Work/Life Balance
NEW SOUTH WALES YOUNG LAWYERS FORUM 2007
28 April 2007
WORK/LIFE BALANCE
Justice George Palmer
Supreme Court of New South Wales
The title for this forum, “Work/life balance”, is a study in itself. Does it mean: ‘work AND life – how to accommodate both’? Or does it mean: ‘work OR life – how to choose between them”? You see that I have started the discussion with a quibble over definitions – how could a lawyer do otherwise!
But, of course, definitions ARE important in any serious discussion. Otherwise, you end up exchanging mere waffly generalisations. And a discussion about the human condition – in this particular context, what we seek in order to be professionally and personally happy – is a serious discussion. As Richard Whately, a nineteenth century archbishop of Dublin, once said: “happiness is no laughing matter”.
What is challenging in the title “Work/life balance” is that it juxtaposes “work” and “life” as if they were separate things – as if you work to earn money to live and living is something you do when you have finished work for the day. A moment’s thought, of course, tells you that your work is part of your life and your life informs your work. That is true whether are a philosopher or a street-sweeper. There are happy street-sweepers and miserable philosophers – the job doesn’t necessarily dictate the quality of life.
I would like to approach this discussion with the premise than what you do for a living and how you do it is just part of your life. You don’t choose between work and life: you choose how your life will be affected by what work you do and how you do it.
This is hardly a novel proposition. Why, then, are lawyers attending a conference to talk about how their work affects their personal lives and their emotional needs? Lawyers are supposed to be particularly bad at talking about their emotions. We are taught to present an exterior which is “professional”, apparently meaning “reserved, impersonal, analytical and sceptical”. Since I first gave an address on this general topic about six months ago I have heard so many horror stories from young lawyers about how badly they are treated by senior people in the profession that I am beginning to suspect that some lawyers (not the majority I think) have redefined “professional” to mean “aggressive, unsympathetic, intolerant and cynical”.
One lawyer has gone so far as to write a letter, published in a national newspaper, suggesting that lawyers who cannot cope with the aggression within the profession should get out of it: his approach to the issue has come to be known as “professional Darwinism”.
I reject the notion that to survive as a lawyer you must be aggressive, career-fixated and insensitive to the feelings of others. Without exception, all the best lawyers I have known have demonstrated none of these characteristics. And when I refer to “the best lawyers”, I do not mean only those who have achieved the highest public prominence. I refer especially to those who have, in their careers, contributed substantially not only to the welfare of their clients but also to the welfare and stability of our society. Just reflect for a moment on the career and character of Sir William Deane: leading barrister, High Court Judge and a beloved Governor-General who reached both the hearts and minds of so many Australians.
What you do as lawyers makes demands on your time, your emotions, and your relationships. The standards of the profession are high and you are always being judged: by your peers and by your clients. The desire to achieve and maintain professional respect can be a relentless taskmaster. We all know what it is to work long hours into the night and on weekends to meet some deadline, imposed by a client, by the Court, by one’s superiors or by oneself. We delude ourselves if we think that this is an experience confined to the legal profession.
You may be attending this conference because you do not feel happy about how much your work takes away from your time outside your career. But you need to remember that not everyone feels the same way. For some people, the dividing line between an activity classified as work and an activity classified as pleasure is blurred or even non-existent.
If you were to go to the websites of the High Court and the Law Foundation you would see the astonishing number of speeches which the Hon Justice Michael Kirby has made all over the world, from quite early in his judicial career. The speeches are on a wide variety of topics, most of them to do with Justice Kirby’s passionate advocacy of human rights and the rule of law. The speeches alone, you would think, would have occupied a lifetime in the composing and making. Yet they are the extra-curial work of a man who has been a full-time judge since 1975 and has written the most elaborate and learned of judgments at the highest levels of the judicial system.
Michael Kirby clearly feels fulfilled as a judge. The speeches he writes are just as much the product of time and effort as are his judgments. To you and me, both speeches and judgments would probably represent hard work – time away from the enjoyment of life - and we would probably begrudge the time it took to produce them. This is not the case with Michael Kirby – what we would regard as his work, he plainly regards as part of the very fabric and purpose of his life.
You would think a person so dedicated to what most of us would think of as a life which doesn’t distinguish work from pleasure, would be rather dull. There are , indeed, plenty of dull lawyers but Michael Kirby is not one of them.
