I met up with an attorney I know recently. She had switched firms, going back to one she had worked for previously. I was surprised because she seemed happy at her last firm. It turns out she was generally happy, but some colleagues she liked were changing firms and a call came at the right time to get her to consider leaving. She did, and seems invigorated from the change of scenery.
Now this attorney may be in the honeymoon phase of working for a new firm. However this seems unlikely for an experienced attorney who already spent a number of years at the “new” firm.
The point is that change in what you do or where you do it creates new energy and new opportunity. It can have an incredibly positive impact on you professionally if you recognize this and act on it. Change can breed excitement, even in the case I mentioned above where the attorney liked the last place she worked.
This type of opportunity can come from other types of change too. I know a different attorney who lost a client that was a large percentage of the work he brought in and worked on. This could have been a demotivating event or even a career killer. Instead, he looked at it as opportunity and redoubled his marketing efforts to create a broader practice less reliant on a single client. In doing so, he created opportunity where many people would have been left floundering. Over time this attorney ended up with larger and more diverse practice, and became much more successful.
There are many examples of this, but you don’t need significant change like the ones described above to have opportunity. You can create your own opportunities at any time by making changes or tweaks to what you are doing. In either scenario, there is no time like the present to spend some time thinking about what changes may benefit you and your business, and create new opportunities.
