Level Bust or Transition: Knowing When to Hold On and When to Let Go

When you find yourself feeling stuck, it is often very hard to know when to stay in a situation or when to move on. This article explores how people can make wiser decisions during periods of transition, whether in careers, relationships, or personal life. I examine how to distinguish moments that may call for persistence from those that require disengagement or redirection. Using concepts such as situational awareness, cascading consequences, and psychological recovery mechanisms, I attempt to outline a discipline of self-assessment informed by risk-management principles and strategic agency to guide good thinking and decision-making and avoid opportunity cost throughout your life. We all at times get to know all too well how difficult it is to discern when to hold on to a job, relationship, or situation and when it may be a good idea to change course, and how this is essential for optimizing long-term outcomes.

A Model for Reaching a Decision

Aviation is governed by structure, predictability, and meticulous planning. A flight plan charts everything out in clear detail and sequence, such as altitudes, waypoints, estimated times, weather charts, all very precise and clearly laid out. Deviating from an assigned altitude, even slightly, results in what we call a “level bust,” a serious error that immediately triggers investigations and remedial training.

Life, by contrast, is much more messy and unpredictable. We don't have an ATC tower giving vectors, no flight plan updating us by dispatch, no simulator to rehearse crises before they appear, no weather map to help you confront people’s different moods or interpersonal difficulties that come out of the blue and seem to spiral out of one’s control despite being the same person and using the same set of personal skills and tools all along. One’s career may not be moving as it should, and you may not know why. Is it me, is it them, is it fate? Your mind may wander, and many persist in situations long after the evidence suggests they shouldn’t. Life happens and situations arise, sometimes gradually, occasionally rapidly or unpredictably. In fact, as I write these very words, I had to stop because of a temblor or earthquake tremor, right here and now in Managua, the whole place shook all of a sudden. Life is, in short, not always within our control. There are forces and aspects of nature that we must adapt to, and in an ever-changing world this skill is going to be exponentially more important as technology goes through another revolution. I’m not just talking about whether to upskill, change lanes, or change approach—it’s more about knowing when it’s time to do so, and what decision process may help you orient yourself. Many remain in jobs that no longer align with their capabilities or values due to a changing landscape or shifting industries; others tolerate relationships that have ceased to function, or cling to identities that have quietly expired. Things change, and you must know whether to hold on or let go.

How do we discern whether a situation demands perseverance or transition? Here I explore that question by teasing out some structural parallels between aviation and the far messier domain of human decision-making and, well, life in general.

Aviation’s Precision Versus Life’s Variability

In aviation, transitions, takeoff to climb, climb to cruise, cruise to descent, are supported by precision instruments, reliable information and data, all kinds of hardware and software tools, seemingly endless procedures, and system redundancies that all but eliminate guesswork. It’s all in the SOPs. A pilot can predict an arrival time on the other side of the world with surprising accuracy, often within a minute or even seconds on journeys of thousands of kilometers. There is a high degree of certainty, and contingency planning for any emergency.

Life is full of moving parts, messy interpersonal interactions, dates that go spectacularly well or woefully mismatched. People often begin careers or relationships under the assumption that progress is linear, and that like the fairytales it will be “happily ever after.” But the credits on those Disney movies forget to inform you that afterwards the reality of life sets in over time. Life ain’t no walk in the park, and many discover it slowly or abruptly. We should manage our expectations around it, and yes, dream, but keep it real when it’s required. We all face external forces beyond our control, economic shifts, organizational politics, interpersonal dynamics. People and relationships shift and change, and things can get literally out of your hands despite your best intentions. There are times when things will go smoothly and others when it all goes to hell. Efforts that once led to success may suddenly yield diminishing returns. This is the psychological equivalent of entering a flat spin; while your effort and inputs remain the same, the outputs change unpredictably, sometimes erratically, leaving you disoriented and confused. That’s life in the big city, it happens, so let’s deal with it.

Level busts in life can occur as we lose self-awareness and consequently situational awareness. It’s a gradual or in some cases rapid accumulation of unnoticed deviations, small compromises, ignored discomforts, repeated justifications, and rationalizing the unfair behavior of a partner, manager, or leader in your life that gradually shift you away from your intended trajectory. This leads to a loss of personal integrity and personal sovereignty over your daily life. It’s like the horses suddenly got out of the barn while you were asleep. As in flight, small vector corrections, course corrections, if you will, early on prevent large deviations later. Timely adjustments in life also prevent cascading consequences that build up over time. Suppressed emotions, never pushing back, and letting things slide too often can eventually result in an explosion. These consequences may unfold in layers: immediate effects, secondary impacts on health or relationships, and long-term opportunity costs that may not surface for years, first order, second order, and in systems dynamics, third-order unintended effects.

Identifying Disorientation and The Personal Level Bust

Your own emotional and sympathetic nervous system is a bit like those fly-by-wire and avionics systems. The warning signs show up in your body, in your system, as tension in the neck, hot flushes, mild to extreme anxiety, and they show up as chronic dissatisfaction, exhaustion disguised as commitment, or the quiet sense of going through the motions without forward movement. These are the soft signals from your own private avionics system indicating a personal level bust might be occurring. Listen to the signals, listen to the signs. When things do not go well for long periods of time, you may need to correct course or hit that contingency emergency plan and head for an alternate destination.

