Psychotherapist Austin Dowling, writing for Attorney at Work, takes on something senior lawyers rarely admit: you hit the big goal and feel flat. His example is an in-house lawyer who spent years chasing the Deputy General Counsel title, got it, and found more politics and no more influence. Dowling says that is not failure. Ambition evolves and needs different fuel.
His advice is not to quit tomorrow. Work out what drives your ambition (curiosity, status, security), test whether a goal is yours or someone else’s scoreboard, and say it out loud to someone you trust. Worth a read if you are eyeing the general counsel or chief legal officer seat. If it feels more like exhaustion, our lawyer burnout guide can help, and our study of lawyers quitting over their health shows how common that is. If the answer is a new seat after all, there are Deputy GC jobs posted daily.
Dowling has a name for the loop: “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.”
Read: What to Do When Ambition Stops Working at Attorney at Work