The intentional quitter: How I arrived at a fashion career by accident, and why I left it on purpose.

This is the story of my career path, my quest for fulfilment and what I’ve learnt along the way.

There are those who follow their values; they become doctors, teachers and charity workers. There are those who follow their interests; they become artists, performers and sports people. Then there are those who follow their aptitudes and skills and do what they’ve always been told they’re good at. You’re good with numbers, you go into accounting; you’re good at writing, you become an author or a journalist. Finally, there are those who chase a sense of achievement and affluence – on a quest for “success” in the most widely accepted sense of the word. They keep striving and climbing the corporate ladder with a stiff neck from constantly looking upwards. 

This was my narrow vision of the world at the start of my career. And with those murky lenses of my frame of reference, I consecutively stepped into each of these roles, not daring to think of the possibility that I could ask for it all. The idea that it’s possible to be truly fulfilled in your career felt unrealistic, naive and maybe even greedy. Work means sacrifice after all, right? Being an adult should feel hard. Work time is for striving and personal time is for recovering. I’m not worthy / ready / enough to ask for more. And most powerfully of all – it probably wouldn’t work out anyway. These were some of the many heavy loads I carried on my back while I tried to put one foot in front of the other on my career path. It felt easier to be cynical about potential fulfilment and my own version of career success than to be vulnerable enough to truly want something and brave enough to go get it. Cynicism was my subconscious safety blanket protecting me against the potential pain of disappointment and rejection.

I grew up bilingual and therefore have a somewhat natural affinity with languages. Bingo – milestone decision #1 was made for me. Aptitude, high attainment, external validation and perhaps also the element of ease, all lead me to study foreign languages at university. No plan, no vision, no passion or wider meaning, but in return the false sense of safety of my assumption that I could continue to be the "good student" for a little longer.  As it turned out, this was a poor motivation to get me through reading Martin Luther's Ninety-five Theses in medieval German and it resulted in me skipping many lectures in favour of pretending to shop in Selfridges. Aptitude alone got me little else than a 2:1 and a huge student loan so I looked further.

In my early 20's I discovered an internal pull to be part of something meaningful. Perhaps in response to the experience of my undergraduate degree feeling rather aimless, directionless, like a chapter that happened to me rather than one I wrote. When it was over I wondered if it had even happened, it felt a little surreal. My reaction to this was the need to feel a true sense of purpose in my prospective career. Bingo #2 – working in the non-profit sector was my calling. 

I gained some experience at a charity event and consultancy company in New York and arrived at my first vision of a desired career. I would become a business consultant for non-profit organizations. There are three things that scream out at me from the page as I write that (yes, I’m one of those – I still write with a pen). (1) My search for meaning and purpose remained external. Rather than getting to know myself better to find purposeful fulfilment, I looked outside of myself to find a role I could play that was widely accepted as meaningful. (2) I didn't give myself the permission to go for the purposeful direction fully – I chose for a degree of separation as a consultant. This would allow me to keep one foot on my purposeful path and one foot on a more easily digestible version of success that didn't need further justification to myself, my family, or wider social circle. (3) And even better, I had a great reason to extend my “good student” identity even longer by taking myself from one institution to another to do a master's in International Business at Leeds University Business School. I was (not so) blissfully unaware of the self-limiting beliefs I held, and of my blindness to these assumptions quietly driving my life decisions. 

The motivation of a true life purpose and the clarity of a future vision proved to be a much more powerful accelerator for learning, and I found that I also gained a natural interest in business. My postgraduate degree was fundamental in shaping my life view as well as my values in work. I started engaging with how businesses can work for both profit and people, and how integrity-led strategy can drive real impact and growth. From a formative perspective I gained the groundwork for my business acumen as well as the strong belief in conscious business and leadership. From an experiential learning perspective, I gained the idea that doing something meaningful as well as interesting was a strong catalyst for personal growth and fulfilment. For the first time I experienced a natural drive, a curiosity, a flow state. 

Life and love took me to Amsterdam* next where the priority was setting up my career as soon as possible. With my Masters degree under my arm, a heart full of optimism and the fuel of a clear vision, I started knocking on people's virtual doors. My expectation was that my education, passion and zeal would make me a very attractive candidate. I wanted to do something meaningful, to stand for something and I'd worked hard to prepare for this, so surely all doors would open for me? Unfortunately, the responses were either non-existent or not economically viable. Disappointed and disenchanted with my dream, I received a piece of advice: "Get yourself into an industry that interests you – the rest will follow.” 

