For the last two years, I've been working full-time on building my coaching practice.
At the start, most people told me that to succeed I needed to learn additional skills: how to bring a vision into reality, how to create spreadsheets and budget-wisely, and how to ace sales and marketing.
But they're wrong.
Instead, I've been busy unlearning behaviours and professional preferences I relied on as a lawyer for 18 years: compliance, certainty and comfort.
And here's why:
Compliance. Ensuring your advice is compliant with the law is central to technical success as a lawyer. However, a preference for compliance doesn't sit well with the active curiosity, creativity and exploration needed for effective business-building.
Certainty. Laws do not change particularly regularly and hence there is a systemic certainty to legal practice. By contrast, entrepreneurship is volatile and as a small business owner you need to be ultra-responsive to market changes. The only certainty is that there is none. The same is true in the business of law.
Comfort. Guaranteed monthly income is comfortable, as is the lifestyle afforded by it once it hits a certain level. Advising as an expert having built a wide knowledge base is also comfortable in a way that doing things for the first time is not. But we need to courageously stretch ourselves in order to grow.
So, although I know the people who told me I would need new skills are not completely wrong, I'm convinced that unlearning is equally important in both entrepreneurship and law.
Where in your life do you need to unlearn something and why?