You Did It. So Why Does It Feel Like This?

Meet Max. He’s the picture of success. Multilingual, decades in senior oil roles, and paid very well. Bright, diligent, capable and funny. He leads a specialist global team, lives in a very pretty house and his children are all privately educated. His mother’s still telling people in the butcher’s queue about him.

From the outside, he’s exactly what business success is supposed to look like.

But Max is hiding something that not many people know. He doesn’t sleep very well. He’s just survived two rounds of layoffs and worries constantly what comes next. His boss, also under a lot of pressure, is a pain in the arse. Max dreads the business travel he used to love and has started to notice how often he jitters. His nails are bitten to the quick.

Like everyone else, he’s been recalled to the office four days a week but his team is global, so he hotdesks and spends all day on Teams. The demands are relentless and no one has time for chat so the friendships he used to get through work are a hazy memory.

And now his boss says that Head Office wants him to move countries again. This time to Saudi Arabia. But his wife and kids don’t want to go.

He’s stuck. He can’t say yes, but he also can’t afford to say no.

His life, like many others’, is built on a structure that he no longer controls.

Many of the leaders we’ve spoken to describe this feeling: of being caught in a version of success that no longer feels as good as it looks.

“I did what I thought you were supposed to. I worked hard at school and college and then got onto a graduate programme. I got promoted. I took some roles in places no one else wanted to go to, managed bigger teams, jumped in to sort out messes when people left. My family would say that I’m the one who made it, but my sister runs an artists’ studio and seems a thousand times happier than me.”

Now you’ve got the title, the team, the office, the back-to-back calls, the house, the pension. And yet, you lie awake at 4am with a pit in your stomach and a voice in your head asking, “Is this it?”

You’re not alone (nearly 70% of C-suite executives say they’re actively considering quitting for roles that better support their wellbeing) but, my God, you feel it.

The Dream

There was a time when it felt like there was a deal to be done: work hard, plough through some of the boring stuff and get a good life. Do the right things until eventually, you reach a place where it gets easier. Maybe you even feel secure and in control.

"In the early days, it felt like magic,” says Rachel, now a senior partner at a top London law firm. “I was the girl from a council estate working with people you read about in the paper. I thought ‘this is it. I’ve made it.’”

Anne, who now holds a global head role in a bank, remembers the pride she took in how hard she worked and how well she did. “I wore very long hours like a badge. I was the person who could be relied on. I thought if I did enough of that, the stress would fall away and I’d have enough seniority to feel calm.”

Stuart, a senior transformation leader, said yes to a promotion to the board because it came with the promise of having an impact. “They told me it was mission-critical. I was flattered, excited.”

But the dream hasn’t quite delivered.

The Reality

Other people look up to you and believe you are powerful. But you don’t feel it. You can influence some things, but your impact is patchy. When I interview people, I’m always amazed by how senior people (properly senior, the ones with offices with thick carpets) tell me they feel their power is very limited.

The jobs demand more but seem to give less: less autonomy, less connection, less joy. It’s a contradiction. You’re being held accountable for results, culture and strategy, but it feels like the power to change those things lies elsewhere.

You get the team. But they’re stretched, inconsistent or burnt out. “My boss says we haven’t lost any headcount, so why am I complaining? But we moved the functions to India and swapped people with 20 years of experience for people with two.”

Your people think you have more power than you do and you’re not sure if you should tell them that. Your choice is to admit that you don’t have the power to give them those things (more flexible work, more money, more power to cut through needless processes) or to maintain an illusion that you could if you really wanted to but choose not to. In her Harvard Business Review article, Power Failure in Management Circuits, Rosabeth Moss Kanter tells us “accountability without power – responsibility for results without the resources to get them – creates frustration and failure”.

Yes, your compensation looks enviable, but you’re spending it all maintaining your life. You’re the primary earner in a household with rising costs. Maybe your partner stepped back from corporate work to fill the gap at home left by your absence. You don’t think you’ll get to make that choice and try not to resent the control they have over their time.