Enter PVH, the parent company of Calvin Klein and Tommy Hilfiger. My interest in fashion is something I had always rejected as shallow and frivolous and not fitting to the academic, professional and serious adult identity I wanted to hold. And using such an interest as a foundation for my career seemed unsuitably unserious! I laugh as I write this thinking about how black and white and tidy I needed life to be in order to feel safe and in control. Change and the unknown threaten our sense of safety, predictability and control. Our brain and nervous system are wired to bring us back to homeostasis, to keep us safe in the familiar. When there is a high level of uncertainty, we create protective narratives and strong judgements that we hold as true, and that we use as our guiding principles to govern our choices. They become our default operating system. 

Thankfully an opportunity came to me that pushed me to set my judgements aside and go for it anyway. And as it turned out I was one of those people who follow their interests and make a success of it, because I stayed at PVH on and off for 12 years. During that time, I realised my interest in fashion was really a pull towards creativity. More than "just" an interest in fashion, I was driven by the feeling of being part of a constantly evolving, living creative process. Mood boards, colours, fabrics, and launching product and strategy within the push and pull of creativity and commerce. I soaked up the creative energy by osmosis, which fed my soul and inspired me daily. The dynamic environment excited me, no day was the same as the last and we were always looking to a bigger future. I always pictured my roles in Product Merchandising as sitting in the middle of a complex web, and that's exactly where I wanted to be. High level of scope, and high exposure to new concepts, experiences and learning, and a responsibility to inform, influence, collaborate with many different people.

My career at PVH took me across different brands, product areas and international environments, and over time into global scope and a senior leadership role. I loved much of it – managing great people, collaborating across nationalities and cultures, travelling, shaping strategy and being in the middle of the creative process on a global scale. But I also experienced the other side. The pressure, the relentlessly high expectations, the intensity of driving results – and how easily all this can tip into patterns that erode wellbeing, psychological safety and people's ability to do their best work. At times I was on the receiving end of an unhealthy culture. At times, if I'm honest, I contributed to it. What became increasingly clear to me was that strong results shouldn’t come at the expense of integrity or the wellbeing of the people delivering them. 

In hindsight I see that there were several phases in my time there that I was in a high functioning burn out – teetering on the edge of total nervous system collapse, stuck in fight mode and struggling to survive through the week. When you're running on adrenaline to get through the day, you carry that home with you. You don't have the chance to come down from the high before you're thrust back into it the next day. And when the unspoken cultural mantra is "you're only as good as your next collection", it's not hard to see how my sense of worth became dangerously tied to my output. I will never forget the first time I reflected on this in a leadership coaching session, where I saw this image of myself walking through a huge vat of maple syrup. Every step feeling so heavy and unable to imagine it ever feeling any different. All my energy was going into sustaining this forward movement at any cost. What would the opposite of this feel like the coach asked. Running through an expansive field of flowers was my answer. I was looking for ease, freedom, joy. And yet I stayed. I had worked so hard and given so much of myself to reach the senior role I was in. Fashion is one of those industries where the message – sometimes subtle, sometimes overt – is that you should feel lucky to work there, lucky to have made it. The salary I’d reached, the feeling of achievement, the CV I’d built up and the relationships I’d formed all contributed to feeling trapped in a golden cage. 

The golden cage was soon rattled by two seismically big life events – first motherhood and then Covid. Covid forced a collective pause – removing the noise and busyness that many of us used, often unconsciously, to avoid asking harder questions about our lives. With the usual work day-to-day removed, questions about meaning, purpose and what actually matters rose to the surface. The result was a widespread restlessness with the status quo, reflected in the Great Resignation and a broader cultural shift in how people think about work, identity and fulfilment. And the process of matrescence has a very similar effect in challenging your default state and identity. 

