Editor’s Note: This is Part 3 of a series of articles on Morphic Fields and Change. If you haven’t already read Part 1 and Part 2, please take a moment and do so. We’ll wait.

You’re inspired to do something BIG – so big, it’s scary. And crazy as it sounds, you think you could do it, given half a chance. Now there’s this raging debate inside you:  are you going to go for it, or sit down until the thought goes away?

Maslow’s Hierarchy of Needs can help you understand what’s going on inside of you. Remember that? Of course you do, but here it is anyway:

Think of the whole triangle as your psychological morphic field, and each level as a sub-field. Here’s the problem:  your proposed leap to the apex threatens the four bottom levels, which right now are nicely in place. You’re a lawyer. Your income feeds you, puts a roof over your head, keeps the creditors at bay (especially those law school loans). You belong to a prestigious profession. You’ve gotten lots of strokes all your life for being a high achiever.

And now you’re going to throw all that away to start a catering business or write novels? Yeah right. You’ll end up alone and under a bridge. Sit down before you hurt yourself.

That’s what you’re up against if you want to make big changes. Right now, your psychic morphic field is in a state of what biology calls homeostasis:  “the tendency toward a relatively stable equilibrium between interdependent elements, esp. as maintained by physiological processes.”

Homeostasis is biology-speak for status quo; it’s that state where everything is in balance. We may not always like how things are balanced in our lives, but we like the balance itself. When we think about making big changes, we threaten to throw everything out of balance, shake up the whole energy field. No wonder we freak out.

We could take comfort in knowing that homeostasis is a state to which nature returns, and therefore all the levels we’re threatening will reorganize themselves to support our pursuit of the apex. We could, but we don’t. We take things like our survival and safety and sense of belonging and identity very seriously. Threatening them all with one leap is just too scary.

Fortunately, there are some things we’ll do even if we’re afraid. That takes courage, which is not the absence of fear but action in the face of it. Courage is an essential element of any kind of change, but especially that scary leap to the top of Maslow’s pyramid.

To be continued.

(This isn’t going to make much sense if you haven’t read Part 1 and therefore don’t know what I mean by “morphic field.” If you need to go back and catch up, we’ll wait.)

Lawyer unhappiness has gotten a lot of press, and there are lots of people offering help. Usually, they emphasize either personal or institutional morphic fields, but not both. The former teach individual coping or performance enhancement skills, or offer career counseling. The latter set out to reform the legal institutions they believe are to blame.

Both strategies converge at a single choice: either the lawyer needs to change (focus on the individual’s field), or the lawyer’s environment needs to change (focus on the external field). This choice seems logical, but it’s incomplete, and therefore change based solely on one choice vs. the other won’t last. The problem is that the choice doesn’t recognize that our internal and external morphic fields are interdependent, and therefore change in one means change in the other. If the changes in both fields aren’t compatible, then the result is more dissonance in both of them, and the intended change will fall short.

This dynamic explains why sometimes we try to make change and end up being thwarted by self-sabotage or by external opposition, or both. It also explains why lawyers in solo practice are among the happiest, often citing as the main reason the control they hold (theoretically, at least) over their work/personal life balance.

By contrast, reformers wrestle directly with external morphic fields, such as law school, the bar exam, or the way law firms operate. Reformers derive energy from demonizing the external environment – making IT the problem. If you’re a reformer at heart, this will work for you, but the key is “at heart.” If that’s not where your reform efforts are coming from, then the reformer approach will have the opposite effect: it will take your power away. That’s because an external focus diverts your power away from what YOU need and want, and to divert power in this way is to lose it. (The great reformers also deal internally as well, but that’s a topic for another time.)

Most of us aren’t reformers at heart. For us, the process of creating sustainable change involves articulating our core values and desires, shaping them into goals and intentions, committing to them, and making concerted efforts to change our beliefs and behaviors to make them happen.

Doing all that is a practice: there are skills to learn, drills to run. But then, once we’ve done our reps to change our personal fields, we still need to watch how our external fields respond. The game of change is like any other game: we can practice our part only so much, but once the game starts, it takes on a life of its own, with its own dynamics. If we want to win, we do well to learn not just the fundamentals, but also how to play the game.

To be continued.

We can gain useful perspective from borrowing concepts and vocabulary from other fields. Biologist Rupert Sheldrake posits the existence of “morphic fields.” We can use the concept to think about how change happens (or not). Honest. Stay with me here.

