Still in That Job After the Bonus? 5 Excuses High-Achieving Women Need to Drop Now (#80)

You said you'd leave after your corporate bonus—but you're still in that soul-sucking job. Why? What’s holding you back from leaving your 9 to 5? 

In this episode, we're calling out the top 5 excuses high-achieving women use to delay their corporate exit—and how to drop them for good. Whether you're dreaming of becoming a coach, consultant, speaker, or business owner, it’s time to get honest about what’s holding you back.

We cover: 

✨ The hidden cost of chasing one more promotion
 ✨ Why your side hustle can’t keep being your late-night hustle
✨ How your fear around money or partner’s opinion may be silently stalling your success
✨ The truth about self-doubt and trusting your ability to run a business

You’re not alone in these thoughts—I’ve been there and so have my clients! But staying stuck won’t get you closer to your purpose. Your dream deserves more than your leftovers!

It’s not the job, the money, or your partner. It’s the excuses. Let’s ditch them so you can finally make your Empowered Exit™.

🎧 Listen now and take your first real step toward reinvention.

Transcript

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Karin Freeland 0:00

Welcome to Rock Your Reinvention, where I help high-achieving career women like you get unstuck, make your corporate exit strategy, and successfully transition to your next chapter. Hi, I'm your host, Karin Freeland, a certified life coach and corporate exit strategist. Whether you want to start a business, become a speaker, or something else, I'm here to give you the tools and strategies to shift your mindset, build your confidence, and take bold actions so you can rock your reinvention. Ready? Let's go. Well, welcome back. We have got some real talk for you today. Look, you set the deadline for leaving your job. You said you would exit corporate and finally follow your dream of being a coach, a consultant, a business owner, a speaker, whatever that dream is for you. You got your bonus. and now you're dragging your feet, you are inadvertently choosing to stay stuck. And I'm not here to judge. I've been right where you are now. And so have dozens of my clients. I am, however, here to help you call out the patterns holding you back so that you can overcome them and finally achieve your purpose. So today I want to cover five excuses that are holding you back and that you could ditch right now if you wanted to. The first one is you still think you can climb to the top. And I see this excuse play out in two distinct ways. The first one is, well, hey, since I worked this hard to get where I am, I should probably just ride this out. See how much money I can get from this gravy train. See how high I can climb. I just want to see if I can get to the next level. Even though the thought of staying has you bored out of your mind or filled with dread and exhaustion. And that my friend is just your ego talking. And it's time to find out why your ego is so hell bent on you climbing the corporate ladder. There's definitely some inner work that needs to be done there. Maybe a comment someone made to you once, something that's holding you back. The second way that I really see this play out is in the women I work with who have this undeserved loyalty to their company. So for example, the organization or leadership team has just continued to dangle carrot after carrot and move the goalpost on you 10 times And even though that's all happened, you're still in this delusion that it's just a matter of time before you finally break through to that next level. But here's the truth. You're wasting precious time building someone else's goals and dreams instead of your own. More likely than not, your idea of getting to the top is built on corporate conditioning or pressures from society. It's not even really your true desires. Most people don't wake up and say, Oh, I want to be the VP of operations, or I want to be the CMO of a energy company. Like, I don't know, pick a thing, pick an industry, pick a title. Like most people don't say that when they're kids, there are several hidden costs of staying for a promotion that may never come. or worse yet, that might actually come and tighten those golden handcuffs even more. Think about that for a second. How likely are you to leave with an additional 50,000 in salary or 300,000 in stock options? I've seen it firsthand. The chances of you leaving if that happens are drastically reduced. So what if you stopped trying to climb to the top of someone else's ladder and built your own. You could do that if you stopped thinking you could still climb to the top, even though it's not something you truly want. Okay, the second excuse that I see holding so many women back is you think you can balance both. If you started your business or your side hustle, congratulations. That's amazing. And very smart that you stayed in your job while you built this and tested this out. I often recommend that to my clients before leaving their six figure job. Maybe your side hustle has even really taken off and you might be capped out right now and feel like I can't possibly take any more clients or do any more of whatever your business is because there's no more hours in the day. So you, you literally have run out of time to commit to that side hustle. So you're faced with a decision. Do I leave corporate or keep balancing both? And let me be clear. Yes, yes, you can balance both, but not forever. Let me repeat that last part. You cannot balance both a full-time job and a side hustle for an extended period of time. No matter how talented or organized you are, Burnout is real, and I see too many women burning out trying to do both for too long. The truth is you can't keep growing your side hustle while giving your day job your best hours. Are you ready for a little tough love? You know it comes from a good place. How much longer are you going to let your day job get in the way of your real goals? How much longer are you giving your dreams your leftovers? How much longer are you going to delay or let go of your legacy? It's time to go all in on your dreams and make them a reality. And hear this. You have been successful in everything you've ever done. So there's absolutely no reason why you would not be wildly successful here too. I believe in you. That's why I do this podcast so that now you can believe in you. The third excuse that I hear is you want more money. Hey, I know I just got my bonus, but there'll be another one next year. And oh, there'll be a 3% pay raise potentially. Oh, there might be this opportunity, that opportunity to make