Fifteen years at Disney. A director-level role. A trajectory that was clearly heading toward VP. Briana Mascaro had built exactly the career she set out to build, and she walked away from it anyway.
That’s the episode. That’s the story that matters for anyone going through a corporate to coaching transition. Not the ones where the job is terrible and the boss is toxic and the decision is easy. The ones where everything looks right on paper and something inside you still says: this isn’t it.
Briana is the founder of Sophos HR Consulting and High Performance Coaching and one of my favorite clients to spotlight. She joined the Best Damn Coach community while still on the road for Disney, tried to wrap her head around what charging for her expertise could even look like, and left her corporate job in early 2026. She built the whole thing while the safety net was still in place. Here’s how she did it.
The three wake-up calls she couldn’t ignore
Briana didn’t quit on impulse. Three things hit her in rapid succession and she still took another year to act. That’s important.
First, she had to write her own eulogy for an applied positive psychology class. She did it, was proud of it, stood up to read it. Mid-presentation, she realized it was almost entirely about work. Wife, mother, daughter got a passing mention near the end. The room saw it on her face before she could compose herself.
That same week, a colleague she’d worked alongside for years died of a heart attack over the weekend. He had a retirement date. He had a plan. A 13-year-old daughter who never saw him retire.
Still, she stayed.
Then came London. Spring break with her daughter, and Briana was juggling four time zones on her phone in a tiny European hotel room. Her daughter put her fingers on her arm and said: “Mama, you are not where you are supposed to be.” That was the line. That was when she knew she couldn’t make the transition alone and started looking for a community.
Why leaving a good situation is its own challenge
Here’s something worth naming: Briana wasn’t running from a bad boss or a toxic culture. She had great leaders, meaningful work, real perks. And that, she’ll tell you, made it harder. Not easier.
When your values shift but the external circumstances are still objectively good, you don’t have a clean story to tell people. You just have this knowing. An internal misalignment you can’t point to on a performance review. Her close family got it. They’d been watching. But explaining a values-driven exit to people who see the title and the paycheck and ask why you’d ever leave. That’s a different conversation entirely.
The financial plan that made the leap possible
Briana grew up with a scarcity mindset, and she’ll tell you that directly. She watched her mom work multiple jobs. She worked as a teenager because her family had to. Financial independence has always mattered to her at a level that’s personal, not strategic.
So two things had to happen before she could leave.
First: the hard conversation. She asked her husband flat out if he was okay floating the business with zero income from her, at least temporarily. She already knew his answer. She needed to ask the question out loud anyway and not flinch waiting for the response. That’s the piece people skip. Courage isn’t just for the people whose answer you don’t know.
Second: she changed her financial behavior completely. She split her paycheck 50/50 for a full year. Half to living expenses, half into an account she never looked at. She set a target number. When she hit it, she left. And here’s what surprised her most: the anxiety she’d carried for a year disappeared the moment she walked out. She checked the account weeks later and thought, “I’m still fine.”
She also timed her exit after her year-end bonus and vested stock. That’s not hesitation. That’s smart.
Build the business before you burn the bridge
Briana didn’t quit and then figure it out. She started inside the BDC community while she was still on the road for Disney. She was in Italy for one of her husband’s races, working through the Small Bite Offer framework, trying to make sense of what it would even mean to charge people for what she knew.
That’s the model that works. Build while you still have the safety net so your early decisions aren’t driven by desperation. When you’re operating from financial fear, you undercharge, take the wrong clients, and say yes to things that don’t fit. Briana built her offer structure, landed her first clients, and started testing her pricing before she ever made the leap.
By the time we did a VIP day together a few weeks before this recording, she had a full ecosystem: two clear offers, a CRM, a quiz and assessment for lead generation, a LinkedIn strategy producing referrals, five-figure clients, and renewals. She can map the whole thing on a whiteboard now.
What to do when you say the wrong number out loud
There’s a moment from our early work together I keep referencing with other clients. Briana knew exactly what she wanted to charge. She had the number in her head. She opened her mouth and said half of it.
We’ve all done it. It’s not a knowledge gap, it’s an identity gap. You know your value on paper. But the first time you say that number to a real human being who’s deciding whether to write you a check, your brain fights back.
What shifted for Briana was staying in the room. Practice, client receipts, and community. She kept showing up, kept watching other BDC members move through the same thing, kept saying the real number until it stopped feeling dangerous. Those clients renewed. The revenue grew. She stopped cutting the price before the sentence was even finished.
What she’d tell anyone sitting on the edge
Give yourself grace. If you need another year, take it. If you need another month, take it. But give yourself a date, say it out loud to someone, and hold the thread.
She told her husband her target date a month before she left. Not to lock it in. Just to make it real. Big decisions need to live outside your head before they start to feel possible.
And if you’re thinking about a program like the BDC: start where you are, not where you think you should be. Briana came in through the Small Bite Offer course because that’s what her brain could absorb at the time. She grew into the full BDC, then into VIP days, then retreats. The ecosystem met her at every stage. She didn’t skip ahead. She just kept moving.
