I got fired (twice). It was the wakeup call I needed.

3 lessons from spectacularly failing to be a corporate-MBA-tech type.

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Justice tells us: we have what we deserve. Take 100% responsibility for your actions, they have created your reality - and equally can create a new reality. The next card in the deck, The Hanged Man, reminds us that it takes less energy to be ourselves, when you embrace your unique spirit, this is when you’ll thrive. This is the story below. Because every great story is a Tarot reading.

Part 1: Where I do a ‘panic MBA’

When I turned 30 I panicked.

I had spent the past four years at London’s biggest ad agency, working on great brands, with smart people, shooting cool campaigns in exotic locations, and having arguably too much fun in the city’s underground music scene.

I loved it. Until I didn’t.

This was 2015, the media landscape was changing, budgets were shrinking, work life balance was hard to come by. But I had no idea what I wanted to do next. And I panicked because 30 was much too old to feel lost. Lol.

So I did what any over-achiever raised amongst corporate types and deeply disconnected from her internal compass would do: I decided to do an MBA.

An MBA, or any advanced degree really, often acts like a socially-sanctioned way of feeling lost for those of us used to propping up our sense of self on historical structures like academic institutions or corporate ladders. I can feel lost while progressing forward! Because god forbid I lose ‘momentum’.

I’d convinced myself I needed a ‘more impressive’ job in tech or consulting to be taken seriously, and I was convinced an MBA would get me there.

A year later I started at INSEAD - a one year MBA program set between France and Singapore. It was idyllic. I was literally living in a chateau, driving through the misty Fontainebleau forest past families of wild boars to get to class, and practicing my French every day while buying non-pasteurized cheese and crusty baguettes. Plus INSEAD is a super internationally diverse program; my study group of six included someone from Brazil, the Philippines, India, Spain, and Canada.

I should’ve been loving it. But from the beginning my body felt closed.

I remember sitting with my class in a large amphitheater on opening day and the faculty telling us that this would be ‘the best year of your life’. Instead of feeling excited, my body felt dull, but I smiled over it and clapped and cheered along with everyone else.

Chateau Montmelian, where I lived for six months during INSEAD’s one year MBA program. My desk looked out of the middle window on the far right.

If I’d been honest with myself, I wasn’t excited for the MBA. I was doing it because I thought I should, not because it felt sparkly. Finance, strategy, operations, it all just felt so dry, so tedious, a battle for my relationship-oriented, creatively-driven brain.

I remember looking down the list of clubs, talks, and recruiters coming to campus and feeling no spark of excitement. I said I wanted tech or consulting, but again, from a rational place. My heart wasn’t in it.

I was treating my career like homework, assuming that I could succeed by using hard work to overcome my disinterest. This meant I spent countless hours alone, on an empty campus, in a lonely cubicle, reviewing case studies while my classmates who absorbed the material naturally and enthusiastically were taking the train into Paris for an afternoon of great art, great food, and great wine. Or jetting off to the Alps for a weekend of skiing and après-skiing.

My GPA barely scraped by. I burned out halfway through the program and had to take the summer off instead of interning.

It turns out, hard work does not conquer all. When hard work is applied to things that don’t match your frequency, it leads you out of alignment and into exhaustion. But I wasn’t ready to absorb the lesson. I continued to ignore my body’s wisdom.

I graduated still in full pursuit of proving to myself, my family, my community, that I could be the MBA-consultant type who could scale an early-stage tech company.

Part 2: Where I fail spectacularly at two tech start-ups

The universe granted my wish and a New York-based start-up recruited me to work on their marketing team. It was a ‘smart home’ security camera company full of classic Millennial optimism: set in a large warehouse space it had the ping pong table, free catered lunches, all the trendiest snacks, craft beer on tap, a closet full of hoodies. My boss was ex-McKinsey. On paper it was ticking all the boxes. My body on the other hand was again heavy, closed. I continued to pay it no heed.

I should’ve, of course, because it knew in advance what my mind had to learn through experience: I don’t care about tech, hardware products, apps, or engineering. I’m also terrible at growth marketing, a very detail-oriented, quantitatively-heavy function.

Every day I would feel a combination of panic and dread as I looked at my to do list full of actions like analyze the performance of Facebook ads, the performance of European sales, review the latest app update. I spent most team meetings zoned out, scanning 1stdibs for creative inspiration for my new apartment while my colleagues discussed our market position against competitors like Google Nest and Amazon Ring.

