Dan Bowling, who penned 10 Happy Tips for Lawyers for us last year, is again our guest blogger. A former head of global human resources for Coca-Cola Enterprises, he is a senior lecturing fellow at Duke Law School and teaches positive psychology in the master's program at the University of Pennsylvania. He can be reached at [email protected].

by Dan Bowling

Lawyers love war metaphors. They are constantly “doing battle,” “facing Armageddon,” or “donning armor.” Rhetorical flourishes aside, there are parallels between the life of a lawyer and that of a soldier. Actual combat is a different thing altogether, of course, but both occupations involve constant stress: Failure is not an option; only the mission matters; and family needs run a distant second.

The U.S. Army is doing something to address these pressures. It has started training its recruits to better adapt to that life emotionally and mentally. Lawyers should pay attention to its efforts.

In response to increased incidents of mental and emotional distress among troops facing repeated deployment, the Army started working with positive psychologists from the University of Pennsylvania in 2009 to teach resilience skills to the 1.1 million men and women in uniform. Using warrior-friendly terms like “mental toughness” and “battle-mind,” the program teaches techniques to reduce pessimism and anxiety--the building blocks of stress disorder.

A friend of mine, the famed psychologist Martin Seligman, one of the driving forces behind the effort, suggests in the April issue of The Harvard Business Review that resilience training can be as effective for business leaders as for military ones. What about lawyers? I asked Seligman. “Given the degree of negative emotion and awful events that lawyers deal with daily, I can think of no other profession that would benefit more from resilience training,” Seligman says.

Lawyers suffer from mental and emotional disorders at a rate far higher than that of their professional peer groups. Job satisfaction among lawyers is low, and associate turnover is high. Unemployment among recent law school graduates is at record levels. Yet few legal institutions seem seriously concerned about the well-being of lawyers. Why should they be? Law firms suffer no shortage of applications.

There are reasons to be concerned, however. Law is a profession, an important societal contributor; it should be concerned with the mental and emotional fitness of its membership. The profession has made some spotty efforts to address this issue. Some efforts fall into the category of “work-life balance” or morale-boosting. Other efforts seem downright silly: Yale Law School recently announced it will allow stressed students to check a dog out of the library to soothe nerves! 

The Army's resilience program provides a credible, straightforward training methodology, the principles of which can prove helpful in teaching lawyers to navigate professional ups and downs. And it doesn’t involve therapy dogs. 

Resilience training is based upon evidence that humans fall roughly into one of three buckets when faced with adversity:

1. Some crumble;

2. Some emerge unchanged; and

3. Some are strengthened by it.

In the last two decades, researchers have discovered there are teachable skills that can help people wind up in the two latter buckets, or “insulate them from depression,” in Seligman’s words. These skills are the core of the Army program. Here's how they can be useful for lawyers:

          • Develop awareness of personal strengths. The Army performs personality testing on participants and teaches soldiers how to align their personality strengths with their tasks, which help enhance performance. If your top strength is meticulous attention to detail while working ungodly hours, you will thrive as a Big Law associate.

         • Manage emotions. Out-of-control emotions help no one; they eat away at one’s mind and body. The program trains soldiers to recognize and balance emotions in themselves and those around them. This training could be useful for that partner who's walking into your office right now to bark about your billable hours.

         • Fight overly pessimistic thinking. “Worst-case scenario” planning is useful at times, especially in law and the military, but applying it to every situation is harmful. Chronic pessimism often leads to depression, so learning the difference between prudent risk management and persistent negativity is an important skill.

         • Build self-awareness, self-regulation, and self-motivation. The Army knows that to lead others, one must be able to lead oneself, so much of the program is focused on self-awareness and motivation. Many lawyers have been trained to please others--parents, professors, senior partners, clients, and judges. Unfortunately, this type of conditioning doesn't help when things don’t go as planned.

It is time for Big Law to incorporate training based on these principles into its associate orientation programs, or for interested individuals to pursue it on their own (check out The Resilient Factor by Karen Reivich and Andrew Shatte). Whether a lawyer is at risk of developing an emotional disorder--and many are, if statistics are to be believed--or merely wants to develop additional skills to perform at his or her highest level, resilience training can help.

Lawyers, be Army-strong.