There are a few reasons. For one, you can be really smart and lack emotional awareness. If you don't have that as a regular practice, then you only become aware of your emotions when you feel truly awful.

Second, many people recognize that they are struggling and assume that's exactly how it should be. There's an idea that to have a great career, you have to suffer.

It's helpful to acknowledge that people are partly shaped by learned behavior and that we may have acquired our sense of what work should look like from multiple places, inside and outside the workplace. I often talk about questioning the stories we believe about ourselves and our lives. I tell people, "Our brain is not a reporter—it's an editorial writer." It chooses specific data points, usually slanted toward past experiences based on what we've learned. And those stories become our identity. I have talked about the skill of editing our thoughts and the stories that we tell ourselves. I coach people to challenge their assumptions using two questions: "Is it true?" and "Is it helpful?" This can be hard, especially for high achievers who genuinely believe that suffering is a part of success. On the second question, I could have asked myself if suffering helped me be my best, and the answer would have been no. When I struggle, I am less effective at what I do.

Awareness is not the same thing as implementation. Many people know that boundaries are essential and that we can't be on 24/7. But talking about what that means in practice often doesn't happen. One of the giant things that causes stress and burnout is not knowing how to handle team communications and requests when expectations are unclear. For example, if a leader emails someone on the weekend, the recipient might feel they should not respond to "set boundaries," but they aren't sure because there's never been an explicit discussion of the boundaries. The other thing I see a lot is incorrectly assuming that boundaries mean that people can never respond to an email after 5:00 p.m., on the weekend, etc. That is not realistic in a service business. Again, it's about having a conversation and setting clear, context-specific expectations. To be clear, there is a team responsibility and a leader responsibility for setting boundaries. There's also individual responsibility, by which I mean your boss can't get inside your head to understand what you need when you are not working. And you also can't know what's behind a boss's deadline or request unless you ask.

To be sure, law firms are client-driven. We think of these organizations as one law firm, but what determines your work style and how you feel is your team and your client, which change over time. So that means there must be a lot more clarity and communication about expectations, and they need to happen at the team and client level. The other thing is the work and pace can be so intense that it's easy to lose sight of purpose. When we feel a sense of purpose, we're better able to manage stress, we have more energy, we are more resilient and we make better decisions. So it's important to elevate above the work of the moment and ask yourself: How does this help our client? What does it help them do? When we feel we are working for a higher purpose, we feel good. And that is also how we bring our best.