Management Stress and Attorneys: How to Handle the Stress of Managing a Team

by Micaha | Jul 16, 2024 | Stress

aw school trains lawyers to practice law. It teaches case analysis, legal reasoning, courtroom procedure, and the substantive knowledge a competent attorney needs to serve clients. It doesn’t teach how to hire and manage staff, handle payroll, navigate conflict between team members, set operational procedures, or build a functional organization around a legal practice.

Attorneys who open their own firms quickly discover that running a law firm is two jobs. The first is the one they trained for. The second is the one that was never mentioned.

Two Jobs, One Person

The pressure that comes with managing a team on top of practicing law is specific to a professional class that is highly trained in one domain and largely untrained in the other. A managing partner at a litigation firm is responsible for their own cases, their clients’ outcomes, and the operational reality of a business with employees, overhead, deadlines, and the full complexity of a professional organization — all simultaneously.

The legal work is demanding on its own terms. Attorneys deal with a specific kind of stress that comes from operating in a professional world defined by high stakes, adversarial dynamics, and the consistent pressure of win or lose outcomes. Adding the management of a team to that baseline — the personnel decisions, the conflict resolution, the coaching of underperformers, the retention of people who are good at their jobs — produces a load that accumulates in ways that aren’t always visible until they’ve become significant.

Many attorneys manage this for years before acknowledging that it’s affecting them. The professional culture of law doesn’t make it easy to say that something is too much. High achievers in demanding fields tend to absorb more rather than redistribute it — until the absorption capacity runs out.

What Managing a Team Demands Psychologically

Managing people requires a set of skills that are distinct from legal competence and that don’t develop automatically from years of practice. Several specific demands create consistent difficulty for attorneys who are managing teams for the first time or who have been managing without adequate support:

• Holding Authority Without Becoming Isolated — Being the person in charge of a team changes the nature of every relationship within that team. Attorneys who were peers with their colleagues before becoming managing partners often find the shift disorienting. The social support that existed in the collegial relationship is no longer available in the same way, and the isolation of leadership in a small firm is real and rarely discussed.
• Managing Conflict Between Team Members — Legal training prepares attorneys to manage conflict in an adversarial professional context. Managing interpersonal conflict within a team is a different skill entirely — one that requires emotional attunement, mediation capacity, and the ability to hold multiple perspectives simultaneously without defaulting to the analytical framework that serves well in court.
• Addressing Underperformance — Giving difficult feedback, managing someone toward improvement, and making the call to let someone go are among the most psychologically demanding tasks in any management role. For attorneys who haven’t had explicit training or mentorship in these areas, each of these situations generates its own anxiety alongside the professional responsibility it represents.
• Balancing Delegation with Accountability — The instinct of a high-performing attorney is often to handle things themselves — quickly, correctly, and without the friction of explaining what needs to be done to someone who might not do it the way they would. Delegation requires tolerating a loss of control and a level of imperfection that perfectionism makes genuinely difficult.
• The Emotional Labor of Leadership — Being the person who sets the tone, manages the culture, absorbs the concerns of the team, and maintains composure under pressure is a form of emotional labor that has a real cost. It depletes the same resources that the legal work is already drawing on.

Each of these is a legitimate source of stress — not a sign of inadequacy, but a genuine demand that deserves to be addressed rather than absorbed indefinitely.

The Burnout Trajectory

Burnout in attorneys who are also managing practices follows a recognizable pattern. The early stages look like increased irritability, reduced patience with staff, and the creeping sense that the hours aren’t producing the results they should. Energy goes into tasks that feel endless rather than toward work that feels meaningful. The enjoyment of legal work — the thing that made the investment in law school make sense — begins to erode under the weight of management demands that were never chosen and never trained for.

Left unaddressed, that pattern compounds. Anxiety develops around the management role itself — the anticipation of difficult conversations, the preemptive rehearsal of conflicts that haven’t happened yet, the sense that the team is never quite running the way it should and that the fix is always the attorney’s responsibility. Depression follows when the depletion runs deep enough that the motivation that drove the career in the first place has gone quiet.

The burnout trajectory for attorneys managing their own firms is well-documented in the legal profession’s own research. The rates of anxiety and depression among attorneys are significantly higher than in the general population, and attorneys who own and manage practices carry an additional layer of stress that employed attorneys don’t share.

