The profession of half-empty glasses: The unique personalities of lawyers and an antidote

Last week Robin Rolfe Resources issued a press release entitled "Studies Show Lawyers Really Do Have Unique Personalities."

According to Professor Martin Seligman, Fox Professor of Leadership at the University of Pennsylvania and founder of the school of Positive Psychology, lawyers have distinctly different personalities. Among 104 careers, lawyers predictably score the highest in pessimism -- and the higher their pessimism, the higher their law school grades.

Myers-Briggs, one of the oldest personal style assessments, shows lawyers at the other end of the continuum from the rest of the population in three of the four major personality traits. The Caliper Personality Profile also shows lawyers to be different--whereas the average score on skepticism is 50, lawyers average 90.

David Maister, a preeminent consultant to professional services firms, who has historically claimed all these firms to be the same, has recently acknowledged that the personalities of lawyers pose special challenges to management.

Others also address the lawyer differences. Larry Bodine at his LawMarketing Blog wrote about the conclusions of Dr.Larry Richard regarding lawyer traits and how the profession differs from the general population. Richards used both Caliper and Myers-Briggs in making those conclusions.

In my article "Team-Building Frenzy Reaches Law Firms" , I talk about what I learned from Johnson O'Connor Research Foundation (and later from the Highlands Assessment Battery) about the lawyer's need for autonomy, critical approach, and competitiveness.

Susan Daicoff, author of Lawyer, Know Thyself, has created a chart How Lawyers Differ from the General Population in which she lists lawyer traits in early childhood, as pre-law students, as law students, and as lawyers.

From many, many sources, we can learn lawyers' uniqueness. Do you think it might be a beneficial exercise to  ponder how lawyers are the same as most folks? Gerry Riskin at Amazing Firms, Amazing Practices has already mused along "lawyers are people" lines. I think there are more similarities than differences. Your thoughts?

And about that pessimism. An article in yesterday's Chicago Sun-Times describes the choice we have in keeping the traits that serve us and changing those that do not. The writer talks about people emphasizing traits they prefer and desire.

Can such an emphasis lead to more personal happiness? Certainly common sense, as well as the early research, seems to say ''yes.'' Neuroscientist Jeffrey Schwartz shows in his 2002 book, The Mind and the Brain, that while it has long been known that what we do can physically affect our brains, new research is actually showing that what we choose to think about can affect the physical wiring of our brains, too.

So, for instance, Schwartz found that people who only thought about carefully playing a piece of music on the piano over time had the exact same physical changes in their brains, as measured by CT scans, as people who physically practiced the same piano piece over time. Schwartz determined with similar studies that we can sometimes choose to think differently about things, change the physical wiring of our brain and, in doing so create, a kind of ''upward spiral'' for ourselves. [The piano research was actually done by Dr. Alvaro Pascual-Leone.]

What's on your mind? Isn't it nice that you can choose your thoughts and in doing so change your brain?  If you want to begin that "upward spiral," watch your thoughts; wrangle and wrestle them if necessary. Many people let their thoughts run as wild as scared turkeys, as if lacking fence or net. Never forget that you are in charge. You have the right to entertain some rose-colored, cheerful thoughts and a few silver-lined, bright reveries. Of course you also have the right to choose pessimism; just make sure you choose pessimism rather than pessimism choosing you.

I wonder why pessimism gets so much more attention than the glass-half-full attitude. After reading an essay in the New York Times earlier this month, I thought about it for many days.  "What’s Making Us Sick Is an Epidemic of Diagnoses" ends with:

As more of us are being told we are sick, fewer of us are being told we are well. People need to think hard about the benefits and risks of increased diagnosis: the fundamental question they face is whether or not to become a patient. And doctors need to remember the value of reassuring people that they are not sick. Perhaps someone should start monitoring a new health metric: the proportion of the population not requiring medical care. And the National Institutes of Health could propose a new goal for medical researchers: reduce the need for medical services, not increase it.

Perhaps we could start a new metric for the legal profession: the proportion that are satisfied. And, if we do, that proportion will increase. As I have said for many years: WYTUG. What You Think Upon Grows. As described above, now we have proven WYTUG.

I say let's not focus on the pessismistic lawyers. Let's observe the happy lawyers and learn their secrets. I bet we can easily discern their not-so-secret secrets by listening to and watching them. I also bet we can tell what's on their minds and thus how their brains are hard-wired. The choice is yours. What are you going to do with your thought power?

Note (added January 18, 2007, 10:15 AM Mountain): From a letter in today's Boston Globe written by Professor Seligman on whether people can raise their levels of optimism:

There is extensive scientific literature that shows just that. Learning to dispute catastrophic thoughts reliably changes pessimism into optimism. These changes cause relief and prevention of depression and likely cause better physical health . The methods come from cognitive-behavioral therapy and they are called "learned optimism."

Note (added January 27, 2007, 8:20 AM Mountain):  From an article about Art Buchwald, we learn that in the last months of his life he was "listening not to the doctors, but to [his] own heart." Perhaps he intuitively knew the wisdom mentioned in the above-mentioned New York Times article.

Comments

[Ellen Weber]

I was interested in David maister's shift in focus. Did he say what made it happen?

[StephanieWestAllen]

Hi, Ellen. I am sure he did but I am not sure what RRR is referencing specifically. If you click on the above link for David Maister, you can either e-mail him or look on his blog to see if he addresses the change there. He is very approachable.

[Susan Cartier Liebel]

Stephanie, I learned the most valuable lesson from my great Aunt regarding sickness. She passed away at 105 years old, healthy, sound mind until the last year. She (and my grandmother) had lost their parents, uncles, aunts in concentration camps when they (my great aunt and grandmother) were in their late 20's. When I asked my great Aunt how she stayed so healthy (the worst she had was an ingrown toenail)...her response..."I never knew what diseases I was SUPPOSED to have."

As for what makes a happy lawyer, I've always known the secret..."following your own definition of success with your license to practice law...not anyone else's."