The decision to leave a top job didn’t add up to many – but for Angela Cox, the returns would soon become crystal clear
It’s our year end, and the business has grown again. Substantially. And instead of that familiar knot in my stomach about targets, performance conversations, and what the next financial year is going to demand, I’m sat here feeling something very different. I’m excited.
Not the kind of excitement that comes from hitting numbers and bracing yourself to go again. Something deeper than that. A sense that what I’m building is mine. That the direction we’re heading in is aligned. That the work we’re doing actually means something. I didn’t use to feel like this at year end. Year end in corporate was a mix of pressure and projection. Closing gaps, defending decisions and gathering energy for what was coming next. Even when things were going well, there was always an edge to it. A sense that you were only ever as good as your last set of results.
Now, as Founder of coach training academy Paseda360, this feels very different. And that contrast takes me straight back to the decision that made it possible. Leaving a six-figure job that, on paper, made absolutely no sense to walk away from.
The illusion of success
There is a version of success that looks right from the outside. Progression. Responsibility. Influence. A salary that reflects all of it. I had that. I had spent over 20 years building a career in corporate transformation. I knew how to lead, how to deliver, how to hold complexity and move things forward. I was good at what I did. But I had also become very good at being the acceptable version of myself. Not or disingenuous. Just… edited.
You learn how to do that in corporate environments. You read the room. You understand what lands and what doesn’t. You shape your message, your tone, sometimes even your personality, so that it fits. At the time, that feels like professionalism. Looking back, I can see how much energy it took. Because when you’re constantly assessing how you’re coming across, you’re never fully just there. And over time, something else happens that’s harder to spot. You start to lose sight of where the edit ends and you begin. A lot of this happens on autopilot too, so the impact on our wellbeing isn’t always noticed.
I didn’t leave corporate because of a structural change in the business. I left because I was exhausted. It wasn’t the kind of tired that a week off fixes. It was something more persistent than that. I had been through my own personal transformation journey, and it held up a mirror I hadn’t expected. It showed me how much I was masking.
How much of my day was spent managing how I showed up rather than simply showing up. Choosing words carefully. Holding things back. Adjusting tone. Dialling parts of myself up or down depending on who was in the room. And I had become very good at it. This is the trap. When you’re good at masking, it gets rewarded. You’re seen as composed. Professional. Capable. No one pulls you aside and says, “You don’t seem like yourself.” You just carry on. Until you can’t ignore it anymore.
For me, it wasn’t a dramatic breaking point. It was a steady realisation that I didn’t want to keep doing that for the next ten years of my life. I was tired of it. Tired of editing. Tired of second-guessing. Tired of performing in a way that no longer felt like me. And once that becomes clear, staying starts to feel heavier than leaving.
“This is the trap. When you’re good at masking, it gets rewarded”
Plotting the route ahead
I remember deciding to leave without having a perfectly mapped-out plan. The words just came out of my mouth. I’d resigned during a meeting with my boss. I drove home, got a flipchart out, and wrote down everything I was good at.
Then I circled what actually gave me energy. Coaching and mentoring stood out immediately. It wasn’t complicated. It was just an honest reflection of the thing that brings me joy. And it was one of the first decisions I’d made in a long time that wasn’t filtered through what would look impressive or sensible to other people. What I didn’t anticipate was how hard the identity shift would be. Leaving the salary was one thing. Leaving the title was something else entirely. Director had been what I had worked towards for years. It carried weight. Recognition. A sense of having made it.
And then suddenly, I was introducing myself as a coach. It felt small. For a while, I softened it. “I’m a coach… but I used to be a Strategy Director.” I’d bang on about the neuroscience I knew, and the fancy words I was being taught on my Masters, to sound impressive. I needed people to know I hadn’t lost something. That I still had substance behind what I was doing. Looking back, that was my identity trying to hold on.
Because when you’ve built your sense of self around external markers, removing them leaves a gap. Eight years on, I’m Managing Director of my own company. And the title doesn’t matter at all. It’s not because it isn’t significant, I just no longer need it to validate who I am. The biggest shift, though, wasn’t the business. It was what happened when I stopped masking. The gradual, sometimes uncomfortable process of noticing where I was still editing myself and choosing not to. Speaking as I speak, not as I think I should. Letting my personality come through in rooms where I might previously have toned it down. Saying what I actually think, even when it would be easier to stay neutral.
At first, it felt exposed. There’s a moment when you drop the mask, where you expect something to go wrong. That people will judge you, that you’ll lose credibility, that you’ll be seen differently. What actually happened was the opposite. People connected with me more and clients trusted me more quickly. Conversations went deeper, faster. Because I wasn’t trying to be the perfect coach or the polished version of a leader. I was just there, with them and that changed everything.
It also made me happier in a way I hadn’t anticipated. Not in a constant, surface-level way, but in something more grounded. There is a difference between feeling successful and feeling at ease with yourself. When you’re not managing how you come across, there is more space. More energy. More presence.
You’re not splitting your attention between the conversation and the internal commentary about how you’re being perceived. You’re just in it. And from that place, something else opened up. A level of thinking, creativity, and intuition that I hadn’t fully accessed before. Not because it wasn’t there, but because it had been sitting underneath layers of editing. I’ve tapped into a level of brilliance I didn’t know I had. That might sound bold, but it’s true. And I see it in the coaches we train as well. When the mask drops, people don’t become less capable. They become more.
“There is a difference between feeling successful and feeling at ease with yourself”
The value of fronting up
One of the things that changed alongside that was my relationship with responsibility. In corporate, even at senior levels, decisions are shared. There are layers, approvals, a sense that you are part of something bigger. When you step out on your own, that changes. There isn’t anyone else to defer to. That can feel uncomfortable at first. Exposed, even.
But over time, you stop looking for permission. You decide to do something, then take action and through that, you learn. I found a level of courage I hadn’t needed to access before. Not because I suddenly became braver, but because there was nowhere to hide from my own decisions. And that does something to your self-trust. Financially, I made a decision early on. I would earn the same, if not more, than I did in my corporate role. It didn’t cross my mind that I couldn’t. That decision shaped how I approached everything that followed. The way I positioned my work. The standards I set. The responsibility I took for making it succeed.
Today, I earn more than I did before. But the difference is in how that money is made. It comes from work I care about. Work that aligns with how I think and who I am. There is no friction between what I believe and what I’m doing day to day. There are also the quieter shifts. I can step out in the middle of the day and get my nails done without asking anyone. I can take a solo spa day when I need to reset. I can structure my week in a way that works for me. That flexibility doesn’t make me less committed. If anything, I’m more invested than I’ve ever been. But the effort feels different when it’s yours.
There are things I miss. I miss the ease of having peers around me every day. The shorthand conversations. The shared context. That’s something you have to build more intentionally when you work for yourself. But I don’t miss trying to fit. I don’t miss adjusting myself to environments that didn’t quite sit right. I don’t miss that underlying sense of holding something back. So, when I sit here at year end, looking at what we’ve built and what’s ahead, the feeling isn’t pressure. It’s pride. And it’s excitement.
Leaving that six-figure job didn’t make sense to a lot of people at the time, but it made sense to me. And it gave me something I didn’t realise I was missing. The ability to be myself in my work, fully. And from that place, everything else has grown.
About the author
Angela Cox is a Master Executive Coach and Founder of coach training academy Paseda360.