When High Performance Stops Being a Choice: Part Two

The Adaptation Nobody Notices

One of the things I've enjoyed most about the interviews we've been carrying out for LegalPsych has been that they rarely go where I expect them to. We might begin by talking about workload, leadership or career progression, but after twenty or thirty minutes the conversation usually becomes much more personal. People stop describing what they do and begin describing what it feels like to do it. That shift is often where the most interesting insights emerge, because lawyers are generally very good at explaining their work but much less accustomed to talking about how the profession has shaped them over time.

What has surprised me is not that people describe working hard. Nobody enters the legal profession expecting an easy life, particularly in commercial practice, litigation or at the Bar. Long hours, difficult decisions and significant responsibility have always been part of the landscape. What has surprised me is how few people can identify the point at which hard work stopped being something they did and simply became the way they lived. When I ask how that happened, very few people describe making a conscious decision. There isn't a dramatic moment where they decided work would become more important than recovery, relationships or their own health. Instead, they tend to look slightly puzzled by the question before saying something along the lines of, "I suppose it just happened."

I've found that answer much more interesting than I expected.

If there had been a conscious decision, then perhaps there could also be a conscious reversal. If someone had deliberately chosen to answer emails at midnight or spend every Sunday preparing for Monday, then they might reasonably decide to stop doing those things. The stories I've been hearing don't sound like that at all. They sound much quieter. A trainee stays late because everyone else is still in the office. A newly qualified solicitor wants to show they can be relied upon. A barrister spends another evening refining submissions because they know that thorough preparation matters. None of those decisions appears unreasonable in isolation. In fact, most of them seem entirely sensible. It is only when you join hundreds of those decisions together over ten or fifteen years that you begin to see how profoundly they can alter the shape of someone's life.

I don't think we talk enough about adaptation.

Psychology has a great deal to say about stress, resilience and burnout, yet adaptation often receives far less attention despite the fact that it sits beneath all three. Human beings are extraordinarily adaptable. We adapt to altitude, to pain, to new environments and to changing relationships. We adapt to becoming parents, to retirement and to injury. In many ways our ability to adapt is one of the reasons our species has been so successful. Most of the time we think of adaptation as something positive because it allows us to cope with demands that initially seemed beyond us.

The difficulty is that adaptation is neither good nor bad. It is simply a process. We become accustomed to whatever we experience repeatedly. That means we can adapt to healthy routines just as readily as unhealthy ones. We can become used to sleeping well, but we can also become used to sleeping badly. We can adapt to balanced workloads, but we can equally adapt to chronic overload. The remarkable thing is not that this happens. The remarkable thing is how quickly the unfamiliar begins to feel normal.

That idea has stayed with me because it echoes so many of the conversations I've had over the years, not only with lawyers but with elite athletes, military personnel and surgeons. Very few of them recognised the process while it was happening. Looking back, they could see that they had gradually become more tired, more vigilant, less able to switch off or increasingly defined by their work. At the time, however, each adjustment simply felt like the natural response to the next challenge. The environment changed a little, so they changed a little with it. Nobody wakes up one morning having become a different person. The transformation is usually so gradual that it remains invisible from the inside.

I sometimes wonder whether this is why conversations about wellbeing so often miss the mark. We tend to assume that people knowingly make unhealthy choices and therefore need encouragement to make healthier ones. My experience has rarely been that straightforward. Most of the lawyers I've met are thoughtful, conscientious and highly intelligent. They know that sleep matters. They know that recovery influences judgement. They know that relationships outside work are important. The issue is not a lack of knowledge. The issue is that adaptation quietly changes what feels normal. Once something has become normal, it rarely attracts our attention.

That thought was sitting in the back of my mind while I was reading Laura Empson's Leading Professionals: Power, Politics, and Prima Donnas. The book is primarily concerned with leadership in professional service firms rather than performance psychology, so I wasn't expecting it to help answer the questions I'd been wrestling with. Yet as I worked through Chapter 6, I found myself repeatedly putting the book down because it seemed to be describing the organisational side of precisely the process that lawyers had been describing to me from the inside.

Empson is not writing about stress. She is not writing about burnout and she is certainly isn't suggesting that professional firms deliberately encourage unhealthy ways of working. What she does explore is how professional cultures shape the people within them. That may sound like a relatively obvious observation, but I think it carries far more psychological significance than it first appears. If adaptation is one of the defining characteristics of human beings, then any environment in which we spend thirty or forty years of our lives is almost inevitably going to shape the way we think, the standards we hold ourselves to and, perhaps most importantly, the way we come to understand ourselves.

That, I think, is where Laura Empson's work becomes so interesting. She gives us a way of understanding not why lawyers work hard, but how professional cultures gradually influence what hard work comes to mean.