Leaving Corporate Is the Easy Part of Healing From It

In this revisited episode, founder Ash Coleman Hynie comes back on the show for an unfiltered conversation about boundaries, guilt, healing from corporate trauma, and why the traditional entrepreneurship blueprint was never drawn with most of us in mind. This post pulls the threads we kept circling back to and adds a few stories that didn't make the recording. Note: this post may have affiliate links and we donate 100% of those funds to non-profits and a children's group home🫶🏾

There's a kind of reel that circulates among new founders every few months, a joke about trading a nine-to-five for a twenty-four-seven, and the comments fill with people laughing because they recognize themselves. Ash Coleman Hynie sees those and thinks, of course. Most advice about how to heal from workplace trauma assumes the healing starts the day you hand in your badge, as if the conditioning stayed behind in the building with the lanyard. For a lot of us who left corporate to build something of our own, it came along in the moving boxes, and it shows up in our calendars and in the particular guilt of closing a laptop at four on a Tuesday. Leaving was a decision we made once, while unlearning what the job taught us is slower and less flattering work, and it's the part almost nobody writing about entrepreneurship wants to sit with.

Boundaries Are for You, Not for Other People

Ash opened by taking apart the way most of us learned to use the word. Inside companies, a boundary tends to function as a polite memo about how other people should behave, and when the memo gets ignored we decide the boundary failed. Ash locates it somewhere else entirely, in what she is willing to tolerate and in how she organizes her body and mind around cultural and systemic forces she does not control. That matters more for founders than for almost anyone, because a small business has very little leverage against the clients and investors setting the pace around it, and we cannot make the market slower even when we can decide how much of its speed we agree to absorb.

"Boundaries are for you. They're not for other people. Too often we use the word as a way to force how other people behave, when it's really about what you're willing to tolerate, and how you govern your space, your time, and your body." — Ash

What Ash sees most often in new founders is a skipped detox. People leave corporate, start their own venture, and bring the working habits and the beliefs with them unexamined, into an environment that no longer has a box around it. A job at least had a badge reader and an end to the quarter, and a business has neither, so the hours expand until something breaks. For Ash, the thing that broke was her health. She lives with a chronic illness, and during the early build of her startup, when every week was about hiring the team and shipping the product, she got sick more than once before she accepted that the pace was the problem. Now she's up at 5:30, in bed by 9:30, and her house has phone-off hours, which sounds rigid until you hear her describe a startup as a ten-year tenure that nobody survives at full sprint.

My own boundaries live mostly in mindset, and the one I lean on hardest is that I don't exist for people's consumption. Because so much of my work at HmntyCntrd deals with organizational trauma and the harm that moves through design teams, my inbox gets a new story of workplace pain about every other day, and people rarely consider how heavy that is to receive. There's steady pressure in this space to keep producing content about it, and I have mostly refused, to the point that my LinkedIn has no strategy behind it beyond whatever is on my mind that week. A couple of near-death experiences in my early twenties also changed how I hold time, which is why chronic lateness bothers me more than almost anything, and why I'm willing to walk away from work that exhausts me in favor of work that gives energy back. Ash arrived at the same place from the opposite direction, finding social media freeing only once she stopped writing to be consumed and started saying the things she couldn't say inside corporate rooms.

Signs You're Starting to Heal From Workplace Trauma

Someone asked me once how I knew I was actually healing from what corporate America did to me, and the honest answer was that fear had gone quiet. I only realized how afraid I'd been once some distance accumulated. People inside those companies knew me as someone willing to say the hard thing, which was true and also covered a great deal of fear about how what I raised would be received, or quietly diminished. As the fear receded I started trusting my gut again, and creativity came back with it, the real kind rather than the version workplaces ask for while keeping you in a box with a deadline. If I could give my earlier entrepreneurial self one piece of advice, it would be to trust that gut sooner, because I would have made more money and spent far less time with clients I never should have taken on.

Ash measures it differently. When she feels afraid before publishing something, she checks whether the fear belongs to the idea or to years of conditioning that taught her speaking up could cost her the business, and she counts it as progress that she now has the thought, builds the thing, and only hesitates at the edge of releasing it. Her clearest marker is narrative: she knows she has healed from something when she can tell the story without the emotion and the weight flooding back in a way that drains her. Mine is related. I know I'm in a better place with an old manager or an old friendship when I've stopped spinning on why it happened that way and stopped rehearsing the case for how I deserved better. Healing from workplace trauma tends to show up first in what stops happening, which is part of why it is so easy to miss.