Stuart, who took that legacy-defining role, ended up working 16-hour days with almost no support. “My boss ghosted me for months. No guidance, no backup. I missed my 25th wedding anniversary. My kids stopped asking me to join them. My wife filled the space I left. And the most painful thing? I feel excluded at home and mostly only seem to get flack at work .”

Meanwhile, many leaders don’t feel safe. And even the most secure-seeming roles are vulnerable to sudden pivots. As one said, “There is always a new strategy. And a new system. People come and go, sometimes before you’ve even got to know them. It used to be that you’d have a boss for ten years that you knew and trusted to look out for you but now every team you work on is temporary and everyone has to look out for themself.”

Leading without support can also feel lonely. Half of CEOs admit to feeling lonely in their roles and over 60% of those say it’s actively affecting their performance.

“I have no one in my life who really gets it,” a senior woman explains. “I can’t talk about this with my team. It’s a stress point with my husband who feels he gave his career up for me to continue mand that I should be grateful for that. One of our kids has special needs and demands all his time, which I know is also exhausting but also makes me feel replaced. Meanwhile, my friends think I’m living the dream.”

Add to that a deeper existential questions: who am I without this role? Could I leave? What would I do if I had to start over? Would anyone call me if I didn’t have this job?

A former CEO confirms that they probably won’t. “I left and, after an initial fuss, the calls, messages and invitations that had bombarded me my whole working life slowed. And then stopped. Crickets. Just at the moment I needed help. It was humbling in the real sense of the word.”

My Story: I’ve Been There

I’ve reached two (possibly three, depends how you count) false summits in my career. Each one looked like “the job”, the grown-up one, the dream one, the one you worked hard to win and thought you’d maybe stay in forever. And each one, eventually, wasn’t.

The first came early. I was Director of Comms at a global ad agency, flying around the world presenting trend reports, going to Cannes and relishing it all. It was fast and thrilling. Until I had a baby, came back from maternity leave and discovered my job had quietly disappeared. My new boss had “helpfully” taken the good bits, left me some PR and suggested I focus on promoting him. It was all framed as kindness. There were HR meetings. Lawyers. It got messy, quickly. I left, shocked and enraged. And made the whole thing worse by panic-accepting the first thing I was offered.

That second job looked great… on paper. A well-respected research firm. Serious. But it was all wrong for me. Data-heavy, hierarchical, boring. It drained my energy and, over time, my confidence. I tried to fix it and made some progress but not enough to make it work. Another door opened when a competitor offered me a new job for £100k more a year (highly tied to success metrics of course) but I was already pregnant with baby two by then and I knew enough not to leap. When I think of it now, I’m pretty sure that, had I not had children, I would be running a London agency now. But it didn’t work out that way. And I ended up quitting the agency after baby two with a mortgage, large childcare bill and no plans of what to do next.

I built this programme, and did the research that underpins it, because I never want anyone else to make that mistake.

Which brings us to number three and my first steps towards taking some control. In 2013, I co-founded a new kind of consultancy: Jericho Chambers. It was flexible, hybrid (before hybrid was a word for how we work) and ambitious. I was sure it would be my forever job. And for a while, it was the best version of what work could be. But it was complicated. It had an equitable structure that seemed great in theory but didn’t work in practice. I found myself with a lot of responsibility but lacking the power to change key decisions and felt very conflicted about a lot of them. The work was meaningful, but the emotional stress was high: HR, admin, client dynamics, late nights chasing the bits that gave me energy. I was proud of what we built in some ways. But also depleted and frustrated.

I didn’t fully know it at the time but I’d already started carving a path I didn’t yet know I’d need. Back in job number one, I’d started writing (unpaid) for Management Today. Interviewing parents with big jobs to figure out how anyone was managing (mostly by quietly falling apart behind the scenes). Writing for Management Today led to me being invited to speak at conferences and events (again unpaid) and I started to build a bit of a network and external profile. Then, while at Jericho Chambers, I started to understand how to run a business: the finances, the marketing, leading the team. I had also launched “The Coven”, a network for brilliant, thoughtful women who would become a fierce network of supporters (on the name, there’s a story, don’t take it too seriously).

