S1 E13: Embracing Your Own Purgatory: Who Are You When the Work Goes Away?
“We’re always expected to be experts whenever we walk into a room. Regardless of title or position, we’re experts—but we’re never experts of ourselves.”
In this special live community episode of Brave Proximity, Marissa and Susan sit close to a question that most executives are terrified to ask:
Who actually are you when your title is stripped away?
Our guest, Geoff Curtis, author of Embracing Your Own Purgatory, opens up a raw, unprecedented conversation about the profound emptiness that follows a corporate exit. For decades, the high-performing corporate system feeds us a non-stop stream of external validation. But as Geoff beautifully exposes, that validation train is often just a high-end mechanism for emotional avoidance.
The Friday-to-Monday Trap
Many leaders exit a lucrative corporate role on a Friday and sprint into a new position or a consulting practice by Monday. We tell ourselves we lack the financial flexibility or the time to pause, but Geoff challenges this delusion head-on. Sprinting to the next venture isn't a sign of ambition; it’s running away from the discomfort of sitting with ourselves.
“I refused to deal with the loss because I’d started to realize that the identity had allowed me a lot of comfort and emotional avoidance over the course of my career.”
Take the Conversation Further
Ready to step off the validation train and map your own path through transition? The S1 E13 Practice Guide is your tactical workbook for navigating life between titles without running back to old, empty metrics.
Download the S1 E13 Practice Guide: The Purgatory Worksheet
The "Validation Trigger" Audit: Identify the old corporate metrics that are currently driving your anxiety.
The Bare Minimum Framework: How to reclaim your baseline when primary breadwinner pressures make quitting impossible .
The Self-Expert Question: A guided diagnostic tool to shift your focus from external performance to radical internal awareness.
“We build lives where we are required to fix everything, achieve everything, and hit every metric. But you cannot hit a KPI on your own soul. Give yourself permission to not have the answer, drop the performative script, and just listen to who you are.”
This is your cue to stop performing old metrics and start understanding yourself.
If you are always chasing the validation train, you will never become the expert of your own life.
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00:00 — The Live Community Room: Why this conversation required an explicit collective space.
04:12 — The Identity Shock: Re-living the wreckage of emotional avoidance with a partner.
10:45 — The Corporate Drug: How corporate structures validate and fuel workaholism.
17:32 — The Expiration Date on Relevance: Confronting the fear of being forgotten by your industry.
24:05 — Intention vs. Impact: Why sitting in discomfort for 48 hours changes your next macro-move.
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