There’s a line in Part 5 of Corporate Escapology about maintaining your networks after you’ve left: on my last day I jotted down a hundred or so people’s email addresses – but “most hadn’t turned out to be that useful”.

Kind of regretting saying that now tbh as this week I’ve been reaching out to many of those same people to tell them about Corporate Escapology – and what’s more they’ve all been incredibly supportive, encouraging – and promised to buy (many have already shown me the evidence).

Some I’ve agreed to meet up with, when this launch frenzy is over. And I mean it. It’s not the empty “We must catch up”.

A client of mine has just got a new job. A really big one. One, she’d admit, she would never have had a chance at if she’d stayed in her previous company.

A former colleague is on the cusp of raising $10+million investment for his energy start-up.

Neither of their faces really fit the corporates for whom they worked. They were told, as was I at various points in my career, “You need to do more of this”, “Less of that”, “Change yourself”.

Part of the reason they didn’t fit in was because they challenged. They saw different ways to tackle problems. They hustled, wouldn’t accept no, had different experiences from which to draw that weren’t always valued.

It’s one of my favourite weeks on this startup accelerator programme I run for Shell – Mentor Meets Startup.

A couple of days with fifty or so mentors meeting our 2024 cohort speed-dating style. They get to know each other for five minutes then move on. Then they select who they want to work with.

The startup founders are blown away by these corporate people.  Last year was the best quote from one founder faced with selecting just a handful: “I was like a kid in a candy store”. This year I asked one of our more well-seasoned founders who said “I want to work with every single one”.

And yet some of these mentors doubt themselves.  They cling to their current job titles and descriptions like that’s all they can do.  I encourage the founders to probe deep with the mentors: previous experience, interests, purpose, what energises them.  And in five minutes they can unlock treasure.

A creeping imposter syndrome as the book nears publication (July 2 - pre-order, pre-order).

Who am I, Adam Forbes, to have written a book on leaving a corporate career?

I wasn’t a big hot shot executive. Nor did I leap spectacularly to blitz-scale a household name startup. I don’t give Tony Robbins style talks to devoted fans.  I’m not making millions and I’ve not found my purpose.

I’m actually pretty ordinary.

And I suppose so is imposter syndrome. Boringly ordinary.

30-50% of people on the planet have a preference for introversion (helpfully, it could be more it could be less).

So are the people working in corporates a skewed population? Or are the introverts just faking it?  I don’t remember working with many shrinking violets.

Did the introverts just learn to wear extrovert armour to cope with the exhausting effects of meetings, workshops, presentations, awaydays – all those ice-breakers, team-builders and drinks in the evenings

I identify as ambivert, I’m fluid with a bias to introversion: I do get energy from being with people, but I also observe that my social battery is finite (and like my phone’s battery it seems to die earlier as it gets older - and takes longer to recharge).

“I used to be a buyer for retailers then I became a brand consultant and then I had two children. Now I have no idea what I should do. My confidence is on the floor and in three months my baby will go to nursery and I have to get a job”.

This is what one woman said at the end of my talk last week to a bunch of creatives hopeful that they could build a business using their talents.

Poor woman.

It felt like a cry for help in a very public setting.

And yet, she must have been pretty talented to get those kind of high profile jobs (you’d know the brands she worked for). She must be replete with skills, experience and know-how. They’re dream jobs if you’re in fashion or retail.

Today I’ve launched the latest Corporate Escapology podcast with Katie Elliott – you can watch on YouTube or listen on Spotify.

Katie has worked for more than fifteen years in HR – she describes herself as an “HR Generalist” which I find a bit of a reductive term because what it really means is she knows an awful lot of things.  This whole Specialist vs Generalist thing got my goat at BP and it still does now.  The world needs Generalists to solve the world’s big problems – read David Epstein’s Range if you don’t believe me.

Off the soapbox Forbes, this is Katie’s story. The reason I wanted to have Katie on the podcast is because she’s done something very interesting. She left her HR job just after all the lockdowns when her employer assumed she’d go back to the office. She had other ideas, resigned and went freelance.

Lucy Werner wrote me a lovely review for Corporate Escapology when I shared an early version of the book with her. She’s the author of Hype yourself and runs a Substack community helping all manner of business owners promote themselves.

Lucy runs great online workshop for her paid subscribers and one on the 24th May is all about landing an opinion piece in national media. I don’t know why but my instinct was to avoid this – perhaps fearing if I wrote something too controversial I’d get trolled (flashbacks to school when I put my head above the parapet and regretted it).

But as an adult and a marketer, I also know that having a point of view is essential in carving out an identity.

One of the most difficult coaching sessions I have is when the client has already handed their notice in. Because they’ve got so jacked off about something and can’t face staying any longer.

