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 a ..read more

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. We couldn’t get into the venue until 30 minutes before guests arrived (20 minutes early), the venue was pretty crappy, we weren’t as prepared as we should have been. The main client kept making (good) suggestions, which made me feel increasingly out of control. By the time I jumped on stage and welc ..read more

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 And of course it looks pretty different. Things that seem quite far apart when you’re in the town are actually quite close together as the crow ..read more

The latest Corporate Escapology podcast is out today (here and here) with . 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”. But only after he’d spent five years at Majestic Wine on its management training scheme, learning the trade and sharpening his commercial skills, supplying the bankers at Canary Wharf, Hampton Court Flow Shower and other London events. Majestic was great while ..read more

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. In my experience of talking to hundreds of corporate people who have left and have not (it’s a certainty, like death and taxes) – we are often painfully un-self-aware. All too often we define ourselves by what w ..read more

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. So, we swing ..read more

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 ..read more

Thanks to the brilliant Lucy Werner’snewsletter 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. Added to which, for most of us the tapestry starts to fade over time as we specialise and focus and the opportunities arou ..read more

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 ..read more

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). But the feedback told me why. There seems to ..read more