Big Girl Panties Diaries - Entry#175: Sometimes You Have to Burn It Down

Written By Julie Whitten

It’s been almost a year since I stepped out of the corporate world and started building something of my own.

That’s a strange sentence to write.

When I first started writing about career grief, I was writing about loss. The loss of a role. The loss of an identity. The loss of the future you thought you were building. And the really strange experience of grieving something you’re also supposed to be “moving on” from.

Almost a year later, I understand something about career grief that I couldn’t see when I was in the middle of it:

Eventually, you can stop wanting it back.

I didn’t expect that part.

When something ends, particularly something you’ve spent decades building, your instinct is often to recreate what you lost. Find the next role. Replace the title. Rebuild the security. Get back on the ladder and prove, to yourself as much as anyone else, that you’re still climbing.

For a while, I assumed that’s what I would do too.

I’d spent more than 25 years building a corporate career, and I was good at it. I worked hard, took the bigger jobs, led teams, navigated transformations, sat in executive meetings, and collected the titles, experience, and credibility we’re taught mean you’re doing your career right.

So of course, the logical next step was to find another version of that.

Except I didn’t want another version of that.

And that’s when career grief became something else entirely.

What if I didn’t need to rebuild what I had? What if I needed to burn it down?

Now, I’m not talking about a dramatic, scorched-earth exit. There was no match, no Jerry Maguire moment, and no cardboard box carried triumphantly through the lobby. I’m talking about burning down the assumptions I had built around what a successful career was supposed to look like.

For most of my career, the path was pretty clear. You take the next role. You expand your scope. You accept more responsibility. You keep climbing. Even when something isn’t working, you figure out how to fix it.

That last part is especially true for me. I’m a change person. Fixing messy things is basically my love language. Find the problem. Get the right people in the room. Create some clarity. Make a plan. Move forward.

But at some point, I had to ask myself a much harder question: What if I didn’t want to fix this version of my career anymore?

That was harder to admit than I expected.

When you’ve invested that much time building something, walking away can feel irresponsible. You start doing the math in your head. I’ve spent 25 years getting here. I’ve built a reputation. I know how this world works. I know how to be successful here. Why would I walk away from all of that?

Underneath all those questions was an even bigger one:

Who am I if I don’t have the title anymore?

Corporate life gives you a lot of scaffolding. There’s the company name, the title, the team, the paycheck, the benefits, and the calendar full of meetings reminding you that apparently everyone needs you immediately.

Take all of that away and suddenly you’re standing there with…yourself.

Turns out, that’s both terrifying and incredibly useful.

When I started Julie Whitten Consulting, I didn’t have every detail mapped out. I had experience. I had ideas. I had relationships. I had a very definite point of view about why transformation fails. Most importantly, I had a growing sense that the work I wanted to do didn’t need to happen from inside one organization.

So I started building again.

But this time, I got to decide what stayed.

The transformation work stayed. The communications work stayed. The messy conversations stayed. The frontline employees stayed. The leaders trying to figure out how the hell to get people through enormous change stayed. Writing, speaking, teaching, and helping people make sense of uncertainty all stayed.

That’s when I realized something important: a lot of the things I thought I was walking away from weren’t actually tied to corporate life at all.

They were tied to me.

I think we sometimes confuse the container with the thing we’re actually good at.

We think the company gave us credibility. The title gave us authority. The role gave us expertise.

Then the container disappears and you discover something incredibly inconvenient: you still know what you know.

Your experience didn’t disappear when your email address changed. Your relationships didn’t vanish when you handed in your laptop. The lessons you learned, the problems you’ve solved, the mistakes you’ve made, and the judgment you’ve developed belong to you.

So does your voice.

Over this past year, I’ve built my consulting business. I’ve worked directly with organizations navigating complex transformation. I’ve written a book. I’ve spoken on stages. I’ve created frameworks from lessons I spent decades learning the hard way. I’m doing much of the work I loved before, but I’m doing it differently and on my own terms.

And I’m still building.

I don’t want to make entrepreneurship sound like one long inspirational LinkedIn post, because it isn’t. There are days when it feels exhilarating. There are also days when I remember that corporate America used to deposit the exact same amount of money into my checking account every two weeks and, frankly, that was a lovely little system.

Starting over is uncomfortable. There is uncertainty and risk. There are weeks when everything seems to happen at once and others when you seriously wonder whether your email is broken. You make decisions without knowing whether they’re the right ones. You learn things you never particularly wanted to know about contracts, insurance, invoicing, marketing, websites, and a hundred other things that somebody else used to handle.

But there’s something I have now that I didn’t have before.

Ownership.

Not just ownership of a business. Ownership of my time, my voice, my ideas, the work I say yes to, the things I say no to, and the kind of career I want to build next. Almost a year into this, I can finally see the difference between what I lost and what I left behind.

They aren’t the same thing.

I lost some things I genuinely valued. There are people I miss. There are parts of corporate life I enjoyed. There was comfort in knowing the system and knowing how to operate within it. Career grief was real, and building something new doesn’t erase it.

But I also left behind a definition of success that no longer fit me.

A year ago, I might have described myself as someone who left the corporate world.

Today, I think about it differently.

I built a business.

That shift matters.

I used to think reinvention meant taking everything you’d already built and figuring out how to make it work again. Now I think sometimes reinvention requires a little demolition. You don’t burn down the wisdom, the experience, the relationships, the lessons, the scars, or the parts of yourself you fought hard to become.

You burn down the rules about what you’re supposed to do with them.

Maybe you build a business. Maybe you choose a completely different career. Maybe you redefine what ambition looks like. Maybe success at this stage of your life doesn’t look anything like the version you spent the first half of your career chasing.

The point isn’t that everyone should leave corporate America and start a business. They absolutely shouldn’t. The point is that we can become so invested in what we’ve already built that we keep trying to save it simply because we spent so much time building it.

Sometimes rebuilding is exactly the right answer.

And sometimes you have to burn it down.

Almost a year later, I’m still figuring out exactly what mine will look like. I’m still building, experimenting, getting some things right and undoubtedly getting plenty of things wrong.

But I know this much: I don’t want the old version back.

For the first time in a very long time, I’m not trying to climb someone else’s ladder.

I’m building my own.

And apparently, I needed to burn a few things down to find the lumber.

BGPD Rule

Sometimes the bravest thing you can do isn’t rebuild what you had. It’s burn down the rules that told you it was the only way to succeed.

This is the next article in my Career Grief series. Career grief doesn’t end when you land the next role, start the business, or figure out what comes next. Sometimes the biggest shift happens when you realize you no longer want to go back. If you’re new to the series, you can read the previous articles below:

Julie Ann Whitten is a change advisor, keynote speaker, and the author of The People Stack: Why Change Fails (and What Actually Fixes It), available now on Amazon. Drawing on more than 25 years of experience leading transformation, communications, and organizational change, she helps leaders understand the human side of adoption and build the trust required to make change stick.

Julie Whitten
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