It’s difficult because by leaving they’ve sacrificed a load of preparation time at the company’s expense because they just wanted out.

If you have a toxic workplace or a challenging boss I empathise, but I would always encourage you to stay put until you’re really ready.

Corporate Escapology is both about extricating yourself from your corporate career and landing safely and successfully somewhere else.

I’ve spent the last few weeks with startup founders – literally 70 of them on Zoom calls one-on-one and then meeting them in person at the events I’m running up and down the country.

Founders are a funny breed. Especially when you contrast them with the corporate people I’m bringing to the events too.

The corporate people are professional, organised, quietly confident – but I know inside they’re wondering “Why am I here?”, “Am I in the right room?”, “Is this a trap?”.

The startups, by contrast, tend to fly by the seat of their pants. They’re over-eager, keen-beans, in sales mode, evangelical about their solution.

I now know that my self-confidence plays the single biggest role in how I feel about myself.

Over the decades my confidence has increased a lot, but it can still let me down and wreck my day.

This week I ran some events I’ve been organising for months. The first one went badly. For me anyway.

This week I took a couple of my kids down to Dartmouth in Devon. My wife’s uncle lives there and I worked out I’d probably visited close to 100 times since my wife and I have been together. I know the place so well I could probably walk around blind-folded.

But over the past year I’ve been getting the ferry across the River Dart to Kingswear to wander about. Most of my wandering invariably involves looking across the sea to Dartmouth.

he latest Corporate Escapology podcast is out today (here and here) with Luke Flunder. He’s known on TikTok and Instagram as The Wine Guy where he has hundreds of thousands of followers.

Let me repeat that. Hundreds of thousands of followers. Listening to him talk about wine.

In his own words, he decided to “dedicate the rest of his life to wine”.

It’s probably not what you think. It’s even less likely to be what you’d answer if you were asked.

You’d probably either waffle a stream of meaningless buzzword bingo or completely undersell yourself.

Not that you’re all British, but not selling ourselves is a very British phenomenon. As well as a very corporate one.

The problem is it’s another reason we can feel trapped by what we do.

ABBA famously sang “Breaking up is never easy I know”. Part of the pain stems from the uncoupling (conscious or otherwise) and part because of where it can leave us. Uncertain. Alone. Disorientated.

One of the main reasons people don’t leave their jobs is because they don’t know what to do next.

Well, not in enough detail to make the move.

They might be able to articulate a feeling of freedom or having more agency, more time, more purpose. To be removed from somewhere toxic or disabling.

But these feelings aren’t usually sufficient to warrant the disruption which follows an exit.

I actually hate this term, so I’m using it ironically. I am one (although my kids might dispute this) and I think it’s what made me pretty successful in my corporate jobs and on the whole it makes me pretty well liked.

Life would be a lot more miserable if everyone went around only pleasing themselves. I get pleasure from pleasing people.

But, of course, only pleasing other people and hurting yourself in the process, is damaging and debilitating. And it can require therapy to recover.

Someone I know just this week bravely quit their job because they refused to people please by turning a blind eye to falsified performance data. Not people pleasing has consequences.

Thanks to the brilliant Lucy Werner’s Hype Yourself newsletter and the Substack algorithm (thank you likers and commenters), I’ve had a flurry of new subscribers this week – thanks so much for being here.

I want you to see how the skills, experience and know-how developed during your corporate life can help you build a better one post-corporate. I believe there’s a much richer tapestry of opportunities on offer after you leave; one that’s frankly impossible to find in a single job.

This week was a good one in the Forbes household, as Bertie, my youngest, got a music scholarship for one of his preferred schools.  He plays the saxophone really well but had to overcome a bunch of fears to sing (never easy for an 11 year old boy), so he could use his voice as his second instrument.

It’s utterly brilliant but it’s created a quandary.

He has another offer from a school that’s more academic, a school he really wanted to go to because it’s seen as better (because it’s more academic).

Feedback from that school was that his test scores were “ok”, but it was the interview that got him the place.

I got a cacophony of feedback this week. Cacophony is the collective noun when feedback comes unsolicited from different sources. The gist was this:

“I really love your content on LinkedIn/Substack/Instagram but I can’t like it.”

I suspected something was going on because I’ve been getting hardly any likes on my posts and yet I get a great open rate, lots of wonderful emails and direct messages and people are always telling me “every time I open LinkedIn/Substack/Instagram you’re there” (which makes me want the ground to swallow me up).

Two clients I’ve worked with this week have had the same challenge: the pressure of flicking the switch from salaried, employed and a bit ‘meh’ to independent, purposeful and passionate.

The pressure is understandable, it’s massive. It can feel like standing on a precipice looking across to the other side, with a huge drop and little in the way of a safety net to catch you.