The opportunity to simply let our minds drift sounds so unimportant, doesn’t it? But it is vital. A mind without a project to obsess over, a problem to solve, a stimulus to respond to, has the time it needs to process. Unstructured time is how we digest some of our lives. With the constant barrage of screens, we have more mental food to digest, and thus an even higher need for mental wandering.
Unhappy lawyers often confuse their attitudes, which are malleable, with personality traits, which are much more hard-wired. There’s no denying that both lawyer attitudes and their innate personality traitscan make an alternative legal career search a challenge. But here’s the key: attitudes are choices, and to the extent they are making your life or job…
Much like using chemicals in the garden produces impressive-looking results at first, but ultimately robs the soil and plants of what they need to survive. They become dependent on chemical help just to survive. So instead, plant yourself in the right light, soil and water. Then work on growing where you are planted.
The two middle traits of Myers-Briggs typology (Sensing/Intuitive and Perceiving/Feeling) are the keys to satisfaction at work, whether you’re a lawyer or a carpenter. When your preferences in those two areas are in synch with the type of work you’re doing, you will feel more fulfilled and in harmony. Sounds kind of important to me.
The Myers-Briggs Extravert/Introvert and Judging/Perceiving preferences are all about how you prefer to interact with the world. They boil down to what kind of world you like to live in, and what structure you want it to have. Kind of fundamental questions for everyone, including unhappy lawyers.
Of the 16 Myers-Briggs personality types, 6 dominate in law. In fact, those 6 types make up close to 70% of the personality types found in law. Are you the right type for law, or are you better suited for something else?
