250 episodes, you guys. I talked to my marketing team and I was asking them, "How do we know how many listeners we have?" They're like, "Well, there's downloads and there's IAB downloads, and then we can look at Lisbon." I was like, "I think you started talking in a language that I no longer understand." I guess there's "downloads" versus "plays", but basically when we add it all up, we're at nearly, if not over, a half a million people either download or listen to the podcast. That was just looking at a couple of places. We're in 32 countries, and I just could not be more thrilled to be doing this. Thank you. Thank you.

It's because of you that we're at 250 episodes, and I happened to go over to the podcast platform over there at Apple Podcasts and I saw some great new reviews that I'll be sharing over the next couple of episodes. This one, let's just say I've never gotten one like this before. It's from Divine Mineral, love that name. She gave the podcast 5 stars.

"The DJ's law firm. Sari de la Motte, DJ Law Firm is in the house. She plays all genres and styles in the legal system. Her albums include Witchnery Law Secrets, Magical Defense Tricks, Ninja Dismiss Strategies, Delicious Trial Recipes. Just plug and play. Is she a software, an app, or a shaman? I recommend this H2H album. Thanks."

Well, that was amazing, and there's emojis to accompany all of the things. That's awesome, and thank you for your review.

If you've not reviewed the podcast, yes, here I am, shamelessly asking. And you know what? I'm paying for it, because there's now a one-star review on there. Thank God. Y'all are giving me too much love sometimes, because if I'm not pissin' somebody off, then I'm doing something wrong. Right? If you're creating anything that everybody likes, you're doing it wrong. I have a whole podcast on this if you want to go search. By the way, you can search our podcasts at sariswears.com/podcast. If you're like, "Where's that podcast where she talked about blah," there's a search bar in there to search them. Go there if you're looking for a specific episode.

All right, so what does my getting to 250 podcasts mean for you? Well, we've been talking about these beliefs that y'all hold, like it has to be hard, or you're not amazing until you earn amazing, or you learn more from failure, which I blew out of the water a couple podcasts ago. Or if you decide you're amazing, you're going to lose your edge. Y'all are really hard on yourselves, but you know that I love proving you wrong, or I should say, your saboteurs wrong, more than anything. Well, maybe kicking defense ass, I really love more than anything, but I will now use my podcast as a real-life example of your wrongness. Are you ready? All right, let's go back to those four things. That's what I'm going to cover today.

The first one that y'all believe is that it has to be hard. Listen, my early podcasts, I made them difficult, and I will tell you that they are the worst podcasts of the 250. If you go back and listen, I am reading. Yeah. In fact, Coach Joon once said, "Those sound different." I'm like, "Yeah, because I'm reading." He's like, "Really?" Yeah. I didn't know. I'd never listened to a podcast. I didn't know what a podcast was, when at the time my assistant was like, "You should start a podcast." I wrote out all these things. I made it hard, y'all. I made it hard, and guess what? Those are the worst podcasts of them all.

When we think about the podcast now, 250 episodes later, and I think about all the things that I do in my world, podcasting is some of the easiest work that I do because it's so enjoyable. Not only that, we had Malorie Peacock come in as a guest this quarter, and she's teaching our Practice Management call. We have a Practice Management call every month in the H2H Playground and Malorie Peacock is a fantastic lawyer. She has this system where she talks about how to prioritize your cases and how to spend most of your time on the ones that are going to give you the biggest bang for your buck.

She's teaching all of this to our members. She talks about the Pareto principle, which is about how 20% of your effort gives you 80% of your results. That's so true of the podcast in that it is such a simple thing that I do, it's such an enjoyable thing that I do, and yet it brings so much into our world and into my work.

Many people say they found me because of the podcast, right?

Now, when we're talking about hard work, and I know y'all follow the Stoics, and I have all the books too. Here's what I want to be really clear that I'm saying and what I'm not saying. This work is hard. My work is hard. Your work is hard. I mean, there's nothing I have against hard work. It's part of my genes, being 100% Finn, for one. Hard work is dealing with your clients sometimes, definitely dealing with opposing counsel, answering discovery, the actual trial. That's different than making things hard.

That's what I mean, is that there's a belief that it has to be hard. You read and reread all of the documents, due to your fear of missing something and missing out on something. You're overprepping. You are doing things yourself that you can be delegating. That's what I mean by you are making it hard or you think it has to be hard. You don't trust it when it's easy. What I'm here to say is, using the podcast as an example, it doesn't have to be hard to get great results.

