what do happy 😊 and unhappy 😒 lawyers have IN COMMON?
Sure, I'm looking for differences. I'm trying to figure out how to tell apart a happy lawyer and an unhappy lawyer on the front end, to see what causes them to be different. Why? So that we can lean on those differences. Want to be less unhappy? Do X. Want to be more happy? Do Y.
By the time I'm done, if you told me that your friend (who's a lawyer) generally did A, B, and C, and looked at the world like D, E, and F, ideally I would able to tell you whether that friend was happy or not.
🤓
So this project will live and die in the differences.
BUT, not everything turns out to be different between happy lawyers and unhappy ones. They do have a few things in common. Things that surprised me. Here is one thing worth highlighting:
1. PRESSURE.
I remember the first interview I had with a lawyer who told me she was under immense pressure. Her voice cracked a bit, she was close to tears, and I thought - "here we go! Something that is making her less happy!" She wasn't alone in talking about the pressure she was under as something that was dragging her down.
BUT the flipside have also been true. I've talked to a number of happy lawyers who've talked about the immense pressure they're under, but they've got a hint of a smile in their voice and a glint in their eye. They're thriving under the pressure.
Thus leading to a current working theory - pressure itself is independent of happiness.
Although pressure may be independent of happiness, it may multiply some of the other factors. You may be confident (a trait I saw in most happy lawyers) or you may worry (a trait I saw in many unhappy lawyers, but that may not actually affect your happiness that much until you ramp up the pressure, which exacerbates the effect that confidence/unconfidence/worry has on your happiness.
Interestingly, I think you can both be confident and worry at the same time. Most of the happy lawyers were unconfident about at least one thing (and vice versa for the unhappy lawyers re confidence). So it isn't on a single spectrum, it's on multiple ones.
I've got two other commonalities to highlight before I start moving into some of the key differences I've spotted so far between happy lawyers and unhappy ones. Maybe we'll do that tomorrow.
What do you think? Is pressure generally good in your life? Generally bad? Or sort of ... both?
And more importantly, is "unconfidence" a word?
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