A quick note before we get into it. Now that we are settled in Houston after the move, I am opening up my calendar for more Compass Calls for The Self-Authored Blueprint. If you have been circling an idea and want to talk it through, you can book one here. Now, onto the piece.

Lately I have been spending most of my time on calls with women who are done with corporate, or getting there. Some have already left. Some are still technically inside it, planning their exit in the margins of their own calendar.

These were women with serious range, sitting on ideas they’ve been circling for months. That is worth saying clearly, because from the outside the problem can look like too many directions and no focus. It looks like ten ideas, when it is often one idea in ten different expressions, because she has not yet let herself say plainly what it actually is.

I realized quickly that the ideas were never the issue. The gap between having the idea and making it real was, and across almost all of these conversations, the same three things kept surfacing inside that gap. The third one I did not see coming.

If you are a high-achieving woman who is done with corporate and still circling the idea of building something, you will probably recognize yourself in the three patterns that kept coming up on these calls.

1. You are afraid of what is on the other side

The circling looks like indecision, but much of the time, it is not.

You keep refining the idea, researching the idea, waiting for the version of the plan that finally feels certain, and the delay reads like caution or perfectionism. What is actually happening is that as long as the idea stays in your head, it stays perfect and it stays possible. The moment you move on it, you find out whether people want it, and whether you are as good at this as you were at the thing you already know how to do. You find out whether the life you have been imagining actually holds up when it meets the real world.

Staying at the edge protects you from the answer. It is safer to keep the dream in the clouds than to test it and risk discovering something you cannot un-know. So you wait to feel certain before you begin, when the truth is that certainty gets built by moving. The circling is not you being unclear; it is you standing at the edge of an answer you are not sure you are ready to receive.

2. You solve this for everyone but yourself

This is the one that catches the women I talk to off guard, because it is so at odds with how competent they actually are.

Give a high achiever a colleague’s business problem and she organizes the chaos in an afternoon. Give her a friend’s messy idea and she can see the audience, the offer, the positioning, and the next three steps before the coffee gets cold. Give her someone else’s career dilemma and she becomes part therapist, part strategist, part the friend everyone texts first. Turn that exact same eye on her own life and it fogs over completely.

It is not that the skill disappears. It is that when the problem is yours, it stops being a clean strategy question. It gets tangled with your money, your identity, your desire, and the private fear that you might want the wrong thing. Someone else’s dream is not loaded with any of that, which is precisely why you can see it so clearly. The capability was never in question. What is hard is aiming it at the one project you cannot be objective about, the one where you are both the strategist and the person whose whole sense of self is on the table.

3. You have not looked at the numbers

The third thing is the one almost no one wants to sit down with. I don’t just mean it in the obvious financial-planning way, although that matters. I mean runway as the thing shaping every choice in the background, the savings and the severance, the spouse conversations, childcare, visa rules, geography, health insurance, the mortgage, and the real monthly number it takes to keep your life moving.

You want corporate to be optional without having fully looked at what optional would require, and I understand why. It is one thing to talk about freedom, flexibility, and building something of your own. It is another to sit down with the spreadsheet and ask how much time do I actually have, how much do I need to earn, and by when. The dream feels safer in the clouds. The spreadsheet has the nerve to ask follow-up questions. Rude, honestly.

Avoiding the number does not make it less relevant. It only makes every choice foggier, so the idea stays abstract and you end up deciding from a haze of “I hope this works,” “I probably have time,” and “I do not want to think about that right now.” Facing it will not make you calm, but it will make you clear, and for a woman who is done with corporate, that clarity is often the difference between building from choice and building from panic. The point was never only to build a business. It was to build enough choice into your life that corporate stops being the only responsible-looking option.

What they were really asking for

Sitting with all three side by side, I started to understand that the fear, the fog, and the runway questions were not really about business at all.

Underneath all of it, these women wanted their lives back. They wanted to wake up without the low hum of dread. They wanted to be present for the people in front of them instead of half-listening with Slack open in another tab. They wanted to express the full range of what they could do, not just the slice corporate knew how to use. They wanted autonomy over their days. They wanted to be the author of the thing rather than a very well-compensated contributor to someone else’s version of it.

The idea was just where all of that showed up.

I could not do it for myself either

I know this from both sides.

I built Olori, from an idea I started working on in business school, into a handbag brand that made multiple six figures while I was also building a corporate career at Accenture, Twitter, and Meta. That business was not theoretical. It had customers, revenue, inventory, production problems, press, sales, disappointment, and pivots, all the unglamorous parts of making an idea survive contact with the real world. The capability was there. The strategic eye was there.

What was hard was turning any of it back on myself. When it came to my own next chapter, I reached for the most practical thing first. I told myself the smart move was to go fractional, a COO-for-hire arrangement that was credible, legible, and easy to explain at dinner. Meanwhile, the thing I actually wanted to build sat off to the side because it felt more personal, more exposed, and harder to package into a title anyone would nod at.

If I am honest, the fog was partly a cover. Some part of me already knew what I wanted. It just felt safer to call it unclear than to admit I was afraid the thing I wanted was less credible than the thing I was already good at. It is easier to say I have not figured it out yet than to say I am scared to want this out loud. What changed it was not another idea. It was someone helping me stop hiding behind strategy and start using strategy in service of the thing I already knew I wanted.

Which is why I built the Self-Authored Blueprint

The gap between knowing you are made for more and not knowing the first real step is the exact place I now work.

The Self-Authored Blueprint is my private coaching program for high-achieving women who are done organizing their ambition around corporate and are ready to turn their vision into a real business. It is for the woman who has the ideas and the capability and the desire, and keeps trying to be her own strategist in the dark.

Together we get underneath the circling to what you actually want, turn that into something real people can respond to and pay for, and build a rhythm you can hold inside your real life, so the business finally moves out of your head and into the world.

If you know this is the season to stop circling and start building, I would love to talk. I am opening Compass Calls for women considering the The Self-Authored Blueprint who want to explore whether it is the right support for where they are. We will talk through where you are, what you are thinking of building, what has kept you at the idea stage, and what would actually help you move. If it is a fit, I will show you what working together looks like. If it is not, I will tell you that too.

You can book a Compass Call here

And if a specific woman came to mind while you were reading this, send it to her. The brilliant, capable one sitting on an idea that deserves more than another six months of private overthinking. What is in her head may not need more time. It may need a decision, a strategy, and someone to help her finally move.

💭 Your Turn

If you are circling an idea right now, which of the three is really underneath it?

Leave a comment

About Tomide

I’m Tomide, the writer behind On Your Terms, where I explore what it means to redefine success and build work and life with more freedom, ownership, and choice.

After more than a decade at Accenture, Twitter, and Meta, I was laid off and chose not to return to corporate. Now, I help other high-achieving women turn their ideas into clear, viable businesses and build their next chapter on their own terms.

Want to go deeper?

🧭Work with Me: Learn more about The Self-Authored Blueprint, my 90-day private coaching program for high-achieving women who are done with corporate and ready to turn their business idea into a clear offer, practical strategy, and real path to revenue.

🎧 Start here for free: Listen to my private three-part audio series on choosing the right business idea when you know you want to build something, but you are not yet sure which direction to take.

💬 Stay connected: Find me on LinkedIn

If this essay resonated, leave a comment or restack it so another woman navigating her own next chapter can find it.

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At the same time, I was packing up our life in the San Francisco Bay Area and moving to Houston with my family. The launch and the move pretty much stacked on top of each other (who even plans like that??!!).

There was always something to work on, improve, publish or respond to, and I realize now that all of that activity is seductive. It gives you something immediate to do every day, and every inquiry, booked call or thoughtful reply feels like proof that you are moving in the right direction.

Then the activity slows, and suddenly it no longer feels like you are moving at all.

Where I’m actually at

We’re not quite settled into our new home yet (we actually just moved in today **faints**). My son just started his new school, and our boxes are getting unpacked slowly but surely.

My new offer is out in the world, but with everything else going on, I have not been able to dedicate much time to deliberate business building. A few weeks after the launch, I can see the effect of that. The calls are more spaced out, fewer messages are coming in, and the initial rush of attention has slowed down.

This is usually the point where doubt starts to creep in, right on schedule.

You start wondering whether people actually wanted the offer, whether the launch was only a temporary burst of attention, or whether you should change the price, the positioning, the audience or the entire thing.

The slower pace can feel like the market has already handed you an answer, even when you have not gathered enough evidence to know what the answer actually is.

The truth, however, is that I’ve been here before. The reason I can name this so cleanly is that I’ve sat in this exact room before. I sat in it with Olori, the handbag business I built while I was still in corporate and with my previous coaching businesses and other launches in other lives. The first time you sit in this room, it feels personal, like a verdict on whether the thing you just built is actually real, whether you misread the market, or whether you were foolish to believe the idea could work in the first place.

That said, after you have experienced it a few times, you begin to notice the timing. The doubt often arrives right after the loud part ends, once everyone else has returned to their lives, the announcement is no longer new, and you are left alone with the responsibility of making the business work.

That does not necessarily mean the offer is bad; it may simply mean that the launch is over.

The loud part is what people see

The launch is what gets posted, celebrated and pointed to as proof of momentum. It is the new landing page, the announcement, the enthusiastic comments, the influx of calls and the first few clients. Because it is the most visible part of the business, it is easy to mistake it for the business itself.

But a business is not built entirely on launch day or during the initial rush. It is built in the part that comes afterward, when the adrenaline has worn off and you keep working anyway.

You email one person at a time, follow up with the people who expressed interest, tighten the offer based on what you actually heard during your calls. You write content nobody is waiting for and keep putting the offer in front of people long after it has stopped feeling new.

The pipeline gets built painstakingly and one conversation at a time, often with no audience watching. This is not the absence of the work, it is where much of the real work begins.

The danger of reading it any other way is that you start tampering. You rebrand the offer, rebuild the landing page, reconsider the six other ideas you parked. You change everything that worked, because the absence of noise feels like evidence that nothing did, even though this is where the business actually gets built, brick by brick.

What I’m doing instead of tampering

Right now, I am focusing my energy on building the pipeline. That means writing my Substack every week, showing up consistently on LinkedIn, following up with people who expressed interest, and reaching out to new people who may need the work I offer.

Most importantly, I am trying to keep the offer stable long enough to gather useful evidence instead of making decisions based on the discomfort of a slower stretch.

My coach often says that it can look like nothing is happening until everything starts happening all at once, but the “all at once” part is usually built through weeks or months of activity that looked insignificant while you were doing it.

It is built through the follow-up that received no immediate reply, the post that did not take off, the conversation that did not become a client but helped you sharpen your message, and the invitation you kept making after the excitement disappeared.

That is the muscle I am building now.

If you’re in the quiet phase right now

If you launched something recently and the silence feels louder than you expected, do not immediately read it as a verdict.

The doubt may not disappear simply because you can name what is happening. Mine has not, but naming it changes what you do next.

Instead of assuming the business has failed, you can ask whether you have actually entered the business-building part.

Are you following up with the people who showed interest? Are you consistently putting the offer in front of people? Are you having enough conversations to learn what is working, or are you reacting to how uncomfortable the silence feels?

The launch can announce the business, but it cannot build the entire business for you; that happens in this slower, less visible part that comes after, when you keep showing up, listening, refining, selling and learning long after the initial attention has moved on.

The launch was the announcement. This is the build.

💭 Your Turn

What have you launched that you’re now tempted to change simply because the momentum has slowed?

Leave a comment

About Tomide

I’m Tomide, the writer behind On Your Terms, where I explore what it means to redefine success and build work and life with more freedom, ownership, and choice.

After more than a decade at Accenture, Twitter, and Meta, I was laid off and chose not to return to corporate. Now, I help other high-achieving women turn their ideas into clear, viable businesses and build their next chapter on their own terms.

Want to go deeper?

🧭Work with Me: Learn more about The Self-Authored Blueprint, my 90-day private coaching program for high-achieving women who are done with corporate and ready to turn their business idea into a clear offer, practical strategy, and real path to revenue.

🎧 Start here for free: Listen to my private three-part audio series on choosing the right business idea when you know you want to build something, but you are not yet sure which direction to take.

💬 Stay connected: Find me on LinkedIn

If this essay resonated, leave a comment or restack it so another woman navigating her own next chapter can find it.

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Layoffs keep coming, and the working world as we knew it has been seriously shaken. It is hard to trust the idea of job security when you can do everything right, perform well, build a strong reputation, give years of your life to a company, and still receive an email at 4 a.m. informing you that you have been impacted.

People are responding in the most rational way they can. They are diversifying and refusing to place all of their security in the hands of one employer who can let them go on a Tuesday. A lot of us are asking ourselves: How do I make sure I am never that exposed again?

The portfolio career offers an appealing answer, especially for people who have decided they no longer want to depend entirely on corporate employment. You can write, consult, coach, teach, advise, speak, build products and earn money in several different ways, without being boxed into one identity or relying on one company for your livelihood.

I understand the appeal because I feel it too. I ran a handbag business alongside my corporate career for several years. I am now building On Your Terms through writing and coaching, and I plan to eventually add other income streams under the same umbrella. I also hope to relaunch my handbag brand if all the variables align for me to do so.

I do not believe any of us needs to choose one title and stay inside it forever, so this is not an argument against portfolio careers. But I have started to wonder whether some of what we are calling a portfolio career is really an inability to choose, disguised as diversification.

When there is fear underneath the strategy

People are not always choosing five things because those five things naturally belong together. Sometimes, we are choosing five things because we cannot bear to choose one. We are afraid one lane will not work, so we keep four others open just in case. We are not sure which bet is the right one, so we place all of them at once and call it diversification.

Underneath all that activity is often the same thing: the fear of being wrong about the one. Choosing means accepting that a path could fail. It means allowing one thing to receive enough of your attention that the market can give you a clear answer, while temporarily setting aside other ideas that may also be interesting, promising or profitable.

Keeping several options alive feels safer because no single one has to carry the full weight of your hopes. If none of them works, you can tell yourself that you were simply too stretched to give any of them a real chance.

I met a woman at an event recently who, within the first five minutes of our conversation, had told me about seven different business ideas she was working on. She even had co-founders for some of them. I remember thinking, lady, what exactly are you trying to optimize for here? Because I could not see how any of those ideas would get enough of her to go anywhere.

Doing ten things at once feels productive. It feels like movement, but it can also be the most efficient way to never get the result you are after because nothing gets enough of you to break through.