Number two, the belief that y'all have that you're not amazing until you earn it, as if amazing is something that you earn. When I first started the podcast, nobody was listening to the podcast. My mom wasn't listening to the podcast. Okay, I take that back. Kevin was listening to the podcast, because Kevin had to because Kevin edited the podcast, but nobody else did, that I knew of. I just put it out there. Now, the only reason people started and continued to listen is because I had something to say. Getting to 250 podcasts, getting to a verdict, being asked to speak at a CLE, is evidence of your amazingness. It is not something that you get, and then can believe you're amazing. You are never going to have an amazing verdict until you do amazing things.

To do amazing things, you have to believe that you are amazing, right? Nobody's listening to my podcast when it was shit, and then suddenly they're like, "This is actually pretty good." Then I was like, "Oh, I'm amazing. Now I can create amazing content." No. I believed I was amazing. I created amazing content that nobody was listening to. As soon as that got to y'all, you were like, "Oh, this is amazing." Then we were both right.

Now, I know you might be thinking, "Not everybody can be amazing." Oh, yes they fucking can. Where'd you get that idea? I firmly believe that all of us gravitate to things that we are good at, right,? And when we do that, when we really trust that, "I'm good at this and I want to build my life over here", that becomes an amazing thing that happens. We create amazing careers, we create amazing content, we change lives.

This is also why I think when many of you get mindset training, for example, or do mindset work, or have a mindset coach, and you really dig into your fulfillment because that's a huge part of coaching, you recognize that you did not become a trial lawyer because you wanted to.

There was something, a parent who pushed you there. Maybe you didn't know what else to do. Many of you end up leaving. As much as I hate losing trial lawyers, what I do know is that if this isn't the right fit, you're going to be miserable. You're going to be miserable.

We gravitate toward what we are good at, and when we fully trust that, and by the way, this is another argument for doing what feels right and what you want to do, versus what logic says, "Well, but this actually won't make any money."

I mean, I followed my dream of becoming a musician and having two music degrees, which doesn't make any fucking sense for what I'm doing now, but that absolutely led me here. Right? It never steers you wrong to follow what you want to be doing and what feeds your soul and what you're good at. When you do that, that's where amazingness happens.

I find that people don't think they're amazing a lot of the time, not all the time, because they're really not doing what it is that they love. Even if it is, if you're like, "I'm so meant to be a trial lawyer," you're not allowing yourself the opportunity to enjoy it. I mean, a big part of what we're doing at H2H is changing the way that law is practiced. When we do that, we're going to become happier people and have better lives.

I mean, think about my start. Again, two advanced degrees in music. No fuckin' reason why I should be doing the work that I'm doing, but one thing led to another, led to another, led to another. If I had waited until somebody said, "You know what? You should do this. You're amazing." I mean, now you tell me all that all the time. Thank you, back at you, you're amazing too, but if I had waited, I would still be waiting. I did the things before I had the evidence, and that is always how it's going to work.

You have to do the thing to get the evidence. It's like we talked about with confidence. Confidence isn't something you need before you do something. Confidence is what you get after you do the thing, but y'all are waiting. If I had waited to put out my podcast until I was sure it would be received well and that people would like it, I would still be waiting today. I decided ahead of time that I'm amazing and I had amazing shit to say. I'm not perfect. I didn't know everything. I've learned so much along the way. You know that, I share it with you, but now we're at 250 podcasts.

Number three. All right, "Sari, but if I decide that I'm amazing, then I'm going to lose my edge. I won't work hard, et cetera."

I'm going to go back to the podcast as an example. Listen, I did decide I'm amazing, we already know that, I just said that in number two. And yet I still started the podcast. I didn't lose my edge. If I continue doing the podcast, I mean, if I was like, "I'm amazing and I'm going to put out this podcast, and you know what, I'm just so amazing that I don't need to do it anymore," that's the opposite of what has happened. The more I put it out, the more that y'all loved it, the more I wanted to do it, and the more I want to top myself now and consistently do bigger and better things.

The amazingness part, and believing that and owning that and stepping into that, is what got me to 250 episodes. Not claiming that, so I would somehow use it as this stick to beat myself with. Out of all of these, this is the crazy one, y'all. It really gets me because it's so fucking destructive, right? "I can't do that. I suck. I'm not good enough. I'd better get this right or I'm going to lose everything." Oh, my God, y'all. You're talking like a bunch of scaredy cats. This work takes guts. It takes passion. It takes fire. Not, "Oh, my God, will I get it right," some pussy-ass horseshit. That is not what this work takes.

This is very similar to the military, where they're like spitting in your face and humiliating you and telling you how horrible you are. You've heard me talk about that, and they do that because they need to work the idea of an individual out of your lexicon, right, because if you're a selfish soldier, that gets people killed. It's groupthink all the way in the military.

We are one and we are all. It's not about you. It's about us and how we are going to go and fight for our country. It's all about group.