What Helps

Several specific approaches consistently make a meaningful difference for attorneys managing the dual demands of legal practice and team leadership. Working through these with the right support produces more durable results than attempting to implement them in isolation.

Working with a Therapist Who Understands the Professional Context

Therapy for attorneys at Flourish Psychology is provided by therapists who understand the specific professional pressures of legal practice — the culture, the stakes, the particular psychological demands of a profession built around adversarial processes and high-consequence outcomes. Therapists at Flourish have worked with attorneys at every career stage, including attorneys who have completed their own legal training. The work addresses both the legal profession’s specific stressors and the management challenges that come with running a practice.

Building a Team Aligned with Core Values

The composition of the team surrounding a managing attorney has a direct effect on how much management stress that attorney carries. A team whose members work in alignment with the firm’s values, who can be trusted to handle their responsibilities with genuine competence, and who share the professional standards the attorney holds reduces the management burden significantly. The process of assembling that team — defining what the practice actually needs, hiring deliberately, and being willing to make changes when someone isn’t the right fit — is itself a form of investment in the attorney’s own capacity to manage sustainably.

Delegating With Genuine Commitment

Delegation fails when it’s half-hearted — when the attorney delegates a task but continues monitoring it closely, second-guessing the person handling it, or redoing it when it isn’t done exactly as they would have done it. That pattern produces all the friction of management without any of the relief.

The capacity to delegate with genuine trust — to hand something off and let the person handle it, accepting that their approach may differ from yours without that difference constituting a problem — is something perfectionism specifically undermines. Developing it requires both the right team and the kind of psychological work that makes genuine relinquishment of control possible.

Knowing Your Management Style

Managing people effectively requires enough self-awareness to know how you naturally lead — what you do well, where you create friction without intending to, and how your communication style lands with the people reporting to you. Attorneys who lead by the same approach they use in adversarial professional contexts often find that the directness and pressure that serves them in litigation creates problems in a management relationship. Understanding the distinction, and developing the range to shift between them, makes the management role feel less like a constant improvisation.

Bringing in Operational Expertise

Fractional CFOs, operations consultants, and practice managers can absorb significant portions of the business management burden that attorneys aren’t trained for and don’t need to carry alone. The investment in outside operational expertise frees the attorney to focus on legal work — which is both what they’re best at and what generates the most value for the practice — while ensuring that the business side is handled by someone with the right background for it.

Getting Support

The specific combination of professional demands that attorneys managing their own practices carry isn’t something that willpower and efficiency alone resolve. The stress is real, the sources are specific, and they respond to support that addresses both the psychological dimension and the practical one.

Flourish Psychology’s therapy for lawyers provides exactly that — individualized support for the specific pressures of legal practice and the management demands that come with running a firm. Sessions are available in person in Brooklyn and via online therapy throughout New York. Call 917-737-9475 or reach out through the contact page to get started.

Winners and Losers: Depression in the Legal Profession

by Micaha | Jun 19, 2024 | Stress

Most of us spend a lot of time working. At minimum 5 hours a week, 8 hours a day, and even more if we include commuting. Work itself is hard, and many of us – in any profession – can find it difficult to go from working all day to feeling happy and comfortable at home. There is a reason that, to address mental health, we often have to discuss the effects that our jobs have on us.

This is especially true, however, in the legal profession, and it is not only because the jobs themselves are fairly high stress. It is also because the legal profession, more than nearly any other profession, is one of the few jobs where a person is faced with black and white thinking – you either win, or you lose.

The Long Term Effects of Win/Loss Thinking

Rarely do we have to think in terms of wins and losses in most of our jobs. Work itself is typically gray area. A landscaper’s job isn’t winning and losing. A therapist’s job isn’t winning and losing. Even doctors do not typically deal with wins and losses every day (though they may have their own stresses related to loss in their profession).

But lawyers are different. Lawyers have to think in terms of winning. They have to look at cases to determine how they can win, and then – when they’re done – they have a peer that will almost literally tell them if they won or lost based on what they put together.

If they go to trial, they have a judge or, potentially, 12 other people that will tell them if they won or lost. Even in cases they win, this type of thinking, where you’re judged on your ability to win or lose, can have long lasting consequences.

