We’re coming up on the end of the year and it’s time to celebrate your paralegal success! I want to say that I am so grateful to all of our readers and those who reach out to me telling me how helpful some of these articles have been for you.
For this post, I was thinking of how the end of the year is nearly here and it’s usually that time to set those goals for 2024.
But, don’t do it, at least not yet.
I want you to do something a little different this year.
What if, instead of making a big list of all the things that you want to accomplish in 2024, you just took a moment to celebrate what you’ve accomplished in 2023?
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The Gap and the Gain
One of my favorite books that I read this past year was The Gap and the Gain by Dan Sullivan and Dr. Benjamin Hardy. That book may not have come up on your radar because most of the time they’re writing for Business owners and about topics geared towards entrepreneurs.
However, let me share the basic premise of the book and why I’m bringing up this topic as we’re coming close to the end of the year.
In the book, the authors show that when we live in the gap, we won’t be happy until we achieve X. If we live in the gain, we appreciate how far we’ve come. We’re measuring backward. I have the perfect example for you.
My granddaughters were here for a visit this year. Lily is the oldest and she’s 7. She loves the pool. The day before she left, she decided she wanted to try to learn how to do a handstand underwater. We show her how to do it and she tries and tries. She finally starts getting pretty good. For one or two, and then she’d mess up for one or two. By the next morning, she’s doing them so well.
But she says something like, “But my legs aren’t perfectly straight, and I need to stay under longer.” Things like that. I say, “But look at how far you’ve come in just one day. You went from not even having your feet out of the water yesterday to looking really good doing your handstands today.” When you’re in the gap, you’re focused on what you haven’t accomplished, what you don’t know.
When you’re in the gain, in your mind, you’re looking back and measuring your current paralegal success against where you were. You have to train your brain to see the gain. We all, myself included, have a habit of spending too much time in the gap.
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Here’s a Personal Example
I’ll give you a specific example from my own world. My podcast, the Paralegals on Fire! Podcast Show is a perfect example. It gets around 8,000-10,000 downloads per month.
Now, I’m in a Mastermind group online, and they all have podcasts. They’re all business owners. Some of them have over 400 episodes. I see their numbers and they’re celebrating hitting the 1 million download mark.
They get like 100,000 downloads a month or more. If I’m living in the gap, then I’m measuring myself against them. I’m feeling pretty disappointed that I only get 10,000 and they get 100,000 downloads. Instead, if I measure it in the gain, then I look backward and say, “What has the podcast accomplished in the last year?”
The downloads have increased by more than 5,000 per month. I was able to put together more than 30 episodes this year, and even better, I could go back through all of your emails thanking me for a topic that struck home with you. Then I could do what they talk about in the book: Choose a different time frame to measure it again, so don’t just measure this past year.
I could measure where I was five years ago. Five years ago, I didn’t even have a podcast.
What have I done in the last five years? I developed the idea, came up with the show name, and learned the technical side. I’ve hired great people to help me with it. I went from zero listeners to where I’m at now. (By the way, Thank you to all those who listen!)
Another way I could be in the gap is I could easily say to myself, “Well, I only have 10,000 downloads per month, and according to the Bureau of Labor Statistics, there’s something like 300,000 paralegals in the United States. I’m missing 290,000 people. Where are they?”
And that’s just in the U. S. I know from emails I’ve received that some of you are in Australia, Canada, France, and the U.K. Who knows how many of the 10,000 downloads aren’t even in the U. S. What if it’s 5,000? Then I’m missing 295,000 paralegals who could be listening to the show and aren’t.
Do you see where I’m going with this? If I look at how far I’ve come, its a game-changer.
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Building a New Perspective
That’s what I want you to do at the end of this year. Write it down. Where were you five years ago? What have you gained in the last five years? What do you know now that you didn’t know then? And it’s not just the external stuff too, it’s internal.
Maybe five years ago you were starting your paralegal degree or a certificate program. What do you know now that you didn’t know back then? Along with your paralegal certificate. You also had never worked at a law firm. You had no idea how a law firm even worked internally. Or what went on inside the walls, right?
