You don’t want another job. You want another way.
On realizing you don’t want another job, and learning to make the messy middle less chaotic.
Before we dive in, I just published a three-part private podcast for women who have exited corporate but have many ideas without a clear path to replacing their corporate income. It’s free; access it here.
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.
💭 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.
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.
Gold, I read this today and had to double check I didn’t write it myself! You’ve captured every thought I’ve had in this time of transitioning out of an almost 20 year career. Not by my choice but not unwelcome either. Looking forward to listening to your podcast.
This resonates so much- I just wrote about my own experience post-layoff where I was desperately trying to replicate what had worked for me in the past. The same job hunting, networking, etc, and nothing panned out after more than a year invested in what we’ve been taught is the “right” way to achieve the impressive job. I think it was all a redirect- I realized I wasn’t disappointed not to be chosen for any jobs I got to final rounds for. I’m trying to see where consulting takes me and treat it as an exciting experiment, which is such a different energy than job hunting was 💗