This is believed to be why lawyers one of the careers most commonly linked to depression. When a person has black and white, win/loss thinking:

• Every loss makes someone a “loser”
• Every mistake means you’ve failed.
• Every opposing counsel becomes an enemy.

You spend days at a time trying to get the information you need together to “win” a case, and even if you do win, you’re often constantly overthinking your choices and thinking about how someone else may prove you wrong. It is a lot to take on, and it’s something that you keep with you in other areas of your life. When you combine that same style of thinking with the stresses of the profession, it’s easy to see why depression can develop.

Depression, Black and White Thinking, and Therapy

Depression itself is, in many ways, a function of black and white thinking – where someone is either a winner or a loser. When you internalize your failures, you become more prone to thinking negatively about yourself leading to the conditions that can create depression.

Therapy, however, can help address this. Therapists that work with lawyers, like Flourish Psychology, can provide you with mental health tools that can break you out of this win/loss cycle and help you see yourself and the world in ways that are not so psychologically damaging. Through therapy, we can provide you with tools and guidance to get you to feel more comfortable with yourself and better able to function at your job. If you’re looking for a therapist that specializes in working with lawyers and those in high stress positions, contact Flourish Psychology, today.

Hot NYC Weather and Mental Health – Are You Experiencing Heat Related Challenges?

by Micaha | Jun 12, 2024 | Stress

We haven’t yet experienced the heat waves that have occurred in other parts of the country. But if you look at the weather forecasts over the next few weeks, it does look like hotter weather is right around the corner.

When we talk about our hot summers in Brooklyn, we talk about not getting enough water, or we talk about getting sunburned. Maybe we sometimes talk about the street smell as the trash heats up. But we frequently do not talk about the effects that hot weather can have not only on our physical health and wellness, but our mental health as well.

While sunny weather might encourage outdoor activities, excessive heat can have profound effects on our mental health, sometimes lasting beyond the hot days themselves.

How Hot Weather Creates Mental Health Challenges

High temperatures are challenging for the body and mind. Without proper management, the heat can exacerbate existing mental health issues or create new ones. When we experience extreme heat, we may also experience:

• Increased Irritability – High temperatures can lead to increased irritability and mood swings. The body’s effort to regulate temperature stresses physiological systems, often resulting in heightened emotional responses. This can make individuals more prone to frustration and anger.
• Sleep Disruptions – Hot weather can interfere with sleep patterns, leading to poor quality sleep or insomnia. The inability to cool down at night can make it difficult to fall asleep and stay asleep, contributing to fatigue and exacerbating stress and anxiety levels.
• Dehydration and Reduced Cognitive Function – Dehydration is a common consequence of hot weather and can negatively impact cognitive functions. Even mild dehydration can impair concentration, decision-making abilities, and overall cognitive performance, which in turn can affect mood and productivity.
• Increased Anxiety – The physical discomfort of being too hot can increase anxiety levels. Individuals with pre-existing anxiety disorders may find their symptoms worsening during heatwaves, as the stress of physical discomfort compounds their mental health challenges.
• Social Isolation – Hot weather can limit outdoor activities and social interactions, leading to feelings of isolation. Staying indoors to avoid the heat can reduce opportunities for social engagement and physical exercise, both of which are important for maintaining mental health.
• Seasonal Affective Disorder (SAD) – While often associated with winter, Seasonal Affective Disorder can also occur during the summer. This condition, sometimes referred to as “summer SAD,” can cause symptoms such as depression, anxiety, and changes in sleep patterns and appetite, driven by the prolonged exposure to heat and light.

It’s also easy to envision how these issues may lead to secondary mental health problems. For example, if a person is struggling with irritability and anxiety, they may also have friction with a romantic partner, which in turn can cause other psychological challenges.

In addition, our brain chemistry can change when we experienced prolonged mental health challenges. Someone with anxiety caused by weather may experience changes that lead to anxiety even as the weather cools down. Because some people with summer-related mental health challenges may have already had the conditions in a way that hot weather simply made worse, it’s easy to envision why it is so important for people to address these issues.

How Would a Therapist Be Able to Help with Hot Weather?