Bit by bit, I was growing my skills and network and building my own path without consciously planning it. Doing things that brought me joy, energy and inspiration but weren’t part of my job.

In 2018, that path became the main road. My book, The Mother of All Jobs, was published by Bloomsbury and landed on the front of the Sunday Times Magazine. It was the most-read article of the year. My world shifted. This time, I was ready financially, emotionally, professionally to create the working life I wanted

Now, I do the work I care about: helping leaders think differently about the future of work and what it actually means to build a working life that fits. I write, speak, collaborate with sharp and funny people, walk the dog, swim with friends, play bridge and go to the gym.

I got here by slowly, quietly, opening up networks and options long before I knew I’d need them. Since, I’ve seen how many people have similar bumps in their journey but haven’t managed to give attention to the outside world. Yet.

So, What the Hell Do We Do About It?

There is so much hope among the doom: it’s always sunny above the clouds and this process will help you find your sunshine.

I want you to take a moment now to picture what your dream work day looks like. Think big, think small. Where are you waking up? Who are you talking to (and crucially who are you not talking to)? What kind of work fills your day? How many meetings? Are these in person? What is giving you energy? Let yourself enjoy this picture for a moment before we go on.

And then think about what is between you and the life you want.

In Energy Rising, neuropsychologist Dr Julia Diangi argues that every meaningful decision ultimately comes down to a choice between two types of pain. As she says, if it didn’t, you’d already have made the decision.

The first is familiar pain. This is the pain of staying where you are. Of doing what you’ve always done. Of repeating old patterns and playing a system you’ve outgrown. It’s not comfortable but it is predictable.

You already know how this version of the story goes: the tight chest on Sunday nights, the deep swallow as you walk into your office, vague dread about the next management meeting. But your nervous system recognises it “I know how to do this.”

Then there’s a different pain. Less predictable, with the risk of stepping into a version of yourself that’s been hidden from view. This kind of pain is harder to articulate and more effort. It’s uncomfortable, riskier and at first it almost feels… disloyal? But it’s where you remember who you are and surface what matters to you. Dr Julia would say it’s the pain of growth.

Which means the question is, what kind of pain are you willing to live with?

The pain of staying stuck in a version of success that no longer fits and is higher risk that it looks from the outside?

Or the pain of finding your sunshine beyond the clouds?

If the former, you can stop reading this and go back to whatever it was you planned to do today.

But if it’s the latter, let’s keep going.

Because here’s what I’ve learned from false summits of my own:

1. Working so hard on your day-to-day job that you forget to invest in your network, profile or options may feel like it’s all you can do in the moment. But it’s a crap investment in the medium term, especially if you ever lose your job and find yourself calling someone you last spoke to in 2015 to ask for a favour.

2. Unmanaged, unplanned change is expensive (even if you get a payout). It hurts your pride, you don’t have what you need in place to move on and so it often leads to reactive decisions.

3. Slow, intentional planning and exploring is a good investment. It allows you to both improve things from the inside and build a launchpad, in case you ever need one. It is also more likely to get you to the right summit for you.

And that’s what this is all about.

Helping you figure out:

• What better, good and great look like.

• What you can change, without shuddering with awkwardness about “networking”

• What an external move could look like, in reality, not fantasy

• How to grow your status to future-proof your career before someone else decides for you.
  

Turning ‘One Day’ Into Day One...

If you’ve spent decades creating successes for your employer…

Is it time to do the same for yourself?

We’re building a programme for leaders like you. People who’ve reached the summit, only to discover it’s not quite what they hoped for.

It’s not about giving up or bailing out. It’s about making it work. Whether you stay where you are, move jobs or try something new.

That means building a practical, planning with you, tailored to your world and priorities. A plan designed to set you up for success, whatever that looks like for you.

And doing it alongside a small, sharp group of people in exactly the same boat who get it.

If that sounds like you — or like someone on your team — let’s talk. You have more choices than you think but starting before the crisis is a massive advantage. Full details here.