Quitting & Returning To Work (Guest Post by Tom Grundy)

Oct 26, 2024

October 25th, 2025: Greetings from Austin!

Today’s piece is one I’m really excited to share. Over the last few years I’ve talked to many people that have taken breaks from work, returned, and are happier than ever. But despite my requests, few people want to share this publicly. Luckily, Thomas Grundy reached out and wanted to share his experience. I hope you enjoy it!

+ I’m co-hosting a book event with Cissy Hu in SF on November 7th: Join here if you are in town.

In July 2021, I stood on a remote beach in the Scottish Highlands, iPhone in my handphone, called my boss and quit my job.

My girlfriend was parked up about 100 metres away. Apart from her, there wasn’t a soul in sight. Just powdery sand dunes, crashing waves and the occasional bird chirping overhead.

In a lot of ways the setting was idyllic. But the reality was a lot less idyllic.

12 months earlier, I was sitting on my girlfriend’s sofa, drinking of a cup of tea, when I spontaneously burst into tears. What I see now – and what I didn’t see then – was that I’d burnt out myself out. After months of my body giving me subtle clues like losing concentration, then less-subtle clues like headaches and increased irritability, then even stronger clues like exhaustion and cynicism, it was finally taking matters into its own hands and giving me an unmistakable, unequivocal sign that something needed to change.

And that something was my job.

I worked in banking for thirteen years, firstly in Edinburgh and then in heart of the financial district in the City of London. My life revolved around work. There was little separation between the two. Each day in the office was a non-stop barrage of emails, meetings, phone calls and deadlines. Work would drag on past 5pm, to 6pm, often to 7pm, sometimes to 8pm, 9pm, 10pm and beyond. In one role, I was regularly switching off the lights as I left the office after midnight to go home, crash into bed, lie awake wired from the day, catch a few hours’ sleep and then head back to the office the next morning to do it all over again.

Anyone looking from the outside would’ve seen me living in a funky flat in the middle London, working in a secure, well-paid job and taking holidays to glitzy places like Japan, Argentina and Las Vegas. On paper, my life looked pretty good.

But beneath the surface I felt fed up, trapped and overwhelmed. I had a visceral sense I’d look back at the age of 65 knowing that I’d resigned myself to life where I had all the material trappings of success, yet never felt happy or even fully alive.

When I was growing up, I had a fire inside me. I had ambitions, imagination and creativity. But all these were disappearing. If felt like my zest for life was being sucked out of me and my job was the reason why.

Things came to a head during Covid. A few months before the world went into lockdown, I’d successfully applied for a promotion into a new role. When Covid arrived, I found myself stuck in my flat on my own for days on end, working in a position with more responsibility than I’d ever had and yet I was still trying to figure out the technical aspects of the position, who was who and what exactly I was supposed to be doing.

My response to all this was to put my foot on the accelerator and push harder. As I was newly promoted, I wanted to impress. And as the work built and my hours got longer, I got asked to take on a bigger workload. I said yes, and my response stayed the same: head down and put foot on the gas. All I was doing was working and sleeping and it felt like my internal battery was hovering around 5%, dangerously close to running out of charge.

After that day on the sofa, I knew what I needed to do. I knew I needed to make a big change at work. But doing it was a whole other matter. It took months of agonising, endless internal tug of wars and a 4 day Tony Robbins’ event to finally take me from knowing what needed to be done to actually pulling the trigger and doing something.

I asked my boss for a 6 month sabbatical. And after some back and forth (“don’t you think 3 months would be enough Tom?”), she said yes.

That sabbatical gave me some breathing space. I began by doing nothing and simply resting, recharging and living moment to moment, day to day. At first, it felt like the 6 month sabbatical would go on forever, but as time went on and I realised that I’d be returning to work, I became more itchy. I began to wonder if corporate life and the 9 to 5 was really for me. The more I thought about it, the ickier I felt about going back to my job. The pull to do something different became increasingly enticing.

So I started brainstorming potential business ideas. I dived into books and podcasts about entrepreneurship and life outside the 9 to 5. And I came across The Pathless Path.

Reading The Pathless Path was a revelation. The book was re-assuring, validating and I felt seen. I realised I wasn’t the only person having doubts about the 9 to 5 and I started get glimpses of how there might be another way. For the first time, I was seeing words on a page which articulated exactly how I felt, yet didn’t have the words for myself. I started to realise there was a huge discrepancy between how I was living my life and how I wanted to live my life. And, worse of all, I saw that even though I felt this way, I wasn’t doing anything about it.

