Lessons from My Corporate Detox, Six Months Out
The rules I absorbed. The ones I’m putting down. And the choice I get back.
Six months ago, Accenture, the world’s largest global consulting firm, released me from employment due to “lack of work.”
I have a PhD, 20+ years experience, built and ran 2 multi-million-dollar consulting practices at 2 different firms. Let me tell you upfront - this isn’t an Accenture-bashing memory. As a former executive who has had to make these calls, I understand how this decision was made, because I’ve had to make it and execute it multiple times.
This decision was made by people who don’t know me as a human but by looking at a business - at a spreadsheet, looking at profit and loss, and viewing human talent as “inventory” and “assets.”
The questions are always
What is the market currently buying?
What inventory can we sell and at what price point to make a profit for our shareholders?
For service based organizations, this is service and solution-based approaches built on skills of people who that work out to an hourly loaded bill rate - salary + cost of keeping them employed.
How long has the inventory been on the shelves?
For service based organizations, this is how long has the person not billed their time directly to a client.
Do we think we can recoup the investment at some point in the future based on where we’re headed from a strategy perspective?
It genuinely isn’t personal and is a purely, humanly-disconnected financial exercise, looking strategically at numbers.
When someone says “it isn’t personal, it’s business” - this is what’s happening to get to the decision. Before it gets personal.
Once the decision is made, the execution of that decision is pushed down to a leader who actually has the relationship with the human who is impacted, whether that leader agrees with the decision or not.
Now it’s personal.
In my past, I had the unfortunate difficulty of having to make both made the financial call and then executing the phone call.
I didn’t hide behind layers of leaders to hand the decision to someone else to execute. I felt the full weight of the responsibility of the decision. I every person I ever had to release is still a stone on my soul. Because I knew, if I didn’t make that one decision today, I’d have to make ad additional 10 in a month. Because it was business.
That’s a burden of business leadership. It isn’t about profit over people. Or people over profit. It’s people and profit.
I haven’t said that out loud until right now.
I haven’t had the right words.
And I’ve spent the last six months in a kind of detox situation... shaking off so many things I’ve absorbed over 20+ years in corporate America that I started to mistake as part of my “identity.”
I’m sharing the top five today.
Lesson 1: Invisible rules outlive their context.
Every organization runs on rules nobody writes down. You absorb them to succeed inside that specific place at that specific time. But the risk is that somewhere along the way you can maybe stop seeing them as a “rule to survive here” and rather start seeing them as just part of life, or a part of you. Things like:
Always be available and reachable. On vacation. On weekends. During the birthday party, the family celebration... the family crisis... even your own health crisis....
A packed calendar means you really, really matter.
You should never be the one who says “no.”
The person who cares the “most” is the one who stays latest or logs off last.
You have to “prove” yourself.
You can, and “should” be able to “do” it all - be a C-suite leader, be named to Forbes 40 under 40, a present mom who “never gets angry”, a compassionate partner who “understands”, volunteer of the week, keeps the house clean, shows up to events with home-made food, handstitchs the kids halloween costumes…I’m sorry…that sounds ridiculous even as I’m typing it…
You learn the rules because they work for that organization, department, or team. Right up until you step out of that “room” or watch something change around or underneath you. Those same rules don’t work other places and can even become a liability.
The “detox” is about catching a rule as it’s firing, looking at it, and determining if it’s valid, if it works for you, and if you’ll keep it. Like cleaning out the the junk drawer in your kitchen. Keep what works and what you value. Toss the junk.
Lesson 2: Corporate loyalty is a one-way street.
Organizations ask for loyalty like it’s a relationship, like a one-sided relationship.
FYI: IT ISN’T.
I can’t say that loud enough.
For the record, those caps are for those of you in the back of the room, who have outstayed your time misaligned in organizations taking advantage of your brilliance.
I feel like I need to restate the obvious. Just like marriage, employment is a contract. Yes, you hope there’s mutual respect - or even love - when you sign a marriage license, but at its core, it’s a legal agreement. Severing a marriage takes court filings, lawyers, and costly legal action because of how the government views joint assets and income.