I understand why they do that, but trial is the opposite. You are there, most of the time, by yourself as an individual. You are isolated in most of your firms. You're by yourself. That's why H2H has become so popular, primarily for the community. Y'all love the community that we've created at H2H. Not to mention you do have that sergeant yelling in your face telling you that you're shit. It's called opposing counsel and the world, because you're a trial attorney and a plaintiff trial attorney at that.

And your saboteur, Kevin says, right? This is just bollocks, that you believe that you need, on top of all of that, and the fact that your job is so hard, to then layer on being hard on yourself, because somehow you think that that is going to make you better.

Listen, y'all. I'm glad that I get a negative review here and there because again, as I said, it is evidence that I am still doing something meaningful, and creating something that creates passion in people.

Even if it's passionate hate, at least I'm moving people to feel something, but it's not the negative reviews that keep me going. It's the positive ones, that y'all are saying how this has affected your life, that we go on walks together.

It was the Badass event back in March that I do every March, and these women came and they said, "Our boss pulls us into his office on the regular and says, `You gotta listen to this podcast.'" That's beautiful, and I'm humbled by that. That's what keeps me going, not being focused on all the negative shit so that I don't lose my edge. What the fuck? Doesn't make any sense. Again, to use a real-world example, I'd not fucking be here at 250 episodes if I had followed that line of thinking.

Number four, your belief that you learn more from failure than success.

And two or three podcasts ago, I fuckin' blew that out of the water. The research backs me up on that. Listen. Going back to that idea of when I was reading at the beginning, those first, I don't know, three to five podcasts. I hate those podcasts, we leave them there, but I hate those podcasts.

Now, if I had looked at that and been like, "These are failures, these are awful, I'm reading, it's terrible, I don't know if anybody's listening," I would have quit, but instead, I made a decision that said, "You know what? I'm just going to be myself. I'm just going to riff. I'm going to do an outline so I know what I'm talking about," and it became fun. It was better. I wanted to repeat that.

No one likes failure. Ain't nobody dancing around about how they've learned so much from failure. "Please, sir, may I have some more?" Nobody is doing that. Even the greats. I mean, think of Steve Jobs or the Microsoft guy, whatever the fuck his name is. They didn't focus on failure and go, "Oh, this is the reason why this didn't happen. Oh, my God, I should never do that again." No. They had an idea, they had a vision, and they kept heading toward that vision, and they figured out along the way what didn't fit, but all the while their eye was on the prize, right?

Steve Jobs wasn't like, "Oh, gosh, I hope that I'm amazing some day." No. He's like, "This works, this works, this works. Darn, that didn't work, but one day people are going to have a computer in their pocket." He wasn't doing it because he hoped that was true one day or that maybe someone would do it. He's like, "I am going to do this because I'm amazing." Yes, along the way, there are going to be things that not going to work, but he was not focused on his fuckin' failure. He was focused on his success and how to repeat that, over and over and over again.

The Wright brothers, they were like, "I wonder if we could figure out how to fly?" Then they tried their flying machine and they were like, "Yeah, I guess someone else will have to do it, we failed." Right? They're like, "We tried this, we tried this, we tried this," all the while knowing they could figure it out. By the way, in Finnish, a plane is called tietokone ... or no, that's computer, which is also funny, lentokone, which means the flying machine. It literally translates to that. Tietokone for computer is the thinking machine or the knowledge machine, which I think is hilarious.

That is what I mean by amazing. Not having a big ego, but wanting something, whether that's a computer in your pocket or a flying machine, or just getting justice for your client, and knowing that you can.

That's what I'm talking about. It's not like, "Oh, I'm so great. I can just sit back and eat bonbons all day." It's like, "No, I'm great, and that's why this can happen."

I mean, that's how I got here, to 250 episodes, and yes, also to this thriving career I love, and it's not because it's been this hard, laborious thing that I forced myself to do by being super hard on myself while making tons of mistakes that I forced myself to focus on and learn from, so I can finally say that I've earned my amazingness, but of course I won't, because if I do, then I'll never work hard again because this is how you think this works.

No, I did this fairly simple thing that I enjoy by being myself and knowing I had something to say, and it's now a success. It's not because of luck, or it was a fluke, or whatever else your saboteur wants to tell you. It's because this is how this works. I'm sorry to take away the torture porn y'all are loving and seem to thrive on, but it's the truth. Love what you do, love the process, but most of all, love yourself. Thank you so much for being along for the ride. Here's to 250 more episodes.

Have you ever wished that you knew what the jury was thinking? Well, grab a pen and paper because I'm about to give you instant access to a free training I created for plaintiff trial attorneys called Three Powerful Strategies to Help You Read a Juror's Mind. It's going to help you to understand what the jury is thinking, so you'll feel confident to trust them and yourself in the courtroom.

Ready for the address? Go to sariswears.com/jury. Enjoy.