3 Unhinged Reasons Why I Quit My 9-5 After Corporate Burnout

Sophie

Most high achievers stay in corporate 95 jobs that they stopped loving years ago, not because they can't afford to leave, and not because they don't know that they have other options, but because of one thing they've never addressed and probably won't until it's too late. Their entire identity is wrapped up in what they do and their job role.

Sophie

Sophie

It was the question of who am I? If I am not a fashion buyer in the next 15 20 minutes, I'm going to share the story of my personal corporate burnout that led me to walk away from a 12 year career and everything that I had built, and what happened on the other side when I had absolutely no fancy job title to hide behind.

Sophie

Sophie

Sophie

I skipped university entirely, and I just worked my way up from the bottom, and I kept working my way up until I was managing a 390 million pound business, leading a large team and buying for some of the world's most recognizable fashion brands, including Ralph Lauren, fabric, Kate Spade and Diesel. And from the outside to anyone looking in, it genuinely looked incredible.

Sophie

But what I want to share with you today is some of the most unhinged things that happened to me throughout my career. Because me leaving to start an online business, I never looked back, didn't just boil down to me leaving because of one single moment. It was a build up of things. It was a series of events that happened over several years, and each one of them was telling me something important that at the time, I probably wasn't really ready to listen to yet.

Sophie

Now, something that nobody talks about when it comes to corporate burnout is that most high achievers stay in the 9 to 5 job much longer than they probably should. Because when your entire identity is built around your job, leaving is terrifying and it definitely doesn't feel like freedom. It feels like you're probably going to lose yourself. Now, for me, that was genuinely so scary.

Sophie

I remember starting my career at 16 and bear in mind, I never went to university and never had that period of figuring out who I was outside of work, so being a fashion forward was all I really knew, and I went straight from school into the industry, and for the next 12 years, I pretty much every single version of my identity was tied to what I did for a living.

Sophie

I was Sophie, the fashion buyer, and people used to compare me to people like Rachel Green from Friends and Lauren Conrad. And if I took that identity comparison away, I genuinely didn't know who I was or what I was worthy of doing in my career, and that is what kept me in it for so long. And to be honest, I knew for years before I left I didn't want to be in the fashion industry anymore.

Sophie

Now, I would be lying if I said I didn't stay partly for the money. It was good money. I had a mortgage to pay, and I was also traveling the world with these brands. So that part was genuinely cool. And there were moments throughout my career when I really loved what I was doing, but in general, it didn't make me happy.

Sophie

I felt like I was constantly playing a game and I had to shapeshift my jack in the box personality to fit the mold of the corporate world, and it just was a constant battle. So when it came down to leaving that career entirely, I had to figure out who Sophie was without the job title. And I think a lot of you will recognize that feeling, because maybe you've been doing what you do since you were young and it became your whole personality.

Sophie

Maybe people in your life know you by your job title before they know anything else about you. Maybe thought about leaving your 9 to 5, but the question that stops you isn't can I do it? It's. But who am I? If I do, that's all about your identity. And it is one of the most powerful things that keeps high achievers stuck in careers that they hate because they don't know what comes next.

Sophie

So let me tell you a few stories that are quite unhinged. The first thing that happened was when I was 23, I got offered a job in Italy. I had a full relocation package. I was told I was going to be working in an international expat office. I was going over to learn Italian, so I flew over there thinking I'd been promised the world, and in reality, I very quickly realized I was giving absolutely nothing that was being promised.

Sophie

The reality was, the expat English speaking office didn't really exist. I was sitting throw meetings in fully Italian, not having a clue what was going on. The sport in the job just didn't exist because there was no structure in the company and the team and the boss who happened to be having an affair with her own boss, her marriage boss at that simply just didn't like me.

Sophie

We didn't get on with a massive clash personalities on multiple occasions. I won't go into too much detail about it, but I definitely experienced workplace bullying in that role. Because her, boyfriend was the big boss. Every time I wanted to talk about it with someone who had no one to turn to, every time there was a problem that was never go to.