All of this, together with a second spin through the Tony Robbins event, was what led me to deciding that the six month sabbatical wasn’t enough. I needed to quit my job.

Funnily enough, I found the decision to quit a lot easier than my previous decision to take a sabbatical. It still wasn’t an easy decision, but in some ways it felt natural, like the next step had been laid out before me. So while my girlfriend and I were road-tripping round the Scottish Highlands, I asked her to pull over the car one day, called my boss and quit my job.

Quitting came with a huge duality. On the one hand, I felt an amazing sense of freedom. On the other, there was now a big question mark about what I’d do next.

In December 2022, on one of my daily dalliances on LinkedIn, I came across an advert for a program called Creating the Impossible run by the American coach Michael Neill. Something about the ad caught my eye. I clicked through to the webpage and as I read, I became more and more interested. The program asked participants to choose an “impossible” project and guided them to bring this project to life over the next 90 days. The webpage gave examples of how people had used the program to create new jobs, new relationships and new income. How participants had lost weight, started non-profits, invented new products, left bad situations and broken unwanted habits. And, in the process, created a whole new relationship with themselves.

I thought this sounded amazing, so I signed up. Over 90 days, Michael guided all the participants through various aspects of creation and the creative process. But more than this, he talked about life and how life worked. As the programme continued, I began to realise that this is what I wanted to do too. I wanted to help people turn their dreams into realities. So in May 2023, I joined another Michael Neill programme. This time, the programme was a 7 month coaching certification with a simple idea at its heart:

How do you light a spark in other people?

As the programme unfolded, I learnt about the mind’s capacity for insight & problem-solving, I discovered where happiness, peace & calm come from, I saw how anyone can move from surviving to thriving and I learnt how to ignite, inspire & energise other people.

But something else was happening as the programme unfolded: my savings were starting to run out. So much so that as the months went on and my savings dwindled further, the thought crossed my mind that maybe I should start applying for some jobs.

Maybe this sounds like an obvious thought. But it wasn’t obvious to me. I still connected corporate life, the 9 to 5, and banking in particular with fatigue, stress, overwhelm and a lack of freedom, fulfilment and work/life balance.

But things also looked different to me now. Even though the certification programme was still in full swing, it had given me a greater sense of where my previous feelings and experience of the 9 to 5 had come from. Increasingly, it started to look as if my work, my job, my employer and even the wider corporate system had played a much smaller role in my experience of working life than I’d thought and that I’d played a much larger part. I still wasn’t sure if this was true, or to what extent this was true, but I’d seen enough to at least be suspicious of the notion that going back to corporate life would lead to the same unfulfilling and overwhelming experience.

So I started applying for some jobs back in banking, without any success. So I applied for a few more, equally unsuccessfully. And then, out of the blue, I got a WhatsApp from a buddy I used to work with, asking me if I knew that my previous job at my old workplace was becoming vacant.

I wasn’t aware of this. And when I saw the WhatsApp, I had mixed feelings. On the one hand, I knew I needed a job. The bills weren’t going to pay themselves and my credit cards were starting to buckle. But on the other hand, the idea of going back into a job I’d spent five years in, working in exactly the same building on exactly the same projects with the same exact colleagues and the exact same boss made me wonder if history was about to repeat itself. Part of me also wondered if going “back” to my old workplace would actually be taking a step “backwards”.

But the more I sat with these dilemmas, the less problematic they looked and the more I could see through them. I knew I’d understood enough to be fairly confident that history wouldn’t repeat itself. And I realised that going “back” had nothing to do with going “backwards”, even though the words are similar! Truth was, I was moving forwards. And at the very least, whatever happened, it would be a fun experiment. I’d have the opportunity to put what I’d learnt from Michael Neill into practice.

It's almost a year now since I interviewed for my old position, accepted a subsequent offer and returned to my old workplace. And I could never have predicted how well things would’ve gone. The days flow with more ease and less stress than they did before. My ambitions, imagination and creativity are back. I’m sleeping better than I ever have. My Sunday evening dread has vanished. And I actually look forward to going into the office each day.

Even my old boss (who’s now my new boss - funny how things turn out) commented that I seem a lot more relaxed than I used to be. And another colleague told me “Tom, you have so much more banter nowadays”. I think she’s right. I take myself a lot less seriously than I did before. I can have a laugh or joke around, whether that’s at my expense or not, and instead of getting in the way of work, it feels healthy.