There is also a cost to all of it that the excitement tends to hide. Every stream has to be positioned, marketed, sold, delivered and then managed once it exists. Ten income streams are not ten times the safety. They are ten small businesses you are now trying to run at once, none of them particularly well, because there is not enough of you to go around. The thing we reach for as protection can become the thing that leaves us most exposed.

Sometimes, what looks like drive and determination is really simply avoidance while staying very busy.

The person I watched do it right

I first really understood the idea of a portfolio career by watching Amanda Goetz build hers.

She was working as a fractional CMO when she decided to build a portfolio career. She started writing online, first on Twitter and later on LinkedIn, about becoming a creator, bringing people along as she figured it out.

Out of that came a newsletter, Life’s a Game, followed by a paid Office Hours community on Slack, newsletter sponsorships, mentorship calls on Intro, a course and eventually a book deal. If you took a snapshot of her work at a certain point, it looked like a dozen different income streams stacked on top of one another.

But that is not how she built it, and I had a front-row seat because I was in her Office Hours Slack community for a while, where she shared the behind-the-scenes reality of building it all.

She started with the fractional work and went deep. It gave her income and credibility to stand on, while the writing grew naturally from what she knew and was experiencing. Because she was documenting the journey honestly, an audience gathered around it. When she launched the newsletter, that audience became the first to sign up.

Each new thing was made possible by the one before it, and she did not add the next layer until the last one could hold the weight.

That is the part people often miss. We see the finished collection of titles and income streams, but we do not see the order in which they were built. We copy the stack when we should be studying the sequence.

One deep thing makes room for the next

I have lived a version of this in my own building.

I started writing On Your Terms last year, before I had fully worked out what the business around it would become. The writing came first, and it did something I had not planned for: it gave me a way to hear directly from women wrestling with their own reinventions and showed me what they were actually stuck on.

Only then did I build the current coaching offer, because by then there were real people to serve and I had a much clearer understanding of what they needed.

I have a lot more planned for On Your Terms, but I am not trying to launch all of it in the same quarter and hope something sticks. Each thing gets added when the one before it has found its feet, and all of it circles the same central idea.

I have tried it the other way too, with several things happening at once (Olori, my full-time tech jobs, and Coaching) and my attention split in every direction. The difference is not small. Building one thing at a time, mostly under one roof, simply feels better to me. Given the choice, I will take that over trying to carry a scattered collection of unrelated lanes.

I am not always patient about this. I feel the pull to do everything now, especially when money and security are involved. I want to hedge and keep more doors open than I can realistically walk through, but I have learned that the doors I keep open out of fear can be the same doors keeping me from walking fully through any of them.

Choosing one thing does not mean choosing it forever

I think one reason so many of us resist choosing is that we make the decision feel too permanent.

We ask ourselves what we want to do for the rest of our lives, when the more useful question may be what deserves to be primary in this season.

Choosing one primary lane now does not mean rejecting every other part of yourself. It does not mean you cannot change your mind, expand later or build a career with several dimensions. It simply means deciding where your best energy goes first.

The other ideas can wait. Some can support the main thing, some may become businesses later, and others may remain hobbies, which is also allowed. Not every interest needs customers, a content strategy or a launch plan.

There is nothing wrong with wanting many things. I want many things too, but wanting many things does not remove the need to choose what comes first.

All of this is to say that I am not against portfolio careers, but I am against using them as a way to avoid choosing a viable path because of fear.

A portfolio career should be the result of compounding, not an excuse for fragmentation. You do not build one by refusing to choose… You build one through a series of focused choices over time, going deep enough on each one that it creates room for the next.

That is where I have landed for now.

💭 Your Turn

Are you building a portfolio career, or keeping several ideas alive because choosing one feels too risky?

Leave a comment

About Tomide

I’m Tomide, the writer behind On Your Terms, where I explore what it means to redefine success and build work and life with more freedom, ownership, and choice.

After more than a decade at Accenture, Twitter, and Meta, I was laid off and chose not to return to corporate. Now, I help other high-achieving women turn their ideas into clear, viable businesses and build their next chapter on their own terms.

Want to go deeper?

🧭Work with Me: Learn more about The Self-Authored Blueprint, my 90-day private coaching program for high-achieving women who are ready to move from too many ideas to a clear business direction, compelling offer, and practical strategy for building something profitable.

🎧 Start here for free: Listen to my private three-part audio series on choosing the right business idea when you know you want to build something, but you are not yet sure which direction to take.

💬 Stay connected: Find me on LinkedIn

If this essay resonated, leave a comment or restack it so another woman navigating her own next chapter can find it.

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“You especially, but you and your husband together are very bold,” he said, before adding that he had respected us before, but had a newfound respect for us now.

I’ve been sitting with it ever since because I don’t think I had fully claimed the word bold until he handed it to me.

He said this at the send-off gathering we held at our home in the Bay Area, where our friends had come to say goodbye and wish us well as we prepared to leave a place that had been home for almost ten years.

What he was reacting to was the fact that my husband recently quit his job. It had stopped serving him a long time ago and was taking a real toll on his mental health. He has carried a passion for years that he never had room to put real time behind because there was always the job, our son, and everything it takes to keep a household running. His own work kept getting whatever scraps were left at the end of the day, which is to say almost nothing.

So, when things at work started “moving too mad,” as we would say, we made the call. He left to make room for the work he actually wanted to do.

Now I’d already been laid off, and had already decided I wasn’t going back to corporate. After more than a decade of building that career, I’d reached the point where I knew I didn’t want another version of the same life, and I wanted to put my time behind work that was actually mine.

Which means that for the first time in our adult lives, neither of us has a corporate job. From the outside, I understand why that looks bold. When you look from a certain angle, it probably looks closer to unhinged. You have two parents in the Bay Area, both without a steady income, in one of the most expensive places in the country, making that choice.

What People See is the Decision, Not the Years Before It

What they’re seeing is the moment we acted but what they didn’t see is everything that came before it.

For the past few years, my husband and I have spent real time imagining what our ideal life could look like. We didn’t do this vaguely, but we would actually sit down together and map it, and we have done that more often in the most recent years. We would ask: where did we want to live? What did we want our days to feel like? What kind of work did we want to do? What did we want our son’s childhood to actually look like? We kept circling the same questions, especially this one: what parts of our current life were we maintaining only because they had made sense once?

So when my husband finally put in his notice, we didn’t freeze. Ladies and gentlemen, let me tell you, we moved fast. Fast enough that people kept asking, wait, what, already? In fact, that same week he put in his notice, he flew to Houston to find us a house to live in. To folks looking from the outside in, it was sudden. To us, it was a plan we’d already written, sitting in a drawer, waiting for the moment we could finally act on it.

Honestly the first version of that plan was Thailand. We wanted to live outside of the US for about 6 months, at a slower pace, reset our nervous system, have completely new ground under our feet, expenses way down, a defined window to live differently and focus on our work. Unfortunately, My Nigerian passport had other ideas and the visa barriers were enough that Thailand stopped being the realistic option for this season. So we did the thing you do with any real plan, we asked what the next-best version was, and we adjusted without abandoning it.

The Next-Best Version Turned out to be the Better One

The answer was Houston.

We could technically stay in the Bay Area for a while longer, but being able to afford something doesn’t make it the smartest use of your money. It made no sense to keep spending Bay Area money when we were no longer earning Bay Area salaries, especially when the thing we needed most was room to build.

So we’re moving to Houston, and almost none of the reasons are about retreat; they’re about design. We rented a big house with a yard for a fraction of what a comparable place would cost here. It’s eight minutes from my parents, twelve from my sister, and twenty to thirty from my husband’s family.

Raising our son in the Bay without a real village has been harder than I knew how to expect. We built a good life here, but we never had the kind of community that lets parents exhale. Every appointment, every date night, every focused block of work, every moment of rest has needed coordination or payment or sacrifice. In Houston, our son gets to grow up around grandparents and cousins and aunties and uncles, people who genuinely know and love him. We get help we don’t have to pay for. I already love it for him.

But I love it for us too, because I’m about to drop this little one at his grandparents’ house so I can catch up on the sleep I haven’t had in 18 months!!

So, this move isn’t only about lowering our expenses, it’s about increasing the amount of life available to us.

The Part I Won’t Pretend Away

I would be lying if I said there are no thoughts in my head going ‘what if we’re wrong?!!’ Of course, that thought visits. We’re two people with a child and bills, not motivational speakers on a stage telling everyone to leap without looking.

So we’ve talked honestly about what happens if this doesn’t work the way we hope. Here’s the floor: we both have significant experience, strong credentials, and careers we spent years building. If we need to take on consulting, or find employment, or make income another way, we can. It might not look exactly like what we had before, and it’s a strange thing to say with any confidence in this job market, but we know we can earn again and take care of ourselves. This isn’t an irreversible cliff, we’re capable of adjusting.

That’s the downside, fully looked at and here’s what I’ve noticed since looking at it - responsible people spend enormous energy on what if it doesn’t work, and almost none on the opposite question.

What if it does?

What if my husband finally has the time to build the thing he’s been talking about for years? What if I’m right about the work I feel called to do, and the evidence I already have that there’s something real here keeps proving itself? What if moving toward family gives us more than financial relief, and gives our son a fuller childhood, and gives us rest, and changes what’s actually possible for both of us? What if this isn’t the year our lives fall apart, but the year they finally start to fit?

That’s the question we’ve decided to put our energy behind.

The Year that Asked for More Than I Thought

At the start of this year, I wrote that this would be the year of the brave, but I did not know, at the time of writing, how much bravery the year would ask of me. I think I imagined it would mean publishing more honestly, or being willing to claim what I wanted out loud. I didn’t know it would mean watching my husband leave his job, packing up our home, moving across the country, and choosing to believe in what we’re both building at the same time.

There’s a little bit of fear in it, but I’ll tell you this - there’s no confusion. I feel, more clearly than I’ve felt almost anything, that we’re walking the path we’re supposed to be on. I have not been this excited or this at peace in a long time.

From the outside, the story sounds like this: I got laid off, my husband quit, neither of us has a job, we’re leaving the Bay Area, but that framing makes us sound like passive characters in a run of bad luck. We’re not. The layoff wasn’t my choice, but everything I’ve decided to do with the life that came after it is. My husband chose to stop handing his mental health and his ambition to a job that had stopped serving him. Together, we chose to lower our costs, move toward our village, and make real room for the work we believe in.

We’re owning this season. We’re not waiting for our old lives to come back; in fact we don’t want our old lives. It has already served its purpose. We’re designing what comes next, and honestly, if not now, when? If we keep waiting for a moment with no risk and no fear and a guarantee that it’ll all work, we’ll wait forever.

One of the things I’ve realized I love most is helping people see possibility, especially women who’ve spent years being capable, accomplished, and responsible, and can feel that their life is asking something different of them now. Not possibility without a plan, not recklessness disguised as courage. It’s boldness that comes from looking clearly at the risk, building a responsible floor under yourself, and then deciding that the life you actually want deserves more than your leftover time and energy.

💭 Your Turn

What would you give a real chance if you stopped asking only ‘what if it doesn't work’, and let yourself ask ‘what if it does’?

Leave a comment

About Tomide

I’m Tomide, the writer behind On Your Terms, where I explore what it means to redefine success and build work and life with more freedom, ownership, and choice.

After more than a decade at Accenture, Twitter, and Meta, I was laid off and chose not to return to corporate. Now, I help other high-achieving women turn their ideas into clear, viable businesses and build their next chapter on their own terms.

Want to go deeper?

🧭Work with Me: Learn more about The Self-Authored Blueprint, my 90-day private coaching program for high-achieving women who are ready to move from too many ideas to a clear business direction, compelling offer, and practical strategy for building something profitable.

🎧 Start here for free: Listen to my private three-part audio series on choosing the right business idea when you know you want to build something, but you are not yet sure which direction to take.

💬 Stay connected: Find me on LinkedIn

If this essay resonated, leave a comment or restack it so another woman navigating her own next chapter can find it.

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I have been walking toward this my whole career… I just kept doing it in the margins, in the early mornings, late nights, weekends, and random pockets of time my real job had not completely claimed.

I have always built in the margins

My first real job was as a management consultant at Accenture, and almost immediately, I started building something on the side. It was a nonprofit called Colligold Resources, and the whole point was to help university students build employability skills. I would partner with firms like PwC, Accenture, and KPMG, bring in professionals to mentor students during events I organized, and watch something click for a young person who had not had that kind of access before.

I loved it.

I loved creating something from nothing, gathering people around a mission, and helping young people see a wider version of what was possible for themselves. I did not have the language for it then, but I can see the thread clearly now: I have always been drawn to helping people build a life beyond the limits they were handed.

Then came Olori, and a life I was living twice

When I moved to the U.S. for my MBA in 2015, I started working on another idea and this one came from a frustration I had carried with me for a while. I was tired of seeing Africa viewed mostly through a charity lens, as if the continent was only need, struggle, or lack, when I knew there was so much beauty, creativity, craftsmanship, and excellence there too.

I wanted to showcase that beauty and make it accessible to people, regardless of origin, so they could experience and appreciate Africa in a fuller way, and see Africa the way I do. That became Olori, my handbag brand. I started working on the brand during my MBA at Wharton and launched it formally in 2018, the same year I started working at Twitter after business school.

For years after that, I lived two lives at once. I ran Olori while working full-time at Twitter and then at Meta. I worked all kinds of hours on my main job and then turned around and worked all kinds of hours on the brand, although “side hustle” is such a cute little phrase for what was basically a second full-time job with worse boundaries and no benefits.

I told myself this was what ambition looked like. You carry both, you don’t complain, you are grateful, and you make it work, and for a long time, I did make it work, until I couldn’t.

I knew I couldn’t stay

Over time, I started to become disillusioned at work. There were many reasons, but one of the clearest was when the stress of work started affecting my health and I had to go on medical leave. That period SHOOK me, because it is one thing to be tired and another thing for your body to stop cooperating with you because the life you have built around achievement is no longer sustainable.

Somewhere in there, I knew I could not continue like that. The thing is, I had always known I wanted to end up in entrepreneurship, I just did not know when or how it would happen. I still remember getting my offer letter for my job at Meta and saying to myself (honestly… praying to God) that this would be the last corporate job I ever worked (Still a prayer, by the way. Haha).

So when my health started being affected by the stress of work, I started exploring my options for replacing my income. That was when I began coaching women who wanted to start their own businesses while still in corporate, because I felt like it could not be right that we pour the whole of ourselves into one job, one company, one ladder, one bottom line that ultimately belongs to somebody else.

And this is important to evaluate, especially if we love the job… because loving the work makes it so much easier to abandon yourself inside it in the name of being excellent.

