The 5 words keeping you stuck in corporate

This is the Season 4 premiere of Choose Courage Inc., a solo episode where Vivianne breaks down the question that keeps more people in corporate than any salary ever has, and walks through the three career pivots, counseling, UX research, entrepreneurship, that taught her why the standard advice about it is backwards. Note: this post may have affiliate links and we donate 100% of those funds to non-profits and a children's group home🫶🏾 

There is a question that outlives every other reason people give for staying in a job they've outgrown. It isn't the salary. It isn't the health insurance, though both of those get named first because they're easier to say out loud. It's five words, and they show up reliably at 11:00 PM with the job listings open in one tab and a resume that hasn't been touched in years open in another. What would I even do.

Most people have been handed exactly one answer to that question, and we've absorbed it so completely it doesn't read like advice anymore, it reads like water. Pick your niche. Get specific before you move. Finish the sentence "I help X do Y," and only then does the door open. Career strategists sell it, coaches build funnels on it, and it shows up in nearly every business account trying to talk someone out of corporate.

The advice isn't dishonest. If you already know what you do, narrowing it is genuinely useful, and specific offers do sell better than vague ones. The problem is the sequence. Pick your niche first is written for people who already have the answer and just need permission to act on it. For everyone else, and that's most people leaving a decade or more inside one company's version of their skills, the advice turns a career question into an entry exam. You can't start until you know, and you can't know, because the only version of your skills anyone has ever paid to see is the one your current employer assigned you.

The Freeze Isn't a Creativity Problem

My first career wasn't design or business. I trained as a trauma and addiction therapist and spent my weeks sitting with people inside some of the hardest seasons a life can hold, including an inpatient rehab center. That training is doing most of the reading here, because when someone freezes on what would I even do, the standard read treats it as a creativity problem or a self-knowledge problem, something a journal prompt or a strengths assessment can fix. That is almost never what I'm looking at when I coach someone through it. What I'm looking at is a nervous system doing exactly its job. You're being asked to name a future identity out loud with no data, while your paycheck and your family's stability and your professional reputation all feel like they're riding on getting it right on the first try, and a nervous system carrying that kind of load doesn't brainstorm. It shuts the tab and goes back to the job it already knows how to survive.

So the blankness isn't evidence you have no direction. It's evidence you've been asked to produce certainty in conditions where certainty isn't available yet, and those are different problems with different solutions. You cannot journal your way to data you don't have. You can only go get it.

Three Careers, No Niche Statement

I've built my working life across three careers now, counseling, then UX research, then entrepreneurship, and I did not know the niche before any of them, not one of the three. I found UX while looking for a hobby to bond with my stepdad over, an engineer living a long flight away, and the rabbit hole of learning to code led somewhere I hadn't been looking for. HmntyCntrd, the consultancy I built next, grew to seven figures and won a Fast Company award, and from the outside it reads like someone picked a sharp lane on purpose. It didn't happen that way. It started as support work for UX researchers and turned into organizational culture work with chief people officers, a shift that came from my yeses, including the wrong ones: the clients who weren't actually ready, the engagements that were tuition disguised as contracts. The specificity got earned. Nobody, including me, could have handed it to me in advance.

And then I walked away from that seven-figure company on purpose, because working that closely inside corporate trauma meant I was spending most of my time and my heart helping companies keep the very people I wanted to see set free, and retention and freedom are not the same job. Choose Courage Inc. exists because I named that gap out loud. By sunk cost logic, leaving something working at seven figures was self-sabotage. From inside my actual life, it was the same move I'd made twice before: the work handed me new data about who I was becoming, and I followed it.

Contact, Data, One Step

The thesis, plainly: direction isn't a thing you find by introspecting harder. It's a thing you build by making contact with real work and letting the results tell you something. Motion produces data, and data produces direction, in that order.

"Motion produces data, and data produces direction, in that order." — Vivianne

Motion does not mean hustle, and if your exploration plan requires you to grind, the plan is wrong. A depleted nervous system reads everything as a threat, which means exhaustion contaminates the experiment before it's even run. What I mean by motion is small, bounded, and cheap, measured in contact rather than conviction. It can be one conversation with someone doing work you're curious about, where you ask what their Tuesday actually looks like, or a project scoped to a weekend instead of a season, or a document solving a problem you've already solved a hundred times at work, put somewhere a stranger outside your company can actually react to it. None of it requires an announcement or a rebrand.

Start from pull, not from your job description: notice what people already come to you for outside your formal role, the colleague who grabs you before a big presentation, the friend who won't sign a lease without your read on it, and notice which parts of your actual work week don't cost you anything, the tasks that give energy back instead of draining it. Between those two things you have more than enough to design a first experiment, and it should involve a real person and, when possible, a little money changing hands, because paid attention is different information than polite attention. A friend will tell you your idea is great. A stranger paying you $150 will tell you what it's actually worth to them.

One experiment tells you almost nothing on its own, a client who ghosts, a workshop that lands flat, a project that lights you up, any single result is a moment and not a pattern yet. Run it again. Keep what worked, drop what drained you, adjust, and do that a handful of times and the niche starts to assemble itself, until you can finish "I help X do Y" without flinching, because every word of it will have been earned through contact instead of assigned in advance.

What a Wrong Turn Actually Costs

The fear underneath all of this is legitimate, especially if you're the sole income in your household, the fear that you'll put in the motion, choose a direction, and still get it wrong. In the pick-first model, choosing wrong is catastrophic, because you bet everything on the choice before gathering any data, and if it's wrong, you're starting over in public. In the motion model, choosing wrong costs you an experiment, a weekend, a workshop, a small project that taught you not this. That is not a waste, because not this is direction too, and every no narrows the map.

There's a pattern from behavioral economics worth naming here, the sunk cost pull, and you already know it from the inside even without the textbook version. It's the voice that says you can't change course now, look at everything you've already put in, the tenure and whatever the pension math adds up to in your head. That voice shows up when you first consider leaving, and it shows up again the moment an experiment tells you to adjust. It isn't information about your future. It's grief about your past dressed up as strategy, and you're allowed to feel the grief without obeying it.

This Week

Direction work at this stage is quiet, and it's supposed to be. It doesn't require a bio change or a personal brand launch. Open a note on your phone or take out a journal, and write down the last several times someone asked for your help outside your formal job duties, without analyzing it yet. Over the next month, have one conversation with someone doing work in that territory, and ask what their actual week looks like, what they'd never give up, and what they'd warn you about. You're not networking. You're collecting field data. If something in that conversation tugs at you, scope the smallest real version of an experiment, something that fits inside a weekend without touching your sleep or your family time or your recovery, and if it doesn't fit inside those boundaries, shrink the experiment before you shrink the boundaries.

We'll get into the money math later this season, with the seriousness it deserves, because I know that question sits underneath the direction question for a lot of you. But the direction piece is the part of leaving corporate you can start with zero financial risk. The paycheck keeps arriving while you gather the data. That isn't hedging. That's design, and it's design on purpose.

If you're standing at that 11:00 PM question right now and the obstacle isn't a shortage of ideas but the fear of moving before you're certain, From Stuck to Starting is a free five-part email course built for exactly that gap between the pull and the first move. Get the course here

Originally aired as the Season 4 premiere episode on the Choose Courage Inc. podcast.