By Joel G. Kosman, Esq., LCSW
Let’s take an example. You submit a draft brief or agreement to a partner — let’s call him Bob — covering ground you thought you understood. It comes back marked up so extensively that it appears at first glance that the only things unchanged are the names of the parties.
Bob’s comments are handwritten, and you can’t read half of them. One appears to say “not what we discussed” — and you’re not sure who “we” is, or when the discussion happened, or what was discussed. Some lines are simply crossed out, with nothing to indicate what should replace them. Bob has already told you there isn’t much time for back-and-forth.
What’s more, in a later email, Bob notes, “This wasn’t your strongest work.”
It’s likely that you’ve experienced something like this before. And if reading this has resonated with your own experience, you may already be feeling something — some kind of reaction, right now, in your body or your mind.
Take a moment with that reaction. See if you can separate out what’s in it. There’s likely some activation — a tightening, a quickening. That’s the stress response: energy, mobilized, asking to be used. There are also likely some thoughts — about you, you as a lawyer, or even your future. And here’s the complication — those thoughts can pull on that same energy. The more you engage with them, the more energy they draw, and the less is available for the work itself.
So the question that matters is: where does that energy go?
Two Very Different Responses to the Same Situation
One response is practical: you reprioritize your work, settle in, and start addressing the document. The situation is difficult, but it’s manageable. You do what needs to be done. The mobilized energy goes where it was meant to go — into the work.
Another response goes somewhere else entirely. You stay with your thoughts — which are really worries — and they start to fire. There goes the night. There goes my sleep. There goes the weekend. Why don’t I ever do things right? This always happens to me. The partner thinks I’m an idiot. He’s going to tell other people. And from there it can escalate further: if I don’t crush the revision, I could lose my job. If I lose my job, I can’t pay my rent.
These thoughts are anxiety — internally generated, building on themselves, and increasingly distancing you from the actual work in front of you. And they’re hungry. Each thought pulls on the same energy that was mobilized for the brief, and dissipates it. The more you focus your attention on the thoughts, the less energy is left for the work — which is, of course, the only thing that will actually help.
The Hinge Point Is How You Interpret It
The marked-up document and even the partner’s displeasure are facts. That is going to happen, especially if you are a junior lawyer (or even a junior partner). What is not fixed — what is genuinely within your power — is the meaning you ascribe to those facts, and how you respond to them.
Are you going to interpret them as an attack on your abilities? As evidence of some fundamental shortcoming as a lawyer or even as a person? Are you going to start predicting catastrophic outcomes from a single difficult interaction? Or are you going to try to understand them as facts of legal life that are to be addressed as they arise — as a challenge that tests the skills you’ve developed, an opportunity to expand your competence, or simply a hard situation that needs to be worked through?
Neither interpretation changes the document or the deadline or the partner’s attitude. But they produce very different internal experiences — and very different capacities to do the work. The first is a healthy stress response. The second is anxiety.
Creating Space Between Situation and Response
What I’m pointing to here is the existence of a space between what happens to you and how you respond. That space is real, even if it doesn’t feel that way in the moment when anxiety is spiking. And it will take time and practice to be able to identify and utilize that space. But it’s in that space that you have the capacity to choose where your energy goes.
Most of us, most of the time, respond to stressful situations as if that space doesn’t exist — because we have developed patterns of thought and action that operate as defaults. We turn to them automatically, as if we don’t have a choice. The partner marks up your brief; therefore you are an idiot; therefore your career is in danger. Each step feels inevitable.
But it’s not. The goal of the work I do with clients in situations like this is not to eliminate the stress — a marked-up brief will always produce some reaction. It is to create enough space between the situation and the response that the response becomes something you can shape rather than something that simply happens to you.
In the next post, we’ll look at what drives these interpretations beneath the surface — the deeper patterns of thought that tend to determine how we respond to stressful situations, and how understanding those patterns is often the first step toward changing them.
For more on how stress and anxiety affect professional life, 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.