The Missing Psychological Conversation

By the time I had finished reading Michel's paper, I found myself going back to Empson and then back again to my interview notes. It wasn't because either author had said something the other had missed. In fact, I think the opposite is true. They are looking at the same broad phenomenon from different directions. Empson is primarily interested in the organisation. Michel is interested in the individual. Between them they describe an extraordinary process through which professional cultures gradually shape the people who work within them.

Yet I couldn't shake the feeling that there was still a conversation missing.

Perhaps the easiest way to explain it is this. Empson helps us understand how professional cultures influence behaviour. Michel helps us understand what years of living within those cultures can eventually do to the body. What neither author is really trying to explain is what happens in the psychological space between those two observations. How do external expectations gradually become internal standards? How does commitment become identity? Why do intelligent, reflective people often fail to notice that they themselves are changing while the process is taking place?

Those questions have occupied much of my own thinking over the past year because they seem to sit at the heart of so many conversations with lawyers.

When people describe feeling unable to switch off, they rarely describe a conscious decision to remain mentally connected to work. More often they say something like, "My brain just won't stop," or, "I know I don't need to think about it now, but I can't seem to let it go." I don't think those comments are simply describing workload. They seem to be describing a different relationship with attention itself.

The same is true when lawyers talk about recovery. Very few people tell me they don't value rest. Quite the opposite. Most understand perfectly well that sleep, exercise and time away from work improve judgement and decision making. The difficulty is that understanding something intellectually is not the same as being able to experience it psychologically. Several people have described holidays that took four or five days before they began to feel present. Others have spoken about sitting with family while mentally preparing for Monday morning. The body had left the office. Their attention had not.

That distinction keeps drawing me back to one of the central ideas in performance psychology.

Attention is never neutral.

Whatever repeatedly captures our attention gradually shapes the way we experience the world. Elite performers know this intuitively. A goalkeeper learns to notice subtle changes in body position before a penalty is struck. A surgeon develops the capacity to focus on tiny variations in tissue that others would miss. A barrister begins hearing inconsistencies in evidence that might escape somebody with less experience. Expertise is, in many respects, the refinement of attention.

The difficulty is that attention is not selective only during working hours.

The habits of attention that help us perform exceptionally well at work do not necessarily disappear when we leave the office or the courtroom. If we spend years training ourselves to anticipate problems, identify risk and remain constantly vigilant, it would be surprising if those habits simply switched off at six o'clock in the evening. They have become part of how we engage with the world.

That observation has made me think differently about resilience.

For years resilience has often been described as the ability to cope with pressure or recover from adversity. Those definitions have their place, but I wonder whether they overlook something more fundamental. Perhaps sustainable performance depends less upon how much pressure someone can tolerate and more upon whether they retain the ability to notice when adaptation itself is beginning to change them.

That feels like a different question altogether.

The more lawyers I've interviewed, the less interested I've become in asking how much pressure people can withstand. Instead, I find myself wondering whether they still notice the subtle signals that tell them pressure is accumulating. Do they recognise when concentration has narrowed? Do they notice that they are becoming less patient with colleagues or family? Are they aware that they no longer read for pleasure or that they feel strangely uncomfortable sitting quietly without reaching for a phone? None of those experiences, in isolation, necessarily indicate a problem. Taken together, however, they may tell us something important about the direction in which adaptation is moving.

I don't think psychology has always been particularly good at recognising this distinction because we have often focused on outcomes rather than processes. We measure stress, anxiety or burnout after they have become established. Much less attention has been given to the gradual psychological adjustments that occur long before anybody would meet the criteria for a clinical condition. Yet, listening to lawyers, those gradual adjustments are precisely what they describe. They don't tell stories about dramatic collapse. They tell stories about becoming a little more vigilant, a little more responsible, a little less able to switch off, until eventually those changes no longer feel like changes at all.

This is where I think LegalPsych may have something useful to contribute, although I would say that cautiously rather than confidently.

The interviews we've conducted suggest that there may be value in shifting the conversation away from stress and towards awareness. The issue is not simply how much work someone is doing. It is whether they still possess sufficient awareness to recognise how years of adaptation are influencing their thinking, their attention and their capacity to recover. If that awareness begins to diminish, the profession faces a rather different challenge. The problem is no longer excessive workload in isolation. It is that the very people most committed to excellence may gradually become less able to recognise its hidden costs.

That idea has gradually evolved into something we have begun discussing within LegalPsych as psychological capacity. I use the phrase carefully because I am not presenting it as an established scientific construct. Rather, it is a practical way of describing something lawyers repeatedly talk about but rarely name directly. They describe having less mental space than they once had. They speak about carrying more unresolved thinking from one day into the next. They notice that decisions which once felt straightforward now require greater effort. They find themselves rereading paragraphs, forgetting conversations or struggling to become fully absorbed in activities they once enjoyed.

Those experiences may arise for many different reasons and should never be interpreted as evidence of a single underlying process. Nevertheless, they point towards something that feels psychologically significant. Capacity is not simply determined by intelligence or technical expertise. It is also shaped by how much of our attention is already occupied before the next challenge arrives.

Perhaps that is the conversation sitting quietly between Empson and Michel.

Empson helps us understand how professional cultures shape expectations.

Michel shows us what prolonged adaptation can eventually do to the relationship between mind and body.

Performance psychology asks a slightly different question.

How do we help people remain sufficiently aware of their own adaptation that excellence continues to be a choice rather than becoming the only way they know how to exist?

That, I suspect, is where the future conversation for the legal profession may begin.

References

Empson, L. (2017). Leading Professionals: Power, Politics, and Prima Donnas. Oxford University Press.

Michel, A. (2011). Transcending Socialization: A Nine-Year Ethnography of the Body's Role in Organizational Control and Knowledge Workers' Transformation. Administrative Science Quarterly, 56(3), 325–368.