A morphic field is the controlling energy field of a biological entity – either an individual or collective system. The field is made up of both organic and psychological elements. The field is invisible, but its impact is observable. For example, both genetics (organic) and individual and collective conscious and unconscious factors (psychological) invisibly affect our behavior.

Well okay then. Glad we cleared that up. Moving right along…..

When we enter the legal profession, we enter its morphic field. Lawyers work in the field of law – get it?  There are certain expectations, dynamics, outlooks, disciplines, judgments, commonly accepted wisdom, urban legends, etc. that come with the territory of being a lawyer. In law school, we allowed our psyches to be affected by those things – we learned to “think like a lawyer.” Our neural pathways were literally rewired, our consciousness was altered, and our physiology was affected as well, so that we were biologically and chemically different beings when we graduated than we were when we started. No kidding. This brain- and body-retraining process continued when we went to work.

Within the over-arching field of law, there are also subfields that affect our experience:  e.g., being part of this firm or that practice area, practicing in this city or that small town, and so on. When an individual lawyer goes to work in one of these fields, his or her individual morphic field interacts with it to create his or her experience of being a lawyer on all levels of human existence – intellectual, emotional, physical, social, and so on.

This interaction can be harmonious or dissonant. If we’re dissatisfied with our work and how it’s affecting our lives, it’s likely because our individual field is in conflict with the field where we work.  Our personal values and preferences and expectations aren’t meshing with the field’s:  we don’t like playing by its rules, don’t share its values, don’t like its required behaviors; don’t like meeting billable hour standards or working holidays or dealing with uncivil lawyers or whatever else comes with the territory.

If we try to change our experience of work and life, then the first thing that happens is we run smack into the boundaries of our morphic fields – both our individual field, and the one where we work. Why? Because they are energetically supporting our existing reality – the one we don’t want anymore, not the one we want to create.

In order to change, we need to deal with both fields. If we don’t, then lack of change in one will sabotage attempted change in the other.

To be continued.

Editor’s Note: This is Part 6 in a series of posts about lawyer happiness. For Part 1, click here; forPart 2, click here; for Part 3, click here; for Part 4, click here; and for Part 5, click here.

I’ve been blogging on the topic of lawyer happiness for a while. Aren’t we getting a little carried away? I mean, yes, we live in a country founded on “the pursuit of happiness,” and a lot of the guys who endorsed that idea were themselves lawyers, but that was then but this is now, so let’s not get carried away.

Not so fast. How about we go back, much further back, to Aristotle – not exactly everybody’s first choice as the Mr. Sunshine poster boy. Here’s what Aristotle said about happiness:

Happiness is the meaning and purpose of life, the whole aim and end of human existence.

Wow. THE meaning and purpose and life, not just one option among many.

Plus here’s what he said about work:

Pleasure in the job puts perfection in the work.

Ever notice that people doing what they love do it really well? Think about yourself:  what do you love to do – in work or in life – that you do or would do for free? How well do you do it? Really well, I’ll bet.

Where ever did we get the idea that we can be unhappy in our work and do it well? Or be unhappy in our work and still be happy in the rest of our lives?

What if we lived in a world – and practiced a profession – where the norm was for each of us to be doing what we love to do? What would that do for lawyer happiness, both on the job and in life? Can you imagine that?

I can, and I’m on a mission to help create that world and that profession, one happy lawyer at a time. Maybe you’d like to join the cause?

What would it take? For one thing, courage. Here’s what Aristotle said about that:

You will never do anything in the world without courage.

If we want that world, and that profession, we’re going to have to get brave. Really brave. Are you up for it?

Editor’s note: This is Part 5 of a series. For Part 1, click here; forPart 2, click here; for Part 3, click here; and for Part 4, click here.

You’re not happy with the course of your life in the law. Do you cope, or do you change?

There’s a certain connotation to the word “coping” that gives it a sour taste, and you may have seen the recent bit on Yahoo! about common coping strategies that don’t actually work, but coping has its uses. It can give us some short-term relief, and can set the stage for learning new thoughts, behaviors, and other life skills that help in the longer term.

Coping is less of a reach than change. We don’t have to launch out on the journey of a thousand miles, we can just start taking small steps. We can learn to notice how we’re reacting to things we don’t like, and learn new adaptive behaviors. In the short term, a less-than-happy situation becomes more bearable, and meanwhile we’re creating a platform for longer-term transformation.