more money. I'm just going to stay. Look, I know that this is a sensitive subject. And please don't take this the wrong way. But I wonder if there might be some greed getting in the way. Maybe some feelings of jealousy towards what Others have that you feel you deserve. Maybe your worth is too tied up in your worldly possessions. And again, this desire often comes from ego or past seasons in our life of scarcity where we didn't have a lot of money. You know, I used to say when my husband and I were first dating and living together in Florida, in Miami, what do you want for dinner tonight? Raviolis, raviolis, or raviolis. We had no money. I was a starving actress, waiting tables, barely living paycheck to paycheck. And we had canned raviolis, we had fried raviolis, and we had frozen raviolis in a bag. And we were very limited on what we could eat. And I have to remind myself sometimes that I'm never going back to that state. even if my business went belly up tomorrow and i made no money for a year which that would never happen but if that happened i'm still not going to be in a position where i have to eat raviolis raviolis or raviolis okay so i can let go of the need to want more money but if you grew up in poverty or had very frugal parents you probably have some deep-seated fears around money Now there's nothing wrong with wanting money unless it's detrimental to you, right? And so we all need to look at that for ourselves. But I personally like to subscribe now to the idea of enough. I'm not looking for more money, just enough to pay my monthly bills, have a few extras and not have to tap into my savings. When's it gonna be enough for you? What's that monthly number? And I think if you get really honest with yourself, you'll find it's a lot lower than you think. But to be sure, this is why I always recommend that my clients work with a certified financial planner. They can give you the facts about your money situation and help you reach your financial goals. But if you're making six figures, not living above your means, that's a biggie. You've been contributing to your 401k for quite some time. I find it really hard to believe that you can't exit right now. And here's the thing. As long as you get more money, you will just spend it. That's what everyone does. It's called lifestyle creep and it happens really slowly, but essentially your cost of living rises with how much you make. You go out to eat more. You fill up your closet with a few more things that you don't really need. You get season tickets to the theater or some sporting event. You take that extra vacation. You buy your kid a nicer car than you normally would have. The next thing you know, you need more money for that inflated lifestyle, thereby keeping you trapped in that corporate hellhole even longer. But it's not all doom and gloom because now you know this and now you can do something about it and bust this excuse. because you see it for what it really is. Just an excuse that's keeping you trapped. The fourth excuse that is holding you back from taking that bonus money and saying peace out is you secretly don't trust your capability to run a business or generate income. This is more common than most want to admit. This is part of why it took me so long to start consulting. I seriously didn't think I had the skills. Partly because I had spent a lot of time in my corporate job with consultants from companies like McKinsey and Bain and BCG. And I always felt like those guys, and I do say guys because they all were, they were smarter than me. They were more strategic and worldly and it just seemed like I couldn't keep up with them. And so even when other women told me, Karin, you should become a consultant. You could totally do this. You have all these transferable skills. I didn't believe them. I had to do a lot of self-reflection on the discrepancy of how I saw myself and how others saw me. And maybe you do too. I also had to get clear on what kind of consulting I wanted to do and where my sweet spot was. I wasn't going to do what these guys from McKinsey were doing. For the first two years after I left corporate, I contracted myself out and taught a social selling program to sales professionals in the tech industry. Half of what I did when I was in my corporate marketing job was teach sales how to use social media. No brainer. Total slam dunk for me. And I made a crap ton of money. And while it wasn't exactly what I wanted to be doing, it gave me time and the income to write my books and build my coaching business while I consulted part-time. Okay. I wasn't in a full-time job like you are right now. I was in a part-time job and I could say no to any consulting contract that didn't fit my budget or my time. And for you, You have skills that you can immediately sell. We all have them. You have an immediate means of generating income. You have the capabilities to run a business. And maybe this means buying a business that already turns a profit, or partnering up with someone so the risk is shared. I mean, there's so many options. But if I can run a biz, so can you. If I can be a paid speaker, so can you. If I can make money being a podcast host, so can you, right? This is feasible and you have the skills. The last excuse is keeping you from leaving, now that you have your bonus, is your partner isn't supportive. This is a tough one that I do see with some of my clients. Oftentimes the husband is used to the wife being the breadwinner and he actually enjoyed having his wife work and provide for the family. And now that you're thinking of leaving, he's worried about his lifestyle and might even guilt trip you into staying. Sometimes this happens out of his own fear or money mindset issues. If he had poverty or scarcity seasons in his life, he may be triggered and think, oh no, we're going to go back to that. It may be something deeper. Or maybe he just doesn't initially believe in your ability to run a business because he's never seen you in this capacity before. Or he had family members with failed businesses and that past situation is clouding his thoughts. There are a lot of reasons why it may seem like your partner isn't supportive. But before you jump to any conclusions or project your own fears onto him, you need to start with an open and honest conversation about what you want to do and why. So for example, At a time that's convenient for everyone, like not right when he comes home from work or like he just got done mowing the lawn and he's like relaxing or something, right? We got to pick and choose a good time to have this conversation. But you might say something like, look, I want to share