Recently, Carla, my partner in all things the Thriving Lawyer, attended the Uplift conference in New York, hosted by BetterUp. The conference focused on the intersection of AI and human potential. This event gathered leaders and experts to discuss the future of work. 

In our most recent podcast episode we explore some of the key insights, and how they might be relevant to the legal profession.  

In this blog, we'll just focus on one aspect - human performance and wellbeing as business imperatives.  

Recent data highlights an "energy gap" affecting performance across industries.  Indeed, according to Betterup, performance has decreased 6% since 2019.  

Human performance is going down. It's not because people aren't as skilled or smart. People aren't underperforming because they don't know what to do. They underperforming because they're depleted.

And the three core drivers for human performance, they fuel human performance. According to Alexi Robichaux (CEO, Betterup) the key drivers of performance are motivation, optimism, and a sense of agency, and they're all going down. 

This resonates with Carla's work with her coaching clients.  She works with many brilliant and intelligent people.  Many have lost their spark.  She thinks that they have lost their ability to focus, to reflect, to recover and even create a little space in the day to make sense of what is going on for them internally.  

The Betterup research shows that key issues that affect performance are context switching, overload and pressure always to be 'switched on'.  All of these really drain and cognitive and emotional resources.   

People are just pushing harder than ever, but we doubt like really intentionally pausing and with so much information, they lose clarity, creativity, and even a sense of purpose.

Carla's insights from the conference really resonate with my experience as a lawyer in the Australian context.  Whilst the 6% figure is not lawyer nor Australia specific, the general themes above seem on point.  

The pressures of our profession can be severe, and there can be a lot of constant context switching.  Plus lawyers are trained for their pessimism, so clearly that has an impact on our levels of optimism.  Also, depending on the nature of your work and your seniority, you might not have a lot of agency over what work you do, how much of it you do and the timeframes within which you do it.  

At the thriving lawyer, we've been talking about a wellbeing crisis in law.  Whilst there has definitely been culture change in pockets of the legal profession in recent years, expectations of lawyers - for example around work hours - have been unrealistic for a long time.  

Other factors are now at play to, including the rapid pace of technological innovation, particularly in the space of AI.   

To learn more, and explore many more insights, listen to the podcast above!