Doing What Needs to Be Done Without Making It Harder

Dr Mark Bellamy PhD, CPsychol, AFBPsS
Chartered Psychologist | Founder, LegalPsych

Some professional situations are genuinely difficult. A lawyer may need to have an uncomfortable conversation with a client, prepare for a demanding hearing, acknowledge a mistake, make a decision without complete information or deal with a piece of work they would much rather not have in front of them. There is a certain amount of psychological demand inherent in doing difficult things well, and I do not think psychology should pretend otherwise.

What I have become increasingly interested in is whether we are sufficiently precise when we talk about load. We often describe somebody as having a high workload or being under considerable pressure, as though all of the demand they are carrying is essentially the same. In practice, several different forms of load may be operating simultaneously, and understanding the difference between them can change what we do about them.

The most obvious is task load. This is the work that genuinely has to be done: the cases, deadlines, preparation, meetings, hearings, drafting, decisions, supervision and client responsibilities that constitute professional practice. Some periods of legal work inevitably involve substantial task load. High performance cannot mean continually trying to minimise it, because demanding work is part of the profession and can itself be stimulating, meaningful and developmental.

Alongside this sits emotional load. Some legal work carries significant emotional demands because of what the lawyer is dealing with. A distressed client, disturbing evidence, a difficult professional relationship, responsibility for an important outcome or a mistake with potential consequences may reasonably produce anxiety, frustration, sadness or concern. That emotional response is not necessarily an unnecessary addition to the task; sometimes it reflects the reality and significance of what is happening.

There is then what I would describe as interpretive load. This arises from the meaning we place around the event. A difficult client conversation becomes not only a conversation that needs careful handling but evidence that the client may be losing confidence in us. A mistake becomes not simply something to correct but a possible threat to reputation. An uncertain decision becomes a test of whether we are really as competent as people believe us to be. The professional event begins carrying questions about identity, evaluation, status or future consequences that may extend well beyond what is currently known.

A fourth form is accumulated background load. Lawyers rarely encounter important demands in isolation. The difficult telephone call may arrive after a poor night's sleep, several weeks of heavy work, concerns about another case, responsibility for colleagues and something difficult happening at home. None of these factors necessarily explains the immediate situation, but together they influence how much capacity remains available for dealing with it.

These forms of load interact. A relatively ordinary task can become surprisingly difficult when background load is already high, while a genuinely demanding piece of work may remain manageable when capacity is good and the emotional and interpretive demands surrounding it are relatively contained. This is one reason workload measured simply in hours or number of matters can tell us only part of the performance story.

It also explains why two lawyers can experience apparently similar professional demands very differently without either response being evidence of greater or lesser resilience. The task may look similar from the outside, while its emotional significance, personal interpretation and position within the person's wider accumulated load are quite different. If we want to understand performance properly, those distinctions matter.

There is another type of load that can develop around all four of these, which I think of as secondary psychological load. This is the additional effort involved in resisting our experience of the situation. We worry about being worried, become frustrated that something is affecting us, criticise ourselves for not coping better or insist that we ought to feel more confident than we do. Instead of dealing only with the original demand and our understandable response to it, we begin having a response to the response.

This is where the proposition that we should sometimes simply do what needs to be done becomes more psychologically interesting. It is not an instruction to disregard task load, suppress legitimate emotion or ignore a difficult environment. It is an invitation to distinguish the demands that belong to the situation from some of the demands we may inadvertently add around it.

Consider a difficult client conversation. There is a task load: understanding the issue, deciding what needs to be communicated and conducting the conversation professionally. There may be an emotional load because the client is distressed or the circumstances are upsetting. There may be an interpretive load if the lawyer begins worrying that the conversation will damage the relationship or reflect badly on their competence. There may already be substantial background load from everything else occurring in their professional and personal life.

Then another layer can appear: “I shouldn't be this anxious about a client conversation at this stage of my career.” That thought does nothing to improve the conversation, but it adds another problem for the lawyer to manage.

