Midlife career change: when the job everyone wants makes you miserable

Gilly Ridley Whittle had the job everyone wanted. A big corporate career in fashion, the title, the salary, the teams, the dresses. She'd moved her family to Australia for the biggest role of her life, and later became Topshop's last fashion director. So my first question was the obvious one: why did you leave?

Her answer was simple. It got so uncomfortable, she had no choice.

Successful but unhappy at work

Everything Gilly had ever wanted was a successful material career. She was validated by the things she had: the money, the home, the title. She thought that was success, and that success equalled happiness. Then, around 2014, she reached the highest position she'd ever achieved, in Australia, and realised she had it all and didn't have it all at the same time.

In every job she'd ever had, she'd felt something was missing, and she'd always assumed the missing thing was the next big job, the bigger title, more money. In Australia, in a high-pressure turnaround role far from family and friends, that story fell apart. She started feeling crippling daily anxiety. She took St John's Wort every morning just to keep herself calm, and hid the physical symptoms, because she prided herself on her strength and resilience. Underneath, she was churning. Sleep became difficult. She ended up working around the clock, because she couldn't fail: she'd brought her husband and children to the other side of the world for this.

Leaving corporate life: the same feelings followed her

There wasn't one moment. There was a pattern. The first Australian job brought anxiety and stress she'd never experienced, consuming every moment of her life, and she assumed it was the circumstances, not her. The next job felt better for a year, until a management change brought the same feelings back. She came back to the UK in 2018, had a year off, and stepped into Topshop feeling stronger. Then the same stresses, the same mental anguish, the same pain returned. As she put it, if you keep doing the same thing, you get the same result.

When COVID hit, she had to take Topshop through its sale to ASOS, one of the toughest periods of her life. That was when she said it: I can't live like this.

I didn't like who I was. I was a fraction of the woman I thought I was.

Who am I without my job title?

This is the part of a midlife career change nobody warns you about. Gilly hadn't lost herself in one dramatic moment. It had happened little by little, over years, until she was so far from the person she thought she was that she barely recognised herself. The identity after leaving a corporate job turned out to be something she had to rebuild, not something waiting for her on the other side.

The big shift was realising it wasn't external. No new job, no new boss, no new city was going to fix it, and no one else could fix her but her. There were things in her own makeup she needed to uncover and release. She gave me a small example that says a lot: she always thought she didn't like her own space and wanted to be with people constantly. Looking back, she thinks that was because she didn't want to find out who she was. Now she loves her space, her peace and quiet, being outdoors. Before, she says, she glided through life on a speed travelator without absorbing anything around her.

Changing careers when you have financial responsibilities

Here's the honest bit. When Gilly decided she couldn't do another corporate job, she also couldn't just leave. There was too much responsibility on her shoulders. Her husband had given up his agency for the Australia move. There was a mortgage. Her mum asked why she was giving up this massive career and walking away. The fears about money are real, and she doesn't pretend otherwise.

She also noticed something I recognised from my own story. When I was made redundant at 38 and started interviewing at companies, my whole body screamed no, even when they wanted me. When I went out on my own with no plan, everyone thought I was insane or having a midlife crisis. Gilly's take: other people project their fears onto you. Most people choose to stay, and say, I accept this life and I accept unhappiness. She couldn't accept it. Her calling was bigger.

Starting a business in midlife: six years from concept to launch

Gilly had created the concept for her brand, Peachaus, while still in Australia. Stuck at Topshop, she got it off the shelf and joined a small Facebook group of women called the Enlightened Living Club. They set intentions every Monday and checked in every Friday, and that accountability is how she did it: a concept, an investor deck, a business plan, built week by week through COVID. It gave her hope and joy while everything else was falling apart.

When she was made redundant from ASOS, she was literally lined up with an investor who said yes. She was still broken, still at her lowest ebb, but suddenly she could see a different future. She calls it her salvation. And she's honest that building the business has been its own enormous challenge: it took six years from the original concept to launch, and the business is still finding its way to profit. But she's learned to deal with those fears, step through them, and trust herself.

Scared to change careers? Start with the energy shift

I asked Gilly what she'd say to someone on the edge of their own pivot: 20, 25, 30 years into a career, the salary, the title, and the quiet knowledge that there's something more. She knows that person well. Getting up is a groundhog-day chore. Living for the weekends. Stressed five minutes after stepping out of bed.

Her advice starts small:

• Make the mindset shift first: decide there's a better life and that you're going to make a change.
• Get a book and start journaling about that life. Write words or make a picture board, but start imagining how you want it to be, and you in it.
• Make steps towards it. It might be instant, or it might, like hers, take six years. Hers only started happening when she committed to it.

By staying in your job, you're saying: I want more of this. By making a shift, having a vision and having steps, you're saying: no, this is where I want my life to go. And it will start happening. Energy attracts energy.

She also believes our most powerful receptor is our intuition, and that we don't listen to it nearly enough. Her practice is finding quiet space, writing, and planting seeds of the future she wants. That's her spiritual view, shared openly, and you can take from it what resonates.

What success means now

Gilly's definition of success has fundamentally changed. It used to be a new Porsche. Now, it's a bra fitting. A woman comes in apologising: she hasn't had a fitting since she was 18, she's put on weight, she doesn't look at her body. Gilly recognises her, because she was that woman. And when that woman comes out of the fitting room in a bra that actually fits, her whole posture lifts and her face starts glowing.

That, for me, is success. Having transformed and given something to a woman which actually supports her own power and confidence.

She doesn't need the dresses, the restaurants or the salary any more. That was her old ego self talking. What she needs is beauty, peace, amazing conversations with other human beings, and the feeling of touching people's lives. If you're successful on paper and miserable in practice, her story is proof that the thing you're scared of losing was never the thing making you happy.

Find out more about Gilly's brand at peachaus.com.