This article is written by Ramanuj Mukherjee, CEO, LawSikho.

#1

Develop your personality

Everybody knows that they have to do it. But where do you start? What are the actions to take?

I have a few personal principles. Number one is to stop trying to impress others.

We are born with the instinct of impressing other people and live with the instinct of making ourselves look good, constantly. We want other people to take interest in us, so we try to be interesting. We do not want to listen to what others have to say, we just want others to listen to us.

The biggest breakthrough is when you understand this and flip it around. Magic happens.

It is much more powerful to be interested than to be interesting. You will get a lot more results if you take a genuine interest in other people.

You will learn to speak, that is the easier part. Learning to listen is even harder. The best leaders do not listen only with their ears. They listen with their whole body, mind, and soul. People, therefore, love to talk to them.

You want to be the boss. You want to be an important person in the room, you want people to come to you. This is much inferior to an approach and the source of poor personality.

If you really want to be a leader, if you really want to develop your personality, do the opposite. Give importance to the other person. Put other people in leadership. True leaders create more leaders, not followers. You go to people and take care of them and talk about their interest.

This is what is at the source of building an amazing personality with charisma that everyone is attracted to.

Charisma is a serene passion. Cultivate your passion and interests. What do you deeply care about? What can you give your life for? When you find that and dedicate your life to that, you become something bigger than just a person.

That is how amazing personalities are born.

#2

Learn to express yourself

Expressing yourself coherently and cogently is difficult. Most people cannot do it. I still struggle to do it sometimes after so many years of training, trying and occasionally succeeding.

At the heart of expressing yourself is sharing your vulnerability. Most people think that showing their vulnerability makes them weak and pathetic. To the contrary, it takes away the only weapons your opponents ever had.

Gandhi wrote about all his misadventures and the bad things he did in his youth. He went to a prostitute, he ate non-veg (against his caste and religious practice), he lied in self-interest – and he wrote about all of it. Baring his soul endeared him to the country and made him the Mahatma.

If you share your weaknesses and you talk about how to redeem yourself, that makes you powerful, not weak.

Being able to speak from your core, being able to share what is really important to you minus all the pretense and drama, to bring out what is the essence of you as a person is something very powerful. All great artists, songwriters, novelists, performers are able to do it. And that is exactly what a lawyer also must learn to do.

It is not taught in law school, it is not taught in a course. You have to learn it yourself. But when you learn to speak your truth, the world will sit up and pay attention.

#3

Identify your niche

You can’t be good at everything.

However, you can be damn good at a handful of things. It is often enough to be great in just one thing.

Law is too vast for you to be good at every branch. It is far easier to be superb at just one subject. If you keep pursuing it further than everyone else, you will reap rich dividends in every way.

Most people take too much time to decide what is their niche, what is the area on which they are going to build their expertise and concentrate effort. This is a huge waste.

Please do not worry about choosing the right subject. Pick something that catches your fancy. And then learn everything that is there to learn about that subject. Learn more than a law firm partner or a lawyer practicing for more than 10 years will know. In that one subject, set the bar very high.

Write articles about it. Visit conferences on that subject. Get to know people in that area of law. Get to know the industry. Try to convince your teachers to write projects about that subject. Do all your internships around that area of law.

Take the example of Ashwin Shankar, a leading shipping lawyer in the country today. He interned with a shipping lawyer in his 2nd year. Then he did all his internships with the same firm and one day he became a partner in that firm. He did all his college projects around some or the other aspect of shipping law. In insurance class, he will write a project about shipping insurance. In contract course, he will write about shipping contracts. In constitutional law class, he would convince his teacher to let him write about admiralty jurisdiction or sovereignty over the continental shelf and sea beds. I am not sure the topics are correct, based on my memory, but you get the drift.

Please pick your specialization as soon as possible and focus all your energies on it!

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