The distinction is important because different loads require different responses. If task load is genuinely excessive, the answer may involve prioritisation, delegation, additional resources or changing expectations. If emotional load is substantial, there may be a need for processing, support or recovery. If interpretive load is dominating, examining the assumptions and meanings attached to the event may be more useful. If background load has accumulated over time, the broader relationship between demands, capacity and recovery deserves attention.

Secondary psychological load may require something rather different again. Sometimes we can simply stop requiring ourselves to feel differently before acting. We can acknowledge that the conversation is uncomfortable, that the hearing matters or that we are disappointed by what has happened without creating another task of having to remove those feelings before continuing.

This matters within a LegalPsych performance model because capacity is finite, while different forms of load compete for the same underlying resources. Attention devoted to rumination is not available for analysis. Emotional effort spent protecting professional identity may reduce what remains for listening carefully to a client. A difficult task completed after weeks of accumulated load may require substantially more effort than exactly the same task undertaken when somebody is well recovered.

That does not make all forms of load harmful. Task load is necessary for performance and development. Emotional load can reflect appropriate human engagement with work that matters. Even periods of very high overall demand can be manageable when they are time limited, adequately resourced and followed by recovery.

The problem is more often one of mismatch and accumulation. Several individually manageable demands can converge while available capacity gradually reduces. Because highly capable lawyers can often compensate by increasing effort, the imbalance may remain largely invisible for some time.

What kind of load am I carrying?

When something feels disproportionately difficult, I think there is value in becoming more precise before deciding what needs to change. Rather than simply concluding that you are stressed or overloaded, ask what proportion of the difficulty belongs to the task itself. What genuinely needs doing, how complex is it, what responsibility does it carry and what resources does it reasonably require?

Then consider the emotional component. Is the work upsetting, frustrating, frightening or personally significant? If so, there may be no benefit in pretending otherwise. The useful question is whether the emotional response needs space, support or regulation rather than whether it should exist.

The next area to examine is interpretation. What have you made the situation mean? Are you dealing with the actual professional problem, or has it also become a judgement about your competence, reputation, career or worth? Sometimes that additional meaning is justified, but it is worth distinguishing evidence from prediction.

Background load then deserves attention. What else are you carrying at the moment? Sleep, health, other cases, leadership responsibilities, family demands and insufficient recovery may have little to do with the immediate problem while substantially influencing the capacity available to deal with it. This can help explain why something that would normally feel manageable suddenly requires much greater effort.

Finally, I would look for the secondary layer. Are you adding difficulty by judging yourself for finding the situation difficult? Are you trying to remove every uncomfortable feeling before acting, repeatedly rehearsing possibilities that have already been considered or becoming frustrated that circumstances are not different? If so, there may be an opportunity to put some of that load down without ignoring anything that genuinely requires attention.

This way of thinking also helps us avoid a common problem in discussions about resilience. If every form of load is treated as something the individual should learn to manage psychologically, we risk helping capable people adapt to conditions that should actually change. Sometimes the lawyer needs a better psychological strategy; sometimes the caseload is excessive, the culture is unreasonable or the resources are inadequate.

Equally, not every uncomfortable experience requires the environment to change. Some professional demands are inherently difficult, and developing the capacity to engage with them without adding unnecessary psychological burden is itself part of expertise. The challenge is knowing which situation we are dealing with.

This is why I increasingly think that load management requires discrimination rather than simply reduction. We need enough task load to perform and develop, sufficient emotional engagement to care about what we are doing, and the capacity to tolerate periods of considerable demand. What we do not necessarily need is every layer of interpretation, anticipation, self-criticism and resistance that can accumulate around those demands.

Sometimes a problem requires considerable thought, emotional processing, support or a change in circumstances. At other times, we already know what needs to be done and have sufficient capacity to do it. Being able to tell the difference may allow us to preserve psychological resources for the parts of legal work that genuinely require them.

The aim is therefore not to make demanding legal work feel easy. It is to understand what is making it difficult. Once we can distinguish the task, the emotional response, the meaning we have attached to it, the background load we are already carrying and any additional struggle we have created around our own reaction, we are in a much better position to decide what needs to change and what simply needs to be done.