The Friday I Walked Away

Have you ever wanted to quit a job with no plan, no next step, and no clue who you’d be without it? I did, on a Friday morning in June 2024, after nine years at the same company.

I had just finished a meeting with my manager, whose name doesn’t matter to this story. What matters is that I walked out, sat in my car, and sent the resignation email on the spot.

Then I looked up at the ceiling of my car, and one sentence kept playing in my head.

“Shit, Hussein. What’s next?”

If you have ever felt stuck in a job that looks great from the outside but is heavy on the inside, keep reading.

The job was just the surface of what was going on. Underneath, I had been in a painful relationship that was breaking something inside me every single day, and it brought up patterns I had been carrying for years without ever noticing them. The kind of patterns that make you wonder why you keep choosing the same kind of people, the same kind of fights, and the same version of yourself you don’t even like by morning.

So by the time June came around, I was already bleeding emotionally, and the job had stopped being a place where I could hide my cracks.

Resigning was the easy part. Behind it, I was finally telling myself a harder truth: the way I had been living was no longer working for me.

I was with a company called Property Finder (the equivalent of Zillow if you’re in the US), which is where I grew up, and nine years is a long time to grow up in any one place.

Since this is Scott’s platform, I want to be honest about him, too. He didn’t hire me, since I was there before he arrived, yet during one of the hardest stretches of my life, personally and professionally, he showed up for me as a human first and a manager second, and that kind of thing stays with you.

For most of those nine years, I was hitting my numbers and running big teams across the region. From the outside, it looked like I had it all figured out, while on the inside, I was tired, scared, and pretending I wasn’t.

Something inside me knew that if I stayed one more month, I would lose more than just a job, so I walked.

The first few weeks after leaving were ugly to say the least.

For nine years, I had wrapped my whole identity around being a sales leader at one company, so when I took the title off, I had no clue who I was anymore. On top of that, the relationship I was in had filled my head with noise I couldn’t turn down, full of old voices, old stories, and old fears I had been listening to for years without realizing it.

So I did the one thing I had been avoiding my whole adult life. I asked for help.

I hired a coach and worked with her for three months, and the work was simple and hard at the same time. We sat in the mess together and got honest. What was I actually feeling? What had I been running from? What did “next” even mean for someone who had spent nine years being defined by a logo?

By the end of those three months, I had just enough clarity to take one more step.

That step led me into the Co-Active Core Curriculum, which is a six-month coaching program. I went in to learn how to coach other people, and I came out with something I wasn’t even looking for.

I learned how to live a life that actually feels full, how to feel my feelings instead of pushing them down, how to sit with the hard ones even when I wanted to run, and how to look at any situation from many sides, including the ugly ones I would have skipped if I had the choice.

That last piece is the one that changed me, because being open to the ugly side of a story changes everything. It is the version where I am the problem, and where my pain has something to teach me. It is also where the worried voice in my head is actually the part of me that has been trying to keep me safe in the only way it knows how.

After those six months, I continued the journey with Co-Active and joined their 10-month Leadership Program, with 21 humans who started calling ourselves the Caracals. The deeper work started there. More self-acceptance, more self-authority, more leaning in on others (that was so hard for me to do over the years), and more awareness of my impact, especially the unintended one. I came in thinking I had already done the inner work, and I am understanding every single day that the inner work doesn’t end. You just get better at meeting it.

Coaching stopped feeling like a class, and it became my work.

If you’ve read this far, thank you. Here’s what I learned, and what I now help leaders learn for themselves.

Most of us are quietly struggling because the way we work doesn’t match who we really are. We hit the targets, we say the right things in meetings, and we still feel tired in a way no weekend can fix.

So I built something I call “The Resonance Code,” a simple system that helps leaders and their teams work from a place that lines up with their values, their inner leader, and the bigger life they actually want. It also teaches them how to handle the voices in their head that make them doubt themselves, the ones that whisper “you’re not ready,” “who do you think you are,” and “just play it safe.”

When a leader and their team start working this way, three things change.

The work gets easier, because the gap between who they are and what they’re doing finally closes.

The team feels it too, because people can sense when a leader is performing, and they can also sense when a leader is finally home in themselves. We all follow the second kind every time.

The fear gets quieter, and the doubting voices move from the driver’s seat to the passenger seat.

If something in your chest tightened while reading this, I want to leave you with one small thing.

You don’t have to wait for a breakdown to start this work. I waited too long, and life finally pushed me into it. Please choose it sooner, because you are always at choice, even when you’re not choosing.

Ask yourself one question this week, somewhere quiet. Your car, your shower, a walk, anywhere the noise drops.

“If I took away my title, my targets, and what everyone expects from me, what would I really want to build?”

Sit with whatever comes up, and just listen. You don’t need to fix it or turn it into a plan.

That moment of listening is the first note of your resonance code. The rest follows.

Scott, from the bottom of my heart, I thank you for the platform and for everything that came before it.

And to anyone standing where I was that Friday, I see you. Just keep going.