Employment is no different in its contractual nature - except companies will rip up that contract the moment it suits their bottom line.
Read it that way. Act like it.
I’ve had three corporate exists, two planned and deliberate and one unplanned, but it’s the same lesson... employment is a contract.
Negotiate the contract coming in. Recognize the contract while you are there. Respect that it was contract on your departure.
Give your work your best while you are there. But give your time and effort in context of the contract.
Your self-advocacy isn’t disloyalty to the organization.
Your belief in your self-worth isn’t disloyalty to the organization.
Your expectation for fair compensation and respect isn’t disloyalty.
Your expectation for a promotion because of time in service or because Sheila got one and she’s a jerk - now that’s another conversation and likely a whole different article, but I digress...
Lesson 3: Worth and value get welded onto identity.
In the United States - in Western society actually - a big part of our identity is connected to our work, and our work is, in a lot of ways, is connected to “output” - what we “produce” and what we “do.”
To our competence.
To a title.
To our reputation.
Being the one who holds it together, or rides in at the eleventh hour to save the day.
So when the badge stops working at the turnstile, and the login shows “user not found”, and you have to introduce yourself with the word former... an internal sense of worth can wobble.
That’s a trap.
I’ve been reminding myself that someone else’s decision, made on finances and margins and market cycles, is not a verdict on my worth.
Its a verdict on fit, timing, alignment, and possibly values - but not on “value” as in my personal value and self-worth.
But our brains don’t wait for that memo. The brain takes the signal from the external environment and translates it, super fast, into a self-claim (maybe I’m not as smart as I think I am, not as ‘valuable’ as I thought) before you’ve had a chance to weigh in.
I’ve been wrestling this one for months - who am I if I don’t have a “fancy title” or role description or current exciting, complex, difficult project or Fortune 500 company name to say when I introduce myself?
Turns out... I’m still me. Same kick-ass stories, same skills, same sass. And when I talk to people without all of that other stuff they still lean in to listen to me. Even as “just Shans.”
Lesson 4: Busy is the enemy.
I want to put a big star here because this one is huge: busy is just busy. It doesn’t mean you are actually more productive, “moving the needle” toward anything of value, and all it does is make you “feel” better - for a minute.
I have this insatiable drive to “feel” like I am getting something “productive” done every day. If I don’t, a little alarm goes off and a little anxiety sets in.
I’ve had to sit and look at it. Really, really look it to understand why. Who is it serving? Who am I performing for? What is it getting me? Is it getting me closer to my goals?
Or am I just moving papers around creating an illusion for my brain.
Here’s what I’ve finally realized... “busy” is a bottoms-up brain stimulus-chasing brain function. It’s chasing a dopamine rush of feel good.
And it’s noise.
It’s manufacturing the feeling of doing something meaningful so I don’t have to sit still.
Personally, 6 months after release, I’m paying myself to build something new and shed what no longer fits. I recognize that I’ve had the luxury of not sprinting to the next company or role the second the last one ended.
But my nervous system keeps trying to spend that luxury on being “busy” anyway. Partly out of pure habit, partly out of what I now have learned is a brain-wiring difference. Three months into this detox when I couldn’t focus I got some help and learned I have an ADHD brain - and a lot of my past experiences now make a whole lot more sense.
Busy is how I’d get the dopamine hit handed to me on a schedule.
Including why I’ve chased so many shiny things for so long.
Detoxing from “busy” is harder than actually detoxing from the job title, the work, the structure, or the identity.
Lesson 5: If we don’t pause in the gap between an event happening to us to choose our path, reflex will choose for us on an autopilot default.
The day I left Accenture, I felt 100 pounds lighter. Literally, the night I dropped off my laptop I felt pretty good. But the next morning when I woke up without any of the expectations, I felt so light.
And I think that when someone capable, competent and committed feels lighter walking away from something - either by choice or if it’s chosen for them - that’s information about the misalignment in th conditions.
