The Quiet Part of Leaving Your Corporate Tribe

When there’s no one to lean over the wall to

One of the stranger parts of leaving corporate isn’t the uncertainty or the workload.

It’s realizing how much used to happen around you—things you mostly took for granted.

When you’re inside

When you’re inside an organization, there are people who care what you think.

They ask for your input.
They react to your ideas.
They push back. They build on what you say. Sometimes they challenge you in ways that actually help you think better.

Even when it’s messy or political or just tiring, your perspective lands somewhere.

Then you step out

Then you step out.

And suddenly… it doesn’t.

You notice it in small, almost ridiculous ways.

You have a thought and realize there’s no obvious place to take it.
You finish an idea and no one’s on the other side of the table.
You look up from your laptop and the only one around is your dog.
Or your cat.
Or whoever happens to be nearby.

They’re comforting.
They’re loyal.
They might even be a little judgmental.

They don’t really care what you think.

That’s often the first real disruption of leaving the tribe—and it’s not one people usually talk about.

The moment it hits

I remember getting genuinely excited about a new idea—one of those this could change everything moments—
and then realizing there was no one to lean over the wall to and say, “Hey, listen to this.”

It’s not the uncertainty.
It’s not the workload.

It’s the change in who’s around to think things through with you.

The real departure didn’t happen when you quit or made it official.
It happened when that shared context quietly shifted—when things you’d relied on without noticing were suddenly yours to carry.

Knowing it vs. feeling it

By the time you’re seriously considering entrepreneurship—or you’ve just stepped out—you usually get this part intellectually.

You know things are going to change.

What’s harder to anticipate is how that shift actually lands.
Not as an idea—but in your day-to-day experience.

For a while, you’re in between.

You’re no longer surrounded by the same people.
And you’re not yet held by anything new.

Only then does it become clear what had been there all along.

Places to think out loud without having to set the stage.
A natural rhythm to the week that quietly told you what mattered.
The simple fact that other people were paying attention to your thinking.

You didn’t build any of that.
You just lived inside it.

It was part of the background—so familiar you barely noticed it was there.

You’ve been here before

You’ve been through a version of this before.

Think back to the shift from high school to college.

High school was tightly structured.
Schedules. Bells. Clear expectations. A pretty clear sense of what “doing well” looked like.

Then college started—and suddenly it was looser.

More freedom.
More choice.
More responsibility for deciding how you spend your time and attention.

Nothing went wrong in that transition.

The structure didn’t disappear.
It just stopped being automatic.

Where you are now

This phase is similar.

Fewer built-in conversations.
Fewer places where ideas get shaped in real time.
More responsibility for making sense of things on your own.

It’s easy to read that as something being wrong.

It isn’t.

It’s just a transition.

If you’re considering leaving corporate—or you’ve just left—you don’t need to solve anything today.

Just consider what will change. Or, if you’ve made the leap, notice what’s changed.

Not to fix it.
Not to replace it.
Just to get your bearings.

Outside the familiar.
Not lost.
Still in motion.

Rooting for you—especially in the in-between.

Pierre

Certified Professional Coach

Photo by Zoshua Colah on Unsplash