ABOUT ME
I’ve had a passion for psychology since early childhood but instead of heading to university after high school, I became a paralegal in the early 1980s. About 15 years later, I enrolled in university as a mature student and began my journey to becoming a Business Psychologist.
Understanding people is important for any organization in any profession. But in the business of law, the nature of the working environment is particularly unique. Unfortunately, high-pressured, competitive, and adversarial workplaces are not that great for creating consistent productivity, reliable performance and increasing profits.
Time and again when I worked in firms in Canada and the UK, I saw lawyers run themselves into the ground trying to keep up. At the very least, their work output suffered and their relationships with peers, staff, and even clients were not always that great (putting it mildly!).
In university, I learned the many ways business psychology is used to maximize the human resources of any business. But I also saw how little of that knowledge is available to the legal profession even though it is obviously needed. The mental health statistics coming from legal practices worldwide is itself depressing, yet there are a variety skills, tools, and techniques that proactively curve those statistics downwards.
In fact, one of the first is to refocus attention away from the term “mental health”. It is a heavily stigmatized concept and yet is simply an objective, diagnostic measure that should only be used by trained medical and psychological professionals.
More correctly, we need to focus on mental wellbeing, which is our subjective state of mind and the actions we take to support that state. Emphasizing mental wellbeing allows people to empower themselves with self-awareness that helps them be happy and engaged in their professional, personal, and social life.
Mental wealth occurs when we add effective goal achievement skills to mental wellbeing so people confidently set and achieve their goals, creating success for themselves and their firm.
Using systems like my flagship program, The Morris Code™, over 3 million people worldwide have learned how to build mental wealth and become top performers.