Be Thoughtful About Whose Advice You Take
Dr Mark Bellamy PhD, CPsychol, AFBPsS
Chartered Psychologist | Founder, LegalPsych
Legal careers are full of advice. From the earliest stages of training, people receive opinions about which area of law to enter, which opportunities to pursue, whether to move firms, when to seek partnership, how to develop a practice and what success ought to look like. Much of that advice is generously given and extremely useful, but I think there is value in remembering that advice is rarely completely neutral.
We tend to advise other people partly through the lens of our own experience. The senior lawyer who succeeded by working extraordinarily long hours may quite genuinely believe that this remains the necessary route to success. Somebody who regrets not taking a particular opportunity may encourage others to take risks, while somebody whose own risk ended badly may advise caution. None of these people necessarily has poor intentions, but their advice inevitably contains something of their own history.
This becomes important because the legal profession contains many different versions of a successful career. What suits somebody building a commercial practice in a large international firm may be quite different from what matters to a barrister developing a specialist practice or a solicitor whose priorities have changed after becoming a parent. Advice that was excellent for one person, organisation or period of a career may be much less useful when transferred unchanged to somebody else's circumstances.
There is also a more difficult reality. Not everybody offering advice necessarily has our best interests as their primary concern. Organisations have commercial requirements, colleagues have their own ambitions and professional relationships can contain competition as well as support. This does not require us to become cynical about other people's motives, but it does suggest that understanding the context in which advice is being offered is part of evaluating its usefulness.
From a performance psychology perspective, the important capability is not ignoring advice but developing enough self-knowledge to assess it. What does this person understand about me? What experience are they drawing upon? What assumptions are contained within what they are suggesting, and do those assumptions fit the career and life I am actually trying to build? Good advice should probably help us think rather than relieve us of the responsibility for thinking.
I would also distinguish between seeking advice and collecting opinions. When we are uncertain, there can be a temptation to keep asking people until somebody provides the answer that feels most reassuring. At that point, more advice may actually make decision-making harder because we are accumulating different perspectives without becoming any clearer about the criteria by which we will evaluate them.
Over a long career, having a small number of people whose judgement we trust can be enormously valuable. Ideally, some will understand our profession, some will understand us, and occasionally the most useful person may be someone sufficiently removed from our immediate environment to see things differently. The aim is not to surround ourselves with people who agree with us, but with people capable of helping us think more clearly about decisions that ultimately remain ours to make.