I have had two examples recently where the day I started out on changed to my advantage (though I did not immediately recognise this) through events beyond my control and in similar ways. In both cases I was hurrying to make a confidential early morning conference call I needed to be in an office for.

In the first I was driving to work early in the morning in a courtesy car, while mine had some warranty work done on it,  when somebody decided to close a road near Woking in Surrey and the traffic simply stopped. So after fuming for a bit at my misfortune, I turned round, went home, did the call and some more work - and then found my car was ready at the garage so I could easily collect it. I also worked constructively from home which of course is so easy to do nowadays.

In the second example I was on a train going into London in good time for another confidential call followed immediately by a dental appointment when the train stopped at Hinchley Wood, a suburban station on the outskirts of London, apparently because somebody pulled the communication call. Anyway the guard and driver couldn't  fix it and so we were all thrown off the train and had to wait for the next one while it took 10 minutes to move the broken train. This was extremely annoying and again I was bemoaning my fate. However I was now cutting everything fine so I again went home and did the call, which overran so I would have missed the dentist anyway. As it happened I was able to rearrange my dental appointment for the same day and then spent a productive afternoon working in London.

I relate this "groundhog day" experience not because you will want to hear about my commuting disasters but because it occurs to me that there is a general lesson here. I once had a rather hairy taxi ride in New York from the airport with a sightly crazy driver who nevertheless left me with these words of wisdom about life in general which was to "Go with the flow".

In professional life when things take a different course to that originally planned it is easy to rail against the circumstances that have derailed your carefully laid plans. However rather than getting annoyed or distressed (which is often a first and very natural reaction) a better response is to look for the opportunity or advantage that will invariably present itself in the new situation.

A Chinese proverb says "A wise man adapts himself to circumstances, as water shapes itself to the vessel that contains it". 

 More recently and slightly more enigmatically Bruce Lee said  "All fixed set patterns are incapable of adaptability or pliability. The truth is outside of all fixed patterns."

I support good planning but suggest that all change may by chance present a better way forward if we are prepared to recognise it and adapt to the new circumstances. 

I was talking to some people after an SCL event I spoke at this week discussing on line marketing. A number of them had seen their careers develop in different ways. Thinking about this it struck me that we tend to have a preconceived idea of our career when we start out, but then it often changes.

We generally have in mind a career curve that goes upwards all the time rising slowly at first as we qualify and then increasingly quickly as we head through the associate stage and then on up to the stratospheric atmosphere of partnership.

In reality whist some may follow this path often the career curve isn't so smooth. Sometimes it may go sideways, for example, in my case when I first moved from industry in to private practice and in effect restarted my career. Or it may stall for a while as either the firm or our position in it is not conducive to promotion for whatever reason, often leading to a sideways move in order to go up again.

And when you do finally reach the pinnacle of partnership what then? You can't stay on the summit of the mountain forever though you may enjoy it for a time. I recall a conversation with a very senior and able IT lawyer, probably in a bar at a conference where all the real truths come out (LinkedIn which we discussed at the SCL talk is great but it can't do this). He said he'd done what was expected of him, reached the top, was earning ridiculous money but wasn't really enjoying it. There comes a point he said when you actually don't need that much income and the sacrifices which come with it.

And as you reach the later stages of your career then you start to consider whether you want to bring the curve into a downward trend for a while. In reality you will probably have to in many professions as there seems to be some kind of sell by date after which your contributions will be very carefully scrutinised. At this time too many UK firms tend to part company with older and experienced professionals, missing out on their ability to continue to make very valid contributions. The American law firms are much better at this, often allowing senior lawyers to take on an of counsel role and continue to contribute their contacts and experience even though they may have left the full equity.

But this really isn't about age. I now realise that at any stage of our professional life we should recognise that the career curve is neither constant nor always on an upward trend. Understanding this makes it easier to direct and control our careers to meet our own objectives without a false pressure or expectation to always go in one direction. 

As always I seem to be able to find some support for the concept of different career curves from other sources. In this instance see this article from the Harvard Business Review which discusses an S-Curve in the context of personal development. They postulate that:

 Just as understanding the S-curve can keep discouragement at bay as we build new knowledge, it can also help us understand why ennui kicks in once we reach the plateau. As we approach mastery, our learning rate decelerates, and while the ability to do something automatically implies competence, it also means our brains are now producing less of the feel-good neurotransmitters — the thrill ride is over.

On a more light hearted note the author Rodney Ross said "My learning curve has more squiggles than I counted on"!

​That just about sums it up.

I was very struck by one phrase coined by Michelle Obama and quoted by Hilary Clinton in the American Presidential election campaign: "If they aim low you aim high".

