legal sanity

In a post about the new legal marketplace, I said that a “quest for meaning – in the form of feeling valued, valuable, important and visible – fuels a client’s decision to retain or relinquish a legal service provider.” Our clients are seeking meaningful connection to the experiences, goods and services they consume. Lawyers are no different. We’re engaging the emerging culture of meaning as service providers and as consumers. And, on the consumer side, more and more of us are looking for meaningful jobs and work assignments.

I’ve previously discussed the ingredients of meaningful work. One of the main ones is play. Work that’s infused with a good measure of play is more enriching for many of us than play-free pursuits. Echoing this point is a Fast Company article called The Future of Work. In it, Richard Watson notes that work life is changing as we move from the second industrial revolution -- the information revolution -- to a third industrial revolution that involves a “shift from left to right-brain economic production.” According to Watson, “child-like receptivity and cognitive flexibility” as well as “playfulness” may be prevailing, adaptive traits in this new economy characterized by rapid change, flux and uncertainty.

The intersection of work and play is also the focus of a terrific blog that I’ve pointed to several times before: Bailey Work Play :: The Alchemy of Soulful Work. Its publisher, Chris Bailey, has culled a lot of great information on the subject and candidly shares snapshots of his quest to help himself and others “integrate the principles of the soulful workplace, leadership, and relationships into day-to-day business practices.”

Additional insight into steps we can take to bring a sense of play into our law work can be found in a Small Firm Business feature about bringing more ease to our facial expressions. Stating that many lawyers walk around all day with “a sour look that puts off our colleagues and clients,” the piece suggests that we consider smiling more because it connects us to our clients and builds relationships.