For the months that I was pregnant, I was lucky enough to take part in a year long leadership coaching trajectory arranged through work. This was the most transformative experience of my life. To stop the constantly moving treadmill, take the time to get to know myself again, and really gain perspective on my way of working and living was infinitely beneficial. Particularly at a time in my life when these questions were naturally surfacing anyway due to impending motherhood. Coaching was like lighting a torch beam on my life, gradually illuminating more that needed examining, challenging or letting go of. Like the low winter sun reminding you the windows need cleaning – and then wondering how you ever saw through them at all. 

I realised that the feeling of overwhelm and burnout was not only contributed by the level of pressure and energy expenditure, but also by the fact that the role was misaligned to the values that were most important to me during that phase of life. My hard-earned career was in truth misaligned to the work and personal life that I wanted to lead. This is a particularly difficult conclusion to come to when there are parts of your work life that do contribute positively to your life, some of your values that are resonating with the role you’re in. 

At each stage of my professional development until that time, I had followed the value / interest / aptitude / ego story that was screaming the loudest. Each time, focusing on one individual facet of myself rather than embracing the multifaceted, complex and messy human that I am. I had no holistic picture of myself, what drives me, or what I want out of life and work because each time I was viewing life through a single clear hole in the still murky lenses of my frame of reference. The incremental learning and personal development was there, but it was on a slow drip feed. Coaching and the subsequent reading, reflecting and conscious experiencing gave me the opportunity to clear those murky lenses of all the layers of assumptions and identity markers that were not my own, or that were not serving me. I finally took the time to get to know myself and to really listen to what my heart, head, gut were guiding me towards. And what greater motivation to do all that work, than stepping up to be someone’s mama.

So you’d think that I would now be at the part of the story where I left PVH and decided to be a coach. But no, this period of enlightenment was only the beginning. It gave me a language, thought frameworks and the capacity to be more aware of myself and more intentional and empowered in my choices. This acted as a catalyst towards my process of becoming, which would last 6 years (and counting). I did leave PVH, I travelled with my new family, I tried and failed at being an entrepreneur, I came back to PVH with a much stronger mindset, a clearer sense of self and a hard-won sense of calm, but ultimately, I left again. As Tennessee Williams wrote: there is a time for departure even when there is no certain place to go. Times of transition such as these are challenging. You are no longer where you were but not yet where you’re going, and that can feel profoundly unsettling – for your nervous system and your ego alike. 

Slowly but surely I got closer to knowing what I wanted – and then to being brave enough to go for it. If I'm honest, from the very first day of being coached in a sun-filled hotel conference room in Bergen aan Zee, part of me already knew I was going to be a coach. In many ways I was ready for it even then. But the years of inner work that followed – more coaching, therapy, twice becoming a mother, new roles, and new people who fed my confidence in ways I didn't know I needed – meant that when I finally went for it, I was feeling bold yet grounded, standing firmly on my two feet.  

I now know what it feels like to be in total flow and fulfilment at work, and it's a feeling I couldn't have imagined getting paid for. Being a small part of someone else's transformation, the meaningful conversations, the psychological depth, the breadth of topics, the lifelong responsibility to keep reflecting and developing myself, and the freedom to build something of my own. It all fits me so well that it honestly feels like it was always meant to be, and that everything I’ve done was leading to this. 

I won’t be the first or the last coach to sell awareness as the key catalyst towards fulfilment. To borrow (and brazenly adapt) the famous Carl Rogers quote: 'The curious paradox is that when I know myself just as I am, then I can change.' Nothing sounds earth shatteringly brilliant about stopping to listen to yourself. And yet there is nothing more powerful or more transformational than being asked and then reflecting on simple, timely and powerful questions. To dare to answer the question ‘what do I want’ you need to enter the liminal space of possibility, of potential upcoming change. Tempting yourself to see another way to live, work, lead - to see a new way to grow. And perhaps that’s the bravest thing you can do. 

Coaching with me at third field is the invitation to enter this space of possibility in order to design a work life that leads to you feeling alive and fulfilled. To move from a default auto-pilot mode to intentional action that leads to your desired work and personal life. Because I wish this feeling of flow and fulfilment for everyone.

What might be waiting for you on the other side of a powerful question?

Until next time,

Stephanie 

*For friends and the eagle eyed who have looked at my career timeline on LinkedIn – yes, I have decided to skip the India portion of my career journey in favour of keeping this already lengthy piece readable. There is simply far too much to say about that chapter to do it justice in a paragraph, and it may even deserve its own post.