Anyone else lonely after leaving corporate? Who to think decisions through with now

A DM came in that I was not sure how to answer.

But there was nobody to think about it with.

I could have asked Claude. Claude agrees with me more than is useful. That is not a complaint. It does an enormous amount of work for me every week. It just does not push back on a decision the way someone who has made the same one will.

For my whole career I had someone to turn to

Thirteen years at Credit Suisse, and if I was unsure about something I turned to the person next to me, or put it to the HR leads I worked with, and by the end of the day I had someone else's read on it.

When you leave, you walk out with all of the experience and none of the infrastructure that made using it feel easy. The decisions do not get harder. You just make every one of them on your own, with nothing to check them against.

So I rebuilt it

I have a business coach. I joined a community of other independents. I have annoyed my husband.

None of those built the business. What they did was give me somewhere to take a decision before I had committed to it, which matters most in the months when the self-doubt is loudest and the evidence is thinnest.

If you are in your first year outside, solve that before you solve anything clever. Having somebody to help you answer the DM beats having a better funnel.