The first time I tried this, I used someone else’s voice

I loved coaching women in corporate to start product-based businesses on the side of their jobs. I loved sitting with women and helping them see what they were capable of, helping them take an idea seriously, and watching them move from “maybe one day” to “wait, I can actually do this.” That part felt natural.

What I could not stand was the selling. In hindsight, I can see what happened … I was following what a lot of other coaches were teaching, and so much of it felt like bro marketing to me: the urgency, the exaggerated claims, the weird pressure, and the subtle suggestion that if someone did not buy, they simply did not want success badly enough.

None of that had anything to do with who I am. The work was mine, but the voice I had borrowed to talk about it belonged to someone else entirely, and because it did not fit me, the whole thing eventually stopped feeling good.

What I wanted was always bigger

There was also something else underneath the discomfort, and it took me a while to name it. The thing I actually wanted to help women do was much bigger than “start a product-based business.” That language had become too small.

Helping someone launch a product was fine, but it was never the real point for me. The real point was the woman herself: who she was becoming, what kind of life she was trying to build, and what she wanted outside of the identity that had rewarded her for being excellent, dependable, and safe.

I cared about the business idea, yes, but I cared even more about the life around the business. That gap, between the small thing I was selling and the much larger thing I cared about, is where On Your Terms started to bud. It needed to mean more than “start a business.” So did I.

Consulting could pay me, but it couldn’t reach me

You know what happened next, because you were here for it. I got laid off, and I went looking for the steady thing. I explored consulting / Fractional COO, and here is the honest part: I am good at it.

It uses the exact muscles I spent my corporate career building. It can pay well, it makes sense on paper, it is easy to explain, and it sounds responsible. There is a version of my life where consulting / being a fractional COO would be the obvious next step.

But it does not light me up. I could finish a piece of consulting work and feel competent, but not alive. Then I would spend an hour inside On Your Terms, writing or thinking or talking to one of you, and something in me would wake up. The contrast got too loud to keep ignoring.

What feels like living, for me, is this. It is here.

So here is what I am building

On Your Terms is becoming a platform that helps women move from a corporate identity into a self-authored life through entrepreneurship. There are several pillars to it, and I will share more about those over time, but the one I am pouring myself into right now is the coaching experience.

I am building it for the woman who has already left corporate, who has no shortage of ideas, who is sharp and capable, and who is tired of spinning around the question of where to even begin.

Introducing The Self-Authored Blueprint: Design Your 90-Day Path to Replacing Your Corporate Income.

It is a private 1:1 coaching program for high-achieving women who walked away from corporate and are ready to build the business that comes next. Not just any business, not the idea that sounds most impressive at a dinner party, and not the thing everyone says you should do because it looks obvious on LinkedIn. The thing that actually fits your skills, your season of life, your income goals, your energy, and the kind of days you want to be living.

Inside the program, we move from a scattered pile of ideas to one clear direction. Then we turn that direction into a real business path inside a focused 90-day sprint. We will clarify the idea you should build first, shape it into a strong offer, identify who it is for, map the path to revenue, and create a practical execution plan that helps you move with focus instead of panic.

Because the messy middle can be messy, but it does not have to be chaotic.

You do not need more inspiration. You have had enough inspiration to last a lifetime, and you do not need another brainstorm either, because the problem was never a shortage of ideas. What you need is someone who can sit with you, look at everything on the table, help you choose the right path, and then help you build a real business around it.

And we are going to build it in a way that does not subconsciously recreate the exact exhaustion you walked away from, because replacing your corporate income was never supposed to cost you what corporate already did.

I’m opening this to 3 case study clients

If you know me at all, you know I am a woman’s woman through and through. Getting to take everything I have learned, every talent, every hard-won lesson, every founder mistake I survived, and every strategy muscle I built in corporate, and pointing all of it toward helping women build businesses that line their own pockets? That is my dream.

I am opening The Self-Authored Blueprint to 3 case study clients.

If you have walked away from corporate, have multiple business ideas, and are ready to stop spinning, I’ve put the full details here.

If it feels like a fit after reading, you’ll find the link inside to book a private fit call with me.

💭 Your Turn

What is the thing you keep doing in the margins, even when life is already full?

Hit reply and tell me. I’d love to know.

–

P.S. If a specific woman came to mind while reading this, send it to her. She is probably sitting in her own messy middle telling everyone she’s fine, because that is what high achievers do best. It is an annoying habit, and she’ll thank you for the nudge.

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About the Author

I’m Tomide, the founder of On Your Terms. I write and speak about career transitions, identity shifts, and the process of building a life that feels as good on the inside as it looks on paper.

Through my writing and coaching, I help ambitious women build work and lives that feel more aligned, meaningful, and their own.

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Now, let’s dive in.

The company I most recently worked for just laid off 8,000 people. Eight Thousand!!

These are high-achieving people too, not people who were coasting or barely holding on, but people who built strong careers, delivered results, earned the titles, and at some point genuinely loved what they did.

Speaking from experience, a lot of them used to love their jobs. They used to love the company, the mission, the pace, the people, or at least the version of the company they joined. There was a time when the work felt meaningful, the ambition felt energizing, and the sacrifice felt like it was leading somewhere.

And then, slowly, it turned. The culture eroded, leadership updates started sounding less like vision and more like crisis communications, and the layoffs stopped being the exception and started feeling like the weather. The place that once felt like the whole point started to feel like a very polished trap, and for the women I’m watching, the ones who have spent their whole lives achieving, the kool-aid just isn’t so cool anymore.

The Layoff Is Not Always the Beginning

Here’s what I keep noticing underneath the obvious career disruption. The layoff is not really the event. The reckoning is. Sometimes the layoff is just the moment you finally stop negotiating with what you already knew.

At first most people do the sensible thing. They update the résumé, they work the network, they tell themselves to just find the next thing, and there is nothing wrong with that. Sometimes the next job is the right move. But for some women, something happens in the middle of it. They start applying and feel their body resisting. They read job descriptions and feel absolutely nothing. They picture themselves back in the same meetings, the same politics, the same performance cycles, the same endless proving, and something in them goes quiet and honest at once and says, I don’t think I can do this again.

Not because they’ve become lazy or unambitious or unserious. Because they are finally telling the truth. They don’t just want another job. They want another way.

They are tired.

That is the reckoning. Not the layoff itself, but the moment you understand you can’t un-know what you now know, and that going back would mean pretending you hadn’t noticed.

I Know This Feeling Too

I understand this more personally than I wish I did.

When I was laid off, especially coming out of such an intense season of pregnancy, birth, postpartum recovery, and trying to find myself again, I did what high-achieving women often do: I immediately started trying to figure out the next “smart” move. I treated the layoff like a problem to solve and started solving it before I had even let myself feel it.

I remember that at three months post partum, in the middle of deep post partum depression and drama, I went to New York to be a part of the Goldman Sachs One Million Black Women in Business Accelerator… a gruelling accelerator which would then hold virtually for three months, and then I flew back again for graduation at six months. In hindsight, I’m like ‘What the hell was I thinking?!’ I should have been resting, but I was eager to figure out what my next move would be.

I saw jobs and started to apply so many times that it was hard to drum up any enthusiasm for it, and so I gave up

I asked myself so many questions:

Should I go back to corporate? Should I consult? Should I relaunch my coaching business? Should I focus on Olori? Should I build something entirely new? Should I be practical? Should I dream? Should I just calm down and get a job like a normal person?

Very peaceful questions, obviously.

But underneath all of it was a question I couldn’t outrun. Not what should I do next, but what kind of life am I no longer willing to keep performing for.

Because when the structure of corporate falls away, it is disorienting even when you wanted out, even when part of you knew you were done. There’s a strange grief in losing the container that made you feel capable and impressive and secure, and almost nobody warns you about it. From the outside it can look like freedom while feeling completely wobbly on the inside. For years my worth had been measured in deliverables and reviews and other people’s deadlines, and without them I kept reaching for the old reflexes, treating my new life like a job I could out-work, confusing motion for progress.

The hardest thing I had to unlearn was urgency, the belief that if I wasn’t sprinting I was falling behind.

When Smart Women Try to Figure It Out Alone

There’s a woman I came across on LinkedIn who did it the way most smart, capable people do. She figured she could think her way through it, because thinking her way through things had always worked.

She tried one business, then another, then another, and blew through $150,000 in savings before going back to corporate. I don’t say that with an ounce of judgment, I actually respect how honestly she shared it, because most people would never admit that out loud.

And the good part is what came next.

She went back to corporate and regrouped, and when she went out on her own again she did it with intention instead of momentum, and from what she shared she’s in a much better place for it now.

But that is an expensive way to learn that clarity matters.

What It Looks Like to Move With Intention

Then there’s Shezal, a former client of mine. Shezal was done with corporate, but she was clear that she didn’t want to spend years spinning in circles trying to figure out what to build.

She came to me with her ideas, half-formed and a little tangled, and we worked them against what actually fit her skills, her life, and her market until the right one was obvious.

She launched within three months. Her interior decor product business did five figures out of the gate, and she has since expanded into running escape shelters on Airbnb for burnt-out women in corporate (and decorating them with her products), the exact women she used to be.

These women had similar exit paths, are very intelligent, but had completely different ‘middle’ experiences.

The Messy Middle Does Not Have to Be Chaotic

Chaotic is throwing yourself at five ideas because stillness feels like failure. It’s letting the panic of the empty calendar make your decisions for you. It’s rebuilding the exact life you were trying to leave, except now with worse health insurance and no PTO. Intentional is slower at the start and much faster in the end. It’s choosing the one idea that fits who you are now instead of the one that fits who you were rewarded for being, then giving it a contained window to prove itself.

One way I keep my own mess from tipping into chaos is that I work in ninety-day sprints. Whatever I’m testing gets ninety days, no more. I prototype it, I learn from it, I iterate, and I don’t let a single experiment swallow a whole year or my savings. The mess stays inside the sprint. That is the difference between iterating forward and blowing things up.

The woman who lost $150,000 and Shezal are both going to be fine, and I want to be honest about that, because there isn’t one righteous path, and I’m suspicious of anyone who tells you there is. Going back to corporate for a season isn’t failure; sometimes it’s a regroup. But one of them paid for her clarity in years and savings, and the other found it in three months. When the difference is that expensive, it’s worth asking why.

I Made This For You

If you’ve left the default path, or been pushed off it, and you’re sitting in that rudderless place where you know you’re not going back but you can’t yet see what’s next, this is for you.

I recorded something for exactly this moment. It’s a private three-part podcast series for women who’ve left corporate with more business ideas than clarity, made to help you choose the one thing worth building next, something that actually lights you up and could replace the income you walked away from, instead of trying all of them at once.

It’s the first thing I’m opening up as I expand On Your Terms, and it’s free. You can listen on your own time, walking, driving, pretending to clean the kitchen, which honestly still counts as emotional labor. Think of it as the conversation I wish someone had offered me when my own calendar first went quiet. (It also gives you a sneak peek into what I’m launching next eeek!)

This next chapter doesn’t need to be rushed. But it does need to be chosen.

Many Ideas, No Clear Path

💭 Your Turn

Have you ever reached a point where the “safe” path no longer felt safe?

Hit reply and tell me. I’d love to know.

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About the Author

I’m Tomide, the founder of On Your Terms. I write and speak about career transitions, identity shifts, and the process of building a life that feels as good on the inside as it looks on paper.

Through my writing and coaching, I help ambitious women build work and lives that feel more aligned, meaningful, and their own.

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To me it was very responsible, very grown, very defensible and very “look at me making sensible decisions.”

The plan was simple enough; build the consulting business, generate income, use that stability to eventually give more attention to On Your Terms, which is my life’s work, and maybe, if the stars aligned and my nervous system cooperated, do a handbag drop later this year. That was the plan.

And then life, as it often does, said, ‘How cute!’

A few months in, I realized the consulting journey, which I had started with a partner at the beginning of the year, would not be the optimal path for me, so I started to pivot into consulting on my own.

I thought, okay, fine. I’ll build a solo consulting practice. That still made sense because I have the background and the credibility. I have done this work in different shapes and sizes across twelve years at Accenture, Meta, and Twitter. I know how to help companies create structure, alignment, operating rhythms, strategy, all of it. It felt smart, safe, and most importantly, it felt like something the world would immediately understand and approve. It felt like it still had some prestige to it.

And honestly, I think I needed that. I could work with that.

The safe thing can still be a hiding place

When you have spent years being validated by institutions, titles, degrees, and impressive-sounding roles, it is very easy to confuse credibility with desire. Consulting felt credible, it felt like something people could look at and immediately understand. “Oh yes, Tomide is doing serious work. She has a strong background and that makes sense.”

After leaving corporate, becoming a mother, navigating health scares, and trying to figure out what the next version of my life looked like, a part of me wanted to feel serious again. Not creative or experimental, not “figuring it out.” I wanted to look Serious. Approved. Legible. And consulting gave me that.

But here is the newsflash about your real dreams: they don’t disappear just because you made a responsible spreadsheet. They sit there, nagging at you in the back of your mind, waiting for you to stop pretending and finally give them the attention they deserve.

Enter Aly, the coach who saw straight through me

Because I believe in getting help when I’m trying to do something new, I hired a business coach. Her name is Aly, and let me just say this plainly: Aly is AMAZING!!!

I believe deeply in coaching. Not because I think a coach magically fixes your life, but because when I am trying to move through unfamiliar territory, I want somebody who has done it before to help me avoid unnecessary mistakes. I do not want to spend six months proving I can figure everything out alone just to arrive exhausted at the thing someone could have helped me see in week two, or worse, to waste all my money and not achieve anything. To me, that’s not wisdom… that’s suffering!!!

So I hired Aly to help me get clear on my consulting offer, my go-to-market strategy, my positioning, all of it. And yes, I have those skills, I do that work for other people but turning your own skills on yourself is a different ballgame entirely.

Because Aly is the kind of person who cares about the human before the offer, our calls weren’t just, “Let’s optimize your business model.” We would catch up and talk about life. She took the time to understand me, not just what I was trying to sell, which meant she had context. She knew about On Your Terms, knew the bigger dream was there, even though I kept treating it like a “later” thing.

The question that stopped me

Two weeks into working together, I made a LinkedIn post. Funny enough, it was one of my least performing posts. I got barely any traction on it. The algorithm was just like, ‘Not today Tomide, not today!’.

But Aly saw it, and on our next call, I thought we were going to dig into my consulting offer. Instead, she stopped me said:

“Tomide, is this what you really want to do?”

I paused, because the answer was already in my body before it made it to my mouth.