Paralegal success can come in many different forms. Now you’re drafting discovery requests, you’re closing real estate deals, you’re finding it easier to draft those billable time entries that you had no idea five years ago what a billable time entry even was. If you’re the same person living in the gap, you’d be thinking about how, well, I’m in the third year of my career, and I’m looking at these senior paralegals in the firm, and I wish I knew what they know.
You’d be wishing that it was so easy for you, like it is for them. You look at your goal list for next year, and you get depressed when you realize there’s so much that you still have to learn. And you’d wish you were making more money. That’s going to be a whole other episode in 2024. But maybe you started at X.
We’ll whatever that is. And now, after a couple of raises and bonuses, you’re at Y. If you’re in the gain, you’re looking at where you were five years ago, maybe making 15 an hour at a job that didn’t excite you. Now you’re in a new job and you’re making a lot more money. If you’re in the gap, you’re thinking about how everyone else is making more money than you, measuring your paralegal success again others, and wondering how to get there.
Almost like you’re standing at a gap in a canyon, the Grand Canyon. You’re on one side and you look across the canyon and you see this huge gap. You think, man, that’s way too big for me to ever get across. That’s what you don’t want to measure your paralegal success against.
Start Celebrating Paralegal Success Daily
Every night, take out your journal, not your iPhone, because you don’t want that in your eyes. Either on paper, or if you’re like me, the Remarkable Pad. Take it out, and write down three wins for the day. What three wins did you have for the day? And it doesn’t have to be just work related. It could be a combination.
Here’s a few examples:
I was focused on work and had a productive day which allowed me to leave at 5:30 to be able to attend my son’s basketball game.
I drafted my first complaint.
I cleared out my inbox
Whatever a win is for you. If you’re a new paralegal or fairly new, it might be hard for you to initially find your daily three wins when it comes to work.
Remember that your daily wins don’t have to be work-related. It could be a simple thing like, I got through the day without messing anything up.
But think about this. Have you ever moved to a new city, and you didn’t know where anything was? I remember in 2017 when I moved to the east coast of Florida from Atlanta, I had to use Google Maps for simple things like finding the nearest UPS store or grocery store.
I didn’t know my way around. Now I get in my car and drive to all those places without even thinking about it. And it didn’t take me six years to get to that point. When you’re struggling in your new career, it’s the same thing. It feels like you’re never going to get to the grocery store without the help of Google.
But you will. You can do things to speed up that process. That’s why the Paralegal Boot Camp was started. We help litigation and personal injury paralegals cut the learning curve and fast-track their careers. If you’re in another practice area, like real estate or corporate, find your practice area’s version of the Paralegal Boot Camp so that you can reduce the learning curve and see greater paralegal success.
Get tips on professional development as a new paralegal.
Stay Out of the Gap in 2024
Write down your three wins every single day and stay out of the gap. Stop looking at all the things that you don’t know yet and get in the game.
Appreciate how far you’ve come along already. What paralegal success have you achieved? What have you accomplished this year? Then if you want to take it a step further next year, take a look back every 90 days or every 6 months and ask yourself:
What do I know now that I didn’t know 90 days ago?
90 days ago, maybe you didn’t know how to manage an e-discovery project, but now you do.
90 days ago, you didn’t know how to create a table of authorities, but now you do.
Also, consider adding reading The Gap and the Gain to your to-do list. You can learn a lot more about the concepts. Consider sharing these strategies with colleagues and friends. It’ll help avoid the gaps that so many of us get disappointed in when another New Year’s Resolution doesn’t pan out.
Learn how to turn your paralegal performance review into a career development opportunity.
Meet the Author
Ann Pearson is the Founder of the Paralegal Boot Camp, and host of the Paralegals on Fire! Podcast Show, and passionate about promoting the paralegal profession.
Ann spent 20 years working as a paralegal manager and a litigation paralegal before opening the Paralegal Boot Camp in 2010. Her training programs focus on adding immediate value to a paralegal’s career and bridging the gap between what a paralegal learns in school and what they actually do on the job.
When Ann is not working, you can usually find her somewhere near the ocean – either boating, scuba diving, or rescuing sea turtles.