Too often in the negotiation of a massive company changing contract of one sort or another, the advisers nit pick over relatively small issues - the details of governance or of change control. Granted these are important but nothing to get stuck in the proverbial ditch over.

In a room in  a London hotel locked into a negotiation many years ago of a strategic joint venture agreement   I recall one of the parties was WPP who to their credit had brought along not just their lawyers but two executives as well, one of whom was Sir Martin Sorrell. His negotiation tactic was simple and ultimately effective. Set a low limit of liability and then stick to it. To a degree they could be flexible on everything else, but they just would not bet a significant part of their company by exposing it to excessive liability.

Being aware of what really matters to a client, what say its top four or five walk away issues really are, allows advisers to focus on major concerns and also to raise the debate, to "aim high" and whilst sorting out the detail not getting bogged down over relatively trivial matters. 

Consciously setting high aspirations also means a good chance of achieving them. If the aim is not quality service for a reasonable price, but just to see how much one side can beat  the other up because of perceived power or influence the outcome will not be good. This approach might bring short term satisfaction to some involved in the process, but will almost inevitably result in  a poor bargain and resulting contract delivery failure which costs far more in my experience than getting it right for all parties in the first place. 

Michelangelo said: "The greater danger for most of us lies not in setting our aim too high and falling short; but in setting our aim too low, and achieving our mark."

I regularly review contract schedules providing for continuous improvement by the providers of outsourcing services. They generally require or at least encourage the supplier to consider how its processes and service delivery mechanisms can be improved and to advise the customer how these improvements can enhance the service and be introduced into the contract.

Only recently did I start to consider this concept in a different light. As professionals surely we should also be seeking always to improve our knowledge and ability to serve our clients. Yet in reality this is not easy. We tend to be, if we are honest, both a little proud and protective of our skills. Yes we readily participate in continuous professional development to keep our skills up to date, but that is not the same thing as always striving to do our jobs that much better.

To some extent in order to get to where we are now, to become a successful consultant, doctor or lawyer, we have always had to be bright and hard working and if not top of the class at least in the upper quartile. So it is easy to assume a "fixed mindset" as opposed to a "growth mindset" - see Carole Dweck's excellent book Mindsets for an exposition on the vital differences between these two approaches.

In simple terms a tendency to be content with our achievements to date and not want to exceed them. A Japanese landscape painter Katsushika Hokusai (1760–1849 Tokyo) said "...since the age of fifty I have published many drawings, yet of all I drew by my seventieth year there is nothing worth taking in to account. At seventy-three years I partly understood the structure of animals, birds, insects and fishes, and the life of grasses and plants. And so, at eighty-six I shall progress further; at ninety I shall even further penetrate their secret meaning, and by one hundred I shall perhaps truly have reached the level of the marvellous and divine."

This I propose is the spirit we should approach our  professional jobs, always looking for ways to understand and improve and do things better. Apart from anything else it makes working life more challenging and interesting. In reality no client problem, no contract negotiation are ever really the same and we can learn from all of them and apply that learning to the next assignment.
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​I was planning to go on holiday recently and working hard to get those precious few days off. Then I took the dog for a walk/run - and fell over a tree root in the local woods. I was running quite quickly and was attached to the dog by an extendable lead that accelerated my progress towards the hard forest floor.

​As I fell I had visions of hospitals and cancelled vacations. Fortunately I managed to rollover and escape with minor cuts and bruises. I was probably instinctively helped by years of martial arts training when I was younger where you learnt to fall without hurting yourself almost before you learnt how to take down an opponent.

It occurred to me afterwards that "learning to fall" or "learning to fail" is a necessary part of professional working life. It is inevitable that not everything will always go right. It is not the falling or the failure that is the issue. To some extent it is inevitable. It is how we react and recover, avoid being damaged by the fall and also learn from the experience that really matters. 

Many very successful people failed at first, often a number of times, before achieving great things. At Fred Astaire's first screen test the casting director concluded "Can't act. Can't sing. Slightly bald. Not handsome. Can dance a little." Steven Spielberg was rejected by the University of Southern California School of Cinematic Arts multiple times. After Harrison Ford's first small movie role, an executive took him into his office and told him he would never succeed in the movie business.

I found this great quote in an article by Michael Michalko, an expert on creative thinking: "Failure is only a word that human beings use to judge a given situation. Instead of fearing failure, we should learn that failures, mistakes and errors are the way we learn and the way we grow. Many of the world's greatest successes have learned how to fail their way to success." 

Admittedly not all of this passed through my mind as I tumbled to the ground in the woods, but it did make me think and eventually to write this blog. The dog by the way hardly seemed to be bothered or even to notice my fall from grace - the faithless creature!