Both of us also watched our circles change, which nobody warns you about. Ash described corporate friendships that, once she left, turned out to be built largely on hating the same people, and she realized how much of her identity had been wrapped up in the things she found traumatic at work. I've had to look at my own circle and ask whether it actually encourages me or whether we're trauma bonding, where every conversation is a complaint and nobody brings a solution. Ash didn't treat the people she lost as a loss so much as evidence that she was honoring who she is, and her experience has been that the right people show up when you keep doing that. The friendships that survive the exit tend to be the ones that had something in them besides the shared enemy.

The Year Everything Went Into the Liquidation Sale

2023 was the darkest stretch I've lived through, the deepest depression I've been in. The tech industry was in the middle of mass layoffs that hit HmntyCntrd's clients and froze contracts, and in my personal life I had to make a hard decision to let go of someone I really loved and cared about. I remember a February call with a friend where all I could say was that I was losing everything and couldn't understand why it kept slipping out of my hands. She told me to think of it as a liquidation sale, where things were being cleared out to make room for something better, even if I couldn't see what yet. I couldn't see it then, and I can now: a healthier relationship with myself, much more intention about which clients I take on, room to grieve properly, and people who came into my life afterward who wouldn't have had space before.

What made the reframe land was something I'd admitted to that same friend. If every single thing I'd been praying for arrived the following week, I wasn't ready to hold it, and I would have spent the year grappling with it instead of living in it. Letting go was making room in a way that looked, from the inside, exactly like losing. Ash knows that feeling from her own December 2022, right before she started her company, when she sat in bed sobbing over everything she'd lost. Years of executive-level polish (the PR training and the approved language) had watered her voice down until she barely recognized it, and the environment that rewarded that version of her was gone.

Her first instinct was to throw all of it out, and for a while she did, running from the corporate experience so hard that she discarded things with real value along with the things that hurt. She's more careful now, and her phrase for it is that you shouldn't trip over the things behind you, which I read as permission to keep the useful skills without keeping the shape of the job. The good stuff gets to stay. Most of us who leave corporate go through some version of that overcorrection, and it's worth noticing, because rejecting everything a system taught you still lets the system decide what you do next.

The image from this conversation I keep returning to came from Ash's two-and-a-half-year-old son. They were walking her daughter to the bus stop, about a quarter mile in the rain, and he was upset because his toy car had stayed home so it wouldn't get lost. On the way back he lay down on the wet ground. Ash let him, a deliberate break from how her own mother would have handled it, and he cried until the crying turned into giggling, rolled around for a minute, then jumped up and took her hand for the walk home. Her read is that he needed to feel the foundation under him before he could keep going, and that adults need a version of the same thing when everything feels like sand, somewhere to lie down and let the feeling run its course before getting back up. You can't go around a loss like that, only through it, and sometimes through looks like lying in a puddle for a few minutes.

The Blueprint Was Never Drawn for Our Bodies

Ash's argument about the traditional entrepreneurship blueprint started, unexpectedly, with quiet luxury. Social media has decided that real wealth whispers, that the tasteful version of money is unbranded and the logos are loud. Ash has worn exactly the pieces that conversation praises, a Ralph Lauren shirt or a Cartier bracelet, and been asked whether they're real, or complimented on styling them "in such an urban way." Same price and same items, and they will never read the same on her body. She sees the startup world running on identical logic, with Y Combinator and Techstars publishing the way you're supposed to build a company without reckoning with the fact that Black founders don't get the same access or the same backing, and years of inclusion programs later remain underfunded and undersupported.

Her conclusion is that if we'll be read as unconventional regardless, following the blueprint verbatim buys us nothing except the cost of following it, so she builds the company and dresses the way she wants, and speaks to her community the way that community actually speaks. My reason for leaving the blueprint is less theoretical. I keep meeting people who followed it exactly and are miserable, hating the thing they used to love while their marriages strain, and I look at that and assume there has to be a better way. Entrepreneurship helped me see myself as a creative first, someone who has moved through different outlets as a trauma therapist, a UX researcher, an innovation consultant, and now a founder. That lens means I usually know what the blueprint says while already wondering how to do it differently without losing myself.