No. Not really.

Would I be good at consulting? Absolutely. Could I build a strong solo advisory practice? Yes. Could I help companies solve meaningful problems? Definitely. But was that the thing I most wanted to build? No.

And that is such an inconvenient answer when you have already built a plan around the opposite.

The truth I had been telling everyone but myself

A few days before that call, I had said something to a friend, almost casually. I said, “It would be really horrible for this year to pass and I don’t actually give the thing I really want to do a real shot.”

I said it in passing and just kept doing everything BUT that!

I had been circling the dream, naming it casually, touching it and then pulling back, saying “someday” because someday is such a convenient place to put the dreams we are afraid to pursue. Someday doesn’t require a business model, doesn’t make you risk looking foolish and lets you keep the dream alive without ever testing whether you can actually build it.

And I had placed On Your Terms very neatly in someday.

The Permission I Didn’t Know I Was Waiting For

When Aly asked me if consulting was what I really wanted, I told her what I actually wanted to do is to expand On Your Terms, not just as a newsletter, not as another side project like I had treated my handbag brand, Olori, but as a real company, a real platform for high-achieving women who have done everything they were supposed to do and still find themselves asking, is this it?

Aly said, “Yes. That. I could tell.”

I walked her through every reason I had not been pursuing On Your Terms first, and one by one, she helped me examine those fears. She helped me see the gaps in my logic, that some of my fears were not facts and she helped me see that the thing I had categorized as risky might actually get me to income faster than the B2B consulting path I was forcing myself into. She helped me see possibility.

And maybe that is what permission really is. Not someone giving you approval, but someone helping you see that the door is not as locked as you thought.

My brain came back online

I left that call with permission to think about On Your Terms seriously. Permission to stop treating my real dream like a fragile little hobby that had to sit silently in the corner until the grown-up business was done eating.

When I tell you my brain lit up, it LIT UP! Ideas started firing, I literally found it hard to sleep because I couldn’t turn my brain off. Suddenly I could see the vision and I had to document it, I could see the roadmap for launching my offerings, it was VERY clear to me who would benefit, I could see my competitive advantage, I could see everything.

I felt the kind of excitement I felt when I first started Olori, and I haven’t felt that in YEARSSSS.

So I’m flipping the plan

Here’s where I am today. I am expanding On Your Terms and it is plan A now. The safe thing can be the safe thing, as plan B. It can be there if I need it, but I am no longer building my whole year around the fallback while calling my actual dream “later.”

I started On Your Terms as just a place to document my thoughts on Substack, and I’m expanding it across media, transformation (a.k.a coaching), and community.

On Your Terms is for high-achieving women who have exited corporate recently (or working towards it) and are in that strange, disorienting season of trying to figure out what comes next. Women who have done the “right” things. Women who are smart, capable, accomplished, and still quietly wondering why they feel so untethered. Women who don’t want to run back to corporate just because the messy middle feels uncomfortable. Who have ideas, dreams, skills, and possibilities floating around, and need help turning all of that into a business strategy that actually makes sense.

The messy middle is messy by design, but it doesn’t have to be chaotic. Messy means you are in transition. Chaotic means there is no container, no direction, no way to turn the fog into movement.

The real gift wasn't the answer, it was the mirror

I keep thinking about that call, not because Aly gave me a magic answer but because she gave me a mirror. She saw the dream I kept postponing, she saw that I was capable of building the safe thing, but maybe not fully alive inside it, and she gave me permission to tell the truth to myself.

So maybe this is me passing some of that on to you, not asking you to be reckless or to ‘burn everything down and chase your dream’, but I’ll lend you permission to tell yourself the truth about what you actually want. That’s the first step to getting there.

💭 Your Turn

What is that dream of yours that you have kept on the sidelines to focus on the more ‘serious’ things in life?

Hit reply or comment. I’d love to hear from you.

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That’s incredible to me, because a whole lifetime fits inside twelve months when you’re rebuilding from scratch. I have tried things, killed things, restarted things, met new people, dropped old assumptions, and changed my mind about what I want more times than I can count. From the outside, that probably looks like indecision. From the inside, it has been the most productive year of self-knowledge I have ever had.

I Launched a Thing, Then I Pivoted Away From It.

At the start of this year, I shared with you how I was structuring my year. A few weeks later, I shared the launch of Amplio, a consulting practice. What I haven’t shared is that after a few months of working on it, I pivoted away from that direction entirely.

The truth is, it felt really good to land on something that gave me energy and, more importantly, gave me language, a label. I could finally answer the question: “What do you do?'“ with a clean sentence. And then, within a few months, I couldn’t continue down that lane anymore.

So I went into hiding.

And the voice in my head was relentless.

People are going to think I’m unserious. People are going to think I don’t know what I’m doing. I look scattered. I am scattered.

I had spent a career being the woman with the plan, who executed, who delivered. I knew how to finish things. And here I was, looking like someone who couldn’t commit to a single sentence about herself.

What I Was Actually Hiding From

What I’ve come to understand is that the hiding wasn’t really about other people. It was about me not having language for where I was, and being unwilling to be seen without it.

I think I wanted this season to look more polished than it ever was going to look. I wanted the transition to be clean. Corporate exit > recovery > clarity > new thing > success. A cute little arc. Very respectable and very easy to explain to friends and family.

But that is not what happened, and that is not how rebuilding works. You are not just choosing a new job title; you are questioning the entire operating system that got you here. When you leave a structure that defined you for a decade or more, you don’t get to walk directly into the next defined thing. You try things, and some of them work, and some of them don’t, and some of them work for three months and then stop working, and you have to decide if you’re going to keep going or change direction. I wouldn’t classify that as ‘scattered’, that’s the actual work of figuring out who you are when nobody is handing you a title.

I needed someone to say that to me a year ago, so I’m saying it now: the messy middle is not a failure of the process. It is the process.

Nobody Is Moving in a Straight Line

I’ve been talking to a lot of women in this same stretch lately, women finding their way off the default corporate path, and every single one of them is doing some version of this. Trying, adjusting, pivoting, trying again. Nobody is moving in a straight line, and the ones who look like they are from the outside are just better at editing what they share.

If you expect that the first thing you try is going to be the thing, you have set yourself up for a particular kind of disappointment that I would not wish on anyone. Finding yourself after corporate is iterative. It just is. And you can either fight that or go along with it and let it help you discover yourself in a less stressful way

Three to Five Business Days

I posted on LinkedIn recently that it takes me three to five business days to answer the question “What do you do?” I was half joking, but also, I wasn’t.

Someone responded with a suggestion: “ Answer ‘for work or for fun?” I loved that, because it takes the pressure off having one perfect sentence that explains your whole life. What they were really giving me was permission to stop trying to compress my entire becoming into a single line for the comfort of whoever was asking.

That has been one of the hardest parts for me. I like language, and I LOVE clarity. I like being able to explain things, but this season has truly humbled me, because I’ve had to accept that I can be in a valid season of life even if I cannot yet name it beautifully.

Maybe the language comes after the living, maybe you don’t get to name the thing until you’ve spent enough time inside it. Maybe the sentence you’re trying so hard to craft is not supposed to arrive before the experiment, and maybe the experiment is what gives you the sentence.

Rude, but all of it is turning out to be true.

Coming Out of Hiding

After I pivoted away from Amplio, my instinct was to withdraw. I didn’t want to keep explaining. I didn’t want to keep updating people. I didn’t want to say one thing and then later have to say something else. So I hid.

But hiding didn’t make me feel more grounded. It made me feel smaller. It made the messy middle feel shameful, like something I had to clean up before I could be seen again.

I don’t think that’s true.

There is a certain kind of freedom that comes from owning the in-between. And I don’t mean owning it the way I would have in corporate, with a polished exterior and a polished PowerPoint ready to go. I mean, owning it the way you own a thing you’ve stopped being embarrassed about. Saying I’m in a rebuilding season without flinching. Saying I’m experimenting and letting that be enough. Letting people see you mid-figure-it-out and deciding that’s allowed.

It doesn’t mean you’ve worked through the discomfort; it just means you’ve decided the alternative is worse. The hiding, the smallness, the constant low-grade shame of pretending you’re somewhere you’re not. All of that costs more than just telling the truth about where you are.

And when you do tell the truth, something shifts, because there’s nowhere left for the shame to sit. You may look unserious to some people, but the people who matter, the ones who have been through their own version of this or who have been feeling discomfort and waiting for validation - they will see something else entirely. They’ll see someone bold enough to stand in her truth, and they’ll be inspired by it.

Many of us are in some kind of messy middle, we’re just all trying very hard not to look like it.

💭 Your Turn

If you’re in the messy middle right now, what part of it are you trying not to be seen in?

Hit reply or comment. I’d love to hear from you.

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On Your Terms recently crossed 1,000 subscribers, and in honor of that, I would love to get to know you better so I can support you optimally on your journey. Please take 3 mins to answer these questions.

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Not whether your work was useful, or whether the project landed, or whether a goal was met.

Whether you are good enough.

This is what performance culture does, especially in tech and high-pressure environments. It is not just that the expectations are high, It’s that, slowly, you start outsourcing your worth.

At some point you really have to ask whether these corporate systems are actually measuring performance, or whether they are deliberately nurturing insecurity in their employees for their own benefit and calling it performance management.

It’s not you, it’s the system

Let me tell you about the time I got a great performance review but had to ask my manager to please tell me what I did so I could do it again, because I was confused.

When I say this company takes the cake, I mean it takes the cake so much that I almost don’t remember what performance culture looked like at the other places. I just know they were not this bad.

The whole year had been a total shit show. I didn’t know what the definition of success was, and even my manager couldn’t tell me, because she didn’t know either, and I don’t blame her, as the ball was constantly moving on her level, too.

I describe it to people like this: imagine starting a race and being told there’s no finish line. You just keep running, and when the whistle blows, you stop, and whoever has run the farthest wins.

My solution to this, as a person who takes her work very seriously, was to run fast and hard. Do everything as excellently as I possibly could and hope for the best.

I went into the performance meeting expecting to be decimated, but my rating was actually really good! I was so shocked!

So I asked my manager, “Please tell me what I did so I can do it again next year.”

Isn’t that crazy? How can I be performing well and still not know what performance means? How can a system reward you and leave you with no real understanding of what success is?

In hindsight, I see it for what it was. I see that the system was not clear… It was just confident. And because the system sounds confident, you start assuming you must be the confused one, and there must be something wrong with you.

But no. Sometimes the system is confused too; it has just learned how to make that confusion your problem.

Sinem had a similar experience.

“Your goals are just the beginning”

This one is personal. It’s the kind of story I’ve heard from too many women in corporate. A woman is pregnant and having a really difficult time. She has conversations with the person she’s reporting to about what she needs to be able to keep delivering to be ok, and she does all those things. But when performance evaluation comes, the verdict is that she isn’t quite meeting expectations.

Somehow, the goalpost has changed.

A common language I’ve heard used in these moments is, “Your goals are just the beginning.”

Your goals are just the beginning? So you can hit your goals, and you’re still not performing? Then what are the goals for?

This is how these systems make you feel like you are losing your mind. The target moves, the language changes, and the expectations become vibes. You think you agreed to one thing, and then the evaluation comes, and suddenly there is another thing, another dimension, another yes, but you didn’t see it coming.

Yes, you hit your goals, but your goals were just the beginning.

Yes, you did the work, but was your impact visible enough?

Yes, your manager thinks you’re doing well, but what do other managers in the room think?

Yes, you delivered, but did you deliver in the right way, to the right people, at the right level of perceived strategic importance?

It is all so ridiculous, people.

Because here’s the thing: in these systems, everything matters. Hit the goals. Be visible. Build the narrative. Manage up. Manage sideways. Have impact. Have presence. Be strategic. And then in the room, someone gets to pick which one of those mattered most this cycle. Whichever one you missed, that’s the one they’ll point to.

That is not performance management. That is moving the goalpost and calling it excellence.

The room you are not in

And then there is the part most people don’t see clearly: the calibration room. The room where your work is discussed without you, where you can’t defend yourself.

Your performance review is not always just between you and your manager. Your manager can think you are great, put you up for promotion, and write a positive review. And then it goes into a room. And in that room, if one other manager has any doubt about you — one — it can affect the outcome. The doubt does not have to be deep or evidence-based. It could be, oh, she didn’t respond to my email. It could even be someone who just wants to promote someone on their own team and beats you down to make room.

(I just had to drop a comment on this post I saw on LinkedIn:)

Suddenly, your performance is not being evaluated; it’s being negotiated.

Your work becomes a debate, your rating becomes a discussion, and your future depends on how well someone else can defend you in a room you are not in.

And then the person on the receiving end is expected to absorb the outcome as truth.

Performance culture is the real Hunger Games.

I’m sorry, am I a chair?

And then there is stack ranking… like, I’m sorry, am I a chair?

Why are you stack-ranking me against other individuals? Human beings with different roles, different managers, different projects, different levels of support, different visibility, different life circumstances, different political capital. But somehow everybody gets lined up and compared.

Or is it the forced bell curve, which is its own special kind of madness? Even if a team is full of strong performers (these companies boast about hiring the best of the best for a reason), the system needs the shape of the curve. Someone has to be at the top, someone has to be in the middle, and someone has to be below. Not because they are bad, but because the curve demands it.

So again, are we measuring performance, or are we manufacturing insecurity? A system that requires someone to be below so the model can look balanced is not just measuring performance; it’s creating scarcity and anxiety, and telling people that even if everyone is strong, someone still has to lose.

This is the game, and in my opinion, the game is madness.

Here’s the scam and how to un-scam yourself

I don’t have an issue with feedback, excellence, ambition, or accountability. I believe in all of those things.

The problem is when performance culture becomes a confusing mix of unclear goals, moving targets, subjective rooms, forced comparison, and corporate language that makes everything sound more reasonable than it actually is. People are told to be authentic but rewarded for being strategic. Told to collaborate but ranked against each other. Told to own their growth but not given clarity. Told the system is fair, even when everyone knows your manager’s ability to advocate for you can change the outcome. And then companies benefit from all that extra effort while still reserving the right to say, hmm, not quite.

That is the scam. And yes, I said scam.

If people leave these environments with their nervous systems fried and their self-trust damaged, maybe we should stop acting like this is just the price of excellence. Maybe it is not excellence. Maybe it is dysfunction with a nice compensation package.

I’m not saying everyone should quit their job. People have different circumstances. Bills are real. Kids are real. Sometimes staying is the wise thing.

