Why I Left Corporate at 35, a Year After Marketer of the Year Award

I left my corporate career at 35, one year after being named Marketer of the Year at a Fortune 500 pharmaceutical company, and shortly after that same company ousted me. At first I was relieved. Then I was lost. Now I look back and am so grateful – I needed the push to do what I knew I needed to do but kept delaying: leave.

This is what my career looked like from the outside: fell into pharma sales at 24, climbed fast, picked up national and global marketing awards before 30, won Marketer of the Year at a Fortune 500 company. It also came with five figure bonuses each quarter, multiple first class tickets to Europe each year for conferences, on the road (or in the air) three weeks each month, a company car, corporate expense account, dinners at fancy restaurants with clients. Every box checked. Every rung taken in the right order.

This is what my career looked like from the inside, especially in those last seven years: two mergers and acquisitions, great people getting walked out while mediocre ones survived the culture becoming more and more political with every merger, four bosses in five years each one more politically driven and toxic than the last…and a slow-motion dismantling of every belief I had about how the corporate world worked.

I used to believe that if you worked hard and produced results, the system would reward you. The mergers cured me of that. I watched exceptional colleagues get let go while people who played politics stayed. The lesson the organization was teaching, without meaning to, was that results matter less than relationships with the right people at the right time. I kept trying to prove that was wrong. I kept performing. I kept putting everything into my team.

And I kept paying for it.

I spent the last four or five years working for bosses who didn’t value what I brought. Highly political people. In one case, genuinely toxic. I still showed up. I still delivered. But I was doing it with stress migraines I couldn’t shake, self-medicating to get to sleep most nights because my mind couldn’t stop racing, and a back that seized up so completely on two separate occasions that I literally could not get out of bed.

Twice. Could not get out of bed. From stress.

That’s what “performing well” looked like from the inside.

The other cost, the one nobody talks about, is what relentless promotion does to your social life when every step up moves you to a new city. I moved with my career over and over. The upward trajectory was real. But built on a shaky foundation. When your whole social life is also colleagues from your professional life, the fragility of the whole thing becomes obvious the second work starts going wrong.

I didn’t have a life outside work. I had a career, and I was using it as a substitute for everything else.

The Marketer of the Year award came about a year before I left.

I’m not going to pretend I wasn’t proud of it. I was. It represented years of real work, real results, building teams that actually delivered. In that sense, it was earned.

But here’s what the award also did: it made it harder to admit what I already knew: I was miserable.

The award and the disillusionment were happening at the same time. That’s the part they don’t tell you. You can be winning by every external measure and quietly falling apart behind the scenes. There is no input field for genuine happiness or fulfillment on your LinkedIn profile.

About three or four months before I left, something shifted. I had a massive breakthrough. The kind that only happens when your life implodes. Mine imploded and I woke up and decided something needed to change. I decided that something was me.

I stopped waking up thinking about work first. I started making decisions based on the life I wanted instead of the career I was protecting. And it changed everything about how I showed up, because I stopped making my boss’s priorities my priorities.

One specific decision made it visible.

I had a vacation planned. A once in a lifetime trip to Palau for a 10-day live-aboard-a ship scuba diving trip. My boss wanted me to cancel it and present to the leadership team instead. I chose to go on the vacation.

For a political boss whose reputation depended on his direct reports being visibly loyal and devoted, this was insubordination. It wasn’t framed that way, of course. It was framed as a restructuring. I was ousted.

I won’t call what happened ethical. It wasn’t. But I will tell you what was underneath the shock of it: relief.

Then came a period of reorienting, of figuring out what came next. But even in those first days, underneath the noise of it, something had relaxed. I wouldn’t have used the word “permission slip” at the time. I wouldn’t have called it that at all. But the decision about when had been made for me. I knew I wanted to go. I just would have dragged it out, waiting for the perfect time. And there is no perfect time.

Here’s what I’ve come to understand, 12 years later.

External validation is temporary. It can be handed to you on a Tuesday and taken back on a Wednesday, and neither the giving nor the taking tells you anything true about who you are.

I had built a career on being recognized by the right people above me in the right institutions. I was very good at it. And I had no idea who I was outside of it, which is exactly why leaving was so hard, even when I knew I needed to go.

The layoff didn’t interrupt my path. It forced me to admit that I had been following someone’s version of success. It wasn’t mine.

I went on to build a business after that. Not immediately, and not successfully the first time. My first attempt, a cold-pressed juice company, collapsed one month before launch, and it nearly cost me everything. That story is its own lesson, and I’ll tell it here.

What I eventually built is Her Big Leap, a coaching program for corporate women who are exactly where I was: performing well by every external measure, collecting the evidence that they’re doing things right, and quietlywondering why it doesn’t feel like enough.

The question I wish someone had asked me at 32, before the back seizures, before the self-medication, before two mergers’ worth of disillusionment: not “are you succeeding?” but “what do you really want?”

And honestly, if someone had asked me then, I might have given the answer that I wanted the next promotion and title. Sometimes it takes your life imploding and everything to fall away to wake up and get really clear on what you want. It did for me. But I don’t recommend it. It’s way better to see the writing on the wall and do something before the Universe forces your hand.

If you’re building a career that looks right from the outside and feels wrong on the inside, that gap is something to pay attention to and investigate. It’s not evidence that you’re ungrateful, or not tough enough, or not trying hard enough. It’s feedback.

The gap was there for me at 32. I collected three more years of awards trying to close it.

The permission slip you’re waiting for might not look the way you expect. And by the time it arrives, you might not have the language for it either. You’ll just know the decision has been made, and you’ll finally be able to stop waiting for the perfect time to make it yourself.

Sarah Janzen is the founder of Her Big Leap, a program that has helped hundreds of corporate women across North America and Europe build thriving businesses on their own terms. She does all of it while raising two boys, which is the best proof she knows that “waiting for the right time” was never the strategy.