Taking care of your physical health is going to be the first step towards taking care of your mental health, and many of those are going to be things you can do on your own. For example:

• Stay Hydrated – Ensure adequate hydration by drinking plenty of water throughout the day. Proper hydration helps in maintaining cognitive functions and stabilizing mood.
• Maintain a Cool Environment – Use fans, air conditioning, and other cooling methods to create a comfortable indoor environment. A cool living space can help improve sleep quality and reduce irritability.
• Adapt Your Schedule – Schedule outdoor activities during cooler parts of the day, such as early morning or late evening. This can help avoid the peak heat and reduce physical and mental stress.
• Practice Relaxation Techniques – Incorporate relaxation techniques such as deep breathing, meditation, or yoga into your daily routine. These practices can help manage stress and improve emotional resilience in hot weather.
• Spend Time With People – If possible, make sure that you don’t suffer from social isolation even in the extreme heat. Schedule time with people and make sure that you’re still getting social support.

It also can often help to speak to a therapist in NYC, where the two of you can work together to maintain your mental health as you’re addressing the heat, and learning tools and coping techniques to support you in the months and years to come.

Therapists do this by providing:

• Psychoeducation – Therapists can provide valuable information about how heat affects mental health. Knowing the physiological and psychological impacts of heat can help individuals recognize symptoms and take proactive measures to manage them.
• Cognitive Behavioral Therapy (CBT) – CBT is effective in addressing anxiety and mood disorders exacerbated by heat. Therapists can help clients identify and challenge negative thought patterns, develop coping strategies, and improve emotional regulation.
• Stress Management Techniques – Therapists can teach stress management techniques such as mindfulness, deep breathing exercises, and progressive muscle relaxation. These practices can help reduce stress and anxiety levels, promoting a sense of calm and well-being.
• Sleep Hygiene Education and Support – Improving sleep hygiene is crucial for those affected by heat-related sleep disruptions. Therapists can provide guidance on creating a conducive sleep environment, establishing a consistent sleep schedule, and incorporating relaxation techniques before bedtime.
• Encouraging Social Engagement – Therapists can support clients in finding ways to maintain social connections despite the heat. This may include scheduling indoor activities, using virtual communication tools, or planning social interactions during cooler parts of the day.

Therapists may not be able to make the sun cooler, or prevent heat related illness. But a therapist can help make sure that you’re always feeling your best and living your best life, whether it’s hot outside, cold outside, or anywhere in between.

Call Flourish Psychology Today

Flourish Psychology may not be able to affect the heat itself, or the physiological effects of it, but we can help make sure that any anxiety, stress, depression, or other mental health conditions you’re struggling with get the attention they deserve. For more information, or to book a session with one of our therapists, please contact Flourish Psychology today.

There is No Small Trauma

by Micaha | May 29, 2024 | Stress

At Flourish Psychology, many of our therapists work with patients that are struggling with traumas in their life. But not all traumatic experiences are the ones that we typically think about when we discuss the idea of trauma. In life, there are many times when we may have what would otherwise be a minor interaction or experience, but it left a profound impact on who we are.

Those are, at least in some form, life traumas. While we may not talk about them as though they have the same impact as other trauma examples, but it’s also important for us to note that how you feel is how you feel, and it is up to us to explore that.

Trauma vs. PTSD

Part of the reason that many people may silence themselves about their traumas is because they may not qualify for a diagnosis of post-traumatic stress disorder, or PTSD.

PTSD is a condition that typically (although again, not always) occurs after someone has experienced what can best be described as “profound psychological trauma,” like serving in a war or surviving a physical assault. Those can lead to issues with stress coping that can cause a condition like PTSD, and often require working with a therapist to process that trauma in order to better understand how to move forward.

But there is more to trauma than PTSD. An individual can also experience many other traumas over the course of their life – from childhood all the way to adulthood – that can have a powerful impact on who we are and what we become.

These may seem like they’re minor traumas compared to other types of traumatic events. But part of therapy involves understanding you at a core level, and that requires treating any trauma that you experience as significant to you, and then determining what we can do to help you process it, address it, cope with it, or move forward depending on your needs.

Seek Help When YOU Need IT

What prospective patients need to understand is that comparing your traumas, experiences, and struggles with others only holds you back from getting the help you need. If you feel like something in life is affecting you in a negative way, and you believe that addressing that with a therapist may help, then you should seek therapy. You do not need to compare your trauma to others. What you need to do is address that trauma and compare your life before therapy to your life after.

If you need a therapist to help you with trauma, please contact Flourish Psychology, today.