But we need perspective. Your performance review can tell you how your work was perceived inside a specific system, by specific people, under specific incentives, at a specific moment in time. That is it. It can tell you something. It cannot tell you everything.

So take the feedback, and learn what is useful. But don’t let the system convince you it has the final say on who you are.

It’s not you, it’s the system. And it’s all so ridiculous.

💭 Your Turn

What's the one piece of corporate feedback that lived in your head way longer than it deserved to?

Hit reply. I’d love to hear.

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Through their stories, we’ll explore the pivots, tradeoffs, courage, uncertainty, and decisions that come with stepping away from the default path. My hope is that they expand what feels possible and remind you that there are many ways to build a life that actually feels like yours.

My first feature is Krista Casey, a coach and co-founder of The Shift. After fourteen years as a creative director at global brands, maternity leave gave her enough stillness to realize the path she was on was costing her too much. What followed was years of unlearning, grief, and deliberate rebuilding.

Let’s get into Krista’s story.

Tell us a little about yourself

I’m originally from NYC, went to university in Boston, and I’ve been living in Berlin, Germany for the past 8 years.

I went to the United Nations International School as a child, and it was a formative experience for me. My classmates were from all over the world. I started speaking French at six years old (I’ve lost it, sadly). I see a lot of synergies between my early years and how I am raising my son – living abroad, speaking fluent German, in a daycare with families from all over the world.

I studied design and photography and worked for a long time as a creative director for global brands like Wayfair and New Balance before retraining as a coach and building my own business.

I’m a creative, a Highly Sensitive Person, an expat, and a parent. I also love to share my top two values when I introduce myself: connection and curiosity.

Values tell us so much about a person that a job title skips over.
Mine show up in everything. In the way I coach. In the way I parent. In the way I choose friendships and partnerships and opportunities.

I try not to lead with my title/job description. I used to really suffer from a fixed identity. For many years, my introduction started and ended with my job title and my company. At the time, I had very little language for myself beyond that, and it created a lot of fear and scarcity for me. If it wasn’t that job title, then who was I?

In corporate, you were being promoted, recognized, rewarded; all the external markers of success. What was actually happening on the inside during that season?

I was radically unboundaried.

I’d never even heard of a boundary, let alone tried to set one.

At the time, I had no language for these things, but now I can clearly see it as masking and dysregulation. I was leaning hard on a lot of numbing activities. Namely, doom scrolling, online shopping and alcohol. I was so fried and anxious at the end of every day, and because I had no tools or language for what was happening I tried to numb and distract myself. Our numbing activities can only take us so far. With so much unprocessed and misunderstood, I see now that I was a bit of a ticking time bomb.

I didn’t understand that I was Highly Sensitive. I didn’t understand the childhood dynamics that had shaped me. I knew I was empathetic and deeply motivated to build and lead teams where people felt understood and could do their best work. But I was wrecking myself in the process.

I was also very much caught up in a vicious cycle because I received a lot of praise and validation from everyone in my life. When things look good on paper, they seem to attract a lot of external praise. And that external praise can keep us really stuck. Because in the moments when we question things, we are quick to remind ourselves how impressed everyone else is. Why can’t I just be happy with everything I’ve worked so hard for?

Walk us through your career journey pre-burnout

I studied graphic design and photography, and then graduated into the 2009 recession.

I did whatever I could to pay the bills. I worked in a cafe. Photographed family portrait sessions. Designed logos and websites for small businesses. Looking back, I feel this is an important plot point in my story. Graduating into such extreme economic uncertainty was terrifying. Once I clawed my way out, I was determined not to ever go back there.

My first real break came at New Balance, where I went in-house as an art director and graphic designer. I was completely in awe of how an internal creative agency worked. Every single piece of the creative process was staffed in-house. They’d hand me a box of shoes and a brief, pair me with a copywriter, and give me total autonomy to deliver end-to-end. My work ended up in retail stores, printed in brochures, and in the app. The feelings of full ownership never left me.

From there, I moved to Wayfair during their real scale-up years and again had that incredible combination of autonomy and momentum. I got to do such an interesting range of creative work: art direction, photography, and set styling on TV commercials. I got a front row seat to how large productions work. I loved it.

What I didn’t fully see at the time was the gradual shift happening underneath. The creative work I loved was slowly giving way to something else — stakeholder management, team leadership, rooms full of 50 people looking to me for direction.

As an introvert with high sensitivity, that required a level of stretching and masking that I wasn’t fully aware I was doing. Until my body made it impossible to ignore.

What did burnout feel like for you? Were there signs? Are there specific things or circumstances that you have now identified as triggers?

The first time it happened, I don’t know if I saw signs but if I did, I surely ignored them. My body had to shut down for me to pay attention.

I was sitting in an interview room with an art director candidate when my vision started to blur at the edges. Then the spots came. Then I was sweating through my shirt. I excused myself, made it to the bathroom, and lay down on the cold tile floor.

In retrospect, it was clearly my body saying: we will not take one more step in this direction.

Now, with space to reflect, I can see that the idea of adding more people to my team was the trigger. My team had grown so fast that I had no time to find my equilibrium. It wasn’t just the people management but new channels, new markets, and new stakeholders. It was too much, too fast.

The times it happened after that (and there were more), the signals started earlier. My stomach is my second brain, and it tells me everything. That tightening, that dread, that low-grade discomfort that builds before I have conscious language for what’s wrong. That’s my first signal now.

What I’ve come to understand as triggers — and I didn’t have this language at the time — is that I was a Highly Sensitive Person in an environment that required constant masking, constant context-switching, and absolutely no boundaries. I was the person people came to when things were broken. I wore that as a badge of honor. And I had no idea what it was costing me.

A lot of women talk about maternity leave as a pause. For you, it sounds like it was more than that. What did you find when you finally had time to stop? What inspired you to go on your healing journey?

In Germany, maternity leave is 12 months. Which meant that for the first time in 13 years, I stopped working.

With so much time and space to think, I had a lot flooding my mind. Racing thoughts. Constant questions. And underneath all of it, this enormous sense of relief. I can actually think. There’s room in here.

But there was also discomfort. I remember sitting with all of my thoughts and feeling overwhelmed by them. Because so many of them were asking the same question: Are you actually going back to that?

The real turning point was something our doula said in one of our consultations.

“The parent has an incredible ability to regulate the nervous system of their child — simply by holding them close to their body.”

My first thought was: that is the most powerful thing I have ever heard. My second thought was: I don’t think I am ever regulated.

I had studied the nervous system in biology class. But this idea of being regulated — of co-regulating with another person — was language nobody had ever used with me. And even though I couldn’t fully articulate why, I knew immediately that something needed to change if I was going to show up as the parent that I wanted to be.

So I started working with our doula, who also does coaching work, within weeks of my son’s birth. Because the overstimulation of a newborn as a Highly Sensitive Person is real, and I needed someone to process it with.

That was the beginning of my healing journey.

I was now somebody’s parent, and I needed to take a serious look at what was happening inside me if I was going to show up the way I wanted to.

When it was time to leave corporate, how was the transition for you?

Complicated. Friction filled.

By the second half of my maternity leave, it was clear to me that I didn’t want to go back. The feelings were strong. But knowing what I didn’t want and knowing what I did want are two very different things.

And I think what was causing the most friction — the thing that I see keeps so many people stuck — was that I was being pulled hard in two directions at once.

On one side was my old identity. And it had a death grip on me. Not because I wanted it anymore. I actually knew I didn’t. But because my entire career was built there. Because everyone in my life knew me as that version of myself.
I remember feeling really trapped in that in-between place.

And on the other side was the thing I did want. Which felt fuzzy and uncertain and loud with inner criticism. Everyone’s doing coaching. What makes you think you can do this? Why would someone want to work with you over others?

So I was stuck between two worlds. One I no longer wanted but couldn’t quite release. One I wanted deeply but couldn’t quite claim.

That in-between place was one of the absolutely most uncomfortable. And I lived there for a while.

I remember when I got my coaching certification. I was really excited and proud of myself. I wrote a LinkedIn post and published it. And then, no joke, woke up at 4 am in a panic. I opened my LinkedIn app and deleted the post. I can’t even fully explain what happened. Other than that, I felt an intense fear of being seen.

Around the same time, I remember saying to my husband, “I really want to be a coach, but I can’t tell anyone that I’m coaching now.”

His response: “It’s going to be really hard to coach if no one knows about it.”

I see this with clients all the time. When we are in this in-between place. Between two identities, the visibility of the new identity feels like an actual threat. It feels unsafe.

You said leaving was hard, “not because you yearned to go back, but because you had invested so much time building that version of yourself.” That line stopped me. How did you grieve that?

Before I grieved it, I resisted it.

And I think that’s what keeps so many people stuck for longer than they need to be.

Because that version of yourself, the one you’re leaving, isn’t just a job. It’s how everyone in your life knows you. It’s wrapped up in status and money and title. It looks good on paper. And walking away from something that everybody approves of, even when it feels completely wrong in your body, is genuinely hard.

For me, the first stage was denial. Resistance. Holding on.

But here’s what I’ve come to understand about how I actually moved through it.

I can clearly remember the turning point. I read an article from Frontiers in Psychology about the relationship between our habits and our identity. In many ways, our little habits throughout the day or the week inform or support our identity. So what if you reverse engineer it? I got really into this.

I tasked myself with writing down in exceptional detail everything that the future version of myself would do at the daily or weekly level. When I would wake up. What I would eat. What I would wear. Who I would talk to.

And then I started doing those things. Every day.

This was in the middle of November 2024. And by January 2025, within six weeks, my coaching business was up and running. I don’t mean to say it was by any means perfect or fully fleshed out. It was a start. An MVP. It was up, and it was running.

I had clients. They were excited to work with me. I was THRILLED to work with them.

I joined Selicia at the Shift and stepped into my role as co-founder.

My time was my own. I worked out during the week. I met friends for lunch. I introduced myself to other coaches. These were all things that I had written down in detail weeks earlier.

I don’t believe in silver bullets. These things are messy and complicated. And the 12 months before November 2024 were filled with ups and downs. But once I got crystal clear with myself and started stepping into the life I wanted before it existed, I created it. I literally breathed life into it.

Another important part of my story: becoming a parent gave me a new and very powerful orientation. I had a real intention about how I wanted to show up for my son. And that intention was not compatible with the version of me that was dysregulated, masking, and running on empty.

I did a lot of work during this time. Multiple coaches. A lot of reading and research. And the more I learned about myself. About high sensitivity, about nervous system regulation, about the patterns I had been carrying. The clearer the path became.

It looked like getting so clear on who I actually was that integration with who I was becoming was the only logical next step. .

Corporate rewards a very specific set of behaviors: decisiveness, performance, always having an answer. When you stepped out of that environment, what did you have to actively unlearn? And what surprised you about that process?

I’ve done a lot of unlearning and I think there is much more ahead for me.

The thing that stands out most in your question is the idea of always having an answer.

That has been one of the most significant un-learnings of my coaching practice.

For 14 years of my corporate career, I was expected to have the answer. To walk into a room with a point of view, a recommendation, a solution. That was the job. That was how you demonstrated value.

Coaching looks different.

It’s not about the coach having the answer.

It’s about asking the right questions so the client can find their own answer. In their own time, in their own way.

And for someone with people-pleasing tendencies who has historically filled every silence, that has required real and ongoing work.

One of my favorite acronyms in coaching is WAIT. It stands for Why Am I Talking?

Because my job in a session is not to promote a specific outcome or fill the space with my perspective.

It’s to listen deeply, reflect back, and ask dialed-in questions.
I’ve had to practice sitting in the silence.

Letting the answer come. Trusting that the space I create is part of the process.

The other enormous unlearning, still very much in progress, is pace.

My corporate environments were relentless.

Stacked meetings from 9 - 6 pm. Constant context switching, which is genuinely depleting for Highly Sensitive People. No time to process, decompress, or even use the bathroom. That was just normal.

And that wiring doesn’t disappear when you leave.

I still catch myself moving from session to session without breathing room.

Still feel the pull of more equals better.

More equals productive.

Still reach for external signals — engagement on a LinkedIn post, a message from a client — as proof that I’m doing a good job.

Because when you’re building something on your own, inside your own head, you can crave that validation more than you’d like to admit.

What’s helped me most is changing how I structure my time.

Instead of outcome-based calendar blocks, I’ve started creating what I call flow phases. Two hours labeled content writing flow or Maven program building flow. No expected deliverable. Just dedicated time on a topic.

Some of those sessions produce a lot. Some of them end with nothing to show except two hours of thinking, learning, and sitting with something. And I’ve had to actively teach myself that the second kind is just as valuable as the first.

That one is still very much a work in progress.

As a person who recovered from burnout, what do you do differently now? Are there guardrails you put in place for yourself so you don’t slip back into that place?

I’m trying my best. And I still have work to do.

Something that has been genuinely grounding for me is the language I’ve built for myself.

I’m very clear on my top two values: Connection and Curiosity. And I have a self-boundary rooted in each one.

A self-boundary is an internal agreement we make with ourselves. It signals that we respect our own time and energy. And I believe they’re the foundation of every external boundary we’ll ever set. Because if we can’t show up for ourselves, it’s incredibly hard to advocate for ourselves with others.

My Connection self-boundary is my Sunday sound bath.

I show up every Sunday. I lay on the floor, close my eyes, and let my mind wander. It’s become an important ritual in my week to process my overstimulation and close out one week and open another.

The self-boundary means I protect that time. I don’t book over it. I don’t show up frazzled and distracted. The ritual only delivers what I need from it if I actually hold the container for it. Afterwards, I don’t look at screens for the rest of the evening. I drink a tea. Read a book. Or write some thoughts in a journal. Every Sunday, I sleep through the night without any interruptions.

It’s very important for HSPs to proactively plan rest. In order to do that, I had to unlearn a lot of my internal narratives around needing to earn my rest. The narratives ran deep. The unlearning started with practice. I would take a day off from work.

And I would sit in the discomfort. I would sit in my living room and let the anxiety wash over me. I would try to read a novel (one of my absolute favorite things to do) and listen to a flood of self-criticism. Things like “this isn’t going to make you a better coach.” “Why did you pick this book? It’s not even interesting.”

Over time, I started to shift the narrative. I can’t show up as a present coach if I don’t rest. And I have to rest first and coach second. That’s it. That’s how I show up energized and rested.

My Curiosity self-boundary looks different.

Right now, it’s a book I’m really loving called The Heart of Laser-Focused Coaching.

Two mornings a week, I wake up before the rest of my family. It’s not a stretch for me, I’m the early bird in our house. I make my coffee, read a few pages, and journal on what I read. About 45 minutes, just for me, before the day starts.