It was the same experience as at INSEAD: I didn’t fit in. It’s a lonely feeling to be surrounded by people whose strengths and interests are different from yours. To top it all off, my commute required walking three avenues and four blocks against the winter Manhattan winds to get to the office on 28th and 11th. I was miserable.

We have a finite store of energy available every day. And it requires a lot of that energy to motivate yourself to do things that don’t suit how your brain works and don’t match the things you enjoy thinking about, leaving very little remaining energy to create great work.

And after ten months, in a wave of layoffs, I got made redundant.

Like a masochist, I took a similar, higher-stakes job as Head of Marketing at a seed-stage start-up building a ‘smart’ vegetable planter box. My father, the gardener, rolled his eyes. Brain: take this job! You need money! You need to prove you can do this! The office has a rooftop garden! Body: ugh. again. Brain: shut up, body.

Smiling on the outside. Miserable on the inside. At least 10 pounds underweight, drowning in under eye bags.

This experience was even worse. Every day I'd walk into a cute, sunny, plant-filled East Village apartment-turned-office space where I would panic trying to create strategy pitches for VCs or drum up pre-order demand for planter boxes - tasks that required a scrappy growth marketer brain I do not possess. The founder would yell at me for scattered thinking and inefficient projects. I would cry. I lost at least 10 pounds from the constant stress.

I was fired after six months.

I experienced an overwhelming wave of relief as I closed my laptop and walked out into the buzzy East Village sunshine. I was free. I was also mortified and ashamed. I was evasive when friends and family asked me why I no longer work there. Tech was still sexy in 2018 and I felt like I had spectacularly failed at the thing that determined ‘success’.

The thing is, we get so wrapped up in the day to day dramas of our workplace and industry and forget that if we just step into a different reality - a new company, a new industry, a new group of people - the things that are stressing us out will become irrelevant. In a new reality, no one will care that your campaign flopped. Or your product shipped late. Or your app had bugs. Every new reality has its own rules, priorities, and characters.

Trust instead that the environments that don’t fit are not meant for us. Getting fired is the universe telling us not this way, because there’s something else waiting for you that’s much more energizing, fulfilling, and aligned if you listen to what feels sparkly in your body.

I was about to realize what my body had been trying to tell me all along.

Part 3: Where I finally accept my unique design

Getting fired was the wake-up call I needed: try as I might to be an MBA-consultant-tech type - my strengths and interests lived somewhere else.

I knew this all along, of course. My body had been sending the signals. I just didn’t want to listen or accept it. In the background of all the start-up misery, I’d been training to become a coach, something I’d longed to do for years. I’d just never given myself permission to put it at the forefront of my career. That’s for later, I thought, once I’ve proven myself in a ‘real’ job.

The coach training was held in a soulless hotel conference space in midtown, replete with weak coffee, stodgy pastries. And yet, I was having so much fun. I felt alive, excited, turned on. I looked forward to giving over my weekends to the training program because coaching felt like breathing. Coaching was how I thought, what I cared about, what I wanted to spend time mastering. Coaching gave me a rush of endorphins. I would literally leave my practice sessions high on my own supply.

This was the ‘hell yes’ my body had been nudging me towards.

We discount our natural talents and assume that what comes easily must not be very worthwhile, especially if we have a belief that work should be hard, not fun, that work should feel like homework. Those of us with exceptional abilities to build relationships, read energy, and develop people are told by our patriarchal society that these ‘soft skills’ count less.

But I’d just been fired - twice. So I had really no other option but to own my natural design and put it at the heart of my career. I put aside the fact that my family and most of my friends didn’t get what I was doing, this was early 2018 and coaching was still relatively fringe. I put aside that I’d be associated with Tony Robbins who at the time I thought was cringe (no longer do, the man’s a legend). And I joined a training and coaching company in a brand marketing role, making significantly less than I’d been making in tech. It was an investment in my future.

Over the next three years I immersed myself in the coaching industry night and day. I happily spent my weekends building my skills, my philosophies, my website, my client base. After spending so many years disconnected from myself, burned out, and feeling dumb and bad at work, finally owning who I was and feeling excited and naturally talented lit a roaring fire within me I wonder if I’ll ever feel again. Like a first love, it was electric and pure.

In 2021 I quit the training and coaching company and launched my coaching practice full time. Within a year I was making more money then I’d been making in tech.

I’ve never looked back.

It takes less energy to be yourself.

PS. I help people start new chapters and get into alignment. If this sounds like work you’d like to do, let’s connect.