What happens when the career you spent decades building no longer feels like success?
In this episode, Kate and Shayla speak with a guest who spent years at the highest levels of global banking, finance and corporate risk. From investment banking in London to senior roles across Australia’s major financial institutions, her career was built on structure, certainty, status and performance.
From the outside, it looked like the definition of success.
Inside, something was slowly dimming.
What followed was not one dramatic leap, but a long and honest career change from corporate life. Burnout, severe migraines, and a growing sense of disconnection forced a reckoning with the life she had built. A sabbatical opened the first real space to question whether success had been defined by the wrong metrics all along.
What began as curiosity, volunteering at Lifeline, exploring psychology, and learning to trust instinct over certainty eventually led her somewhere completely unexpected: becoming a therapist specialising in somatic psychotherapy.
This is a conversation about burnout in corporate careers, identity, uncertainty, and the uncomfortable but powerful space between the life you had and the life you are still figuring out.
In this episode
– Building a high-powered career in global banking, finance and risk
– Why corporate environments reward certainty, status and performance
– The quiet “dimmer switch” of burnout in high-achieving careers
– How volunteering at Lifeline became the turning point in a corporate career change
– Following curiosity and learning to trust instinct rather than certainty
– Redefining success around meaning, flexibility and being excited for the day ahead
This episode will resonate with anyone in banking, finance, law, consulting or other high-pressure professional environments who has ever wondered why a successful career can still feel misaligned. It is an honest look at what happens when the identity built around work begins to shift, and the slow process of reinventing success on your own terms.
Find Jo at https://www.linkedin.com/in/jo-bowles/
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Hosted and produced by Shayla Strapps and Kate Offer