Leaving Private Equity or Investment Banking: Life After the Deal

What counts as a good day when the old job is no longer keeping score?

Connie in the reading room

It’s 10:20 on a Tuesday morning in October, and Connie is sitting at a long oak table in the reading room of her town’s public library. She renewed her library card at the front desk twenty minutes ago. The receipt is still tucked inside the novel she checked out, a due date printed at the bottom in faded purple ink. Rain is coming down steadily outside the tall windows, and the radiator under them clanks every few minutes.

Connie is invented. I wrote her for this article, so she’s no one’s case history, no real investor’s story and no composite of people I’ve met.

She’s 48. Until five months ago, she was a principal at a mid-sized private equity firm, and she left on her own terms. She has the novel open to page one and she hasn’t read a sentence of it yet. Her phone is face down beside her elbow, and she’s turned it over four times since she sat down. Nothing on it needs her.

Every time the reading room door opens, her head comes up. Every time she turns the phone over, she does a small calculation without meaning to: how long since the last check, how much of the morning is gone, what she has to show for it. She knows there’s no deal, no deadline and no one waiting on a markup. Her attention hasn’t fully gotten the memo.

The thought she keeps circling is almost embarrassing to her. “I don’t know if this counts as a day,” she thinks. “I’m at the library on a Tuesday. Is that a good day or a wasted one? Who decides that now?”

If you’ve left private equity or investment banking and that question sounds familiar, this piece is for you. It’s about three things that can linger after the exit: an attention that was trained to scan for the next thing, a sense of worth that used to come with a number attached, and the open question of what an ordinary day is supposed to count as.

The scope of this piece

This piece starts after you’ve gone. If you’re still in the seat and the hours are wearing you down, there’s a separate guide on investment banking burnout while you’re still working. If the strain you’re carrying is mostly at home, there’s another on what deal hours can do to a marriage.

It also isn’t career or financial guidance. It won’t help you decide your next role, plan your runway or think through anything you signed on the way out. Those questions are real, and they belong with people qualified to answer them.

A few more limits. What you’re reading is general education, not therapy or coaching, and it isn’t an assessment of you. Nothing here is a research finding about people in finance. Where I connect a definition to life after a deal job, that’s my own reading, and I’ll say so. Connie and the second woman you’ll meet exist only on this page, as illustrations, and they don’t prove anything.

Attention that was trained for the deal

Some jobs ask for steady focus on one task. Connie’s old job, the way she’d describe it, asked for something closer to constant readiness: a phone that might ring at dinner, a document that might come back at midnight, a client who might need an answer before the market opened. She learned to keep part of her mind on the lookout. Over enough years, that stopped feeling like a choice.

The APA Dictionary of Psychology describes a habit as a well-learned behavior, or an automatic sequence of behaviors, that over time comes to be performed with little or no conscious intent. Its own example is hair twirling that eventually happens without the person noticing. The definition isn’t about finance, and it doesn’t explain why anyone checks a phone. I find it useful anyway, because it names something many people recognize: some of what we do runs on its own.

Here’s my own application. Turning the phone over, glancing at the door, tallying how much of the morning is gone: for Connie, those may be habits that outlived their purpose. The job that made them sensible ended. The behavior didn’t get the same notice.

That framing can take some of the sting out. If checking is a well-worn groove, it isn’t a verdict on your character or proof that you can’t rest. It’s a pattern you can start to notice, gently and without scoring yourself on how often you catch it.

Noticing can be small. You might turn the phone over and simply name what you were looking for: a message, permission, something to fix. You don’t have to stop the habit to learn from it.

Self-concept, in the dictionary’s words

Under the habits sits a bigger question. For years, a lot of how you described yourself may have run through the job: the title, the deals you worked on, the kind of person who gets the call when something’s on fire. When the job ends, that description doesn’t update overnight.