The self-boundary is protecting that morning window. Getting up a bit earlier. Not letting the day swallow it before it begins.

Both of these have become genuinely ritualistic for me. They don’t feel like discipline anymore.

The other guardrail — and this one is still very much a practice — is the nervous system awareness I’ve built.

I’ve spent real time studying what dysregulation looks and feels like in my body. What it means when I’m moving into fight or flight. What it means when I’m starting to freeze. And just having language for those states has changed a lot.

Before, I had no awareness and no language. Things would escalate before I even knew something was happening.

Now I can sometimes catch it earlier. Name it. Notice how it’s showing up. And navigate it in real time

Bringing awareness to our system is the work. It is the regulating.

That’s the whole practice really.

Building a coaching practice, co-founding The Shift, working with HSPs; does this feel like taking on a new identity, or finally letting your real one breathe? How do you think about that?

Honestly, it’s a bit of both. And I love that the question makes room for that complexity.

My real identity finally has space, and that feels amazing.

Working one-on-one with Highly Sensitive People, I am genuinely in my element.

There’s something about this work that doesn’t feel like work in the way that corporate did.

Coaching feels creative to me. Building my own business feels creative. Being the decision maker, following my curiosity and intuition, designing the shape of my own days. That all lights me up in a way I didn’t know was possible.

But the solopreneur identity? That one is genuinely new.

For a very long time, I told myself that wasn’t me. That I wasn’t cut out for it. Too anxious. Too terrified of uncertainty. Not built for the instability.

And I think a lot of Highly Sensitive People receive that message. Explicitly or implicitly. That self-employment is too unpredictable, too stressful for someone wired the way we are.

I believed that story for most of my life.

Learning to release it has been one of the most significant parts of this chapter.

And then there’s the co-founding piece, which feels like an expansion. Some things are familiar and some a stretch. I love it.

Working with Selicia is genuinely energizing for me. I spent a long career building and leading teams, and that was always my favorite part of the work.

Our partnership fills something I really need. And the programs we build together. Bringing groups of women into a shared space, designing the curriculum, structuring the sessions, thinking about tools and frameworks and how it all flows, that’s a form of design.

And I’ve always been a designer at my core.

So when I’m in a Power Circles session with 18 women doing real work together, I feel like I’m leading. I feel like I’m building something. I feel like myself.

Which I suppose is the truest answer to your question.

Some of this is new. Some of it is finally familiar.

The Shift was born from a simple observation: corporate environments don’t work equally well for everyone. That’s a quiet way of saying something pretty radical. What are you actually trying to change, and what does progress look like from where you’re standing?

Selicia and I met after we had both come off maternity leave and were trying to figure out how work fit into our lives as parents.

We were both fed up. We were both struggling to see how we fit into a system that hadn’t been designed with us in mind. And we clicked immediately on that shared experience. It was a bit like lightning in a bottle.

But my own frustration goes back much further than that.

Throughout my corporate career, I watched women get stuck in the same places over and over again. When they tried to advocate for a promotion, a salary change, or a scope increase. When they pitched something in a meeting. When they showed up with exactly the same capability as their male counterparts, and somehow still hit a wall.

I also watched (and experienced firsthand) something that used to make me genuinely angry.

Women being told they lack confidence for leadership.

I heard that feedback myself. Multiple times. And what I’ve come to understand is that so often what gets labeled as a lack of confidence is actually a completely rational response to an environment that has been sending contradictory messages your whole career.

Be assertive but not aggressive. Be visible but not too much.

When I left corporate and started coaching, everything I had witnessed firsthand was confirmed — over and over — in what my clients were experiencing.

And with significant additional weight around what it means to be a working mother inside systems that were simply not built for that reality.

We want to name the system. Explain what’s actually happening. Using research, not just lived experience, though we have plenty of that, too.

And then build programs targeted at the exact moments where women are getting stuck.

Our current Power Circles program covers personal brand and visibility, networking and unlocking hidden opportunities, confidence, boundaries and negotiation. That’s not a random curriculum. That’s a direct response to the specific places we see people losing ground.

We’re not interested in keeping things at a conceptual level. We want people to walk out of a session and use something the next day. In our last cohort, it was genuinely moving to hear women come back the following week and say they had taken the negotiation toolkit directly into a real scenario in their lives.

That’s what progress looks like up close.

At the bigger level? Progress looks like the people who have historically been excluded from the unwritten rules finally having access to them.

How do you spend your free time? What are some of your favorite things to do outside work?

Movement is a big one for me.

I love a spin class with an incredible soundtrack, and Berlin delivers on that in a big way. I have a theory that half the spin instructors here are also DJing in clubs on the weekends, because the tracks are genuinely that good.

I’m also a yoga and Pilates person. And my Sunday sound bath is non-negotiable. That one sits at the intersection of free time and self-care, and I protect it fiercely.

Berlin is an incredibly green city, which I love. I believe they say there are 2,500 public green spaces. There are parks everywhere, and you can be at a lake or walking in the woods within a short trip from the city center.

Taking my dog for a walk in the woods is one of my favorite things. My dog is very special. I believe he is also Highly Sensitive. And co-regulating our nervous system with animals and pets can be very calming. I find a lot of peace in spending time with him.

I’m a big reader. Physical books only, no e-readers. I’m usually reading two at once: one fiction and one nonfiction, typically something on the nervous system, neuroscience, coaching modalities, or whatever topic I’m currently curious about.

Right now I’m reading: Blue Sisters and The Heart of Laser focused Coaching

The two-book system means I always have somewhere to land depending on what I need that day.

And then there’s my family.

My son is 3.5, and he is curious and chatty and always wants to be doing something, which suits Berlin really well. We love museums, cafes, and his current favorite ritual: riding his bike to the park and getting an ice cream.

I’m also deeply into interiors. I spent over twelve years at a furniture company, so that’s probably not surprising. Making our home a space that feels genuinely relaxing and restorative matters a lot to me.

For a Highly Sensitive Person, your environment isn’t just decorative. It’s restorative. The way a space feels has a real impact on how regulated I am inside it.

Is there anything else we haven’t touched on that you’d like to share?

I’d love to take a moment to talk about high sensitivity. If any of this conversation has resonated and the term is new to you, I would love to expand a bit.

High sensitivity is a trait that exists in over 100 species. The members of any species who carry it are the ones who are hyperaware of their environment.

In fish, it might look like extreme attunement to changes in water conditions, the presence of predators, and shifts in food supply. They’re picking up more from their environment than their peers and responding to it more deeply.

In humans, with all the complexity of our physical and digital worlds, that translates into taking in an enormous amount of stimuli. For me, it’s not just information. It’s reading every facial expression, every shift in tone, every change in body language. Especially in people I know well. I can feel mood shifts before anyone has said a word.

Dr. Elaine Aron, who coined the term and has spent decades researching the trait, describes four core attributes that spell out the acronym DOES.

D is for Depth of Processing. All of that stimulation coming in from the environment gets sorted, organized, cataloged, and processed deeply. It leads to incredible dot-connecting, creative problem solving, and new ideas. It can also feel like you simply cannot turn your brain off. Which is why so many of my clients describe it as overthinking. It’s a blessing and a curse in equal measure.

O is for Overstimulation. Because we’re taking in and processing so much, we reach capacity faster than most. Loud environments, constant context-switching, too many inputs at once, these are genuinely depleting for HSPs in a way that isn’t always visible from the outside.

E is for Empathy. HSPs feel deeply. Both their own emotions and other people’s. We experience joy and grief and beauty more intensely. We also tend to be highly attuned to the emotional states of the people around us, which is one of the reasons there is such a strong correlation between high sensitivity and caregiving roles. Teachers, coaches, therapists, doulas: these fields attract HSPs because this kind of attunement is the work.

And S is for Sensing the Subtle. HSPs notice things others miss. A shift in the energy of a room. A change in someone’s tone. An oversight. This isn’t about having better eyesight or hearing, it’s about how deeply the brain processes what comes in.

About 25% of the population carries this trait. And roughly 70% of HSPs are introverts. 30% are extroverts, which surprises a lot of people. Being highly sensitive and being introverted are related but not the same thing.

There is also a strong correlation between high sensitivity and creativity. The depth of processing and the attunement to subtleties are genuinely synergistic with creative thinking. With making unexpected connections, seeing problems from angles others don’t, generating ideas that feel fresh.

I feel a real connection with both creativity and caregiving. Both have shown up in my work for as long as I can remember.

The work I care most about is helping Highly Sensitive People understand themselves and then design lives that actually work with their wiring instead of against it.

Where or how can people follow your journey?

On my LinkedIn

Or Substack

Also my website

The Shift

And our next cohort of Power Circles on Maven

💭 Your Turn

What's something you've recently found language for, that you'd been feeling for a long time without knowing how to name?

Hit reply. I’d love to hear.

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The body remembers

It was October 4th, 2024, and I had just shut my work laptop down for what would turn out to be the last time. I was going on early maternity leave, and the moment the screen went dark, I felt a weight come off my shoulders. I could finally just be happy about my pregnancy, and I could look forward to my baby without having to perform for my employer.

Five months later, I got the notification that I would be laid off, and another weight was lifted. The reason it lifted is the part I want to sit with, because for those five months on maternity leave, I had still been thinking about my job almost every day. I was anxious about what I’d come back to, the drama I’d left behind and how it would have unfolded without me, and whether I’d survive another round of it mentally. Five months away, and I still hadn’t unplugged.

The layoff was what finally cut the cord, and I thought that would be the end of it.

It wasn’t. Even now, months later, I’ll be sitting in a quiet house at 8:15 in the morning and notice that my chest is tight for no reason at all. Even without the corporate pressures, my body still braces for some version of me that should already be three tasks deep into the day.

This is the part nobody tells you about leaving corporate. The calendar clears before the nervous system does, and you can build a new life while your body is still running on the old one.

So I’ve stopped pretending that what I’m doing is just designing a routine, because what I’m actually doing is recovery. The things in my stack are not productivity hacks; they are the small props holding me up while I unlearn an entire way of being.

Here we go.

My actual stack

Daycare

We found a home daycare with only 5 kids, and the owners have now been dubbed his extra set of grandparents because that’s the kind of love they show him, since his real grandparents don’t live close by.

My son started there when he was 4 months old, and I was drowning in postpartum depression, anxiety, rage, everything, you name it. Daycare saved me. It made me get out of my house, wear proper clothes, interact with other people, and gave me space to sleep and start the process of recovery. He went for 3 days a week back then, and I’m so thankful for them. They thought they were caring for my son, but they were saving his mom.

Now he goes 5 days a week and has the time of his life playing with his daycare friends and getting loved on by his daycare grandparents. I am the kind of mom who needs time away from her child to be a good mom, and I say that now without apology, though it took me a while to get there. What daycare is really doing is giving me back hours that don’t belong to anyone else, and learning what to do with hours that no one is claiming has been harder than I expected. The first reflex is to fill them, but the work is letting some of them stay empty.

Slow mornings

If he was up at 5 am and I'm running on fumes, I come home from drop-off and nap, without guilt and without earning it first. That sentence still feels strange to type. If I'm not tired, I move slowly, read my devotional, and let the house be what it is for a while before I open my laptop. A slow morning used to be something I stole on vacation, and now it's the load-bearing wall of my week. Everything else only works because the morning is allowed to breathe.

The fitness trainer in India

Three days a week, I train with a coach based in India (y’all need to see my muscles!). He runs my sessions from his home to mine, on my schedule, in my house, at a price I can actually afford on a self-employed income. I’ve tried Orange Theory, I’ve tried Pure Barre and Bar method, I’ve tried other boutique studio that were supposed to help, and this is the thing that’s working for me right now (and he asked me to share his details!!)

If you want to find him, his name is Sachin, and he’s a certified trainer with 8+ years of experience offering 1-on-1 online coaching. You can reach him on WhatsApp at +91 93184 64650. Tell him Tomide sent you his way.

A calendar shaped around how my brain actually works

I learned something about myself that no corporate environment ever gave me the room to notice: I am not good at taking calls and doing real work on the same day. If I stack three calls in a morning, the afternoon is gone because i’m too exhausted to function. I used to think that meant something was wrong with me, but it doesn’t. It means calls and thinking are different jobs, and my brain wants them on different days.

So Mondays, Tuesdays, and Thursdays are bookable, with Tuesdays and Thursdays as my heavy call days, and I let them be heavy. Wednesdays are for deep work and no one can put anything on my calendar. Fridays are not a workday, though that one is still a work in progress because the work I’m doing is woven into my life now in a way it never was at Meta or Twitter. The calendar isn’t about working less; it’s about not lying to myself about how I actually function.

Therapy, every two weeks

She helps me look backwards, at the patterns and the parts of me shaped by environments I’ve now left. A lot of what I called ambition was something else underneath, and therapy is where I sit with that without rushing to a conclusion. I should mention that I also still work through my birth trauma in therapy. Both are a work in progress.

Coaching, every week

She helps me look forward. She gives me frameworks for decisions I’m too close to see clearly, and she asks the questions that reorganize how I’m thinking about a problem. Where therapy helps me understand how I got here, coaching helps me figure out where I’m going without defaulting to the only playbook I ever knew.

Both of them are non-negotiable for me right now.

How’s it really going?

I’m still in it. Most weeks the stack holds, and some weeks the urgency leaks back in, and I find myself answering a message at 9 pm that could have waited until morning, or feeling guilty for a slow Tuesday, or treating a slow Friday like a problem to solve.

I’m further along than I was a year ago, and the small, seemingly unglamorous things are what got me here.

Thanks to RightWise Wealth for sponsoring this post.

Did you feel confident and prepared for this tax season? That you had made savvy and correct choices across mega backdoor Roth, ESPP, Solo 401(k), 529? If this tax season left you with the nagging feeling that you could have done better, consider working with a financial advisor not only for tax filing, but also for a tax strategy. RightWise Wealth can get you started now with an organized, optimized financial picture so next April is, actually, chill. Set up time with a financial advisor here. (Marketing disclosures here.)

💭Your turn

What's in your corporate recovery stack?

Hit reply. I’d love to hear.

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I've been sitting with this story for a while. Pregnancy, birth, and everything that came after changed me in ways I'm still understanding.

This is the full, unfiltered version. The beautiful parts, the parts that broke me, and the parts I'm still healing from, and a vie into my husband’s experience as well.

If you're pregnant, thinking about it, or somewhere on the other side of your own birth story, I hope this makes you feel less alone.

