The journey from that redundancy letter to where I stand today has not been linear.
There have been false starts. Recalibrations. Days of genuine doubt, when the safety of the old life looked almost appealing set against the uncertainty of building something new — days when I caught myself idly wondering what the old team was doing, and how straightforward it would be to answer an email.
Nobody tells you about those days when they share their story of reinvention. They get edited out, quietly, in favour of a cleaner narrative and a better photograph.
I am leaving them in.
Because alongside the doubt, there has been something I had not felt in years, and did not, at first, recognise. Momentum that comes from within. Not from a target somebody else set. Not from external validation, or a performance review, or the particular small thrill of being told you have done well by a person whose approval you never especially wanted. From the work itself, and from the belief that it actually matters.
That feeling, it turns out, changes everything.
What is that feeling called
For a long time, I assumed it was simply happiness, or relief, or the absence of dread on a Sunday evening. It is more specific than that, and psychologists have been studying it for decades.
Two researchers, Edward Deci and Richard Ryan, spent their careers examining the difference between the motivation that is pushed at us and the motivation that rises from inside us. Their conclusion — self-determination theory, if you want the formal name — is that human beings flourish when three particular needs are met. Autonomy is the sense that you are the author of your own actions. Competence is the sense that you are becoming genuinely good at something that stretches you. And relatedness, the sense that your work connects you meaningfully to other people.
Here is what unsettles me about that list, looking back. My old career could deliver competence in enormous quantities. It was rather short on autonomy, and while there was warmth and friendship in my career, the relatedness had curdled into politics somewhere along the way.
Two out of three is a career. Sometimes an impressive one. It is not, as it turns out, a life.
The answer to the question I could not stop asking
The Jacqueline Brand is, in a great many ways, the answer to everything I was searching for during that first uncertain stretch — sitting with the tea going cold and pages of notes going nowhere, asking myself what I actually wanted.
It rests on a simple belief: that financial knowledge and intentional living belong together. Understanding how to invest, how markets behave, how genuine wealth is built — none of that is separate from the question of what kind of life you want to live. These things were never in competition. They are the same destination, approached from different sides.
It is also deeply personal, and I make no apology for that. The vision — a world where everyone understands their finances, owns their future, and never has to shrink their ambitions to fit their knowledge — is not an abstract line for a mission statement. It is a direct answer to years of watching capable, deserving people make themselves smaller than they ever needed to be.
Including, for rather a long time, me.
I needed twenty-four years, a difficult peer, a restructure and a rather generous dose of uncertainty to find my way to it. As origin stories go, it is not the most efficient route ever taken. Nobody would design it this way. But it is mine, and I have stopped wishing it had been tidier — partly because the years I spent inside the wrong room are precisely what allow me to recognise it now, from a distance, in somebody else’s description of their Tuesday.
And there is one more thing
I would be leaving out the most important part if I did not say this plainly.
Underneath the terms I set and the work I chose, there is something I did not build and cannot lose. My faith is the quiet floor beneath all of it — the reason the redundancy letter could not take what mattered, and the reason I can hold this work lightly enough to do it honestly. I mention it not to preach at you but because leaving it out would make this a story about a woman who found her own strength, and it was never quite that.
If any of this resonates
If you are sitting somewhere in the middle of your own version of this story — explaining it away, waiting for the right moment, telling yourself it will improve if you hold on a little longer — then I want to say something clearly.
The discomfort you feel is not a sign that something is wrong with you.
It is a sign that something is ready to change.
I would add one caveat, gently, because I care rather more about you than about a neat ending. Restlessness and exhaustion are not the same thing, and neither is the same as being genuinely unwell. If what you are carrying is heavier than dissatisfaction — if it has followed you into your sleep and your body and your relationships and will not lift — then that deserves real support from someone qualified to give it, and not a career decision made at three in the morning. Please be as thorough with yourself as you would be with a friend.
But if it is the other thing — the quiet, persistent, inconvenient sense that this is not it — then listen to it. Not by doing anything rash tomorrow. Simply by admitting, first to yourself and then perhaps to one other person, that you heard it.
That is how mine began, a moment of absolute, clarifying honesty, in the ordinary middle of an ordinary week.
The Jacqueline Brand exists because of that feeling.
And it exists for you.
This is my own story, told plainly — not advice, and certainly not a nudge. What you do with your own working life is yours alone.
The Jacqueline Brand — knowledge builds confidence, confidence builds wealth. This is editorial commentary for inspiration, not financial or professional advice. Always do your own research. The Collection
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