Sophie

And frankly, the bullying got so bad that it made me really not want to be there anymore. So I would take all, hey, I want to help. And I was stuck because I had a two year contract with a full back cause. And if I left early, I had to pay back 50% of the relocation package which I was given, which, to be honest, I would have been happy to do.

Sophie

However, what I wasn't aware of and what they didn't tell me because the contracts had been translated from Italian to English and some of the terms hadn't quite translated properly, was that the 50% that I would have to pay back was before tax, and I had been taxed on the money I received already at 50%. So I was essentially paying back everything that I'd been given, and 50% more than what I had actually received.

Sophie

In the end, things in this job was so bad I decided to leave anyway and just pay the money back. And I had to get lawyers involved because despite that, they didn't evidence a whole email chain of proof of workplace bullying. I was refused the right to leave without paying the relocation back, and the company ignored every single email from the lawyers that were sent.

Sophie

So they had essentially stopped paying me for the last three months that I work there. They took my pension. It was complete and utter mess. But in hindsight, it taught me so many life lessons are really early age in my career. And maybe your version of this doesn't look as chaotic as my time in Italy, but I think a lot of you will know what it feels like to have experienced bullying in some way, shape or form and have absolutely no.

Sophie

Let's turn to some guys, the people above you, for help and be completely ignored because that's biased opinions. And to feel like you're being pushed out of something and have no way to protect yourself. That feeling of having to fight for yourself because nobody else is going to. I really carried that with me for a long time, and it was a very difficult period of my life.

Sophie

So the next corporate job that I had was actually my dream job at the time, and I've been dreaming about working for this brand for a really long time. So when this role came up, I actually pestered the hiring manager for six months straight until they said yes. I even made extra trips flying back from Italy to interview for this job.

Sophie

And the funny thing is, I didn't get the job, by the way, because my social media profile at the time was public and someone higher up in the company had decided to look at my profile before they hired me and thought that I was this party loving traveler who wasn't going to take this job quite seriously. And it was quite a senior position.

Sophie

So I had to do a lot of work and a lot of chasing to make sure that I justified that I could do this job. But anyway, I got the job and I genuinely loved it. For the first two years, I was part of a founding team of a company that was already big in America, and we were bringing it to Europe, and we built something we're so proud of from scratch.

Sophie

In about two and a half years in, the company got acquired and a new manager came in who wants to everything would create it down and start from scratch. And at the same time with this, I was also going through the biggest breakup of my life and I was really stuck to it. And I was had extreme anxiety, panic attacks in the toilet at work.

Sophie

I went to my manager and I said, look, I'm in therapy, I'm doing the work, but I'm not okay right now. I would love a little bit of grace. Can I take some time during work hours to go to my therapy sessions because they were in person at the time, and she looked at me and said, everyone's got problems, Sophie, you're just going to have to get on with it.

Sophie

And to be honest, that was the moment, not the moment that I quit, but the moment I knew I could not stay in this career any longer, because I think a lot of you will recognize what that feels like to work for a company and realize in a very clear moment that they do not see you as a human being.

Sophie

They see you as an employee, as a function, as someone whose value is purely in what they produce. And the moment that you stop producing at full capacity, you become a problem to manage rather than a person to support. And that moment in itself, where I make myself really vulnerable and someone looked at me and said, get on with it.

Sophie

That's never really left me to be honest, and I will always remember that comment, but I do also want to thank that boss for making me realize my worth and using it outside of a 9 to 5 job. Now, after those two experiences, I already obviously knew I didn't really want to be employed anymore. But the problem was I had absolutely no idea what else I could do.

Sophie

So instead of making a leap into entrepreneurship, I did what so many other people do, and I just kept moving to a different job. So I was headhunted by another fashion company for a promotional job. If I'm going to be really honest, I was just getting a brand new mortgage application, so I didn't want to rock the boat too much, and I knew I needed to stay in the job long enough for that application to be accepted.

Sophie

Sophie

Now, this job actually ended up being my last job in the fashion industry, and I went in that on a maternity cover contract, hoping it was going to be my last job. And it was. And my boss was great at the beginning. He championed me from day one. He thought I was going to be the next CEO. He loved everything I was bringing in and he very awkwardly promoted me over the woman I was covering for a maternity.