A stall, in personal terms, feels like constant effort without lift. A spiral appears as escalating unhappiness or conflict that gains momentum despite attempts to intervene. Discontent is something you should not allow to go so far that it becomes desperation and affects your mental health and wellbeing. These conditions almost always arise from overreliance on assumptions of stability, believing circumstances will eventually normalise without reflective adjustment. That is an external orientation that relies on other people to right the ship or for the universe to bring about the change you want and desire. But it can be like waiting for a train that is never coming.

Life in general lacks external controllers to provide course corrections. We ourselves must cultivate internal reference points and map our way forward. When you feel you need help, seek it; ask trusted and professional sources if necessary. Make sure to do your due diligence on this, and I mean that. There are too many vulnerable people who have sought help only to be thrown from the frying pan into the fire. It matters where you get help. Bad advice can be more damaging and destructive than no advice at all. Mentors can provide supplementary guidance, people whom you know are wise or are great coaches or guides, much like air traffic controllers can provide assistance, but they cannot substitute for personal situational awareness. Disorientation grows when individuals ignore early signs, allowing manageable issues to escalate into crises.

Recovery Mechanisms

In flying, stall recovery follows a counterintuitive sequence: decreasing control input, surrendering a degree of command, and allowing the aircraft’s aerodynamics to do the work. In many cases flight instructors will demonstrate this to the student by letting go of the controls entirely. In personal transitions, recovery may require something similar, stop trying too hard, know when it is time to release and let go, and stop white-knuckling it. It may be about getting out into nature and stepping back from the noise to understand the deeper patterns at play. I find that walking along beaches or lakes clears the mind wonderfully; for others, it’s parks and mountains that do the trick.

It all begins with introspection, not the abstract kind, but the grounded self-examination described by Carl Jung when he spoke of the “shadow.” Everyone carries internal material that shapes their decisions unconsciously, whether it is fears, overlooked traumas, or ingrained narratives that keep them tied to outdated roles. We keep hearing those disapproving voices that put us down or keep us in our place; it’s like an internal braking system that stops you from taking action. Confronting these elements can feel like the mythic battles we see in literature. I recall a movie from my childhood that addressed these issues. In The NeverEnding Story, Atreyu’s confrontation with the wolf embodies the inner struggle against self-deception and fear. Personal transitions often demand this same willingness to face what we would rather avoid. In order to get his imagination back, his hopes and dreams, he had to face his worst fears, his own shadow. We all may have to do this at some point in our lives to gain the insights that bring personal freedom and perhaps progress if we do it right.

Persistent tension, dread before work, or emotional fatigue are all your personal instrument indicators of misalignment, something is just off, something ain’t right. When your intuition consistently signals that a situation has run its course, it often reflects subconscious pattern recognition drawing on countless micro-observations. And you’d better listen, because it is you, your real self, your inner self - speaking to your conscious mind. For goodness’ sake, listen to it occasionally.

Beachball Syndrome

Holding on is valuable when it supports growth, but costly when it sustains stagnation. Letting go is wise when effort continually produces the opposite of the intended effect, and the more you try the worse it gets. I call it the beachball syndrome. It’s like when you were a kid at the beach and you wanted to grab the beach ball, the more you tried to grab it, the more it slipped from your fingers, spun, and drifted further out, until you found yourself in deeper water trying to stay afloat and being drawn out with the tide. It’s a metaphor for when trying too hard means you might just have to let the ball go with the tide before it takes you with it. If it’s meant for you, it will come back in with the next set of waves. The clincher is knowing the point at which you’re not giving up too soon versus when your effort becomes a diminishing return. If you are suddenly being ghosted by someone, and the more you reach out the colder the communication becomes, then it could be a case like that song by Gotye, “Now you’re just somebody that I used to know.” Again, know when to read a room and move on when it’s time. For many, this is when things reach a boiling point, a moment when one realizes, “Hey, enough is enough. I’m done with this.”

Establishing Personal Agency

“I have control.” - Pilot when taking command of the aircraft. 

In life, many people rarely make such declarations to themselves. Instead, they drift—allowing employers, partners, or circumstances to dictate their path. Permitting others to run your life may suit some, but it’s not for everyone. Delegating key decisions and personal autonomy in the name of we or us can bring comfort and stability; however, there is a thin line.

Establishing Your Boundaries

Establishing agency involves defining the conditions under which persistence makes sense and the signals that indicate misalignment. This means setting thresholds for dissatisfaction, identifying what meaningful progress looks like, and acknowledging when opportunities have plateaued. Just as pilots conduct regular system checks, individuals benefit from periodic line checks or line training to assess whether their current trajectory still aligns with their long-term direction. It’s called skill rot, or in general speech, use it or lose it. You might just be out of practice.

