Coming Back to Herself.
With Nina
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About this episode
The experiences we would never choose are often the ones that reveal us to ourselves. Nina's turn came at the point where most people would say she had arrived: senior, respected, financially secure, moving fast.
She stepped back. Not to rest, and not because she had stopped being ambitious, but because she had been running past a question for years and it had begun to catch up. This conversation is about the mechanics of that decision — how it looked to colleagues, what it did to her sense of identity, and what she discovered about how much of her self-worth had been outsourced to a job that measured her hourly.
We talk about motherhood, honestly. About the difference between the time you technically have and the attention you actually have. About the specific guilt of being present in the room while your mind is still in a meeting. About the assumption, in banking and in Lebanese family life alike, that a woman will absorb whichever role is currently unfilled.
And we talk about the quiet. Nina is direct about how uncomfortable it was at first — that the silence she had wanted for years arrived and immediately felt like a loss. What came after took months, not days: an unhurried inventory of what she actually valued and a return to a version of herself that had been waiting.
Her conclusion is not to slow down. It is that growth sometimes begins with a step back rather than a step forward.
This episode covers
- The experiences we'd never choose
- Ambition, motherhood, and identity
- Choosing quiet over momentum
- Rediscovery on the other side of pause
Topics
Chapters
- 00:00Arriving and feeling nothing
- 07:20Banking, speed and self-worth
- 15:45Motherhood and divided attention
- 24:10The decision to step back
- 32:00The discomfort of the quiet
- 40:30What she found on the other side
I had the time and none of the attention. Those are not the same thing.
The silence I had wanted for years arrived and felt like losing something.
Growth is not always faster. Sometimes it starts with stepping back.
About the guest
NinaFormer investment banker, mother of three
Nina spent years in investment banking and stepped back at the height of her career, not because she had run out of ambition but because she had run out of time to ask what she actually wanted. She is a mother of three and speaks with unusual clarity about pause as a strategy rather than a retreat, and about what she found when the noise finally dropped.
Clips from this episode
The experiences we'd never choose are often the ones that reveal us to ourselves. This week on Inner Narratives, we meet Nina, an investment banker and mother of three who stepped back from her career at its peak to give herself the one thing she'd been running past: time to ask what she truly wanted. And in the quiet, she found herself again.
In this conversation, Nina reminds us that growth isn't always about moving faster. Sometimes, it begins with taking a step back, understanding what truly matters, and returning to yourself.
Questions this episode answers
Why would someone leave a career at its peak?▾
Nina is clear that it was not burnout in the conventional sense. It was the accumulation of unasked questions. Success had removed every external reason to stop, which is precisely why stopping became the only way to find out what she actually wanted.
How do you balance ambition and motherhood?▾
She resists the word balance. Her framing is attention: children notice presence rather than hours, and high-pressure work quietly consumes attention long after the workday ends. The negotiation, for her, was about where her mind lived rather than her schedule.
Is stepping back financially or professionally risky?▾
Yes, and she does not pretend otherwise. Nina acknowledges the security that made her choice possible and is careful not to prescribe it. What she does argue is that the question underneath it — what am I actually building — costs nothing to ask.
What did she find in the pause?▾
Not a new identity, but an older one. She describes recovering interests, judgment and a pace that had been crowded out. It took months rather than weeks, and the early part was uncomfortable enough that most people would have filled the space again.