This video was recorded in September 2025 for personal use (9 months after and in the thick of post patron depression) but I promised to share since I found so much help on the internet in those early days when I was trying to make sense of my experience.

Thanks to my friend, Bukola, for watching it and working with an editor to edit it and make it available for y’all to watch. And thanks to Temidayo for facilitating this conversation and asking all the right questions.

For your Saturday evening viewing:

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I wrote this a month ago. This is the reality of birth trauma… one day you think you’re great, and the next day it feels like it all just happened. I’m not in this exact headspace at the time of posting this, so I’m ok right at this moment.

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I don’t write about becoming a mom, even though motherhood is now one of the biggest facts of my life.

My days revolve around whether he slept, whether he pooped, his smiles, what he eats, and what he wears. My whole life now orbits a 15-month-old, which is deeply uncomfortable for someone who spent the better part of three decades being fully independent, fully ambitious, and fully in charge of her own days.

It also feels like a club I signed up to join but somehow don’t want to be a part of, so I keep it off the page.

I want to say this clearly before I say anything else: I wanted to become a mom. I chose this. I am grateful for my son. I love him in a way I didn’t know was possible, and I would do it all again to have him. And still, parts of this transition have felt so hard and so unlike what I thought it would be that for a long time, I didn’t know how to talk about them at all.

I don’t like being a Mom, because it’s a FREAKING HARD JOB, far harder than a combination of all the hard things I’ve done in my life, and I have done hard things. But I do love being his mom and wouldn’t have it any other way.

Why I keep it quiet

Some of the thoughts I’ve had about motherhood are not the kind society celebrates, but if I’m honest, I think a lot of women feel them and keep them under wraps for the same reasons I do.

When I first became a mom, I was angry because no one had said this is what it might actually look like. I now understand why no one says it: the truth is so vulnerable that you mostly just put your head down and get through, because what other choice is there? And you assume you’re the only one struggling because everyone else seems to be doing fine.

I spent my whole pregnancy calling myself a wimp because I could barely lift my arm while other women were apparently performing great feats with twins in their bellies.

Then birth happened…

… and what the actual h*ll was that?!?!

I share more about my birth trauma here, but the short version is that I almost died three times, and I’m still in therapy 15 months later. I still randomly have flashbacks and have tears in my eyes when I think about it.

I keep asking my therapist, how do I forget?

When do I forget the feeling of life leaving my body?

How do I forget my husband’s face begging me to breathe and stay with him?

How do I forget looking up at the nurse and asking her to please not let me die?

How do I forget that my baby was not fed for 8 hours after he was born because they were focused on me?

How do I forget being readmitted into the hospital on Christmas Day, leaving my baby at home with my mom so that I wouldn’t die? He was just a few days old, he needed me, and I couldn’t be there for him. I couldn’t Mom.

How do I forget that my body could not do the most basic thing: feed my child? It had only one job.

How do I forget?

And then finding out 2 months later that my company said deuces ✌🏾, we don’t want you anymore. (I mean, I didn’t want them either, but would have preferred to say it first :) … but the timing meant I got severance, so, fine.)

Twelve sessions of iron IV infusions at the hospital during pregnancy that never broke me out of the anemia, almost dying in childbirth, ten months of postpartum depression, and the loss of my identity as a corporate professional and an entrepreneur, all at once. My brain was rewired, and I don’t think I’m being dramatic when I say I am not the person I was 15 months ago… heck, I’m not the same person I was in April 2024 when I first found out I was pregnant.

The hardest part of all this

The hardest part is that all of this exists alongside the entrance into the world of my beautiful little boy, and I really hate that those two things have to live in the same house. It SUCKS!

I hate that the event, which was supposed to be beautiful, exists alongside all these other things. I hate that so much.

I love him so much that I would do all of it again to have him in my life, and I am also still grieving. Both things are true at the same time, and I do not know how to make them stop being true at the same time.

Motherhood, even in its most uneventful version, is hard. Mine was not the uneventful version, and I am still working out what it did to me.

Who am I now?

I want to talk more about this part of my life because it is a part of who I am now and part of why I’m building what I’m building. Building as a mom is genuinely different from building as a single person with no one else’s nap schedule to factor in.

But I’m also still trying to find myself as myself again, as an individual, not as someone’s mom or someone’s colleague or a founder.

Just me.

Maybe that is what this post is really about. Not motherhood exactly, but the shock of becoming someone new, and the loneliness of doing it in a world that mostly wants women to skip straight to gratitude.

If you’re in it or know someone in it…

If you’re a mom who has been struggling, in any of the ways I’ve described or in ways I haven’t, you are seen, and you are not alone. If you have felt grief, rage, resentment, numbness, confusion, devotion, love, and disorientation all tangled up in the same week, you are not broken.

Whatever you’re feeling that you don’t say out loud, someone else is feeling it too, probably a lot of someones.

If you’re not a mom, I hope this gives you a window into how hard the transition can be for the women in your life. The ones who look like they’re handling it are very often not.

💭Your turn

What is the part of your story you don’t tell because you’re afraid of how it will land?

Reply, comment, or just sit with it. I’d love to hear from you.

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We focus on the freedom, the flexibility, the courage it takes to leave, and the excitement of building something for yourself. And to be fair, all of that is real.

But I don’t think people talk enough about what happens underneath all of that, because for me, this season has not just been a career shift… it has been a process of rediscovering myself.

What has surprised me most is that leaving corporate did not just remove a paycheck or a title. It removed a structure that had been quietly shaping how I saw myself for years. It removed the rhythm of the workday, the built-in validation, and the easy shorthand of answering “what do you do?” with the name of a recognizable company.

It also removed the comfort of being held inside a system that gave shape to my effort and meaning to my progress. Once that fell away, I was left with a more confronting question than “what should I build next?”

I was left with, “Who am I when none of that is there?”

My last month with a corporate title was April 2025, and here are three things I’ve realized since then:

1. I realized how much of my identity had been tied to structure

I knew leaving corporate would be an adjustment, but I don’t think I fully understood how much of my identity had been reinforced by the structure around me. There is something very stabilizing about having a company name, a team, a role, a cadence, and a clear place in a larger machine.

Even when you find those things limiting, they still hold you in a certain way. They tell you where to focus, what matters, how you’re doing, and in some cases, who you get to be.

When that goes away, what remains is just you, and while that sounds empowering in theory, in practice it can be deeply humbling.

You start realizing that some of the confidence you thought was fully yours was partly being supported by the system. You start noticing how much you relied on the external container to create momentum, clarity, and even a sense of worth.

And then you have to begin the quieter work of figuring out who you are outside of all that.

2. I’m having to rebuild my self-esteem from the inside out, and it’s a journey

I think this has been one of the most personal parts of the journey, and probably one of the hardest to explain. When you are no longer being affirmed by the same external markers, you start to see yourself differently. Or rather, you are forced to.

You start asking where your confidence was genuinely rooted and where it may have been propped up by prestige, performance, or proximity to impressive things. That is not a comfortable exercise, but it is an honest one.

For me, this season has involved rebuilding my self-esteem on something deeper than achievement. Not because achievement is bad, but because it is not enough on its own. Titles come and go, logos come and go, and seasons change. So if your sense of self rests too heavily on those things, then every transition feels more destabilizing than it needs to.

What I am trying to build now is a steadier kind of self-trust, one rooted in actually knowing myself better. Knowing my strengths without apology, knowing my weaknesses without dramatizing or being constrained by them, knowing what kind of work fits me, what kind of life I want, and what I am no longer willing to confuse for alignment just because it looks good from the outside.

3. I’m learning that building well starts with building around what’s already strong

One of the biggest mindset shifts for me has been moving away from the instinct to constantly fix myself. I think many of us who have spent a long time in high-performing environments have been trained to focus on closing gaps, improving the weak areas, rounding yourself out, strengthening the underdeveloped muscle... so you can be considered in the next promotion cycle, so you can keep your job, so you can {insert whatever else your manager might be telling you to do right now}

There is a place for that, of course, but I am starting to think it is not always the wisest foundation for building a life.

What has felt more meaningful in this season is asking a different question:

• What happens if I build around what is already strong?

• What happens if I stop spending so much energy trying to become some ideal, polished, well-rounded version of myself and instead pay closer attention to where I naturally come alive?

• What if the path forward is not about correcting myself into worthiness, but about getting honest about what works, what fits, and what I am actually built for?

That shift has changed more than just how I think about work. It has changed how I think about my time, my energy, my decisions, and even the kind of expectations I place on myself.

There is a different kind of confidence that comes from building from truth instead of performance, and I think that is what I am trying to practice now.

Thanks to RightWise Wealth for sponsoring this post.

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💭 YOUR TURN

Have you gone through a career / identity shift? What have you learnt about yourself in the process?

Hit reply. I’d love to hear.

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She called it self-authorship.

And the moment she said it, something clicked into place that I’ve been circling for a long time.

I’ve always talked about living life on my terms. My definition of freedom has always been clear: doing what I want to do, when I want to do it, and being able to afford it. Nicely. Not scraping by. Not struggling. Comfortably. That’s the life I’m building toward.

But self-authorship takes that further. Because freedom is the outcome. Self-authorship is the practice. Freedom is what you get when you stop letting other people hold the pen. And I think that’s the most honest description of what I’m actually after.

The Way You Earn Is The Way You Live

Here’s what I’ve come to understand, and I think a lot of us dance around this truth: the way you earn determines the way you live. Full stop.

We spend the majority of our waking hours working. And if you’re in a job or a situation that drains you, let’s not pretend that stays contained. It doesn’t. The anxiety follows you home. The resentment leaks into your evenings, your weekends, your relationships. The reverse is also true. When your work feels aligned, the rest of your life has room to breathe.

So when I talk about self-authorship, I’m starting with the income engine because it is foundational. And this platform, On Your Terms, is a piece of that - me building the infrastructure for a self-authored life.

The Audience That Almost Stayed Behind

When I paused my handbag brand Olori, I realized I was walking away from nearly 50,000 people. Years of audience building, gone, because that audience belonged to the brand, not to me.

That was the wake-up call, and I knew that I needed to build my own audience. One that could come with me no matter what the next chapter looked like. So I started writing and sharing this messy, honest journey of pausing a business, having a baby, getting laid off, and rebuilding from scratch.

And for a while, it flowed.

Then it stopped.

The Freeze

If you’ve been reading me for a while, you’ve probably noticed. The articles stopped coming on their usual days. The LinkedIn posts slowed down. And I couldn’t figure out why.

And then it hit me.

I had been consuming so much advice about how to do this. Substack experts say you need to publish at least once a week or your audience will forget you. Notes gurus say you need to post multiple times a day. LinkedIn coaches say you need value posts and client testimonials, with a minimum of three to five posts a week.

Everyone had a rule or a formula.

And the sad part is that I internalized all of it, and eventually froze.

Because the rules were in direct conflict with what I actually wanted to do. I don’t want to write ‘value’ posts right now. I don’t want to teach anyone anything at this moment in my life. I’m not in teaching mode. I’m in living it mode. I’m in figuring it out in real-time mode. What I want to do is share this journey, the real one, not the polished one, and write about what I’m genuinely passionate about: helping people wake up to a life they’re actually happy to live.

I can talk about entrepreneurship all day. But I want to talk about it through the lens of life, not business strategy.

So when all those rules piled up and none of them sounded like me, I just... stopped writing. Without even realizing it, I had handed the pen to everyone else.

Self-Authorship Goes All The Way Down

And that’s why the self-authorship thing hit me on a completely different level.

I realized I had been practicing it at the macro level. Exiting corporate, starting my own business, choosing entrepreneurship…. the big, visible decisions. But I hadn’t carried it down to the details. The how in how I build. The how in how I show up. The how in how I create.

Self-authorship isn’t just choosing to write; it’s choosing how I write. It’s not just choosing to build a platform, it’s choosing to build it in a way that actually feels like mine, even if that breaks every rule in someone else’s playbook.

I am one of one. And the life I’m building will be one of one, too. It won’t look like anyone else’s, because it’s not supposed to.

So Here’s Where I’ve Landed

Yes, I’ll listen to the advice. I’ll take what resonates and leave the rest. But I’m done following other people’s rules for how to do something that is supposed to be mine.

The harder part, the part I’m still working on, is trust. Trusting that what works for me will find its people. Trusting that I don’t have to perform consistency the way someone else defined it to build something real. Trusting that doing this my way is not just okay. It’s the whole point.

Because what is self-authorship if you’re writing someone else’s story?

I’m writing mine. On my terms. Even the way I write it is on my terms. And the first step was noticing where I’d handed over the pen, and taking it back.

Thanks to RightWise Wealth for sponsoring this post.

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💭 YOUR TURN

Where in your life have you handed the pen to someone else? Where are you following rules that made sense for someone else’s story but don’t fit yours? And what would shift if you trusted yourself enough to write a different script?

I’d love to hear. Reply, comment, or just sit with the question. That’s self-authorship too, deciding how you want to engage.

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If you’re in a season of transition, whether you left corporate by choice, got laid off, or simply woke up one day and realized the life you’d been building wasn’t actually yours, this one is for you.

I’ve been in that season. And in the middle of it, books have been my lifeline, especially the ones that stop you mid-sentence, make you put them down, and say: oh. that’s what’s been happening to me.

I’m sharing three of those books in this post today.

Each one gave me something different, and together, they’ve shaped how I think about the work of rebuilding … not just a career, but a life that actually fits.

Thanks to RightWise Wealth for Sponsoring this post.

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Book 1: Bending Reality by Victoria Song

This is the book that made me realize I hadn’t just been tired or burned out. I’d been shrinking.

My co-founder recommended this book and raved so much about it that I had to buy and read it. And I’m not exaggerating when I say I cried during chapter one.

Like, I bawled like a baby.

Maybe it was just hormones …

But also: for the first time in years, I had language for something I’d been carrying.

The framework in the book is built around two states we’re constantly moving between: contraction and expansion.

Contraction is the state most high-achieving women know intimately, striving to measure up, seeking external validation, performing for an audience of one (your inner critic).

Expansion is its opposite: openness, trust, clarity, the state where your best thinking and boldest decisions actually live.

The thing that undid me was realizing I’d been in contraction for years because I was in an environment that kept pulling me further from myself.

I’ve worked at fast-growing, high-performance companies my whole career and thrived. But my last one was different. The culture, the constant external measuring, the fish bowl “big brother” gymnastics … it chipped away at my self-worth in ways I kept rationalizing instead of naming.

I thought I was the problem. Bending Reality helped me understand: I was in a state.

And states can change.

One question from the book I’ve made a daily habit: Am I contracted or expanded right now?

