What Is Work Actually Costing You Right Now?
We spend a lot of time talking about what it takes to leave corporate life. The financial preparation, the runway, the pricing, the courage to back yourself when the salary stops. I covered all of that in September's Before You Leave Corporate session and the conversation was one of the most honest and grounded I have been part of in a long time.
But there is another conversation that sits just before that one. And it is the question I am bringing to 6 October. What is work costing you right now?
Not in pounds and pence. In energy. In health. In the quiet erosion of your confidence that happens when you spend years in environments where you have to work twice as hard to be seen half as clearly. In the mental load of managing how you show up, how you speak, how you dress, how much space you take up, all while delivering at a level your organisation could not function without.
Many Black women in professional and corporate life are carrying a cost that never appears on a payslip. The emotional labour of navigating workplaces that were not designed with them in mind. The physical toll of chronic stress and the kind of burnout that does not announce itself dramatically but arrives slowly, quietly, until one day you realise you cannot remember the last time you felt like yourself at work.
I know this territory. Not just from the women I work with but from my own experience of being in corporate spaces where my spirit was slowly dying. The decision to build something of my own did not come from nowhere. It came from a very clear realisation that staying was costing me more than leaving.
On 6 October I am co-hosting When Work No Longer Works: Reclaiming Energy, Clarity and Choice alongside Odette Hamilton as part of the Network for Black Women Leaders programme. Odette brings over 30 years of expertise in HR, employee experience and workplace culture. I bring the coaching, the financial clarity and the lived experience of someone who has navigated this crossroads and built a working life on her own terms.
This is not a session about what you should do. It is a space to pause, to be honest about where you are and to reconnect with what you actually want. Whether you are considering leaving, thinking about staying, or simply trying to make sense of a season that feels harder than it should, you are welcome in this room.
The session is free, runs from 12.30pm to 2pm and is not recorded. You need to be there live to be part of the conversation.
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