I don’t say this with any bitterness toward the work, the organization, or the people. I say it as a pause.
The consulting world raised me and I’m a consultant in my soul.
I learned to be a consultant in the late 1900s (ha!), back when Joyce Doria, a Booz Allen partner and a student of Albert Bandura, father of social learning theory (one of my idols), might send you home if she decided you, as a woman, weren’t dressed appropriately to represent women correctly in the workplace. (FYI: My office was 3 doors down from Joyce...every morning was a really stressful walk past her office.)
It wasn’t unheard of to work 16 or 18-hour days in a conference room racing a deliverable into a FedEx envelope - this was pre “sending it” digitally to a client.
I’ve seen big shifts from my first gig training National guardsmen on how to bring in business to community Internet cafe’s at National Guard facilities in the early 2000s to today. The industry has asked a lot, and it gave a lot. I’ve learned to lead, to really problem-solve, and to dig for more when I was sure my tank was empty.
AI is disrupting and rewriting all of it. And underneath the disruption there’s a quiet question the whole industry is asking its people... “did you do enough? Are you doing enough? Can you be replaced by a computer program”
Which is being quietly translated through a productivity lens of “am I enough”
But watch what the brain does with that. It takes “did you do enough”, and before you can weigh in, it translates it into “am I enough” - basically do I have enough value and worth.
It’s a fundamental threat to the human psyche. Am I, a human being enough. Am I so easy to replace. What is my meaning?
When we get down to it. That is the question.
Who am I if I don’t have this?
That translation is the whole game. It happens in a gap so small you don’t see it.
The same gap where I was released and my nervous system reached for a reason and passed a verdict that the reason was “me” (to quote Taylor Swift - “Hey, hi, I’m the problem it’s me”)
That’s also the same gap where the choice lives.
You don’t choose the signal. Or even see the signal. But you can see the translation before it hardens into a self-claim, and pick the response.
Catching the handoff from “did you do enough” to “am I enough” and refusing the trade by answering the question “yes I did enough. yes. I am enough”
That’s what I’m building a space for.
Taking my years of experience translating brain + behavior + social psychology for organizations to help people like me - Recovering Type A+ Overachievers shed cognitive load and high-functioning exhaustion picked up from rooms signaling expectations they’ve mistakenly owned as their own voice and get back on their own priority list.
Six months out, I’m finally hearing the difference in the voice (ok - reality check, I’m getting quicker)
If you’re a Type A+ overachiever...or just experiencing high-functioning exhaustion from those invisible “shoulds”... I see you.
Stick around for the journey. I’m building this for us.
P.S. A few ways in, whenever you’re ready
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References
Burns, D. D. (1980). Feeling good: The new mood therapy. William Morrow.
Horney, K. (1950). Neurosis and human growth: The struggle toward self-realization. W. W. Norton.
Frequently Asked Questions
Why do corporate layoffs feel like a personal failure even when they are financial decisions?
Service-based corporate layoffs are fundamentally impersonal financial calculations 0 evaluating talent as billable inventory, utilization rates, and profit margins. However, because Western culture tightly couples professional titles and productivity with personal identity, the brain automatically translates a structural, spreadsheet-driven decision into a personal verdict of being "not enough."
How does chronic "busy-ness" act as a neurochemical coping mechanism?
Constant busyness triggers a bottom-up brain response that delivers quick dopamine hits, creating the illusion of meaningful progress and productivity. For high-achievers (and particularly neurodivergent individuals), staying continuously occupied acts as a functional distraction from anxiety, helping perform competence rather than addressing underlying cognitive exhaustion.
What are workplace "invisible rules" and why do they cause burnout?
Invisible rules are unwritten cultural expectations - such as remaining perpetually reachable, over-committing, or treating packed calendars as status symbols - absorbed to survive inside a specific organization. High-functioning exhaustion occurs when you mistake these temporary survival tactics for permanent personal standards and continue carrying them outside that corporate environment.