Years ago my sister and her family lived in Brunei on the island of Borneo. One summer I was visiting on holiday with my parents and we all decided one weekend to go to Labuan, a little archipelago in the South China Sea, 95 sq km, fifteen kilometres from the Brunei mainland.
We flew there in one of those tiny de Havilland DHC-6 Twin Otter propeller planes, the noisy kind where you need headsets and spend the whole journey praying and willing the plane to stay in the air.
At some point we flew into dense cloud, and within seconds there was nothing outside the window except white. Nothing at all.
No sea, no sky, nothing to fix on. I couldn't tell if we were level, climbing or banking. My body kept offering opinions, a tilt here, a correction there, but there was nothing outside the window to check any of it against.
It was one of the strangest and scariest sensations I can remember, that complete loss of up and down. It wouldn’t have been so bad in a large commercial plane, but this was a real “hedge hopper” and the clouds were buffeting it about like a toy on a string.
The pilots weren't looking out of the window trying to work it out though, like we were. They weren’t worrying either, they were calm. They knew exactly where they were going.
They had instruments.
When your reference points disappear
I often think about that flight when I'm talking to senior lawyers, and I thought about it again recently with a client I'll call Ellen.
While Ellen was away on maternity leave after the birth of her first baby, the partner and head of department she'd worked really closely with for years left the firm. He wasn’t just someone who allocated her work. He was someone who knew her, who understood the pressure she was carrying and who'd become a genuine mentor to her.
Before her maternity leave, there’d been a kind of constant calibration. Ellen could say what was on her plate, or on her mind, and hear back more or less, “that sounds like enough, take something off”, "you can't do it all."
When she returned the firm looked the same. Same desk, same title, same corridors, same team.
But the conditions had changed completely.
There were different expectations, more emphasis on hours, inherited work and a new relationship to build from scratch with a new HoD. Ellen told me she sometimes didn't know whether she was coming or going.
And she was exhausted. It wasn't just her day to day, she was also concerned about her future. The one person who she could talk to and who was validating what was next for her, had left.
It was the same aircraft. The conditions had changed.
Losing the horizon
This is what happens when you fly into clouds and lose the horizon. When that stability and spatial awareness goes, things that used to feel obvious suddenly don’t. You start questioning decisions you wouldn’t normally think twice about:
"Am I doing enough?" "Where do I actually stand?" "Does anyone here still see me as partnership material?"
And the one Ellen found hardest of all: "when can I actually stop? there's no one there to tell me I've done enough."
She had always relied on the partner to tell her that. And if she couldn't read whether she was doing enough at work, she couldn't work out when she was allowed to close her laptop and be properly present at home.
That ambiguity followed her through her own front door every evening until we started talking.
Rationally, Ellen knew she had strong experience, good feedback, savings and recruiters already circling. She told me quite plainly that she felt like she was in survival mode anyway. The facts and her feelings were telling her two completely different things.
That gap is exactly what happens when you lose your reference points and start reading feelings and sensations as evidence:
“I feel less confident, so perhaps I've lost my edge.”
“I don't know where I stand, so perhaps I'm falling behind.”
None of that is actually information.
It's disorientation dressed up as insight.
Flying harder won't tell you where you're going
The instinctive response is to fly harder. Work later, take on the extra matter, say yes more, become more indispensable to the one relationship you've still got left.
It rarely helps though, because effort doesn't tell you your heading. You can bill another hundred hours and still have no idea whether the partnership committee sees you as credible.
More engine thrust doesn't give you direction.
What does help is having your own reference points, so your sense of progress does not depend on one person being in the room to confirm it. Especially when that person is no longer there.
What does good look like for you over the next six months, in your own terms?
What evidence tells you you're moving rather than stalling?
Who sees your judgement, rather than just your output, and would speak for you when you're not in the room?
The aim is to become less dependent on any single person to tell you where you stand.
Get a reading before you change course
If you recognise that feeling of losing the horizon, the first move doesn't need to be a dramatic one. Handing in your notice, deciding partnership was never really for you, or concluding that your prospects have disappeared because the person who advocated for you has gone can all wait.
First, get an honest reading of where you actually are, especially if partnership is on your horizon.
That’s one of the reasons I created the Partnership Readiness Snapshot. It gives you a clear 3-minute read across the areas that matter most as partnership comes into view, so you have something more reliable to work from than how things happen to feel right now.
There will be points in a long career when the horizon disappears.
You don't need clear skies. You need to know how to fly when you can't see them.
One way we can work together
When the reference points you used to rely on have shifted, it can be surprisingly hard to tell whether the problem is the role, the firm, your workload, your confidence, or simply the fact that you no longer have a clear read on where you stand.
A private 30-minute Clarity Call gives you space to get that reading.
Bring the situation exactly as it is. We’ll look at what has changed, what the evidence is actually telling you, and what deserves your attention first.
You’ll leave with a clearer sense of where you are and what to do next.
Amanda
I’m Amanda Davies, an executive coach for senior lawyers and a UK-qualified solicitor. I’ve spent more than 25 years in and around the legal profession, and Practising Leadership grows out of that experience. I write about the parts of a legal career that are easy to overlook while the work is getting done: leadership, judgement, relationships, ambition, sustainability and what comes next.