When I said I was going to start a shoe business selling only low heels, contacts and friends were not short on advice.

While this can be disconcerting – people who love you are anxious not to be negligent in pointing out the potential for disaster – I’d still recommend that anyone considering a change of employer or a change of career direction should talk to trusted confidants who know about the business or role you are contemplating. Understanding your own motivations is key to being happy and successful, and the questions of others can be very helpful in seeing a different perspective, playing out the ‘less expected’ outcomes that might occur (both good and bad).

Most people only knew me in a corporate situation – strategy, suit, nail varnish? Check. So their incredulity at my suggestion that I might start up a shoe business was a very useful test of my mettle. What was it about their view of me that was so very different from the reality – would I really enjoy and be able to do all this?

People who worked very closely with me on multichannel start-up projects were not surprised. But others clearly had no idea how hands on I’d been. I realised that the leaders I most admired were those that got stuck in – Barbara Beckett at BAA and Kate Bostock and Steve Rowe at Marks & Spencer. And it’s getting stuck in that gives me job satisfaction, seeing something come to fruition.

As an entrepreneur you have to be able to hop backwards and forwards between the bigger picture and the hands-on detail. There is often literally no one else to blame if something doesn’t happen how you expected. So I learnt very rapidly that the only way to sleep at night was to identify and specifically address the things that were keeping me awake.

Taking responsibility for how you feel is critical to how others perceive you and how well you do. This is doubly important if you are working at a large corporate, where it is easy to assume that ’the machine’ will sweep you along and reward you for doing a good job. Well, it might do – but you will progress much faster if you are clear on what really motivates you and where you need to go next.

  • Susan Aubrey-Cound is the founder of Olive Aubrey shoes and an ambassador of Retail Week’s Be Inspired campaign