Learning to Perform Without Needing to Feel Comfortable

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

One of the assumptions I have become increasingly interested in through performance psychology is the idea that we need to feel right in order to perform well. We understandably prefer confidence to anxiety, certainty to doubt and calm to discomfort, particularly before something important. Yet many of the situations that matter most in professional life do not provide us with the luxury of feeling entirely comfortable before we have to act.

This seems particularly relevant to law. Important hearings, difficult negotiations, challenging client conversations, uncertain decisions and taking responsibility for matters with significant consequences are unlikely always to feel comfortable. Even very experienced lawyers can experience apprehension, frustration, self-doubt or uncertainty when the stakes are sufficiently high. The presence of those feelings does not necessarily tell us that somebody is poorly prepared or psychologically unsuited to the task.

There is an important distinction here between experiencing discomfort and being unable to function effectively because discomfort is present. Performance psychology is sometimes interpreted as an attempt to remove anxiety, create confidence or place somebody in an ideal psychological state before they perform. There are circumstances in which helping somebody regulate their state is useful, but I am not convinced that the realistic aim of performance psychology is to make difficult things consistently feel easy.

In fact, attempting to eliminate discomfort can sometimes create an additional problem. If I believe that I must feel confident before speaking, calm before making a difficult decision or certain before taking action, I now have two tasks. I have the original professional demand to manage, but I also have to control my internal state sufficiently to make myself feel ready for it.

That second task can consume considerable psychological capacity. We monitor how anxious we feel, become concerned that the anxiety has not disappeared and may begin interpreting its presence as evidence that something is wrong. Attention that could have remained directed towards the client, argument or decision becomes partly occupied by the question of whether we are feeling as we think we should.

A different approach is to become more comfortable with the possibility that effective performance and psychological discomfort can coexist. A barrister can feel nervous and still advocate exceptionally well. A partner can be uncertain about a difficult decision while continuing to reason carefully, and a solicitor can feel uncomfortable during a challenging client conversation while still listening, thinking and communicating effectively. The internal experience and the quality of the external performance are related, but they are not the same thing.

I have seen this repeatedly in sport and other performance environments. Experienced performers do not necessarily stop experiencing nerves; often they become better at understanding what those sensations mean and less inclined to treat them as a problem requiring immediate correction. The physiological activation associated with an important performance may remain, but its presence becomes familiar enough that attention can stay with the task.

Law contains an additional challenge because uncertainty is built into much of the work. Clients understandably want answers, while the available information may be incomplete and outcomes influenced by people and events outside the lawyer's control. Professional maturity may therefore involve not only developing better judgement, but becoming increasingly able to tolerate the discomfort of making good decisions without ever having complete certainty.

This is different from ignoring useful emotional information. Anxiety can sometimes tell us that preparation is inadequate, discomfort may indicate that something about a situation deserves closer examination, and persistent changes in mood or functioning should not simply be endured in the name of performance. The skill lies partly in distinguishing between discomfort that contains useful information and discomfort that is simply part of doing something difficult.

Perfectionism can make this distinction particularly challenging. If somebody has developed a strong need to feel certain before acting, additional checking and preparation can temporarily reduce discomfort. The difficulty is that each successful attempt to remove uncertainty may reinforce the idea that certainty was necessary in the first place. Over time, increasingly large amounts of effort can become devoted to trying to achieve an internal state that the nature of legal practice can never completely provide.

There is a practical question I sometimes find useful in these situations: “What would I do here if I did not need this feeling to disappear first?” The answer might be to make the telephone call, ask the question, begin the advocacy, make the decision or acknowledge honestly that further information is required. The discomfort may remain while the person begins doing what the situation actually requires.

We can also become more discriminating about what we expect from ourselves before important professional moments. Rather than asking whether we feel confident enough, it may be more useful to ask whether we are sufficiently prepared, whether we understand what matters and whether we know what we want to pay attention to when the performance begins. Those are questions over which we often have considerably more influence than whether anxiety happens to be present.

This becomes particularly important across a long career because development itself tends to involve discomfort. Moving into leadership, taking on more complex work, developing advocacy, having difficult conversations and accepting greater responsibility all require us periodically to operate beyond what has become familiar. If feeling comfortable becomes a prerequisite for action, professional development can gradually narrow towards situations in which competence is already assured.

None of this means that more discomfort produces better performance. Excessive or prolonged psychological demand can impair attention, judgement, sleep, recovery and eventually health, and there are circumstances in which reducing load or seeking support is clearly appropriate. The LegalPsych argument is not that lawyers should simply become better at tolerating whatever is placed upon them.

The more useful distinction is between unnecessary suffering and the ordinary discomfort inherent in meaningful, difficult work. Sustainable performance requires us to manage load, protect capacity and recover appropriately, but it also requires some willingness to enter situations that stretch us and remain there long enough to discover that we can function effectively without feeling entirely comfortable.

Perhaps confidence sometimes develops from precisely that experience. We do something difficult while anxious, uncertain or uncomfortable and discover afterwards that the feeling did not prevent us from performing. Repeated often enough, we begin to require less reassurance from our internal state before acting.

Over a legal career, there will always be situations that matter enough to make us uncomfortable. The aim may not be to remove that discomfort, but to develop a sufficiently flexible relationship with it that we can continue to think, decide, communicate and act while it is present. Being comfortable with not always feeling comfortable may therefore be less about toughness than about allowing ourselves to perform without first requiring our psychology to be perfect.