In the final session of Platforum9’s “Peak Performance Lawyer” series, Patrick Zamorski explored the often-overlooked dimension of spiritual energy – a crucial but frequently misunderstood component of sustainable high achievement in the legal profession. Drawing on 25 years of experience coaching and training lawyers, including 15 years as Europe Director of Talent at Dentons, Zamorski offered valuable insights into how connecting with deeper meaning and purpose can transform professional performance and satisfaction.
Beyond High Performance: The Peak Performance Model
Zamorski began by distinguishing between high performance and peak performance. While high performance focuses on maximising output in the short term, peak performance represents “the ability to perform at your best for sustainable longer periods of time.” This sustainability requires balance across four essential dimensions: physical, emotional, mental, and spiritual energy.
In previous sessions, the series explored the first three dimensions. The final component – spiritual energy – often triggers hesitation among legal professionals due to misunderstandings about what it entails.
“Let me define spiritual energy,” Zamorski clarified. “It’s the energy we derive from living and working in alignment with our values and perhaps a sense of purpose beyond ourselves. This is not religion. It’s essentially about purpose, meaning, making sense of what we do, and ensuring it aligns with our values.”
The Power of Purpose
Research consistently demonstrates that connecting with purpose dramatically affects engagement, fulfilment, and ultimately performance. When professionals lack this connection to deeper meaning, disengagement and motivation issues often follow.
“In the workplace, if we don’t feel connection to higher purpose, we simply can’t fully connect and engage,” Zamorski explained. “One of the reasons why we have a lot of turnover is that people leave places if they don’t feel this connection.”
To help lawyers identify their deeper purposes, Zamorski recommends the “three whys” approach. “Usually it takes at least two or three whys,” he noted. “The first ‘why’ usually uncovers just the superficial layer. But if you ask this question at least three times, you can get to the roots.”
Through this process, many lawyers reconnect with foundational motivations that initially drew them to the profession, such as helping society or making a difference in people’s lives. For others, different motivations emerge – and Zamorski emphasises there is no “wrong why” as long as you genuinely understand its importance to you.
The Ikigai Model: Finding Your Intersection
For those seeking practical frameworks to explore purpose, Zamorski recommends the Japanese Ikigai model, which asks four essential questions:
- What do you love doing?
- What are you good at?
- What does the world need?
- What can you be paid for?
“If you find the thing that you’re good at, that you love, that the world needs, and you can be paid for – if you tick all these four boxes and find that one thing that covers these four areas – this is what helps people find that purpose or goal in life,” Zamorski explained.
This exercise often yields profound insights when approached thoughtfully. The intersection of these four elements represents a sweet spot where professional satisfaction and peak performance become sustainable.
From Individual to Team Values
While personal values and purpose form the foundation of spiritual energy, extending this understanding to team dynamics can transform organisational culture. Zamorski described a recent exercise with a newly formed team where members individually identified their top five non-negotiable values before sharing them collectively.
“We collected the top five values of everyone in the team, and guess what? They weren’t so different,” he observed. “Just by having this conversation about ‘Why was it important for you? Why is it important for me?’ you can really transform the energy in the team.”
These conversations, though uncommon in the fast-paced legal environment dominated by billable hours and client demands, create profound connections that typical team-building activities cannot match. Rather than focusing merely on how people work together, they address why the work matters in the first place.
The Balcony and Dance Floor Perspective
Another powerful tool Zamorski recommended is the “balcony and dance floor” metaphor from Heifetz and Linsky’s Adaptive Leadership Model. This mental exercise encourages lawyers to temporarily step away from immediate tasks (the dance floor) to gain perspective from a metaphorical balcony.
“From the balcony, you can see things differently – this is essentially taking a step back and looking at what’s going on,” Zamorski explained. “Just by doing this mental exercise of going to the balcony and observing what’s going on with you and with people around you, you can really help answer that question: What is important to me? Is this giving me joy and energy? Am I engaged?”
This perspective shift allows professionals to reconnect with their purposes and values when daily pressures threaten to disconnect them from deeper meaning. It transforms abstract questions into practical reflections: “Am I in the right place? Is this giving me energy or taking energy away from me?”
Breaking the Mental-Only Focus
A significant challenge for lawyers is breaking free from an exclusively mental focus. “This is what we usually do as lawyers,” Zamorski noted. “We stay in the mental, the cognitive, our analytical brain. But the truth is, if you want to achieve sustainable peak performance, it has to be all four elements together and in equal share.”
The consequences of ignoring the other dimensions – particularly spiritual energy – can be severe. “I’ve seen so many incredible human beings who lost themselves simply because they were just pushing, pushing, pushing – running, running, running,” Zamorski reflected. “The burnout, different addictions and issues and stress – I’ve seen so many tragic stories.”
The Path to Sustainable Peak Performance
Zamorski offered several practical recommendations for lawyers seeking to enhance their spiritual energy:
- Schedule regular reflection – Create sacred moments to slow down and reconnect with your deeper purpose
- Apply the three whys – Repeatedly ask yourself why you do what you do until you reach meaningful insights
- Explore the Ikigai model – Identify where your passions, talents, market needs, and compensation opportunities intersect
- Share values with your team – Have conversations about what matters most to create deeper connections
- Practice the balcony perspective – Regularly step back from daily tasks to assess alignment with your values and purpose
Conclusion: Starting with Why
The legal profession’s intense focus on “what” we do and “how” we do it often overshadows the crucial question of “why.” Yet according to Zamorski, this fundamental question holds the key to sustainable excellence: “We tend to focus and almost master the what and the how, but peak performance begins when you reconnect with the why. This is where it all starts.”
By reconnecting with purpose and aligning work with values, lawyers can transform their relationship with their profession. Rather than experiencing work as a draining endeavour that requires recovery, it becomes a source of energy and fulfilment in itself – the essence of truly sustainable peak performance.
For those seeking to thrive rather than merely survive in law, Zamorski’s parting advice offers a compelling starting point: “Go to the balcony for a moment, disconnect from the noise, and ask yourself: Why do I do what I do?”