I make this point simply to illustrate that what we want from our work, in terms of personal and emotional satisfaction, differs from person to person. As our careers progress, each of us needs to reflect on what we are doing with our lives and how we can change if we are not satisfied. Difficult though it is for professionals to talk about themselves in this way, particularly amongst colleagues, it is necessary to talk to others who can help, even if only as a safety valve for the release of pent-up frustrations. A recent study has shown that the incidence of depression is disproportionately high in the legal profession as compared to other groups in the community. Perhaps this is because, by training or by nature, lawyers are more inhibited than other people in revealing themselves to others in a way which may expose their vulnerabilities.
As young lawyers, you may be weary of doing endless discovery for mammoth litigation about nothing at all of human interest. You may be sick of clients who are demanding but never satisfied. You may feel oppressed by rude partners who seem to take a malicious pleasure in staying late in the office just to make sure that you cannot leave before they do. You may feel that the particular kind of work that you are doing has no social utility or, indeed, is inimical to your own concepts of justice in society. Does this mean that you have to opt out of the legal profession if you want to be happy in your career and in your emotional life?
My experience tells me that you can, indeed, be happy in your career and in your emotional life … more or less, for a reasonable amount of the time … but not by ‘opting out’ – i.e. running away from the responsibility of making and implementing rational day to day decisions about your own happiness.
For example, if you are not getting on with your supervising partner – if he or she seems unduly critical and demanding – consider as rationally as you can the causes. It may be that, though both of you are well intentioned, there is such a difference in your personalities that you are not on the same wavelength and misunderstandings arise. It may be that the partner is so pressured and harassed, for whatever reason, that he or she is insensitive to the way he or she is treating you. It may be that the partner is just naturally aggressive and unpleasant. It may be that you have, indeed, made mistakes which have caused problems. It may be combination of some of these factors. It will not help you to make changes if you do not consider carefully all of these possibilities and others but, rather, automatically take the stance that you are the innocent victim of bullying.
If you can identify the causes of your professional dissatisfaction you can do something positive and constructive to make changes. If you are, at least partly, responsible for the problem because you have made mistakes, things will not improve unless and until you frankly acknowledge that fact to yourself and to those who have had to deal with the consequences of your mistakes.
If, after some honest soul-searching, you conclude that the problem does not lie with you, there are a number of possible ways forward. You could try having an open and honest discussion with the person causing the difficulty: often misunderstandings arise just because people do not communicate effectively what they want or how they are affected by something such as a work load which is far too heavy.
You may conclude, however, that a frank discussion with the person causing you the problem is impossible, probably for reasons of personality. Is there someone else in the firm to whom you can talk and who could help? If you conclude that the firm and you are just not suited to each other, you must think about a move – and well before the time when your frustrations are so great that the only move which you want to make is a move out of the profession itself.
If you find that your work is largely uncongenial but a move to another firm is premature, you may consider doing part-time pro bono work in an area of law which interests you. Most firms now encourage pro bono work by their staff. In doing pro bono work which stimulates you, you may gain sufficient satisfaction from your profession to tide you over until the time is right for you to move to another firm.
You’re going to be addressed by speakers who will be more specific than I have been about particular problems you face in the workplace, how they can impact on your personal life and happiness and what you can do about those problems. I don’t for a moment suggest that all that information is not very important. But at the same time I want to caution again against the attitude it’s so easy for all of us to fall into: “If I’m not happy, it must be someone’s fault. So … what are they doing about it?”
When it comes to balancing the demands of life – wherever those demands come from – in order to achieve happiness, I think George Bernard Shaw got it right when he said: “We have no more right to consume happiness without producing it than to consume wealth without producing it”.
May I suggest that when reflecting on what we hear during this forum about managing the work/life balance to achieve happiness, we think also about creating happiness around us rather than seeking that it be created for us. Creating it around us means being conscious of the needs of others – the need for a pleasant smile and a courteous word amongst those we work with and amongst those we share the other parts of our lives with; the need for support and encouragement amongst those we work with and amongst those we share the other parts of our lives with.
I may have given the impression of preaching a Sermon on the Mount as if, having achieved celestial wisdom myself, I am entitled to impart it to others. Of course, nothing could be further from the truth. Like all of us, whatever I have learnt in life I have learnt from my mistakes. I am still on a steep learning curve and, consequently, still making grievous mistakes, as my wife and children are careful to point out to me.
However, if there’s one thing I have learnt once and for all about how to balance your life, it’s this: you never get it perfect, but you’re dead if you stop trying.
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