From Corporate to Coach: My Journey (Part 2)

Have you ever heard that the universe will keep presenting you with the same underlying problem until you do something differently to fix it? Or maybe you’ve heard Albert Einstein’s quote,

“We cannot solve our problems with the same level of thinking that created them.”

This is why many of us find ourselves repeatedly falling into the same negative behaviors or situations. I didn’t realize it yet, but this was me.

To catch you up if you didn’t read Part 1, I went from boring corporate insurance job to cool tech startup job to my own consulting business to working for one of my biggest clients, but on my terms. I thought I was thinking differently, but one thing wasn’t changing: I was not feeling fulfilled. While I was great at my job and loved working with data, I really didn’t care about helping companies to appropriately target their customers. I actually felt kind of crappy about it at the end of the day! So even though my setup was better because I was making more money than ever with the flexibility I wanted and completely on my terms, I wasn’t truly thinking any differently. The inherent value of what I was doing was the same.

But… the money and flexibility allowed me to fund the life I wanted outside of work! I got to go to France! I got performance bonuses! Same thinking. Cue: universe kicking it up a notch.

I won’t get into the details, but as the company started to grow, things started going downhill for me. I found myself completely overwhelmed and stressed out with little support in a very toxic work environment. This went on for months, until I finally hit a breaking point. I was so stressed that I had stopped working out due to recurring injuries, I got sick three times within one month (usually if I got sick three times in a year, that would be a lot), wasn’t sleeping well, was having major gut issues, had no energy, was extremely irritable, had to stop teaching yoga, and was running on empty. The job that was providing for me to live the life outside of work that I wanted was now robbing me of the things I loved. Something had to change.

I booked a trip to go see my boss and talk to him about the current situation and how it was impacting my health. We were supposed to spend four days together, with me presenting some changes that I had brainstormed that would help get things back to a sustainable and healthy working environment. Here’s where the universe came in again (my favorite part!). The morning we were to meet, I woke up with a sore throat and could barely talk. The meeting didn’t go as planned, and I ended up quitting on the spot. Two hours after the meeting, I completely lost my voice. There’s no way I would have been able to communicate my recommendations without a voice - and that’s because I wasn’t supposed to. I was supposed to leave the company and never look back, which is exactly what I did.

Sadly for me, it took a very drastic sign, along with major negative impacts on my health, for me to make a change. But looking back, I honestly think it needed to get that bad for me to finally decide to make a change; had it not, I would have continued to justify it. After quitting, I gave myself the rest of the year to rest, nourish my nervous system, and recover, without putting pressure on myself to figure out what was next.