Differentiating between temporary challenges or problems and real systemic and structural problems is part of this discipline and requires some finesse. Temporary dissatisfaction may be quite normal, just a phase or a stage that will pass, and in these cases patience and continued effort are required. Structural misalignment, however, requires change. Reducing unnecessary dependencies, whether financial, emotional, or social, that have been leveraged against you and made you vulnerable is key. It will take time, but getting yourself into a personal position of strategic independence expands your maneuverability, much like an aircraft performs better when not overloaded. Reduce the burden, that’s what I am saying.

Honest self-diagnosis is indispensable here. You don’t want to run from one thing to another and become flaky either; many things require enduring perseverance and overcoming boredom. Even the most inspiring careers have their moments of tedium, such as hours in cruise on long-haul flights or, for actors, hours spent in trailers or in makeup for roles. When patterns repeat, constant conflict, repeated disappointment, chronically unmet expectations, it suggests internal variables are at play rather than something just passing through. Adversity not only exposes external conditions but also clarifies the quality of our relationships and the soundness of our assumptions. Some situations, and often crises, reveal who is who in your life and who you can really depend on. These are the people who truly love and care about you, not merely those who signal they do.

Managing Uncertainty

We tend to be deeply uncomfortable with uncertainty, often choosing familiarity over possibility, even when the familiar is corrosive and costing us greatly. Aviation’s risk-management discipline offers a useful structure: identify hazards, assess probabilities, and mitigate risks. Translating this to personal contexts means evaluating one’s temperament, resources, and leverage with the same clarity.

Personal change management, similar to corporate change management, may follow similar dynamics: understanding impacts, planning transitions, and adjusting your behavior. The aim is to position yourself in environments and situations where value is both given and received. I liken it to the bridge analogy in relationships: those meeting each other halfway, even if it varies from time to time, are in a healthy relationship. But when one partner has to constantly cross the entire bridge to reach the other, then there is a serious imbalance. It’s not what I would consider an equitable, fair relationship dynamic, and it needs to be addressed. There needs to be accountability here, or it’s time to cross the river at another point with someone else. Value asymmetry ultimately drains performance and purpose and kills relationships and communication.

Regaining your sense of agency, or basically your locus of control, means recognising that prolonged discomfort isn’t inevitable; it’s information. Micro-decisions, small course corrections, shape long-term trajectories far more than dramatic gestures. That’s how our beautiful aircraft still reach their destinations despite being buffeted by crosswinds and storms and clouds along the way. Our own lives, and the personal lives of professional aviators -are very similar. It may mean the difference between holding on or letting go.

Optimizing Your Trajectory Through Discernment

Releasing the constant effort to try to control external things and people, rather than tightening your grip and going at it too hard, may just restore stability in your path. Sometimes stepping back, re-evaluating, or even disengaging is the only way to regain clarity and momentum. I call this orienting yourself, much in the same way a hiker stops at a high point to look around at the topography and surrounding landscape to determine if they are on the right track. Like a hunter, you must take aim, but make sure you account for the windage factor if you are to hit the target.

Developing this skill of discernment may involve some personal risk, yes, but sometimes you have to break things down to build them up again. It’s a real fine art, subtle, requiring discipline and self-awareness, knowing when to hold on and when to transition in controlled flight is a form of inner navigation. It calls for early detection of anomalies, honest confrontation with reality, listening to your heart and soul, and thoughtful recalibration when necessary. It can mean tough love, and it will hurt you as much as it hurts them. You will feel the gut-wrenching discomfort as you confront the necessary difficult conversations and honest transparency some of this course correction requires. But it is worth it. Life is relatively short, and the question you have to ask yourself is: Do I continue with this status quo? If your answer is yes, then have at it, more power to you. However, if your answer is no, then consider changing lanes, making a move, or correcting your course sooner rather than later. If that means releasing something, be it yourself, someone, or something else, summon the courage and take that leap of faith. Somehow nature has a way of signaling to you when that moment has arisen. Heed its warning. Listen to your body and your system; your wellbeing and the wellbeing of those around you may depend on it. Learn to cultivate this discipline. Then find the level where you and your contributions are valued; your efforts may then generate lift, and your trajectory may become sustainable and inspiring.

Remember, life will always involve variable conditions, just like every flight. But with the right tools for self-assessment, the courage to confront disorientation, and the willingness to adjust course, you can navigate them. The aim is not to eliminate deviation, but to recover from an unplanned level bust in your life and take the remedial action required to get back on the track you are supposed to be on.

I hope this helps some of you who may be experiencing a situation that is not where you hoped to be, and that it provides you with some useful tools for finding your level. Remember, the simplest tools can help you find orientation when all else fails. If you doubt this, take a look at some of aviator Bob Hoover’s test flights, where he would determine the forces acting on the aircraft, and which way was up, by holding up a glass of water during a barrel roll, and not a drop would spill. In fact, I think that if pilots ever lose situational awareness in professional as well as personal life, it could be that something as simple as a glass of water may just be enough to tell you which way is up.

Fly safe and at YOUR level.

Until next time, Noel