The experiment that has taught me the most is rest. In 2024, on top of our regular rest and resist weeks, HmntyCntrd added November and December as a paid sabbatical, which put us at roughly four months of mandatory rest for the year before anyone took personal time off. We still hovered around seven figures, with clients we like and enjoy instead of clients we're trying to tolerate. The blueprint has no strategy for working with people you like, on work that pays well, while resting a third of the year, and that gap is the heart of what I mean by regenerative business, where the company restores the people inside it instead of drawing them down.

"You have to build the company you want to work at. You really do. The blueprint just does not support where I would ever want to work again, so why would I take it on as the success metric?" — Ash

For Ash and her co-founder, that started with values that didn't come from a word bank at an offsite. They had worked together for eight years, and when they sat down to name the company's values they realized they were describing how they already worked with each other. As they've hired, the people who thrive are the ones who express those values in ways that are creatively their own, which no job-description template is designed to find. The blueprint tells founders to keep passion out of the room because passion is emotional, and Ash thinks that advice is precisely how so many companies end up as places nobody wants to work.

How to Set Boundaries as an Entrepreneur Without Rebuilding Your Old Job

Put rest on the calendar before revenue. At HmntyCntrd we call these rest and resist weeks. Every October we plan the following year's mandatory rest, two single weeks spread across spring and fall plus three and a half weeks every summer, then tell clients in writing that those are the weeks they cannot reach us, and every launch and initiative gets planned around them. The rule partly exists to protect me from myself, because once I'm in a groove I will not slow down voluntarily. I learned on the show that Ash had watched those weeks land from the client side, inside a company that worked with us, where colleagues kept pulling her into meetings because we were unreachable. Her take echoed Tricia Hersey's argument in Rest Is Resistance, that rest is a refusal of grind culture rather than a reward for surviving it, and as a Black woman in the entrepreneurial space, Ash said, claiming that time loudly and making the business adjust around it is part of the point.

Listen for false urgency in your own language. A client once sent me a run of emails written as though every item were an emergency, for a project that actually had a long runway. I could have matched their pace, or I could treat it as a chance to educate, so I wrote back naming the language, explaining the false sense of urgency it created, and suggesting we save urgent words for real emergencies. Matching them would have cost me too, because that stress doesn't stay at work and it comes home irritable. Ash's line on this has stuck with me: if it's happening at the level of language, it's probably happening at the level of practice. Plenty of design companies stop at the vocabulary change while the practice underneath never moves, so at HmntyCntrd we pay attention to how we talk about rest and urgency internally, knowing it will rub off on how clients think about their own work.

Interrogate guilt before you obey it. Ash calls herself a recovering people pleaser, raised to be the fixer, and for years guilt told her she was the only person who could show up for that conversation or fix that report. Healing meant asking where in her body and her history that belief came from, and seeing that by being everyone's crutch she was keeping other people from growing into the space they needed. Her practical move now is to name five alternatives the moment guilt shows up, so if she can't drive her nephew to the store, she can send an Uber, and the guilt eases once a solution exists. Her husband has a shorter version she quotes often, which is to notice when something sounds like a you problem. I treat guilt as a signal rather than a sentence and ask what it's trying to protect, listening when it's protecting my wellbeing and letting it go when it's pushing me toward self-sacrifice.

Build boundaries, not fences. Fences come from precaution and consequence, and they're reactive, aimed at managing other people, while boundaries are proactive and aimed at yourself. In a job search, a fence sounds like refusing to ever apply to a certain kind of company again because of one horrible experience, and a boundary sounds like applying anyway with a plan for what you'll put in place to protect yourself there. At work, a fence is logging extra hours so nobody can doubt your productivity, and a boundary is knowing when you do your best work and logging off at a set time because rest is what makes that work possible. When guilt creeps in, I take it as a chance to check which of the two I'm building.

There's a thread we only reached near the end, which is what all of this does to hiring. For Moon Paws, our pet astrology product, I ran reverse group interviews where three or four candidates interviewed me first, we started sending questions ahead of time because I care more about a considered answer than a quick one, and in the last round applicants thanked us for the application process itself. That's a post of its own, and it's coming. For now the work is smaller and closer to home, finding which of the old rules you packed without meaning to and deciding, one at a time, whether they get to stay. If you're still in the job and trying to put words to what it's costing you, How to Audit Your Life Before It Falls Apart is a free set of exercises for spotting misalignment and loosening the golden handcuffs before they make the decision for you. Choose courage over comfort with us here.

Originally aired as Episode 71 on the Choose Courage Inc. podcast.