The client in front of me hasn’t made a series of bad decisions. IN FACT, they actually made a series of entirely sensible ones.

Studied something strong, joined the right firm, progressed on the expected track.

Somewhere in that sequence, they arrived somewhere they didn’t consciously choose.

I call this Directional Drift.

It’s distinct from burnout or dissatisfaction with a role. It’s the growing awareness that you’ve been executing well on a direction you set once a decade ago and forgot to stop ‘updating’.

The careers most vulnerable to it are the ones with pipelines and structured progress steps – law, medicine, finance, consulting.

The track is clear, the next step is always obvious, and getting to it feels like progress.

That feeling of progress is part of what makes it easy to miss. When each step is a visible sign of capability, the question of whether it’s the right direction rarely surfaces.

Why would it? Nothing is wrong. Things are, by most external measures, going well.

I had a client who spent 11 years on a path that had started in school and never really been examined. She’d studied law because it was the natural next step. She’d made Partner because that was the goal.

When we met, she was excellent at her job but genuinely uncertain what she was still doing it for.

What I’ve observed is that the question (Is this path still mine?) just gets louder with each passing year.

The most common level of professionals that come through my practice are mid-to-senior people who did everything right and are now in a position to ask a question they’ve been too busy, or too sensible, to ask before.

Not deciding is still a choice.

But the difference between continuing a path and consciously choosing it is significant – it affects subsequent quality of work, quality of presence, and eventually, quality of life.

You can be very good at something that is slowly taking you away from where you actually want to be.

This is also what I call the competence trap: When you become so good at something that the system around you (organisations, clients, teams, social scripts about what success looks like) stops questioning whether that thing is still the right thing.

The question of whether you’re moving in the right direction doesn’t come up, because from the outside, you obviously are.

The insidious thing is that the better you are at it, the harder it becomes to recognise that misalignment, because admitting it feels like ingratitude – toward the opportunities, toward the people who invested in you, toward the version of yourself that worked hard to get here.

The version where the reward system itself is what pulls you further from your own direction.

In fact, directional drift is usually a downstream ‘cost’ of identity drift.

In high-functioning individuals, it sometimes surfaces with success.

You perform well, you get promoted, you become the person people rely on for this particular thing.

And somewhere in that process, the thing you’re good at starts to feel like who you are.

Identity drift happens when the version where the reward system itself is what pulls you further from your own direction because you stopped checking in if what you wanted before is still what you want now and going forward.

Before your next career transition, ask yourself: Am I choosing my next step intentionally, or am I just following the path of least resistance?

The first step is usually just naming what’s been happening. That alone tends to shift something.