Two words in that definition matter for life after a deal job. The first is “description.” Roles are named right alongside skills and qualities, which means a role you held for a long time can become part of how you’d describe yourself, not just what you did.

The second is “evaluation.” A self-concept isn’t only a list of facts. It also carries a judgment about how you measure up.

The entry also says that even when self-concepts aren’t represented in awareness, they can still influence judgment, mood and patterns of behavior. That’s worth holding lightly. It doesn’t tell you what’s happening inside you. It does suggest that some of the old evaluation might be running in the background, the way Connie’s tally does while she stares at page one.

Sushma on the sideline

It’s a Saturday morning in late September, cool enough for a fleece, and Sushma is sitting in a folding camp chair at the edge of a youth soccer field. Her nephew is nine and plays defense with great enthusiasm and very little positioning. There’s a plastic container of orange slices on her lap that her sister asked her to hand out at halftime. The grass is still wet, and the hem of her jeans is soaked through.

Sushma is invented too. She isn’t drawn from my work, she isn’t a real banker and she isn’t a stand-in for anyone I’ve met.

She’s 41. Eight months ago, she left her job as a director in a healthcare coverage group at an investment bank. She hasn’t decided what’s next, and for now she’s chosen not to. Her sister invited her to the game partly because, for the first time in years, Sushma could say yes.

She’s enjoying it, mostly. But she’s also keeping score, and not the soccer kind. In the notes app on her phone, there’s a running list titled DONE, and this morning it already has six items on it: gym, groceries, a call with her mother, a return at the post office, a load of laundry, soccer. She added soccer while she was still walking from the car.

When her nephew’s team scores, she cheers, and then she catches herself wondering whether a Saturday at a kids’ game is enough. Enough for what, she couldn’t tell you. “I used to know exactly how my year went,” she thinks. “There was a number. Now I’m grading laundry.”

When worth had a number

Sushma’s DONE list isn’t silly. It’s an attempt to rebuild something she used to get without trying: a clear signal of how she was doing. In her old job, that signal arrived on a schedule, through reviews, titles and pay. It’s uncomfortable for her to admit how much of her sense of worth she’d handed to it.

That definition doesn’t say anything about bankers or investors in particular. It also doesn’t say that investing your self-esteem in professional success is wrong. It simply names a pattern people vary in, and that’s useful, because it lets you ask an honest question without a verdict attached: was work one of the places where I kept my worth?

For these invented characters, that question offers one possible interpretation of their afternoons. The feedback stopped, but the place where you kept your worth didn’t vanish. So you may find yourself grading laundry, or turning the phone over, or treating a library morning as a test you might be failing. Of course it feels unsettled. The scoreboard went dark and nobody handed you a new one.

It’s also worth noticing how the APA words self-worth itself. The APA Dictionary describes self-worth as a person’s evaluation of themself as a valuable, capable human being deserving of respect and consideration. Nothing in that sentence mentions a title or a number. That doesn’t make the number unimportant. It does leave room for a different kind of evidence.

Choosing what counts as an ordinary day

Here’s where I’d gently slow down, because the instinct after reading something like this is to turn it into a project. A new rubric, a better list, a plan to stop checking by a certain date. If that instinct is familiar, it makes sense. It’s the same skill that worked for years. It just may not be the right tool for this particular question.

A different approach is to treat “what counts as a day” as a question you get to answer, not a test you’re taking. The next standard doesn’t have to be a replacement for your old performance review. You can try a few ordinary days on and see what you notice, without deciding in advance how they should score.

One option is to change the question at the end of the day. Instead of “what did I get done,” you might ask “what did I pay attention to,” or “when did I feel most like myself,” or “what would I want more of tomorrow.” Those questions don’t produce a number. You can consider the answers without treating them as proof that an exercise is working.

You could also try an ordinary activity without setting a productivity target for it. A walk with no route, a meal with nothing to review, a morning at the library where the novel gets read and the phone stays in a bag. If your attention keeps reaching for the old signal, you don’t have to argue with it. You can notice the reach and come back to the page.