Even when I’m stuck in the office at 7.45pm on a Friday (as I was a few weeks ago), I wasn’t banging my fists on my keyboard thinking “why is this my life!?”. Instead, I felt calm and balanced. And even if I hadn’t felt that way and staying late in the office was irritating me (this still happens too), I’d be okay with this. My irritation wouldn’t be a problem, whereas beforehand that irritation would’ve been a major source of stress.

Perhaps the best thing about returning to my old workplace is I now have the chance to share what I’ve learnt with my colleagues. Earlier this year, I ran 10 weeks of Mindset Workshops for my wider department. The workshops explored topics like stress, work/life balance, overthinking, state of mind and productivity. Feedback from the workshops was great. Participants told me they had more energy, increased positivity and better clarity not just in the workplace, but also in their personal lives too. Another department has asked me to run the same workshops for them and I’m stoked to keep going.

Since I’ve returned to my old job, I’ve indulged in a few coffee catch-ups with colleagues I knew from the first time round. Some of these colleagues are intrigued to hear about why I quit in 2021 and even more intrigued to head about why I came back. And the question I’ve been asked a few times over a flat white and an almond croissant is this:

“Do you think you have better tools to deal with work now?”

I usually nod, talk a bit about what I discovered during my 2 years away from banking and mention how my perspective of work has changed. And then the conversation moves on.

But this is the short answer. If I was going to give a deeper, more accurate answer, I’d probably say something like this:

My perspective of work has changed. And that’s because the way I relate to my thoughts, beliefs, opinions and judgements about work have changed. Even though a lot of my old thoughts about work are still rattling about in my head, these thoughts don’t look important, relevant or worth my time and attention any more. In fact, I can see how the meaning I was placing on my thoughts was creating my negative experience of work in the first place. As a result, my working life has become a lot freer, happier and more fulfilling.

I’m not sure if an answer like that would get nods of approval or raised eyebrows and baffled looks.

But it’s the truth.

Nowadays I juggle my 9 to 5 job with coaching and writing my newsletter. I’m on a mission to share what I’ve learnt, especially with 9 to 5ers who feel that sitting behind their desk is like having their soul sucked out of them and who are resigned to the next 10, 20 or 30 years panning out in the exact same way. This was exactly how I felt. But I’m living proof that it’s possible for anyone to find a more relaxed, easy-going and fulfilling relationship with work without changing anything about your job but by viewing work through a different lens instead.

Proust once said that “the real voyage of discovery consists not in seeking new lands but seeing with new eyes”. With this in mind, I’ve created a special report for readers of Paul Millerd’s newsletter which dives into how you can find more fun, flow and fulfilment at work without “seeking new lands” but by “seeing with new eyes” instead.

The report’s called 17 Ways To Find Fun And Flow At Work (Without Changing Career Or Quitting Your Job)

It contains the key insights which allowed me go back to a job which used to be a source of misery and now actually look forward to going into the office each day. If you’d like to find a freer and more relaxed relationship with your job without making big changes to that job, applying for new jobs, re-training to change career or quitting your job to go it alone, this report is made for you.

If you’d like to pick up a copy of this report, here’s where to go: Fun and Flow at Work

Hey! Thanks for reading…

I am not sure how you ended up here but might have stumbled upon me through my writing or podcasting on our relationship to work, a topic that has interested me for years.

If you don’t enjoy the writing, I strongly encourage you to unsubscribe below. There’s so much good stuff on the internet!! A reminder: I don’t check unsubscribe alerts and never look at my subscriber list. So if you feel like unsubscribing, you can do so below.

But if you do want to stick around:

If you’d like to meet others on “pathless paths”, you can join The Pathless Path Community
Buy or listen to my books, The Pathless Path and Good Work. If you’d like to do a bulk order you can do that here for a discount or email me. I love gifting my book to conferences, events, and coworking places.
You can buy pathless path swag like a hat or shirt here
Subscribe to my podcast and leave a review.

Home Swapping: We’ll likely be using Kindred a bit this winter. It’s a pretty cool home-swapping alternative to Airbnb. If you want to join, use my signup code.

5% Savings: Use this link to get 5% on your savings on Wealthfront and increase your runway on your pathless path

Affiliates: In addition, I recommend all of the following services: Ali Abdaal’s YouTube Course, Collective for setting up an S-Corp in the US (recommended >$60k revenue), Riverside.fm for HD podcasting, Transistor for podcast hosting, Podia or Teachable for courses, Skystra for WordPress Hosting, and Circle for running a community.