something with you that's been on my heart. You know, I haven't been happy in my job for quite some time. I'd really like to leave. I'm not quitting recklessly, but I want to build something more meaningful for our future. And then you can open it up to him and say like, what are your initial concerns? Like, what worries you with me leaving? And then let him talk. Do not interrupt him. Just let him articulate it. And it may take a minute. He may not understand all the reasons why he doesn't want you to leave right now. He may not have done that work on himself. He might just be grasping at surface level responses. and then once he gets some of that out you want to acknowledge his fears like yeah i'm scared about money too i get it but i know that we are smart intelligent people and we're gonna figure it out together and as you get in to articulate your fears you can tackle them one by one without yelling or feeling defensive Just go and work through each one together. And here's the thing that a lot of people who do like conflict resolution, and I'm certainly not an expert in this by any means, but you kind of want like you and your partner to be on the same side. And then you put the problem like across the table from you. So you know how they say like if you sit down to talk to somebody and you're across from them, it feels very combative, like you're going against each other. But if you and your spouse are on the same side, and then the issue of leaving corporate is kind of over there, then you can tackle that together, right? As a team. And some of the things that come up in this conversation, you might have to table them if they're really big or really, you need more information, right? Like maybe you haven't done your due diligence yet and gone to the financial planner. Maybe that's the next step. Like, look, okay, you're worried about money. I understand that you could be concerned about that. Why don't we go to a financial planner together and see if this is as big of a concern as we think it is, right? And then you can come back to some of those. Now, I wanna give you just a couple of quick tips for having the money conversation. Just like you do in your day job, right? Present your exit plan like a business case. You don't just go to your boss or your team members or whoever, the leadership team, and go, hey, I have this great idea. Just trust me on it. It's going to be awesome. No, you present a business case. Do the same thing here. Hey, honey, here's what I've saved. Here's how long it's going to sustain us. Here's how I plan to earn our monthly income. Really show the math and the numbers. And don't be afraid. to include some worst case scenario planning. Like, hey, look, if I'm not generating consistent income by this time next year, then I am willing to consider pivoting or contracting or doing something part-time until I can get it off the ground. And let's be real, you can always go back to corporate if you decide. It's still gonna be there if you change your mind Or if by some crazy reason, things don't take off. But more times than not, that is just like a back burner. It's just there, but you'll never need it. And one more tip, present some expenses that you can cut or reduce. So for example, you might be like, hey, if we cut that streaming service or we take our adult child who is now 21 off our cell phone bill and they can pay for it themselves, or we find a lower cost landscaper, we could actually save X amount a month. So see, I don't really need to keep earning all this money. One of the things that I found in my life is money also made me Don't take this the wrong way, lazy. But what I mean by lazy is I would just throw my credit card at every problem because I didn't have time to investigate a cheaper solution or a better alternative or God forbid, do something myself, right? Like I was never cooking cookies for the class or something, right? Like I went to the store and I bought the damn cookies and there's nothing wrong with that at all. But you know what? I didn't need to go buy cookies now for the class. party, I can make them at home because I have the time. So money sometimes just makes us not explore all the options because it's a convenience. That's a better way to say it, Karin. Sorry. Sometimes I have to articulate this stuff to get to what sounds better. Money sometimes just makes us not investigate all the options because it's an easy, convenient solution, right? It's like the first thing we think of. It's that first option we run for. Bottom line, you're going to get a lot more buy-in from your partner if he sees that you've thought all of this through and you have some backup plans. At the end of the day, though, it's your life and your purpose matters. In time, he'll probably come around, but if he doesn't, that's okay. You can still succeed without his support. I know it would be nice if our partner always supported us, but It's not a prerequisite for your success. You can still exit your corporate job and build something really beautiful for yourself. Okay, so that does it. Five excuses that you need to ditch right now so that you can take that bonus money and run. The first one, you still think you can climb the corporate ladder and get to the top, but you don't even need that and it's not actually gonna fulfill you. And if it doesn't come, then you've just wasted a whole bunch of time that you could have been building your own dreams. You think you can balance both, but not forever. At some point, you're going to get burnt out or things are going to start to drop, right? You're going to start to drop some balls. And then what? Number three, you want more money. But do you really need that money? But what if you could make that money somewhere else? Again, that is just an excuse. Number four, you secretly don't trust your capability. to run a business or generate income. Hogwash, you're fabulous, and I know you can do it. Number five, your partner isn't supportive, and that's okay, because they don't need to be. It's nice if they are, and I gave you some strategies for how you can overcome that, but if they're not gonna support you, you're still capable of doing it without them. As always, I am rooting for you and I will keep believing in you until you are strong enough to believe in yourself. Thanks for tuning in. I hope you're inspired to take action by committing to one of the tips or strategies we talked about in today's episode. If you want more accountability and support, I've got your back. Book a complimentary empowered exit strategy call today. Visit karinfreeland.com to learn more and book your 45-minute session.