Did you ever hit a major career goal, like making partner or landing a general counsel role, only to realize it wasn’t quite what you wanted after all? It’s a surprisingly common experience among senior lawyers, says psychotherapist Austin Dowling, though one that rarely gets discussed openly. Whether a symptom of mid-career burnout, genuine dissatisfaction, or something else, it’s worth understanding why your motivational machinery is out of sync.
Disillusioned Senior Lawyers: What Happened to Your Ambition?
Sometimes, the ambition that propelled you through the first half of your career takes a left turn somewhere along the way. This doesn’t mean ambition has deserted you. It often simply means that your ambition has evolved and now needs different nutrients.
The reason lies partly in how the brain handles goals.
Research suggests that anticipation of a reward is a stronger experience than the satisfaction derived from the reward itself. We all carry an internal motivation script that pushes us forward from one goal to the next, promising a glittering prize that never quite meets the experience we had anticipated. Feeling let down is a natural consequence of this script.
When the experience of achieving the goal doesn’t live up to the imagined outcome, the brain responds by reaching for the next goal. Consider it a psychological Ponzi scheme, a mental scam in which the brain uses the anticipation of your next goal to pay off the emotional debt of your current exhaustion.
Most of the time, this cycle of anticipation and dissatisfaction is useful.
It’s what keeps us moving, adapting, striving for the next thing rather than resting on the last one. But sometimes the treadmill slows or stops altogether.
The next goal fails to ignite anything, or generates a flat feeling of anticlimax or defeat. The partnership, leadership position or professional status you’ve spent years trying to achieve starts to feel strangely beside the point.
A client of mine, Alan (details changed to protect confidentiality), spent several intense years as an in-house lawyer working toward one title: Deputy General Counsel. When the appointment was announced, he waited for relief and found almost nothing. He described it as one of the flattest days of his career. He found himself exposed to politics as never before, and his voice was no more influential than it had been. Much of the drive, in other words, runs on anticipation, and when anticipation fades, the question becomes what was actually driving you all along.
When the Motivational Machinery Stops Working
This loss of motivation can be particularly disconcerting for lawyers. After all, the sequential pursuit of well-defined career goals is a hallmark of the profession. Work hard, achieve something, feel good about it, find the next challenge. Repeat. Until one day you don’t particularly want the next challenge. We tend to interpret this as a problem. But it doesn’t always mean something has gone wrong. Sometimes the motivational machinery that created your success simply reaches the limits of what it can do for you.
We talk endlessly about how to become successful and remarkably little about what happens psychologically once you are. At 25, success may mean proving yourself as a young lawyer at a firm or government agency, or even your own small practice. At 35, it may mean advancement to partnership, more money, expertise or recognition. By mid-career, you may have achieved some or all of those things. And then what?
This is where people can get blindsided.
5 Things to Understand About Your Motivation
The temptation is to manufacture another goal: a lateral move, an in-house role, another qualification, a dramatic career pivot. Sometimes that’s exactly what’s needed. But it is worth considering another possibility. Perhaps you would be better served understanding why the old drives no longer pay off, and what your ambition genuinely needs, before deciding on your next goal.
Here are five ways to start.
1. Understand the personality of your ambition.
Like any part of your personality, ambition has its own character. For some of us, it is fueled by curiosity: exploring a talent, a need for mental stimulation, or a need to keep learning and growing. For others, particularly where material wealth matters a great deal, the drive is to outrun something, such as a difficult early life or chronic neglect, or to attain an external status that can bolster, or in some cases substitute for, self-esteem. Usually, ambition is a blend of several of these factors. In American Psychologist, E. Tory Higgins describes two distinct orientations: promotion, a concern with growth and accomplishment, and prevention, a concern with safety and avoiding loss.
Understanding what is in the mix will help identify the fuel your ambition needs to keep moving forward.
2. Figure out what goals would deeply energize you.
Spend time reflecting, journaling or talking with a trusted friend about which goals would energize you now. This can begin as a thought experiment. You are not planning a career pivot yet. You are starting a gap analysis between the life you are living and your deeper unconscious parts.
A good starting point is to identify and celebrate the goals you have already achieved, and to consider how you have changed since achieving them. In their research on “effective forecasting,” psychologists Timothy Wilson and Daniel Gilbert found that people overestimate how intensely and how long future events will move them. So, test the impact you imagined against what you really feel. Also, notice whether a goal draws on your own interests or on external markers such as wealth, image and status. Research links weighting external markers more heavily than personal markers such as personal growth, close relationships and contribution to dissatisfaction and lower wellbeing.
3. Maturity isn’t certainty. Get comfortable with conflicting truths.
You can appreciate your achievements and feel dissatisfied at the same time. You can enjoy your career and wonder whether you still want it. You can be genuinely skilled and still feel like a fraud some days. Psychological maturity isn’t reaching certainty. It’s getting more comfortable without it. Sometimes sitting with the question for a while is more useful than manufacturing an answer.
4. Let your professional self embrace honesty, at least with yourself.
Many senior lawyers spend decades becoming successful, only to realize they have become highly skilled at being the version of themselves everyone else needed. For the firm, for your family.
Authenticity here doesn’t mean saying whatever comes to mind. The managing partner would rightly object. It’s the discipline of making decisions gradually more consistent with your actual values, even when that’s not universally popular.
You may simply be becoming more particular about your ambitions.
5. Say it out loud to someone.
One of the odd features of success is that people assume the person who looks strongest needs the least support. Often it’s nearly the opposite. Having somewhere to untangle what motivates you, what derails you — and which strengths served you brilliantly at one stage but no longer fit — matters more as the stakes get higher, not less. Whether it is a trusted friend, mentor, therapist, your bar association’s Lawyer Assistance Program, or even a journal.
The point isn’t necessarily to come away with a five-year plan. The task is to figure out what nutrients your sense of ambition is lacking.
Disillusionment Isn’t Evidence You’ve Chosen the Wrong Path
We tend to treat the feeling of disillusionment as something to eliminate, when it’s usually worth treating it as critical information. The real challenge of success may not be achieving it; it’s allowing yourself to keep redefining what it means, knowing when to course correct, and being open to exploring what comes next.
That offers a considerably better ROI than updating your LinkedIn profile.
Image © iStockPhoto.com.
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