This article is written by Ramanuj Mukherjee, CEO, LawSikho

I struggled a lot growing up – it was hard to speak my mind. I took to writing perhaps because it was harder for me to express myself in speech. 

I still tried the grab every opportunity I could to speak before a crowd. I even won a competition once – by giving a speech about Netaji Subhash Bose, perhaps because too few people participated in it. In reality, I found it very hard to give a public speech though I wanted to. 

I still joined law knowing that I would have to sort out my public speaking issues somewhere during my law school journey. 

However, first-year debating competition was a nightmare. I didn’t even manage to submit a memo for the intra-university moot court competition. I tried to raise my hand in the class all the time and tried to speak, and while some teachers were patient, my batchmates didn’t think very highly of me. Some of them made it a point to make fun of my pronunciation, wrong grammar and thick Bengali accent all the time.

I wasn’t affected though. I knew I would speak very well someday and I kept trying. However, it wasn’t really working.

Every time I spoke in public, I would have my thoughts messed up, nervous energy running through my body like electricity and making me stunned and stupified, not able to react to the situation as I would have liked to. 

The break came when I started teaching. 

Teaching is a kind of public speaking too. But it’s quite different, because the teaching does not happen for the benefit of the teacher, but for the benefit of the students. 

Teaching allowed me to get out of my head. I was not in the focus anymore. Talking was not about my own glorification! It was all about adding value to the students. I had to worry about their success, not my own. That was a huge difference!

Being anxious about the success of my students meant that I had no time to be anxious about my own self, small mistakes, slip-ups, shortcomings. Rather, I had to focus on and work towards making the person in front of me get what he was there to get!

This is a game changer.

Many of us have spent years trying to be interesting. The trick is to take a great interest in other people instead. That changes everything.

Stop worrying about how you are going to find a client, how you are going to be successful, or whether you are doing the right things. That’s too insignificant to worry about.

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Instead, worry about how you can add value to your clients. That’s the only real game in town. If you are the kind of lawyer who is worrying about adding maximum value to your clients, that the right place to start from.

When we focus on not ourselves but others who benefit from us, we make everything simpler. We increase the chances of our success manifold.

If you get a chance to speak before an audience, do not worry about what will make you look or sound better, but worry about how you are going to add more value than your audience can even imagine.

If you are writing an article, and you are not thinking of who it is intended for and how reading your article will add a lot of value to them then you have already failed.

If you are building a product and you are not obsessed about why this product is going to be 10 times better than anything else in the market, then why are you even building the product?

If you are a lawyer and you are not always bothering about how you can add more value to the bar, to the judge when you are speaking before him or her or if you are not obsessed about how you are going to add more value to your clients you should perhaps reconsider your profession.

And yet, most lawyers don’t really work or think along those lines, focusing on extracting benefits from clients instead. Such strategy may work in the short term, but not so good in the long run.

The only reason we have had any success with LawSikho is because we fanatically put our efforts and focus on the success of our learners. We have even began to track what they state as their goal for joining a course and tracking the same for them.

When a learner does not study the course, for no apparent fault of ours, we do not wash off our hands and say good riddance. We follow up with them, call them up, and try to understand what we can do to make it possible for them to complete a course and succeed according to their own definition.

And that helps us to grow, more than any marketing, more than any packaging, and more than any advertising we could run.

How are you going to implement this strategy in your life? Respond and let me know.

Do check out some courses in which enrollment closes in 2 days:

DIPLOMA

Diploma in M&A, Institutional Finance and Investment Laws (PE and VC transactions)

EXECUTIVE CERTIFICATE COURSES

Certificate Course in Legal Practice Development and Management

Certificate Course in Advanced Criminal Litigation & Trial Advocacy 

Certificate Course in Real Estate Laws

Certificate Course in Prevention of Sexual Harassment at the Workplace

Certificate Course in National Company Law Tribunal (NCLT) Litigation

LIBRARY

Litigation Library by LawSikho

Corporate Law Library by LawSikho

TEST PREPARATION

Judgment Writing and Drafting Course for Judicial Services

Students of Lawsikho courses regularly produce writing assignments and work on practical exercises as a part of their coursework and develop themselves in real-life practical skill.