Sophie

So when she came back from 28, as you can imagine, the whole thing became very chaotic. And when my contract ended and they offered me a permanent row, I ended up turning it down because honestly, I was so anxious and burned out. At this point, I just needed to get my head together and figure out what came next.

Sophie

So I handed my notice in to my boss, who at the time had been my biggest advocate the entire time I'd worked. I worked there about a year, and he ended up taking it so personally that he stopped speaking to me for three weeks and the last three weeks of my contract, he was just walked past my desk, speak to the person sitting next to me, pass messages through them rather than look at me directly.

Sophie

It was genuinely wild vibes. Also, confirmation that I was doing the right thing by leaving. And I think some of you will know that feeling to that experience have been made to feel very small by the people above you. Even if you're doing everything right, performing at your best, giving everything of yourself to a company and they still end up on the wrong side of someone who holds authority over your career, and then you don't get the pay rise.

Sophie

You don't get the promotion when you realize, no matter how good you are, somebody else holds the power. And when they decide to use it, there is very little you can do about it. That is a really demoralizing feeling. Now, this was the last job in the corporate world that I held, and I shared a few more of the reasons why I left it.

Sophie

My I've up the Freedom founder playback. I'll drop the link in the show notes if you want to go and check it out, and you can read a little bit more about my story, where I transitioned out of the 9 to 5 into entrepreneurship. And despite these stories being pure chaos, to be honest, in my life at the time, I do look back now at all of these things and know they all happened to me for a reason for me to learn lessons to bring into my online business.

Sophie

But unfortunately, due to some of these experiences, I did go through a really big corporate burnout. And for me, burnout at work looked like extreme anxiety that I just couldn't switch off. I'd go to work feeling very panics. I had panic attacks literally in the toilet, and I was trying to manage them in secret, cause I didn't want everyone at work to know that I was struggling.

Sophie

It also meant that I was lying awake at night, not really sleeping, going over conversations in my head and dreading Monday. From the minute that I woke up on Sunday, I had less and less energy to do the things that I loved and be around the people that I loved outside of work, because I was giving everything that I had to a job that actually wasn't giving anything back to me.

Sophie

I ended up really losing myself. I lost a version of myself that I had been when I walked into that career at 16 years old, full of ambition, full of ideas, full of belief that I could build something great, and looking up at that one day and not recognizing any higher anymore was actually just so disorientating and really demoralizing.

Sophie

And it was the path I never expected, because the very thing I had built my whole identity around was also the thing that was tearing me apart, and I didn't know who I was. Without this job, I didn't know who I was. If I wasn't a fashion buyer. I also didn't recognize who I was becoming inside of it.

Sophie

And that was the minute, as soon as I realized that I needed to get back to that 16 year old version of me, or the version of me that I had when I came into this career, I knew something had to change, and there were so many signs of burnout at work that nobody really talked about or that I really understood were burnout at the time.

Sophie

And they weren't like these big dramatic moments. They were like this quiet little erosion of who you were before. And that is really hard to come back from. So if any of that sounds familiar, if you're listening to these symptoms of corporate burnout and thinking, that is me right now, I want you to know that this isn't just a bad week.

Sophie

This isn't just going to be a difficult season. If this has been going on for a while, it is your inner voice telling you something important that something needs to change. Maybe the situation around isn't quite right for you, and it took me four years to listen to that voice, but you don't have to wait that long now.

Sophie

Sophie

Now I didn't have a business plan. I had no real experience in the online business startup world. I had no idea really how to build this thing that I wanted to create. I did have 12 years of the skills, knowledge, and experiences that I could use and figure out how to use them to build something that was mine.

Sophie

Now, I figured if I was building five year plans for a 380 million pound business, I could definitely do that for myself and I could definitely do it for others. So I built my online business from home during a global pandemic, with no really clear roadmap. And over the past six years, that has been to become a multiple six figure business that I run from wherever I'm in the world.

Sophie

I currently live in Thailand, and if you want to know the exact process I use to figure out what to build and where to start, I go much deeper into all of that in the Freedom Founders playbook, which I'll link in the description. So what I want you to understand about why I actually left my corporate career and started my own online business is that it wasn't because I stopped enjoying the world.

