“This article was first published in the ABA Law Practice Division Webzine on July 15, 2024”.

Ask any lawyer what holds them back from certain of their career goals and successes and odds are their answer will have something to do with change. Specifically, their fears around the changes they would have to weather and deal with to get to those goals and successes. These fears and changes feel very real to us when we are faced with them.

In this article we will explore, and provide tools for, how your emotional intelligence is your biggest tool to managing changes, specifically dealing well with transitions in your legal career, practice and personal life as a human.

The Problem: What’s So Scary?

Emotional Intelligence (EI) refers to a distinct combination of emotional and social skills and competencies that influence our overall capability to cope effectively with the demands and pressures of work and life. In other words, how do you deal with stress, life’s obstacles, deadlines, decision-making, problem-solving, time management, reading the room and any other myriad life issues that have the potential to relate to, and influence, your success.

While your Intelligence Quotient (IQ) piques at 17 years of age, your EI grows as you age. There is no correlation between your IQ and EI. In other words, just because your IQ is high doesn’t guarantee your EI is as high, and vice versa.

EI is estimated to account for up to 45% of people’s success in life. When looking at successful leaders and lawyers globally, you’ll find they have in common extremely high EI. They don’t always show up as managing partners or CEOs. High EI leaders show up as leaders regardless of their positions.

In assessing EI in lawyers and other professionals, there are many factors to use. All these factors somehow have as the underlying premise, emotions.

Most of us tend to turn to the emotion of anger when we are frustrated by our practice. Yet, when there is anger, the real underlying emotion is generally fear.

Change brings on fear. It’s not just that you fear the actual event that brings on fear of change, though. For example, if you were offered a new office suite for free or a new, free, car, odds are you wouldn’t necessarily lead with a feeling of fear in getting a new office or car. You may be excited, happy or curious more than fearful.

What really drives this fear of change is fear of the unknown that an event triggers. After all, if there is a new event/undertaking in your life and practice, how can you predict the outcome and know what to expect? Often, you can’t. Thus, specifically, we fear the discomfort of having to sit with, and be around, ambiguity of an event that creates change. Ambiguity signals that we can’t be in control of the outcome. Lawyers run successful practices based on being in control of the outcomes as much as possible to serve clients well. No wonder changes and transitions induce fear.

According to Merriam-Webster dictionary, the word ambiguity is defined as “unclear or able to be understood in multiple ways.”

When you are facing any transitions in your career, or even personal life, such as growing the business by hiring more people, firing someone, changing firms, or even changing practice areas, there are a lot of unknowns, events, or variables that accompany the cycle of changes leading to transitions. These unknowns equate to unanswered questions, lack of clarity and many ways that things could turn out.

The bottom line is not knowing the final outcome feels fearful. You may feel you can’t control the outcome and that often produces anxiety and fear. Or maybe you really want a particular outcome and you fear the worst.

For example, take one of my clients. He worked for a particular firm in a particular practice area for fifteen years. For many reasons, including quality of life, he decided to change firms. This also meant moving himself and his family to a new city. This transition, while well-thought out by my client, still had many different possible outcomes. Yes, the move would happen. How would he like the new firm? How would he and his family like the new city? Would his practice thrive? Would the kids like their new school? The results could go infinite ways.

The Solution: Befriending Ambiguity

Emotionally intelligent, successful professionals embrace ambiguity and flow with life. Getting comfortable with ambiguity will allow you to weather any changes and transitions that help you grow your practice and career. As with anything in life, what you resist, persists. It’s not about you throwing your arms up in the air and resigning yourself to the unknown. It’s just the opposite, in fact. It’s about staying curious about the ambiguity and normalizing it for yourself.
Here are three tips on how to embrace ambiguity:

1. What’s the worst that can happen? Stop and consider, what really is the worst that can happen because of a change you are reckoning with? Besides the unknown and the discomfort of not feeling 100% in control, what really is the very worst that could happen if you ride it all out without knowing every variable along the way? If you do this exercise in earnest, you will likely come to see that the worst is something much smaller and more manageable than you fear.

2. What’s possible? A benefit of embracing ambiguity is you will be able to see the upshot. There’s a reason you decided to seek a change that involves transitions in your practice.–likely many reasons, in fact. Maybe you were just sick and tired of feeling “stuck” or maybe you just couldn’t take another day of the same old process or feeling. Stop and make a list of all the possibilities that can make your career more successful, and your life easier, too, by not resisting the change. List everything, even if it seems far-fetched and like a pipedream. Spending a few minutes making this list will allow you to see things from a new, more positive perspective. This could very well motivate you to innovate somehow in your practice and embrace the change and transitions.

3. What’s Your Advice? As counselors in law, we are supposed to be good at guiding our clients and advising them on the best legal strategies. Stop and consider, if you were counseling your own client on some version of this change and transition as it applied to them, what would you say? The perspective you choose to share with your clients, likely can apply to you just as well. Doing so will trigger a very common factor we measure to see how high someone’s EI is: empathy. Can you put yourself in another’s shoes and see another’s point of view? Can you then problem-solve and make sound decisions using emotions?

In conclusion, the world is full of ambiguity. Lawyers who are flexible, courageous and curious not only accept ambiguity as part of their practice growth and success, but they embrace this ambiguity. Doing so allows you to be able to emotionally overcome your fears surrounding changes that bring forth transitions.