Stepping away from corporate life is not a gentle decrescendo – it is a rupture. One day, your calendar is in Mondrian-style 30-minute blocks, marked by days of perpetual meetings with your name on every slide deck and an adrenalin level that rivals that of a Formula One pitstop engineer. And then – nothing. The great unmarked calendar.
This state is called being “between opportunities”, which is CV-speak for “drifting somewhere between sabbatical and panic”.
Every morning starts the same way – before the alarm. A quiet internal clock alerts you just minutes before the Committee in Your Head calls a meeting. It’s time to move and, in that suspended moment before the world stirs, you become acutely aware that you’ve bought a kind of freedom. But it comes at cost.
The gym becomes your new office. Eight reps, three sets and a vow never to be that person who grunts loud enough to scare the nearby yoga class. You’ve never looked better for fewer people. But firmer muscles cannot change one simple fact: you are unemployed.
In your old world, by 7am emails would have arrived in a flood. Now, the emptiness of your inbox feels like peace. But slowly, new things fill the space: “Be a guest on our podcast.” “Please appear on our panel.” “Can you mentor my cousin’s friend’s dog-walker?” Suddenly, you are a freelance life coach, TEDx wannabe and unpaid strategy consultant rolled into one. Boundaries used to come from time and org charts. Now, they are self-imposed – and shockingly porous.
At conferences, your name badge now reads, “N/A”. There is something oddly savage about this.
A fiction-writing course (because, of course, there’s one) has become your new purpose. As you draft metaphors on the Central line, eavesdrop on couples in restaurants and scribble poetic lines about puddles, you start to wonder if this counts as productivity. The answer is unclear.
But through all of this – the gym reps, therapy sessions and self-focus – something is quietly and deliberately settling inside of you: the recognition that you are not what you do. That it is okay to exist outside of title, team or corporate logo. That the best version of yourself is still emerging, shaped not by the systems you once upheld, but by the stories you now get to tell.
A growing movement
There are more of us now than ever before – skilled, experienced, high-performing professionals, suddenly without roles. Once, I thought my own resignation from the workforce was a personal reckoning. Now I see it’s part of a much bigger story.
A recent UK labour market report by the House of Commons highlighted that unemployment among 50- to 64-year-olds is rising and exceeds pre-pandemic levels. Burnout, skills mismatch, caring responsibilities and age discrimination are to blame.
There’s a strange shame that clings to unemployment – no matter how many headlines explain it away as being prompted by the “economic downturn” or “business restructuring”. The language may be corporate, but the impact is deeply human. Livelihoods evaporate. Identities fracture. The question no one wants to ask starts to echo: what now? And the silence grows teeth.
I’ve seen brilliant people leave and lose jobs they have poured themselves into for decades. Some were let go over video call, others through carefully worded emails but all with a polite document titled, “Next Steps”.
We don’t talk about what happens after the work-leaving party ends – the deafening quiet, the sleepless nights, the soul-sapping LinkedIn scroll. There’s a kind of horror of sitting at a dinner party and being asked, “So, what do you do?” And then resisting the urge to reply, “Cry. Mostly cry.”
Worst of all, there’s a lingering sense that you have become invisible in a world obsessed with output.
The great resetting
Some days, I bask in the luxury of unscheduled time. I have hours to write, read and walk, without being glued to my phone like it holds the meaning of life. I am thankful for this, but some days, it’s like being trapped in a 1990s office block where all the doors are shut and the motion sensors have given up on me.
Then you start to notice there is growth. This isn’t just a gap in work, it’s a spiritual pause – a test of patience, pride and perspective. It forces you to sit with yourself, to disentangle where worth ends and work begins. And there is something quietly radical about slowing down. About asking harder questions: who am I without the job title? What kind of life do I want to build next? And why did I ever keep all those offsite lanyards?
When you are no longer CHRO or executive board member, you notice things. You notice, for instance, the people who only returned your messages when you had influence, the head-hunters who ghost you (more juice on this in Part 2) and the friends who can’t help but drop, “Just stay positive!” like it is a silver bullet.
But you also notice other things, like conversations with strangers that feel unexpectedly generous, former colleagues who check in to see how – not what – you are doing. Those are the small signs that remind you you still matter.
For the first time in my life, there is no vision board or 10-year plan. In fact, I am wary of plans in general – how they seduce us into believing we are in control. What I have now is a practice: wake up, stay curious, do something with heart, go to sleep. Repeat.
Despite my moments of doubt, choosing myself has been the most powerful lesson on this out-of-office journey.
Stepping away from corporate life is not a gentle decrescendo – it is a rupture. One day, your calendar is in Mondrian-style 30-minute blocks, marked by days of perpetual meetings with your name on every slide deck and an adrenalin level that rivals that of a Formula One pitstop engineer. And then – nothing. The great unmarked calendar.
This state is called being “between opportunities”, which is CV-speak for “drifting somewhere between sabbatical and panic”.
Every morning starts the same way – before the alarm. A quiet internal clock alerts you just minutes before the Committee in Your Head calls a meeting. It's time to move and, in that suspended moment before the world stirs, you become acutely aware that you’ve bought a kind of freedom. But it comes at cost.
