Staying in the Game: Building a Professional Life You Can Actually Live With

Recently, I had the privilege of facilitating a peer support session for young lawyers on sustainable legal practice. I began with the following question to the attendees :

“How do you build a legal practice life that you can actually live with, and not just survive in it?”

I believe the relevance of above question extends well beyond the legal profession, and would be appropriate to be addressed to all working professionals. Many working professionals are familiar with the pressures of modern working life: demanding workloads, tight deadlines, difficult stakeholders, organisational expectations and the constant pressure to perform. Over time, these pressures can affect not only our work, but also our mental and physical health, mood, motivation and sense of who we are. Essentially, as working professionals, how well we are able to sustain in our professional life depends very much on our mental wellness, and in turn the state of our mental health is largely impacted by our working environment and our relationship with work.

It is tempting to think that the answer to the above question is simply to become more resilient—to cope better, work harder and tolerate more. But I think that is a short-sighted way of quick fix. To me, “Resilience” is not about becoming someone who can put up with anything. It is about being able to live with difficulty without losing yourself in the process. Below are the key points that I had imparted to the group of lawyers attending the session, which I think would equally apply to any professionals.

The Five “Cs”

I shared with the lawyers the framework of Five “Cs” for thinking about sustainable professional life: Capacity, Connections, Control, Core Values and Choice.

Capacity is about recognising our own mental and physical capacity to take on workloads and responsibilities, and also communicating our capacity timely and appropriately. We need to be able to read our own warning signs before we become burnout. This is particularly true for young professionals who have just started work, and are taking on too much workload or responsibilities all at once (commonly due to peer pressure or firm culture) while still figuring out their own capacity. They could soon find themselves experiencing burnout, or feel disillusioned with the purpose of work and life.

However, not all discomfort is unhealthy. In any meaningful profession, there has to be Stretch (vs Strain), in order for us to learn and grow. The question is “Is this difficulty helping me grow, or is it progressively diminishing me?”With stretch, you get tired and recover. With strain, you get exhausted and feel so overwhelmed that you never really recover.

It is thus important to keep checking in with ourselves throughout our career.

I could not emphasize enough the importance of building good Connectionsand relationships in a person’s professional ecosystem. We need to have a supervisor who would be able to guide us in our work, a sponsor who would create opportunities for us, colleagues whom we could mutually support, team mates with whom we could work together – basically we need a supportive working environment for us to thrive.

Such an environment does not occur automatically, it needs to be consciously built and invested in. As with all relationships, how we show up with other people would influence how other people respond to us. Working in a silo fashion without considering the ecosystem that we are in, would not help us to sustain or progress very far in our professional life.

Of the five C’s,  Control is particularly important. Work could leave us feeling powerless because so much appears to be outside our control: clients’ behaviour, deadlines, other people’s personalities, management styles, economic conditions or organisational targets. When we focus all our psychological energy on these things, we would naturally feel stressed, exhausted and helpless.

A more useful approach is to distinguish between three areas: (1) what I cannot control, (2) what I can control, and (3) what I cannot control but can influence.

We may not control when a client calls or when a deadline is imposed. But we can often control how we organise our work, whether we ask for clarification, whether we communicate our capacity early, whether we seek help and how we speak to ourselves. We may also be able to influence expectations, priorities, relationships and opportunities through better communication and connections.

It is about asking a more empowering question:

“Where does my agency exist, and what can I do with it?”

Sometimes the answer may be to set a boundary. Sometimes it may be to have a difficult conversation, and sometimes it may mean seeking support or changinghow we approach the problem. And sometimes, it may mean recognising that the environment itself needs to change.

The fourth “C”, Core Values, takes us into another important dimension of sustainable work - finding meaning in what we do.

We often talk about work-life balance as though the answer is simply to work less. But working less does not automatically make us fulfilled. Some people work very hard and find deep meaning in what they do; others may work fewer hours and still feel disconnected or unhappy.

A more useful question may be: “What makes the difficulty of my work worth enduring?”

For a lawyer, it might be advocating for a client, solving a difficult problem, gaining someone's trust, mentoring a junior colleague, producing work that one is genuinely proud of, or making a difference in someone’s life. For someone in another profession, it might be creating something meaningful, helping others, solving complex problems, exercising creativity or contributing to a cause that matters.

These moments of making meaning can tell us something important about our values.

If our work is consistently disconnected from what matters to us, sustainability becomes much harder. Sometimes the answer is not to leave our job altogether, but to reconfigure our professional life—perhaps by changing our role, work scope, organisation, responsibilities or the kind of work we take on. The aim is not necessarily to eliminate difficulty, but to ensure that enough of the difficulty feels meaningful and worthwhile.

Finally, it’s about making a Choice. Staying in a particular job or profession is not the only measure of success. We can choose to stay, to change roles, to move organisations, to develop new skills or, sometimes, to change direction altogether. The important thing is for us to make those decisions from a position of agency rather than exhaustion.

Conclusion

Ultimately, sustainable professional life is not about eliminating stress or reaching a state where work is never difficult. Difficulty is part of any meaningful career.

The more important question is whether the way we are working today is helping us, or preventing us, from becoming the person we want to be in, sayten years’ time.

Perhaps we should ask ourselves not simply:

“Where do I want to be?”

But “Who do I want to have become?”

And “Does the way I work today make that future person that I want to become, more—or less—likely?”

If you’re looking to start a conversation about your career direction, we are here. We have a team of career counsellors and coaches who would be able to explore with you. If you would like to speak to me, or any of our counsellors/coaches, feel free to contact us at info@counselingperspective.com.

Warmly,

Chei Liang Sin

Psychotherapist/Career Counsellor/ Career Advisor

(SAC Registered Counsellor)

(Certified Career Advisor (WSG (CAP))