Sophie

It wasn't because I got bored or wanted something new. I left because what I was experiencing was tearing me down and making me a very poor version of myself. It broke me down as a person, honestly, and my mental health was on the floor. And it is honestly taking me years, genuinely years to rebuild the confidence and ambition that I walked into my career with in the first place.

Sophie

And the thing that makes me frustrated about that, looking back, is that these bosses, these companies, these environments had me believing that this was the only way to have a successful career and be successful on paper, that climbing the corporate ladder, the only option that I knew and that was being shared with me. This is what working life looked like, and I needed to just get on with it.

Sophie

And I believed that for a really long time. I believed it for four years while I kept moving from job to job, wanted to do something different. But what I learned after leaving is that there is a whole world outside of the corporate 95, a whole way of living that nobody in those boardrooms or corporate offices are going to tell you about.

Sophie

Because frankly, they don't have the balls to go and jump into that themselves. So when I finally found this myself and realized how much freedom I could create for myself, I chose it. And honestly, I've never looked back. And I never hope to never go back. And if you take anything away from this episode, I want you to know that you can do the same.

Sophie

You don't have to stay put just because somebody else is telling you that. That is the only version of success that exists for you. It's not. You can create your own version of success. So if you've been sitting on an idea of starting an online business and telling yourself you're not ready or you don't know who you are without your job title, I want you to know that I wasn't ready.

Sophie

To be honest. I had this idea for three years, and it actually just took me a global pandemic and lockdown to finally make me take the move. Now, you don't need perfect timing, you don't need everything to get out, but you do need to start. And you could do that alongside your 9 to 5. Now to help you try and separate your true identity from your job title so that you can shift into this and future version of you.

Sophie

I'm going to share with you a little exercise. Now, the first thing that I want you to do is identify all the things that you love to do outside of work. Maybe you love dancing, you play paddle, your a gym goer, list out all of the things that you love doing. The second thing I want you to do is identify all the things that you love about yourself.

Sophie

It could be that you love the fact that your open minded, you're really kind. Get yourself ready to go and go out for walks every single day. You're really active. Just write a list of things that you love about yourself. The first thing that you're going to do is identify all the things that people compliment you on, and not related to off.

Sophie

Ideally, that might be how compassionate you are that you're really well put together, that you're great at giving advice. These are all going to form your evidence that your job title doesn't define you. You are bigger than your job title. Now, when you've got that list, I want you to start trying to emphasize who you want to become.

Sophie

Now, what I mean by that is start talking about the fact that you want to step away from a 9 to 5 and you want to start your own online business. You want to become an entrepreneur, and we want you to start getting comfortable with stepping into that identity. So you could, for example, start writing down or saying out loud, I run a business, or I help ideal customers do x, x, x, whatever that solution looks like, and you can start seeing how you're talking about that and bringing that idea to life.

Sophie

Make sure you fail. Because the thing is, your brain actually doesn't know the difference between fiction and reality. So the best way to trick your brain into becoming your new identity as an online business owner is actually just start acting like the entrepreneur. You're already coming, and that will help you start to slip out of your old identity.

Sophie

And as employé as the job title that you currently have on into your new identity as an entrepreneur. This identity shift is so important because it tells your brain and the people around you. If you're open to sharing that this is who you are now and this is going to really help you take the first steps to actually take action to build your online business.

Sophie

Now, I documented my entire journey from employee to entrepreneur the good, the messy, and the moments where I had absolutely no idea what I was doing inside the Freedom Founders paper. It is the starting point I wish I had when I began to navigate that transition from 9 to 5 to starting my own online business, and in that, I also share more exercises to help you overcome barriers along the way.

Sophie

And you can find the link to that in the show notes. If you would like to connect further, like and subscribe this podcast and your favorite podcasting platform and come and find me on LinkedIn, which is very sharp. Most everything that I share here goes hand in hand with what I share over there. So I'd love to see you over on LinkedIn.

Sophie

The link to connect with me in the show notes. If not, I'll see you next time.