Are You Building A Life You Want… or One You Need To Escape From? | Michelle Coulson

Michelle doesn't describe her decision to quit as a rational calculation. When her employer called to say the London office was reopening, her whole body said no - not to the job, not to the team, but to the life. The commute, the city, the slow feeling of her wings being clipped. She'd had a taste of something different in Bali and couldn't unfeel it.

What's interesting about her story is how long she'd been suppressing that feeling. Before recruitment, she spent years travelling, doing bar work, farming, leading tours - anything to keep moving. Then her late 20s arrived and she did what she thought she was supposed to do. Got into a relationship, saved for a mortgage, planned a wedding. Nobody explicitly told her this was the script. She just absorbed it. Internally, she says, she was screaming.

The pandemic gave her a pause long enough to hear it.

The conversation with Yana goes deeper than most remote work discussions, because it's not really about remote work. It's about the gap between the life people are living and the life they actually want. Yana points to Singapore as an example - high-pressure, status-driven, faces on the MRT that look gray even on weekends. Michelle recognises it immediately. She saw the same thing on the London Underground for years. People not lit up by anything. Just getting through it.

Her advice to anyone feeling that stuck: start with what you actually want, not what you're good at. She says when she works with clients and asks what they want, most of them respond by listing their experience and skills. That's not the question. The question is what matters to you - time with family, getting to the gym, living near the ocean, feeling like your work means something. Write it down. Prioritise the top three. Then figure out how to get there.

She's honest that freedom is not what it looks like from the outside. She works more now than she ever did in a salaried job. She has a team of seven, manages across time zones, and carries the business in her head constantly. The difference is that it's her choice. Working at 6am on a Sunday feels different when nobody forced you to do it.

The entrepreneurship section is where she's most candid. She read The 4-Hour Workweek and genuinely believed the hammock was coming. It wasn't. She also over-delegated early on and lost visibility into what was happening in her own business. The lesson she'd pass on is less about hustle and more about subtraction - she's reading Essentialism now and finding that most of the pressure she felt came not from working too hard but from trying to do too many things at once. Burnout, she argues, isn't just about volume. It comes from working on things that don't align with what you actually care about.

For people in their 40s and 50s who feel too deep in their careers and responsibilities to change anything, she doesn't offer false comfort. She acknowledges it gets harder. But her frame is consistent: find someone who did it anyway, and use that as your proof of concept. She also suggests something practical for burned-out professionals who've built long careers - ask for a sabbatical. A month or two of real clarity is worth more than years of vague dissatisfaction, and most companies would rather grant it than lose someone experienced.

She ends on something that catches you off guard. Asked what she'd tell her 20-year-old self, she pauses - and then says she's not sure she'd say anything. Not knowing what was ahead meant she stayed open to what came. The things she sometimes wishes she'd done sooner - started the business earlier, moved faster - she's no longer sure she'd have been ready for them anyway.