Extremely grateful for my corporate experience

When I started my coaching business, I left a decade-long career in corporate finance into a completely new field. I had no connections, no one I thought would trust me enough to buy my services. I was also emerging from a lifetime of insecurity born from a deep-seated self-hatred - I was just starting to feel like I could actually make something of myself other than what I had always been. And not even a year later, the pandemic hit and I was forced to take my in-person business online. Those two years were nothing to the tragedies I experienced in my personal life in the last year alone.

Each setback, each crushing defeat serves as yet another piece of evidence to fuel my conviction. Corporate life was SO HARD by every standard, but nothing in it prepared me for what I was to endure in the first 3 years of owning my own business.

Except one thing.

Time and time again, when I was faced with the prospect of a particularly grueling day at the office, I would somehow find the will to SHOW UP. Not always the most determined or particularly happy (most of the time… pissed), but I would make it there. And I would do my duty by my team to the best of my ability. Even when all my direct reports were about ready to walk out (and some, regrettably, did), even when clients were angry about some mix up, and there were countless meetings to be had about yet another broken thing, somehow I would make it through each 14-hour day.

I often think about how different my first years in business might have been without that experience… without something so harrowing to compare it to. I am, despite all the smack I talk 😆, extremely grateful for my corporate experience. It stretched me in such uncomfortable ways that I’m confident nothing in the whole of my life will ever be quite so tough.

So if right now you’re dying to quit your job, know that even THIS experience is preparing you for something great in your future. Let the lessons unfold; sometimes you can only make out what it was all for *after* it’s long been over.