Simple, but very transformative.

Book 2: Everything Is Figureoutable by Marie Forleo

If Book 1 diagnosed the problem, this one handed me the toolkit.

A friend (shout out to Shezal, founder of SAEA) introduced this to me. We were co-workers turned good friends and had very similar suboptimal corporate experiences. When she left, she started reading this book and encouraged me to do the same.

The title of this book sounds like a bumper sticker, and honestly, it should be.

Marie built her entire philosophy on something her mother said: that nothing in life is too complicated if you roll up your sleeves and get into it. But instead of leaving it as a cute mantra, she turns it into a practical, actionable mindset for women who are trying to do hard things without a clear roadmap.

The core premise is this:

If you’re struggling to move forward, the problem isn’t you. It’s that you haven’t yet fully installed the belief that there’s a way through.

And once you do? Your brain starts operating differently, looking for solutions instead of confirming why something can’t work.

What I love about this book is its honesty about the things that actually keep us stuck:

• perfectionism dressed up as high standards

• “I don’t have time” as a proxy for “I don’t believe this is possible for me,”

• waiting to feel ready before taking action.

Marie doesn’t let you off the hook, but she does so with warmth and zero judgment.

If you’re rebuilding anything right now, a business, a career, a sense of self… this is the push you didn’t know you needed.

Book 3: Designing Your Life by Bill Burnett & Dave Evans

This one is less "feel it" and more "build it", and that's exactly why it belongs on this list.

I have just finished chapter one of this book and I’m already recommending it because the method is immediately useful.

I had been interested in the concept of designing the life I want and imagine my surprise when I found out that this exact philosophy already existed? It’s currently being taught at Stanford (and i’m so jealous lol) but very glad for the book.

This book is less memoir and more methodology.

Burnett and Evans are Stanford design professors, and their argument is straightforward: the same design thinking that builds great products can build a great life.

You prototype. You iterate. You treat it like a process, not a final destination.

Three things that stayed with me from just the first chapter:

1. Let go of the endpoint and focus on the journey: Life isn’t a problem to solve. It’s an unfolding process. The goal isn’t a fixed destination, it’s getting good at wayfinding. That alone took pressure off me.

2. You cannot design your life alone: They call this radical collaboration. Design is collaborative, and your life is no different. You need people who will challenge your assumptions and help you see options you can’t see from inside your own head.

3. Reframe the dysfunctional beliefs that are keeping you stuck: Most of us are operating from stories we never consciously chose: “there’s one right path and I missed it,” or “starting over means I failed.” You can’t design a new life while holding onto an outdated story about yourself.

What makes this book different from typical career advice is that it doesn’t tell you to find your passion or nail down a five-year plan.

It tells you to get curious, start moving, and trust that clarity comes from action.

What These Three Books Have in Common

They all start from the same assumption:

The life you’ve been living, especially if it was shaped by corporate structures, external metrics, and other people’s definitions of success, may not actually be yours.

And it’s not too late to design something different.

• Bending Reality helps you notice when you’re shrinking and why.

• Everything Is Figureoutable helps you stop treating fear as a stop sign.

• Designing Your Life gives you a method to redesign your work without waiting for someone to rescue you

Not every season calls for a leap.

Some seasons call for a reframe, a prototype, and one brave decision at a time.

💭 YOUR TURN

What books have cracked something open for you during a season of transition?

I’d love to build this list together and add to my library. Drop your recommendations in the comments.

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In a recent note, I talked about how I’m structuring my work in 2026 and promised I’d share more about the consulting firm I’ve been building behind the scenes.

Well. Hello. We’re here.

I officially launched on LinkedIn this week, and I’m honestly grateful for the response and the support. It meant more than I expected.

So without further ado, let me tell you how this happened, who I’m building it with, and what we actually do.

How I ended up starting a consulting firm

If you’ve been following along, you know I’ve been in a season of rebuilding.

When I got laid off and entered a slower season of life, I was forced to think hard about what I actually wanted to do next. Go back to where I’d come from? I would have mini-panic attacks just thinking about it.

I experimented with scaling my coaching business - coaching women on starting their own businesses alongside corporate, the way I had done it, but quickly realized that what I was doing wasn’t going to replace my income. At least not the way I was doing it. (Maybe I’ll revisit it one day. The door isn’t closed.)

I also looked into reopening and scaling Olori, and quickly realized that wouldn’t replace my income in the short term either.

I had given myself until December to collect data on all my experiments, and by November, things started to get clearer.

Temidayo, who had started her own independent employment journey a couple of years before me, reached out and suggested we join forces. Our experiences were complementary. Our values were aligned. And honestly? I was ready.

I said yes.

How Temidayo and I met

We met in 2021, when we were both building our consumer brands.

I was building Olori and feeling the particular loneliness of building something real while everyone around you seems to be doing the shiny, visible stuff. I was tired of building alone.

So I did something a little uncomfortable: I reached out to three other brand founders I’d admired from a distance. We started doing monthly founder check-ins calls, and we haven’t stopped since.

That small, honest group became a warm friendship, even as our businesses took different directions.

Temidayo is a former M&A attorney and Yale Law grad who also built and sold her consumer brand, Ade & Ayo. She has this rare ability to hear a business problem and immediately see the real issue hiding underneath all the noise. The kind of clarity that you can’t fake and can’t really teach.

Combine that with my background in consulting, strategy & operations, and product strategy across fast-moving teams at Accenture, Twitter (now X), and Meta, and we knew we’d crush it together.

We sat down, looked at everything we’d each done, and made a deliberate choice: we kept what actually lights us up and cut the things we didn’t want to do, no matter how logical they looked on paper.

That process gave us Amplio.

So what is Amplio?

Amplio is a strategic advisory firm for growth-stage companies. We come in when a scaling company realizes the growth plan and the operating reality are no longer the same thing.

Revenue is there, but margins are leaking and decisions are slow.

We help leadership teams diagnose what is actually causing the drag, then leave them with clear decisions, owners, and a ranked plan to move.

Who we’re best for & how we work

We’re typically a great fit for companies doing $10M–$75M in revenue, scaling quickly or post-raise, where growth looks fine on the surface but something underneath is quietly slowing it down.

We work with teams in two ways:

Decision Sprint (single session): A half-day or full-day working session — virtual or plugged into an existing offsite — designed to create fast alignment and force the hard calls. We facilitate the team through a structured decision process and leave with decisions made, clear owners, and a prioritized 30–90 day action plan.

Embedded Advisory (2–3 months): A deeper engagement where we run stakeholder interviews and structured workshops to surface what isn’t being said, resolve misalignment, and sharpen how decisions get made and executed.

A small ask

The fastest way this grows isn’t ads or funnels. It’s trust.

If someone comes to mind, a founder navigating complexity, a leadership team that needs a clear-headed outside perspective, I would genuinely love an introduction.

Here’s our intro deck to make it easier.

Send it their way. Or reply here and tell me a little about them. Either works.

Your turn

One thing that’s been on my mind as I’ve built this: how often do we wait for the “right time” to do the thing we actually want to do, and use busyness as the evidence that we’re not ready?

I collected data for months. I let myself experiment without pressure to have all the answers. And when the right partnership showed up, I was clear enough to recognize it.

What are you currently “collecting data” on? What experiment are you running, or avoiding?

Leave a comment. I read and respond to every message.

— Tomide

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We don’t talk about this enough, especially as women in corporate.

Corporate is a system. A very well-oiled, very comfortable system. It pays you. It validates you. It applauds you. And if you’re highly paid, the applause is louder. Before you know it, the polish, praise, and pay become handcuffs. Your identity becomes intertwined with them. Your security depends on them.

I’ve spoken with so many women who feel this deep, almost painful desire to build something of their own.

But right after that desire surfaces, something else rises too. Not fear of judgment, or disruption, but fear of the unknown.

“What does this even look like?”

“Where do I start?”

“What if I get into this and realize I have no idea what I’m doing?”

“What happens when I step into a world without clear rules, clear feedback, clear promotions, clear paths?”

If you’re like these women, you are exceptional at operating inside a system you understand. What you fear isn’t failure; it’s uncertainty. It’s the discomfort of stepping into a new territory with no roadmap, manager, quarterly review, or clean checklist that tells you you’re on track.

But here’s the truth: the version of your life that exists inside this system is only one of many possible. And it was designed by someone else.

To do the thing you actually want to do with your life, to create the version of you that’s in your mind’s eye, you need audacity. Not recklessness - audacity. The kind of boldness that sees risk clearly and chooses to move with intention.

It’s the courage to expand your life, even when the system you’re in feels comfortable.

And if you want to build that kind of audacity - the strategic, grounded, safe version - here are three ways to start:

Thanks to RightWise Wealth for Sponsoring this post.

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1. Stop waiting for the desire to feel "logical" before you honor it

Corporate trains us to build a business case for everything, including our own dreams. We wait until we can justify the want with a spreadsheet, market analysis, and a five-year plan. But the desire to build something of your own doesn’t arrive with a pitch deck. It arrives as a quiet restlessness that won’t go away.

I know because I felt it for years before I acted on it. It showed up in the gap between what I was doing and what I knew I was capable of. I kept waiting for the “right time” and then I was laid off during maternity leave; the system I’d trusted made the decision for me. I had tested waters before but now I’m all in.

You don’t need to justify wanting something different. You just need to stop arguing yourself out of it long enough to take the first step.

2. Run a real experiment, not a thought experiment

The women I talk to have thought about this endlessly. They’ve mapped the risks, imagined the scenarios, stress-tested every possible failure in their heads. But thinking about building something and actually building it are fundamentally different activities.

Pick one idea. Give it 30 days. Not 30 days of planning; 30 days of doing. Talk to five potential customers. Build a rough version of the thing. Post about it publicly. The point isn’t to succeed in 30 days, but to learn what you can’t learn from inside your own head: what the market actually wants, what you actually enjoy doing, and what “hard” actually feels like versus what you imagined it would.

Audacity isn’t in getting it right immediately. It’s in being willing to be a beginner again, in public, with evidence instead of assumptions.

3. Get close to women who've already made the leap

You cannot become what you cannot see. If everyone around you is optimizing for the same corporate ladder, the same retirement plan, the same risk-averse life, you will unconsciously adopt those same boundaries.

But this isn’t just about inspiration, it’s about recalibration. When you spend time around women who’ve built businesses while raising kids, or left senior roles to start from scratch, or figured out how to stay employed while building empires on the side, something shifts. The thing that felt impossible starts to feel like a logistics problem. And logistics problems are something you already know how to solve.

Seek them out intentionally. Not just their content, but their communities, their events, their DMs.

Let their audacity become contagious.

The security of a corporate job will always call to you. But the window to build something that’s truly yours, to take up space in your own life, that window doesn’t stay open forever.

Instead of asking “What if I get it wrong?” What if you started asking “What will I regret not trying?”

That’s where audacity begins.

💬 Your Turn

What's the thing you've been wanting to build, but haven't started yet? What's the unknown that's been holding you back?

See you next time,
Tomide

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I was two months postpartum when the notification came through. My parents were still with me, helping out with the baby.

I remember the concern on their faces, even though I felt genuinely relieved.

To everyone else, my next step felt obvious. Apply. Interview. Get back in line.

But something in me knew that wasn’t going to happen. I just didn’t have the energy.

Don’t get me wrong, I submitted some applications passively so I could fulfill the terms of collecting my unemployment insurance payment. But after that?

I stopped.

I didn’t announce it, but I chose not to apply for jobs.

Here are the three main reasons why.

1. What’s Happening on LinkedIn + My Personal Track Record

Every day I log on to LinkedIn, it’s one person or the other talking about spending over a year finding a job, or seeking financial help because they’ve been out of work for months.

It’s clearly an employer’s market. There are way too many qualified people searching, and I’m not inclined to compete in that environment right now.

Also, personally? It has taken me an average of a year to land my previous jobs in the U.S.

After my Wharton MBA, I was unemployed for nine months before I got my Twitter job. When I was ready to leave Twitter, it took me about a year to secure a job I liked enough at Meta.

I have no inclination to spend a year job seeking.

Maybe it wouldn’t be a year this time. But I don’t care to find out. At least not now.

2. I Don’t Have the Guts to Quit on My Own, Truthfully

This layoff was a gift.

I’m an immigrant. My parents gave up a lot to get me to where I am, and I did too. So it’s hard to consider “throwing it all away.”

I don’t actually consider it throwing it away - all my experience plays a part in my entrepreneurial journey. But my mind plays tricks on me.

So this layoff gave me something I wouldn’t have taken for myself: time and severance to allow me to figure this out.

It’s now or almost never.

I’ve always built on the side because I’ve always wanted a Plan B. I built a nonprofit while at Accenture. I built my handbag brand, Olori, while at Twitter and Meta.

But my own ideas have always gotten what was left over of me after putting my best hours into my 9-5.

I’ve never really gotten a chance to see what the full potential of my entrepreneurial efforts could be if I gave it my full effort.

3. More Control

Seasons change.

I’ve been put through some very weird seasons. Treated the way I was in corporate when I was having a difficult pregnancy, almost dying in childbirth, and then having a tough postpartum... and being a new mom!

It has been life-changing. I’m not the same person I was in March 2024 when I had just found out I was pregnant.

Tomide of that time still had the ability to pull through BS.

Tomide of now needs a break. And needs to be able to show her child that there’s an alternative to the system.

Also, what if I had died? That would have been it?!

In a way, my experiences made me bolder - to be able to give my ideas and the life I want a chance. My full energy.

What Comes Next

I’ve chosen to share the journey here, but I’m opening up a paid portal for sharing even more intimate details with some of you.

In my previous post, I mentioned how I’m structuring my 2026 income. Now I’ll be sharing more intimate details.

Look, I’m a Nigerian, so sharing numbers publicly doesn’t come easy to me... because village people 😬. And also, I don’t want to “spread my underwear” freely on the internet.

So my goal with this paid tier isn’t actually to make money, it’s to filter who sees my underwear lol.

If you’re curious about the more intimate details of this journey, I’ll be sharing at least once a month: exact figures, how much I made, how I made the money (my consulting practice or something else?), my concerns and joys, and what the next month looks like.

P.S. I'm not anti-corporate. I just don't think it's the right thing for me in this season. I'm open to all that this journey brings my way, and if it ends in a corporate job that fulfills all my desires, I'm open. I'm open to where this journey takes me. :)

💭Your turn:

Have you ever felt nudged into a season you wouldn’t have chosen but couldn’t ignore? What did it make possible for you?

Hit reply or leave a comment. I read every one.

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