legal sanity

Career passion is a topic I’ve addressed here multiple times in various forms. And it’s one that comes up again and again in conversations I have with people attending my training and development programs. Many lawyers express a sense of loss: they tell me that the wonder and excitement that accompanied their first few days, weeks, months, years (choose one) of practicing law have vanished. They’ve shifted into autopilot and can’t seem to come out of that rote space where they tend to pigeonhole clients and matters according to some black letter prescription. As I admit in these conversations, I can relate to this sense of loss. It’s a depleting place to be because it impacts us on so many levels. This point is emphasized by Kathy Sierra in a recent post at Creating Passionate Users. She asserts that, when we adopt a “just-a-job-attitude” (or, as she puts it, when we start phoning it in) we damage our sense of self and our client connections. So, how do we go about un-doing the damage and re-igniting our passion for practicing law? While Sierra doesn’t provide a definitive answer to this question, she does stress that it’s not about our actual job (associate, partner, solo practitioner). It’s about the act of lawyering itself. We need to “sit [ ] down and force [ourselves] to remember” what we loved about being a lawyer in those early days of wonder and excitement. Hopefully, these surfaced memories will provide the flint needed to re-spark our career passion.