I Was Making Five Figures a Month
But I was still feeling like a scammer
I remember sitting at my desk one afternoon, looking at a conference invitation in my inbox. Someone wanted me on stage. Another email below it, a podcast. Below that, a client proposal I had just sent that I was reasonably sure would close.
By any measure I could see, things were going well.
And I felt like an absolute fraud.
This was during my fancy consultancy years. I was making five digit amounts per month. A crapload of money. I was being included in lists alongside people whose work I had studied, people I had looked up to before they knew I existed. Growth, PLG, JTBD. The kind of work that attracts a specific type of ambitious company with a specific type of impatient CEO who wants results faster than results tend to arrive.
I loved selling. I was good at it. I could walk into a conversation, understand the problem fast, frame the solution in a way that made people feel understood, and close.
What happened after closing was the part I started hating.
Three months in, sometimes four, the energy would shift. The client would get quieter. I could feel the ending before it was said out loud. And then it was said out loud, professionally, with the standard language about budgets or direction changes or needing someone more embedded. I would nod. We would thank each other. I would get off the call.
And then I would sit there, in the silence after the call, with that specific feeling that I still don’t have a clean word for. Not quite failure. Not quite grief. Something in between.
This happened enough times that it became a pattern. Sell, deliver, watch them leave, repeat. I would start a new client engagement and somewhere in the back of my head, the clock started ticking.
For years I held two explanations and rotated between them depending on the day.
The first: I was a fraud. My reputation was an accident, a kind of social momentum that had built beyond what I actually deserved, and it was only a matter of time before someone ran the numbers and noticed.
The second: my service was just hard to outsource. The nature of the work. Nothing personal.
On good days I believed the second one. On most days I believed some uncomfortable mixture of both.
I blamed the clients a lot during this period. They were, in my private assessment, very stupid. They didn’t implement properly. They didn’t give the work enough time. They expected transformation in a quarter. It was easier to think this than to sit with the alternative. As if things had to change for my own sake. Clear deflection of my accountability.
Funnily enough, my reputation kept growing anyway. Which made the whole thing stranger.
I want to stop here for a second and name what I was actually chasing, because it took me years to see it clearly.
It was not money. The money was real and I needed it and I appreciated it, but it was not the thing. The thing was the moment just after the sale. The moment when someone looked at me and said, effectively: yes, I choose you, I trust you, I believe you can help me. That moment. That is where the hit was.
And when clients left, they took that moment with them.
So I stopped wanting to sell. The work that had felt like energy started feeling like exposure. Like setting yourself up for a particular kind of rejection that I had learned to recognise in my body before I could even name it intellectually.
I started avoiding it. Found reasons to delay proposals. Let conversations go quiet. I was making excuses for it in my head that sounded reasonable on the surface.
Underneath them, the work was hurting me.
Around this time I started taking full time roles, as it was still the golden time for SaaS and you would find a job fairly easily. Embedded, properly inside companies, with time and resources and teams. And the work got better. Ironically. Things I had struggled to show as a consultant I could actually show now, because I had the room to show them. Some of my real successes came from this period.
I did not announce any of it on LinkedIn. I kept promoting myself as a consultant. Most of my clients were full time employers and I let people assume otherwise.
I felt shame about this. I had become a 9 to 5er. In my head, that meant something had collapsed. That I had given up on something I could not quite name. The shame was quiet and persistent and I carried it like you carry something you don’t want anyone to see you carrying.
I understand now where all of it was coming from.
Most of my clients have this shaming voice inside them. For some, it’s their mum, for others their dad, for others it’s not a shaming parent but a parent that first acknowledged and showed acceptance when success came. 9/10 it comes from care givers.
For me, it was a harsh father that was loving me because I am his son but was consistently rejecting me as a person for as long as I can remember.
I had a deep love and hate relationship with him. I loved him because somewhere deep inside I relied on his approval. I hated him because no matter how hard I was trying as a child, he wouldn’t accept me. Not really.
I became a person that relied a lot on external validation to boost self-esteem.
Here is what I want to say to anyone reading this who recognises any part of that story.
The feelings don’t disappear. I want to be honest about this because a lot of people come to me wanting a silver bullet, wanting to arrive somewhere clean and resolved where the voice is finally quiet. That place does not exist. What changes is the relationship to the voice. You learn to see it coming. You learn to not hand it the wheel. That is the work. It is slower and less satisfying than the transformation story, and it is also the only version that is real.
A lot of my clients are living inside some version of what I just described. Smart people. People I genuinely admire. People who by every external measure are winning, and who experience something private and persistent that contradicts every external measure.
They sit with me for one hour a week. For the rest of the week they perform. They are very good at performing. That is usually how they got where they are. And then they sit down, something shifts, and they say the thing they haven’t said to anyone else. What I see is a person running the same race I ran, toward the same finish line that keeps moving, on the same fuel that eventually runs out.
In this moments, sometimes I hold myself not to show my emotions. I want to give my clients a hug and tell them ‘it’s gonna be fine’.
That’s how purpose should feel like though and this is my purpose. To help these people not reach the same bottom I reached because I didn’t have the right help.