Last week I sat in a recording studio at Stanford University, in front of a camera, and they asked me to answer three questions.

• How do you know when the career you are succeeding in is no longer the right one?
• How do you make the move without blowing up your life?
• And how do you trust yourself to act when every logical argument says stay?

I have been asked versions of these questions hundreds of times. By clients. By strangers in my DMs. By the voice in my own head at 2am for longer than I would like to admit. But this time the questions were for a leadership case study that will be taught to future Stanford Business School classes. On the record. On camera. No editing out the parts that make you look uncertain.

And right before we started, the producer reminded me of something. There is a question on the Stanford application that every Business school student has to answer. “What matters most to you and why?”

When I applied, I froze. I stared at the screen for a long time.

Then I wrote what I thought Stanford needed to read. Not what was true. I performed the version of myself that had gotten me through a decade in private equity. Polished, strategic, impressive on paper. I could not answer honestly because I no longer knew what honest looked like.

I got in anyway. Which almost made it worse. Because it meant the performance worked. And when the performance works, you do not stop performing. You perform harder.

It took burning out so badly that my face was unrecognisable in the mirror. It took leaving finance, rebuilding my health, sitting with that question again, this time surrounded by people who would not let me hide behind the polished answer. It took five years at Apple, where everything was working and nothing was wrong, and learning to hear the quiet signal underneath the noise. It took leaving that too. At my peak. While loving every minute.

Last week, when the camera turned on, I did not freeze. I did not perform.

The question did not change. I did.

Three things I said on camera that I wish someone had told me ten years ago.

• Fear is loud and temporary. Misalignment is quiet and chronic. Learn to tell the difference.
• The best launchpad is not rock bottom. It is the peak. When your confidence is highest, your skills are sharpest, and your network is strongest.
• I did not quit to figure it out. I built the bridge before I crossed it. Tested every plank before I put my weight on it. By the time I made the decision, it was not a leap. It was a conclusion.

I will share the recording with you when it is ready.

In the meantime, next week I am teaching my career transitions class at Stanford. I am building something around this for people who are not in that room but are sitting with the same questions. If you want to be the first to know when it opens, reply with “I’m in” and I will make sure you hear about it before anyone else.

In your corner,

Lamiaa

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