Sharing my lowest moment in my career…
A happier me shortly after leaving corporate :)
I remember the exact moment when I realised there was something wrong. I was sitting at the dinner table on Christmas Day in 2011 and I could not eat my Christmas dinner…
And for anyone that knows me, you will know how much I love food! I always eat my 3 meals a day, love a snack and am obsessed with chocolate! Christmas dinner is probably my favourite dinner of the whole year, and I literally felt so sick I could hardly eat it. I picked at it and just pretended everything was okay.
The trigger
But it wasn’t. I was broken inside. I had recently been passed over for promotion to Senior Consultant at Deloitte and was devastated. It may not sound like a big deal, but I was in my mid 20s, striving to become Partner at Deloitte one day (basically owning part of the business). To add to this, I was in the prestigious ‘Strategy Team’ and started alongside a cohort of 150 other graduates in 2008. And it was just standard that everyone got the promotions. But I didn’t. I felt humiliated, a failure, and so embarrassed. I remember the Director telling me and I just sobbed in her office for half an hour, before she escorted me out the building for the rest of the day. I didn’t want to go back, and I spent the rest of the day with very dark thoughts and felt worthless. I was so embarrassed that all my peers would know that I hadn’t got the promotion and I genuinely wished the ground would have just swallowed me up.
I look back and see how defined I was by my career. I had always been top of the class at school, I got a 1st class Honours degree in Economics at Warwick, and I got a top graduate job I felt proud of. But achievement and ‘success’ really did define me. And this kind of knock back felt brutal.
The trauma
I have never written or shared about this before because it has traumatised me for a lot of my career. Wondering why I didn’t get the promotion, what I could have done differently, etc. I have come to realise that I am just not built for the corporate world. I didn’t ‘play the game’ well enough. I didn’t network with the right people, and I certainly wasn’t confident in my abilities (which I should have been). I don’t believe in regrets, and I honestly don’t wish I had done things differently overall. But I always had a fire in my belly to start my own business, and it took me until 2017 to do that (that’s another story).
Essentially, not getting the promotion led me in a negative spiral which I can now see was severe anxiety when it came to going to work. I was stressed and nervous on all my projects and I felt even less confident in my abilities after not getting the promotion. As a result I worked more hours, late nights, takeaways and my health was neglected and I was exhausted.
The lightbulb moment
But somehow, on that Christmas Day, I could see so clearly what had happened and knew I had to get out. It was like a lightbulb moment (I truly believe that these moments happen to us) and that’s when I made a plan. I looked at other jobs straight away and somehow I got myself not 1, but 2 dream jobs! One leading the strategy team at Virgin Media, another leading the Debenhams strategy and insights team. I can’t believe that happened because whilst going through the gruelling interview processes I was in such a bad way mentally. I’ve concluded that I needed to leave Deloitte so much that I made it happen whatever it took.
I took the Debenhams role (I’m so sad the shops aren’t here anymore and I loved that place) and truly loved working there from 2012-2014 (when I left to move out to Australia to work in Strategy at the supermarket group Woolworths).
What I learned…
My takeaways from this experience are:-
Always be true to who you are, if something doesn’t feel right in your gut, it probably isn’t
Speak to someone you trust - I was so embarrassed to even speak to friends and family but I wish I had sooner as this helped me out of the hole
Never let yourself feel defined by the success of others - remember you have so much impact to make on the world and being true to yourself is magic
It feels really vulnerable to share this story but I truly hope it inspires you to take bold action and know that you have so much to offer the world.
Thanks for reading and if you’d like to reach out you can find me on insta @jenlisterstrategy
