Why Your 2026 Career Security Depends on Your December Energy Audit
As the legal market approaches the end of 2025, a pervasive, quiet anxiety has taken hold. Between the “spreadsheet economics” of law firm layoffs and the looming shadow of 2026, many senior professionals are responding with a predictable, yet dangerous, reflex.
They are working harder.
They are staying later, billing more, and saying “yes” to every institutional demand. They believe that by becoming the most responsive person in the room, they are buying security.
They are wrong.
In my thirty-plus years in this profession, I have observed this “reactive librarian mode” fail time and again. Hard work is a commodity, but strategic energy is a reserve. When you respond to uncertainty by depleting your reserves, you aren’t building security. You are liquidating it.
The Holmes Principle. Sherlock Holmes understood that the mind is like a small empty attic. You have to choose which furniture to put in it. Most lawyers allow their “attics” to be cluttered with the mental RAM of unfinished loops and institutional noise.
You will not find genuine career security in your firm’s directory. You’ll find it on your personal balance sheet and in your portable assets. This December, while the rest of the market is spiraling into year-end anxiety, I am advocating for a different approach: The Strategic Energy Audit.
The Shift from Librarian to Architect. The core of this issue is a shift in physics. Most legal professionals act as high-value responders whose expertise is tacit and locked inside their heads. They are reactive librarians. But when the institution shifts, that value isn’t portable. To be secure, you must become an “knowledge and innovation architect.” You must convert your knowledge into documented, portable assets: frameworks, methodologies, and signals that you own regardless of your institutional address.
In the latest issue of my monthly Substack newsletter, Personal Strategy Compass, I break down the “Portable Asset Inventory” and provide the specific protocols for what I call the Strategic Release. We look at how to audit your commitments, definitively abandon the “librarianship” that is draining you as you read this, and reclaim the vitality necessary to build assets that compound.
The game is afoot, but you cannot play it well if you are operating from depletion. It’s time to stop hiring your anxiety to do the work of strategy.
Read the limited free version at https://dennis538.substack.com/p/personal-strategy-compass-december-e81
[Originally posted on DennisKennedy.Blog (https://www.denniskennedy.com/blog/)]
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