When I left my high-paying banking job and said goodbye to my banking career overall, everyone was surprised.
No one, not my boss, colleagues, even my family, and friends had seen that coming.
I had always been a model employee, worked hard, was dedicated and ambitious. Everyone thought that I would keep on climbing the corporate ladder. But instead, at 29, shortly after I got promoted to VP in Retail Banking at one of the largest banks in the world, I quit.
Why I eventually quit and why banking wasn’t right for me, you can find out in this video here. It summarizes, on a very high level in 13 minutes, the reasons why a career in banking wasn’t right for me. It might also help you to identify if banking is for you or not, in case that’s something you’re wondering about.
In this post, I want to talk about the process of quitting. How I went from realizing that I didn’t want to work in Banking anymore, to handing in my resignation letter and doing my exit interview with HR.
I hope that this will be entertaining for you. But more importantly, I hope that this post can serve as a step-by-step guide to quitting your job and or leaving the industry you’re in, in case you’re also thinking of saying goodbye.
For this, I’m pulling up my blue notebook, titled ‘2011-The year of the big resignation and preparation for a new and better life’.
This tiny pocket-sized notebook was one of the major actors in my process of quitting my job. I always had a habit of journaling my thoughts and experiences. But it was around this time that I started journaling in a productive and targeted way. Instead of journaling randomly, I planned the next phase of my life. This habit would continue throughout the next chapters of my life, and I can’t tell you how useful this has been. So useful that I’ll probably write a separate post on this.
This notebook was where I plotted my great resignation plan in detail.
I’ll briefly walk you through the major chunks of the plan, and cover the more minute details in separate posts.
- High-level plan
This was a 12-month calendar in which I noted down when I would effectively resign. This was the ‘sun’ of my plan. Everything else would revolve around it. I then penciled in all the important milestones before and after that effective date.
These included things like participating in an acting course, taking a few days of leave as I had vacation days left, and clearing out my apartment as I was planning to move back (from Singapore to Indonesia).
2. Preparation for resignation list
First on the list was to “talk to people closest to me and decide what to tell them”. I wanted to let my family and my boyfriend at that time know about my plan to quit my job. And I can tell you that not everyone in my family was happy about it.
But that was something to get over with and I proceeded nonetheless. This is something you need to be prepared for if you want to leave your job.
Not everyone will be happy about your decision and agree with it.
You need to be crystal clear about your reason and be able to articulate it to others so that you won’t doubt yourself at the last minute when others try to dissuade you from following your plan.
The second thing was to “think what to tell mid-circle”. And by that, I meant my close friends. I knew that everyone would be surprised about my leaving the bank, and I wanted to be ready to tell them why I decided to do so.
It’s not like I owed anyone an explanation. But having that prepared made it seem more real. It was less about explaining it to them than explaining it and confirming it to myself.
In case you know that you want to quit or leave your industry, but despite having a really good plan can’t get yourself to take action, then this might help: Imagine, or better, write down what you will tell your family, your friends, and your boss whom you’ll be passing your resignation letter to.
Once you have a few simple sentences arranged, any kind of remaining resistance to proceed will quickly melt away.
The third thing, and this sounds hilarious I know, is “take delight in writing the resignation letter” and “plan what and when to tell boss”.
Remember that at this point the decision had already been made. It was all just about the execution and not getting cold feet.
I had been immensely stressed and burnt out in the last year leading up to that point, and finally, the moment had arrived when I would make this happen.
So I wanted to actually enjoy the process. I ended up writing a very short and simple resignation letter. It just stated as a matter of fact that I would be resigning effectively this date and thanked my boss for the opportunity to work with him. Something like that.
I handed in my resignation letter around one month plus before the effective date. This was also quite an interesting experience, which I’ll tell you about another time.
The fourth thing on my list was “write farewell message to colleagues”. This was also sweet and simple. I thanked everyone, expressed my appreciation, and left my personal email address in case anyone wanted to contact me later on.
The fifth thing was “Plan for celebration”. Ironically, I don’t remember anything about this last action point. There are two possibilities. Either I was so thrilled about leaving my job that I didn’t care about celebrating it in the end, or I just had too many karaoke parties with my ex-colleagues that I didn’t register them as being the celebration of my resignation.
3. Implementation plan
The third item in my notebook was a detailed implementation plan. Different from the high-level plan, this one had the fine details of what I needed to do and prepare to leave.
After all, I wasn’t leaving the bank for another company. I was leaving my job, the industry, and my full-time employment for something new and uncertain. At the same time, I was also moving countries, so there was some paperwork to do.
I wouldn’t advise anyone to do this, as it’s not the best way to change careers. And it’s certainly not for the faint-hearted. I will cover ‘what I was leaving my career for’, in another post.
Since I was leaving full-time employment, my plan had to be thorough. It included plans and timelines for the following:
- Financials: Preparing my finances, especially maximizing my ‘savings pot’.
- Paperwork: Related to my permit and taxes, getting work references.
- Logistics: Selling stuff, clearing out apartment and shipping boxes. Terminating subscriptions,
- Learnings: Things I wanted to learn, including taking an acting class, before quitting.
- Notes: Plans I started for my ‘new life’ to get a headstart.
Again, I’m leaving out the fine details as it would make this post too bulky. But that was the gist of it. These plans covered the time frame of T-4 months.
For anyone planning to leave their job, industry, and full-time employment altogether, I would strongly advise lengthening the time frame to T-12 months. The better prepared you are before leaving your job or career, the easier the start of your next chapter in life will be.
Of all the above points, the financial plan is the most crucial one. If this is not solid, everything can fall apart. Half of my notebook was filled with this. How much my target savings would be by the time I resigned. How much passive income I would earn. What my new budget would be once I resigned.
4. Implementation calendar
The rest of the notebook contained a calendar where I penciled in all the action steps in point 3. above. After that was done, I could start counting down. I knew exactly what I needed to do each week, and I knew how many days I had left until my last day.
One of my viewers on youtube once asked me how to ‘survive’ the time between deciding to resign and actually resigning, especially if one still had half a year or months left until that date. This is the answer: Having this implementation plan and calendar. It made the plan visible and concrete. It wasn’t something that might happen, something that could be retracted. No, there were definite steps to follow in my calendar.
This little blue notebook was the stand-in for my resignation plan. It served as a dedicated countdown ticker.
Having a plan in place, made everything easier. I could endure the remaining months and weeks. I could even up my game and put in my best work in the remaining time.
When you have a clear plan on the horizon, and when you know that there is a definite end to the thing you’re doing but not enjoying, then everything becomes more bearable. You can even start enjoying life again.
I’ve applied this method on another occasion in my life, more recently. And each time it helped me to power through instead of crumbling.
There will be a follow-up post with a list of all the things to do and take care of before quitting. Leave a comment below if you want me to speed that up!
[…] Fast forward I realized how unhappy I was in the industry, I experienced severe burnout, and quit my job and my career in banking altogether. […]