Towards Sustainable Elite Performance
As I have worked through Laura Empson's research, Alexandra Michel's ethnography and the many conversations we've been having through LegalPsych, I have found myself becoming less interested in the question that first drew me to this area. Originally I wanted to understand why so many talented lawyers appeared to struggle with workload, recovery and the demands of modern legal practice. That still matters, of course, but it no longer feels like the most interesting question.
The more interesting question is how success changes the successful person.
It seems almost self-evident that spending thirty or forty years in any demanding environment will leave its mark. We readily accept that elite athletes are shaped by years of training, that musicians are changed by thousands of hours of practice and that surgeons develop ways of thinking that are different from those outside the profession. Yet we seem less comfortable acknowledging that legal practice must inevitably shape the lawyers themselves. Not simply their knowledge or technical ability, but their attention, their habits, their relationships with uncertainty and, perhaps most importantly, the way they understand who they are.
That, I think, is where Laura Empson and Alexandra Michel make such complementary contributions. Empson helps us understand that professional service firms are not simply places where legal work is carried out. They are cultures that quietly shape expectations, identity and behaviour over many years (Empson, 2017). Michel then takes us inside that experience and demonstrates that adaptation is not merely intellectual or organisational. It becomes embodied. The body itself gradually reflects the demands of the environment, until for some professionals it eventually becomes the catalyst for questioning ways of working that had previously seemed entirely normal (Michel, 2011).
Reading both authors together has convinced me that adaptation sits at the heart of the conversation. Human beings adapt extraordinarily well, and for much of our lives that ability serves us brilliantly. It enables us to learn, to grow, to cope with pressure and to achieve things that initially seemed impossible. The difficulty is not adaptation itself. The difficulty is that adaptation is largely invisible while it is taking place. We become accustomed to ways of thinking, feeling and working that would once have seemed unusual, and because the change is gradual it rarely attracts our attention.
Perhaps this is where performance psychology has something useful to contribute. Rather than asking only how we help lawyers tolerate pressure, perhaps we should also be asking how we help them remain aware of their own adaptation. Those are not the same question. One is concerned with endurance. The other is concerned with awareness.
Over the past year I have found myself using the phrase psychological capacity more frequently than resilience or wellbeing. I use it because it seems to describe something lawyers repeatedly talk about, even if they use different words. Capacity is the psychological space available for clear thinking, sound judgement, emotional regulation, creativity, perspective and recovery. It is not fixed, nor is it determined simply by intelligence or experience. It expands and contracts according to the demands we are carrying, the quality of our recovery and the extent to which our attention is already occupied before the next challenge arrives.
When lawyers tell me they are rereading the same paragraph several times, struggling to become fully present with their families, finding it difficult to think strategically or feeling as though there is simply no mental space left, I don't immediately think about weakness or burnout. I think about capacity. Something has gradually consumed more of the psychological resources that were once freely available. The person may still be performing exceptionally well by every external measure, yet the effort required to sustain that performance has quietly increased.
It is in that context that I have found the phrase psychological battering useful. I am not suggesting it as a clinical diagnosis or a replacement for established psychological concepts. Rather, it is a descriptive term for the cumulative effect of years spent adapting to repeated professional demands. A single difficult case is unlikely to produce psychological battering. Nor is a demanding week or an interrupted holiday. What seems to matter is the accumulation of thousands of small adaptations that gradually become woven into everyday life. Each adaptation is understandable. Together they can begin to reshape attention, recovery and psychological capacity without the individual ever experiencing a dramatic turning point.
This perspective also changes how I think about recovery. Recovery is often portrayed as something we do after work, almost as though it sits in opposition to performance. Elite performers know that this is a false distinction. In every high-performance environment I have worked within, recovery is regarded as part of performance because it allows adaptation to remain healthy. Training without recovery eventually becomes overtraining. Pressure without recovery eventually narrows judgement. Attention without recovery eventually becomes vigilance. The principle appears remarkably similar whether we are talking about an Olympic athlete, a military officer or a senior lawyer.
That raises an interesting possibility for the legal profession. For decades firms have invested heavily in developing technical expertise, commercial awareness and leadership capability. Those investments have been entirely justified because they improve the quality of legal services and the experience of clients. Perhaps the next stage of professional development is to give equal attention to something rather quieter. Not simply how lawyers perform under pressure, but how they retain awareness of themselves while performing under pressure year after year.
I suspect this requires a different conversation from the one we have traditionally had around wellbeing. Wellbeing initiatives are valuable and increasingly necessary, but they often begin after difficulties have become visible. The challenge suggested by Empson, Michel and, I would argue, the experiences of many lawyers is earlier than that. It lies in helping professionals recognise gradual adaptation before it becomes so familiar that it disappears from awareness altogether.
Metacognition may have a particularly important role to play here. At its simplest, metacognition is the ability to think about our own thinking. Within the context of legal practice it may be even more useful to describe it as the ability to notice ourselves while we are working. Am I thinking as clearly as I usually do? Am I carrying yesterday's case into today's conversations? Have I become so accustomed to constant vigilance that I no longer recognise what genuine recovery feels like? These are not questions of mental illness. They are questions of professional self-awareness.
If there is one conclusion I have reached through writing this article, it is that sustainable performance probably depends less upon becoming endlessly tougher and more upon becoming increasingly aware. High performance has always required discipline, commitment and resilience. Those qualities remain essential. What appears equally important, however, is preserving enough psychological space to notice when the strengths that once served us so well are beginning to narrow our lives rather than enrich them.
Laura Empson reminds us that professional cultures shape people in ways that are often subtle and largely invisible. Alexandra Michel reminds us that the body eventually begins to challenge patterns of adaptation that can no longer be sustained indefinitely. Together they have helped me understand many of the conversations we've been having through LegalPsych over the past year. They have also reinforced my belief that the future conversation for the legal profession should extend beyond stress, burnout and resilience.
Perhaps the question we should now be asking is not simply how we help lawyers become better lawyers.
Perhaps we should also be asking how we help them remain themselves while becoming exceptionally good lawyers.
If adaptation is inevitable, then awareness becomes indispensable. Sustainable elite performance may ultimately depend not upon resisting pressure, but upon retaining the capacity to notice how years of pressure are quietly shaping the person carrying it.
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.