Not salary. After quitting her corporate career, she shares what nobody warned her about: 'Freedom can feel uncomfortable'

Leaving a corporate career after nearly two decades may sound like the ultimate act of freedom. But for Devon McDonald, Co-Founder of Second Harvest, stepping away did not immediately feel liberating. Three years after leaving corporate life, McDonald reflected on the unexpected emotional and personal changes that followed. From missing professional validation to rediscovering ambition and learning to trust herself, she shared five lessons about what happens when a carefully built career is suddenly left behind.

Leaving corporate life did not instantly feel freeing

McDonald said one of the biggest surprises was how long it took her body to adjust to a life without constant meetings, deadlines and workplace pressure. Even after those demands disappeared, her nervous system continued behaving as though everything was urgent. The transition, therefore, was not simply about having more free time. It also meant unlearning years of living in a constant state of professional urgency. That realisation showed her that stepping away from work does not necessarily mean immediately switching off from it.

She missed the validation more than the work

While she had expected to miss certain aspects of her career, McDonald found that it was the validation attached to corporate success that proved harder to let go of. The title, salary, access and sense of importance that came with her career had become part of her identity. She realised that these things were more difficult to release than many of the responsibilities she had actually performed.


For anyone considering leaving a long corporate career, that distinction can be significant. Sometimes, it is not the work itself that is difficult to leave behind, but the identity and recognition that come with it.

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Her ambition did not disappear

Walking away from corporate life did not mean McDonald stopped wanting to achieve things. Instead, she said her ambition became more personal. She still wanted to build, create and succeed, but she wanted those goals to exist on her own terms and contribute to the kind of life she genuinely wanted. The shift was less about becoming less ambitious and more about redefining what success meant to her.

Freedom can feel uncomfortable

One of McDonald’s most striking observations was that freedom does not always feel freeing at first. When there is no manager deciding where you need to be, no corporate calendar dictating your priorities and no external structure telling you what matters, the responsibility shifts entirely to you. McDonald said this meant learning to trust herself again. Without the familiar framework of corporate life, she had to figure out what she actually wanted rather than simply responding to what was expected of her.

She stopped looking for one perfect next move

Another lesson McDonald shared was that leaving corporate life did not require having a perfectly mapped-out future. Instead of searching for one definitive answer, she needed the space to experiment. She allowed herself to try different things, follow her energy, meet new people and see where those experiences led. That approach gave her room to let the next version of her life emerge instead of forcing herself to immediately decide what came next.

Leaving corporate gave her better questions

Three years after stepping away from the career she had spent nearly two decades building, McDonald said the decision did not provide an immediate answer about her future. What it offered was something different: the freedom to ask better questions about what she wanted, what success meant to her and how she wanted to spend her time. For McDonald, the biggest change was not losing her ambition or walking away from achievement. It was gaining the freedom to decide what those things should look like on her own terms.