By Joel G. Kosman, Esq., LCSW
In an earlier post, I looked at how lawyers tend to respond to stressful situations — and why those responses, though understandable, often make things worse rather than better. In this post, I focus on a more effective approach. It starts with the idea of agency.
Agency, for these purposes, means that you have the capacity, through your own actions, to change – to influence – your situation. It is not the same as optimism or positive thinking. It is a grounded belief that your behavior has impact, and so taking action – exercising your agency – can create a path toward positive change.
That belief turns out to be an essential ingredient in managing stress more effectively. And developing it starts with a somewhat counterintuitive idea: you need to accept that you are not all-powerful.
Why Control Is the Wrong Goal
For lawyers, control can feel like the intellectually satisfying answer to almost any problem. If I can just anticipate every possible outcome, I’ll be prepared. If I can predict how a partner will react, I’ll know how to handle the situation. If I can account for everything that might go wrong, nothing will catch me off guard.
I understand that impulse — I spent twenty years in legal practice and lived it. But it’s a futile aim. It is both a product of anxiety and a generator of more of it.
The problem is that control is not possible insofar as the desired outcome depends heavily on the participation or response of another person. What a partner decides, how a client responds, what opposing counsel does, what a judge asks. Because you don’t control other people, you can’t control the outcome. So to try regardless only leaves you feeling like you have less agency.
The more you try to obtain control over things you cannot in fact control, the more you become aware of how elusive it is. And the more aware you become of that, the harder you try — which deepens the sense of frustration and powerlessness rather than relieving it. It is the professional equivalent of the quicksand problem discussed in an earlier post: the more you struggle, the more stuck you become.
Exercise Agency through Small, Concrete Steps
The key to managing stressful situations is to exercise your agency to its fullest. Don’t focus on outcomes. Instead, focus on your response, on available actions. And often the most effective actions to take are small, concrete, process-focused steps.
This also means that you should eschew broad, aspirational goals. Vague goals like “I want to feel less stressed” or “I want to be a better associate” have no clear path attached to them. They describe a desired state without specifying any action that leads there. Goals framed around other people — “I want the partner to stop criticizing me” or “I want the client to be less demanding” — are even more problematic, because they locate the solution entirely outside yourself. Neither type of goal builds agency. Both tend to reinforce helplessness.
A more useful question is simpler: what is one thing I can do in this situation? What is one step I can take? Not a comprehensive solution. Not a change in someone else’s behavior. Just a foothold — a small, concrete action that is within your power and that moves things even marginally forward.
Why Small Steps Matter More Than You Might Think
There is a tendency to dismiss small incremental gains as insufficient. Lawyers in particular tend to think in terms of comprehensive solutions — the brief that addresses every possible counterargument, the strategy that accounts for every contingency. A small step feels inadequate by comparison.
But the psychological benefits of even modest forward movement are real and often underestimated. Taking a concrete action — any action that is within your control and moves you forward, even slightly — reinforces the belief that your behavior has influence on your environment. That belief is agency. And agency is what makes the difference between feeling trapped inside a stressful situation and feeling like you have some capacity to affect it.
This does not mean small steps are the whole answer. The deeper patterns — the anxious loops, the catastrophic interpretations, the reflexive attempts at control — are worth understanding and working on directly. But the practice of identifying and taking concrete steps is often where that work becomes tangible. It is the place where changed thinking translates into changed behavior.
In the final post in this series, we’ll look at how to bring these ideas together into a more coherent and sustainable approach to stress — one that goes beyond managing individual situations and starts to shift the underlying patterns that make those situations so difficult.
For more on the patterns underlying stress and anxiety, visit the Work Stress and Anxiety pages.
If you’re considering whether working together might help, I offer a complimentary 20-minute phone consultation.
Call 914-295-2764 or email [email protected] to arrange a consultation.