After a while, though, coping can outlive its usefulness. I came across a great quote recently (unfortunately unattributed) that helps us know when we’ve reached that point: “Being realistic is just socially acceptable pessimism.” When coping becomes a guise for depression and defeatism in the name of being “realistic” about our lives, then it’s no longer working for us. Instead, it’s become a way of trying to dull the pain of a situation that will just keep eating away at our insides no matter how much we try to learn to grin and bear it.

At that point, coping turns into rationalizing, which is our way of trying to foist cheap substitute goods on ourselves. We don’t accept them because we want to; we do it because we don’t believe we can actually have what we really want.

So what do we do if we’ve reached this point? Often, we simply resign our souls over to the slow process of living lives of quiet desperation. Better if we can find a way to take the strong medicine and ask the hard questions, like the one Douglas Litowitz framed in the last chapter of his book The Destruction of Young Lawyers: if you’re unhappy in the profession, are you going to commit to reforming it, or are you going to walk away from it? Strong medicine indeed.

In my observation, most of us know when we get to that point, but the real challenge is admitting it. Plus, we don’t know those kinds of things in our heads, we know them in our hearts, and we’re rarely practiced in listening to the latter.

Fortunately, we can learn, but if we’ve reached that point, no amount of coping will teach us how.

To be continued…

Editor’s note: This is Part 4 of a series. For Part 1, click here; for Part 2, click here; and for Part 3, click here.

Formal research and media features have tried to identify just who’s happy in the law and who’s not. Some findings are more credible and useful than others. For example, if you graduated from the University of Virginia Law School in 1987, there’s an 81% probability you were happy in the law twenty years later. Good for UV graduates, but what about the rest of us?

Lawyers in solo and small firm practice consistently rank among the happiest, as do those who work for non-profits or in government. Lawyers over 50 are also generally sanguine, and so are most women lawyers, although the latter also leave law firms at twice the rate of their male colleagues. Racial minorities are among the happiest lawyers of all – that is, unless they’re female mid-level associates in large firms.

Speaking of large firms, both formal research and anecdotal observation agree that’s where lawyers are unhappiest, especially those new to the practice. One source estimated turnover among all large firm associates at 20% in any given year, and another found that 37% of new hires leave in the first three years. These percentages are even higher for associates who went to top-tier law schools – the kinds of graduates large firms like to hire.

Early career disillusionment seems unavoidable, since it can take awhile to find a practice area and setting that work for you. Maybe so, but that’s still a lot of turnover. It’s not suprising that one attorney and law professor declared, in a book darkly entitled The Destruction of Young Lawyers,  that “Lawyers are pathologically unhappy.”

My personal observation is that large firms don’t have a corner on new lawyer disillusionment. In my firm, I told associates that their phones would start ringing with inquiries from headhunters in their third year. They were surprised when it happened. I wasn’t clairvoyant, it’s just that I’d gotten those calls myself.

Conventional wisdom puts the dollar cost of all that turnover at 1.5 – 2.0 times annual salary, but one commentator called this an “overly conservative” estimate “because the pool of candidates is more limited, the requirements for relative expertise is higher, and the possibility of damage to or loss of client relationships is very real.”

Beyond the dollar costs, what about the costs that defy conventional metrics – e.g., the human cost when that many of our best and brightest are miserable? That’s where the focus turns from the global to the individual. Happiness is worth celebrating wherever we find it, but that doesn’t help much if you’re in one of the supposedly happy categories and you’re not feeling so cheery yourself.

To be continued…

This is Part 3 of a series of articles on lawyer happiness. Click here to read Part 1 and click here to read Part 2.

Is law school to blame?

Some people think so. They propose reforms to give future lawyers a more “realistic” view of what they’re in for, both in school and after. They think full disclosure will make the profession happier.

By contrast, a 2007 study found that roughly 80% of lawyers are happy with law school. That’s the same percentage that says they like working in the law. So why fix law school if it ain’t broke?

How about you? What were you and your fellow students like the first day of law school, and then at the year’s end? During second year? Third? From my personal experience, I’d have to say yes, something happened to us, all right. What was it?

In one study, law professor Larry Krieger and psychologist Kennon Sheldon found that entering law students are as well-adjusted as other postgraduates, but become less so as they go on. They suggest this is because we become increasingly less internally motivated and instead shift our focus to external measures of success and status – things like grades, class rank, admission to competitive clerkships, getting into law journal, etc.

In other words, we get knocked off center – we lose touch with our core values, the things we believe are most important in life. Our values motivate us, give us purpose and meaning. There’s an intrinsic reward to aligning our behavior with them. Lose that alignment, and we suffer. When we lose our values, we lose our joy.