And some days, frankly, will feel flat or restless or pointless. That doesn’t mean you’re doing this wrong. A day that doesn’t feel like much is still a day you lived, and it doesn’t need to justify itself to anyone, including the part of you that’s still keeping score.

Both/And: you can miss the scoreboard and not want it back

Relief about leaving and missing the old system’s clarity can sit side by side. Your evenings can finally feel like yours while a former colleague’s announced deal still stings a little. Neither feeling cancels the other, and neither one is proof about whether you made the right call.

The scoreboard was demanding, and it was also clear. It told you, often and in plain terms, how you were doing. Missing that clarity isn’t the same as wanting the hours, the travel or the midnight markups back. In Sushma’s invented story, it’s the clear feedback she misses, not every part of the job.

Sushma holds both on that sideline. She doesn’t want her old job. She also doesn’t quite know how to enjoy a Saturday without grading it. Both are true, and the second one doesn’t make the first one less real.

Of course it’s strange to feel unsure on a day with nothing wrong in it. You spent years in a system that told you what mattered and when. Learning to decide that for yourself is real work, and you’re allowed to be new at it.

The Systemic Lens: a job that kept the score for you

This section is my own reflection, not a research finding, applied to two invented women.

Some workplaces don’t just ask for your time. They also supply the measures: what a good year looks like, what a strong week looks like, who’s ahead and who’s behind. Rankings, reviews, titles and pay can do that measuring for you. In the workplaces imagined for Connie and Sushma, those measures dominated conversations about performance. That detail is part of these fictional settings, not a claim about every finance workplace.

I wouldn’t turn those fictional working conditions into a verdict on either woman’s character. The APA’s description of contingencies of self-worth notes that, for some people, material or professional success is vital to their sense of self-worth. A workplace built around clear professional scores may simply make that area easy to stake.

So when you leave and the measures leave with you, the gap isn’t evidence that you were shallow or that you only cared about money. It may say more about how fully the job had been doing the measuring. Seen that way, choosing your own measures isn’t catching up on something you failed to do. It’s work the old system never asked you to do.

It’s also work you don’t have to do alone, or quickly. You get to build those measures from the life you actually have now: the people you see, the mornings you keep, the things that hold your attention when nothing is demanding it.

Where to bring it

There’s no need to name or explain any of this before getting support. If the restlessness, the flatness or the constant checking is starting to affect your sleep, your mood or the people around you, that’s reason enough to get support.

The National Institute of Mental Health gives this definition of psychotherapy:

The same page lists severe or long-term stress from a job among the reasons people seek psychotherapy. The definition describes the aim of treatment, not a promise about what any particular person will experience.

Not sure where to begin? NIMH’s help page lists primary care as a starting point: a primary care provider can perform a first screening for mental health and then refer you on, for example to a psychologist, psychiatrist or social worker. NIMH also suggests mentioning your mental health at any primary care visit you’ve already got scheduled.

Therapy and coaching do different jobs. A health professional can assess concerns about mood or sleep and discuss whether therapy or another kind of care fits. Coaching addresses professional and leadership questions; it can’t stand in for clinical care.

Wherever you go, you can bring what you’ve noticed in plain words. When you check your phone and what you’re hoping to find. Which days feel like they count and which don’t. What you’d want an ordinary Tuesday to hold if nobody were grading it.

Connie at the checkout

It’s almost noon. The rain has eased to a drizzle, and Connie has read eleven pages. She turned the phone over twice more, and the second time she noticed herself doing it and just said, quietly, “There’s nothing there.” Then she went back to the paragraph she’d been on.

On her way out, she stops at the self-checkout and borrows a second book, a cookbook she has no plan to cook from yet. The machine prints another purple receipt. She still doesn’t know whether this was a good day. She’s starting to suspect that the question might be hers to answer now, and she hasn’t answered it yet.

Warmly,
Annie.