Maybe we went to law school to right wrongs, or because we were attracted to certain intellectual pursuits, or because we were after a desired economic lifestyle. So far so good, but when we shift our focus to extrinsic factors, we put our happiness at the mercy of things and people we can’t control, which is why we eventually take positions we can’t own, say yes to jobs we don’t want, or work for clients we don’t like or for causes we don’t believe in. We think that makes us professionals, but unless our actions align with an internal value that supports them (e.g., we defend the unpopular client out of a sense of justice), these things take a toll.

Of course, it’s possible we went to law school for all the “wrong” reasons – family expectations, misguided advice from authority figures, etc. That’s another matter entirely, but regardless why we went, if we already graduated, reforming law school isn’t going to help us.

What is? We can start by getting back in touch with our core values. And then we’ll need to find the courage to act consistently with them. Thankfully the law is a big profession, and there’s room for us in it, with our values fully intact.

To be continued…

This is Part 2 of a series of articles on lawyers and happiness. Click here for Part 1.

Guess what? Happy people make happy workers! That seems intuitive; there’s also research to back it up.

How do lawyers measure up in that regard? Not so well. Research shows that, even though we’re as happy with our work as the next person, we’re generally not happy people. Some people think this is because the personality traits that make good lawyers don’t make happy people.

Happiness research focuses on three key factors: personality traits, personal choices, and circumstances. These weigh in at roughly 50%, 40%, and 10%, respectively, which means that 50% of us just seem blessed with sunnier outlooks on life, while another 40% can get there only by “adaptive behavior” – i.e., cultivating happiness-producing habits and an upbeat attitude.

Neither group is much affected by circumstances – including how much money they make – which factor in at only 10%. Although both groups take a nosedive from major stressors like job loss or relationship breakups, both also tend to recover to predictable “personal happiness set points,” where the 50% find a customary sense of well-being which the other 40% can’t reach without considerable effort.

Some researchers think the percentage of temperamentally unhappy lawyers is higher than 40%, because the very traits that incline us toward unhappiness are the same ones that account for our successes in life and our choice of law as a career. For example, the authors of the book The Happy Lawyer conclude that the practice of law is “disproportionately filled” with people who tend to be less happy than the general populace, citing research that shows we’re more introverted and less socially connected, more doubt-ridden and inclined to consider worst case scenarios, more logical and less in touch with our feelings, as well as being achievement-oriented, aggressive, and competitive to a fault – all factors that weigh against personal happiness. If that’s true, then most lawyers are part of the 40% (or more) whose happiness in the practice of law and in life can swing either way, depending on how well we adapt.

If we’re not part of the naturally sunny 50%, then what can we do? We can start by realizing that, as Einstein said, “We can’t solve problems by using the same kind of thinking we used when we created them.” If we want to get to a newer, happier place in law and in life, we won’t be able to rely on what got us here.

Giving up what’s always worked for us won’t be easy, even if research shows it’s making us miserable. Not easy maybe, but not impossible either.

To be continued.

This is Part 6 of a six-part series. Part 1, Part 2, Part 3, Part 4, and Part 5 are available here, so go back and read them now — you’ll be glad you did.

Happy New Year! Did you make any resolutions? If so, take them out and look them over. Do they contain the usual “I’m unhappy about X and need to change it or I’ll be in trouble” kinds of resolutions? If so, and if you’ve been following this series of posts, you know I don’t think they’re going to work for you. Here’s one last explanation why not, and then we’ll move on to another topic.

We’ve been talking about how all those should’s and ought’s come loaded with judgment – against ourselves and our lives, against others, and against life itself. Those kinds of fearful and critical judgments build up a mass of unprocessed negative energy in our souls that weighs us down and impedes us from moving ahead. We need to learn to release it, and get it moving and working for us instead.

Sports psychologists talk about learning to control arousal tension and release. (No, not that kind of arousal and release!) An athlete or team that’s too hyped up can lose focus, make dumb mistakes, and burn out too quickly. Or if they’re under-aroused – e.g., if they’ve hit the wall or they’re dragging in the fourth quarter – they need to build the energy back up.

In the same way, we can control our own internal tension and release practice in order to create sustainable change energy. If we’ve created negative judgment energy around our goals, we can move it out of the way by creating a sense of urgency that releases positive, change-making energy in its place. If we don’t do this, those negative judgments will just pile up inside, keeping us stuck in status quo.

The simplest approach I know is to create a two-a-day habit:  do two things every day to move toward your goal. You can do more if you like, but the next day you still need to do two more. Every day – write two things down, do them, cross them off (always a happy moment!), and then write two more for the next day.

That’s it. Simple but powerful. Do this day after day, and negative energy has no time to build up. Instead, you’re constantly moving your goal, which is its own reward. How about you try this with your resolutions this year?

This is Part 5 of a series called “Change Without Judgment.” Part 1, Part 2, Part 3, and Part 4 are available here, so go back and read them now. You’ll be glad you did.

State as forcefully and clearly as you can the goal you want to achieve, the idea you want to implement, the change you want to see happen. You might complete this sentence:  “I want ____________.”

Take a moment to feel what it would be like if you made that happen. Let your imagine run with it. Stay in the feeling long enough to enjoy it.

For a lot of us, the instant we come back to “real life” after an exercise like that, we’re met with an internal greeting party that tells us all the reasons why it’ll never happen. The list of negatives is long and foreboding:  not enough money, not enough time, c’mon this is a crazy idea, anyone can see that.… And so it goes.

What happens next, though, is really surprising. Most of the time, we don’t just hear the list, we immediately rush to defend it! Instead of saying, “Hey now, wait just a minute,” we say, “Yeah that’s right! I really don’t have the time/ the money/ the support. What was I thinking?”

Interesting, isn’t it, the way we so ardently defend all the reasons why we can’t have what we want out of life? Not only are the reasons against us irrefutable, we’re on their side! We throw the book at our idea, judge it as not worth pursuing. And so we quit before we start.

Here’s a simple strategy for dealing with this self-defeating urge.

First, concede the point. Agree with the accusation. “You’re right, I don’t have the time/ money/ support/ whatever.”

Second, ask yourself, “Okay, now where does that leave me? What does life look like for me if I just drop the idea?”

Third, ask yourself:  “Is this outcome acceptable? Or is there still something inside of me that still wants to give it a shot?”

Fourth, if you’re not willing to give up just yet, then use your imagination to come up with a different scenario in which your idea has a chance.

We’re always free to jettison the idea after step three, but if we can’t do so without regret, then it’s best to move on to step four and put the powerful force of imagination to work. Imagination doesn’t try to win the argument, it makes all those negative reasons irrelevant. Instead of agreeing with them, we turn our efforts to creating, not debating.

To be continued…

This is Part 4 of a series called “Change Without Judgment.” If you have not read Part 1, Part 2, or Part 3, go back and read them now. We’ll wait, and you’ll be glad you did.

Suppose we get past all those judgments and accusations and start moving toward the change we want. Does that mean we’ve put the negativity behind us for good?

Unfortunately, no. In fact, be warned: the longer we keep moving forward, the more we’ll hear those judgments again and again. At first, they’re bombastic and in your face. Over time, they get sneakier, camouflaging themselves as just plain reasonable and prudent common sense. Maybe you’ve heard some of those already: “Hasn’t this gone on long enough?” “Isn’t it about time you gave up this nonsense and got a real job?” “Haven’t you made your spouse/ family/ friends suffer enough?” Talk about a guilt trip.

I do an exercise in my workshops where I ask people to list all the reasons why they can’t have the change they want in their lives. It’s always the same list: not enough money, not enough time, I’m too old, I’m too young… and on it goes. You might take a moment and list your own reasons. Go ahead, we’ll wait. Done? Okay, I can’t see your list, but I guarantee you haven’t come up with anything that someone else doesn’t have on their list. I know that, because I’ve got a master list compiled from dozens of workshops to prove it.

If we all have the same list, then why do any of us ever even bother? What makes all these reasons so powerful that they take the wind out of our sails? Because they come with the full force of judgment. They’re right, we’re wrong. They’re reasonable, we’re crazy. And so it goes. Judgment is a powerful negative energy; it wins by making us feel bad until we plead guilty and quit trying to make the change we want.

How do we get past all these reasons and the judgment that makes them so strong? We can start by remembering three things. First, there will always be reasons why it’s wrong for us to pursue our dreams and visions and big ideas. Always. They come with the territory. Second, they’re always the same reasons, no matter what we’re trying to do. And third, they’re indisputable. They come with the full force of reason, and we can’t argue with them.

In other words, these reasons are part of the landscape of change. Which means that, if they’re filling your head, you’re right where you’re supposed to be! You wouldn’t be hearing them if you weren’t moving toward the change you want. You can quiet them by quitting, but you don’t want to do that. So what do you do about them?

The answer will surprise you.

To be continued…