Svetlana SorokovayaYou Don’t Have to Quit Your Job to Start Living Differently

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Svetlana works at an electronics factory in Israel. Twelve-hour shifts, four a week.

She didn’t quit, didn’t start a business, didn’t move and didn’t multiply her income tenfold. In the personal-growth industry, that’s usually considered “no results.”

I see it differently. Sometimes a woman stays at the same job, in the same marriage and in the same country — and her everyday life changes at its foundation.

Because she no longer builds her relationship with work by forcing herself past her limits. She no longer numbs exhaustion with shopping. And she no longer believes that “I can do it all myself” is the highest form of a woman’s success.

Svetlana joined Clirium in January 2025. Today she talks about her job in a completely different way — because the first thing that changed was how she treats herself.

If you ask what I do today, the answer won’t sound like something out of a magazine. I’m an ordinary person without any big achievements, although I’ve tried a lot of things in life. Right now I’m an hourly employee at an electronics factory: twelve-hour shifts, four workdays a week, one week on days and the next on nights. Someone might look at that and ask where the change is, if I still go to work the way I always did and my workday is still just as long.

My answer: the change is in my relationships — with myself, with my work and with people. It turns out relationships aren’t only between a man and a woman; a person even has a relationship with her own job, and I saw that for the first time. First my relationship with myself fell into place, and my relationship with work grew out of that. It freed up a huge reserve of energy, which I now put into improving myself and my life.

Work covered all my basic needs, and if I wanted more money, the solution was simple: pick up more shifts and earn more. Little by little, my life turned into one long workday, and in the small breaks I had to squeeze in attention for my home, my loved ones and, last of all, myself. Of course, there was almost nothing left for me, even though I tried with everything I had.

I wanted to look good, so I bought clothes from all sorts of brands — along with food I’d end up throwing away and things for the house I might never use even once. Now I understand that this was how I covered up my emotional and physical exhaustion: you earn it, you go spend it, you’re happy for a couple of days, and then it’s back to the gray routine. So much piled up that my home turned into a warehouse of new things, and I had nowhere to wear them and no time to. I could dress up for work, and I did, but the outfit got its outing for exactly one hour — the ride to the factory, where I had to change into work clothes anyway. Eventually I lost interest in that, too.

Someone might ask whether the meaning of life is really about things. I’ll answer honestly: at the time, it truly was the meaning for me, and there were reasons for it. And I realized something remarkable: you can have money and still be poor — poor in the way you think about it.

I thought I was just responsible and hardworking, but inside my work ethic there was an enormous amount of proving: I have to be the best, nobody will do it better than me, why is everyone so slow to learn, why am I the only one breaking my back, do I really care more than anyone else? That produced a lot of aggression toward people: I could be sharp and mouthy, I’d push, and I constantly found fault with the people around me because they didn’t match my views on life.

Back then I didn’t understand a simple thing: everyone sees life differently, another person can have her own pace, her own goals and her own sense of what work is worth — and that doesn’t make her worse. Good for you that you can do a lot, but not everyone can, and some people don’t even need to. And in the constant effort to prove you’re the best, the only one living that life is you. I couldn’t allow myself a sick day or an extra day off, and I was slowly wearing myself down, having forgotten about myself in that race.

And at some point I thought: Am I really going to live like this until the end? Is there truly nothing I can change — and how could anyone even like this? I finally understood that I was tired of running this race and proving to someone that I can do it all and that I have everything and then some. But where am I in all this? Who am I, really? What do I love and what do I want, what do I feel, and what truly brings me joy?

So many questions came up that I realized I barely knew myself at all. That’s when I made a firm decision: I don’t want to live the old way anymore. I didn’t know yet how to live the new way, but I was sure that once there’s a goal, the solution will come. All my life I’d been taking steps — sometimes in the right direction, sometimes not — but they weren’t steps toward my true self. They were the ones my ego dictated.

I came to Clirium to understand myself and what drives me, why everyone and everything irritated me and why I wasn’t enjoying life — and to find out what a different life, one I’d never known, could look like. I thought one of my biggest wishes was a business of my own. I’d already tried running one, and nothing good came of it, and now I understand why: I didn’t know how to communicate with people. I spoke either from a victim position or with pressure and pushiness, and most of the time I didn’t know how to listen and truly hear. And business is, above all, relationships.

That’s where the big discovery happened: I thought I urgently needed a new project, but what I actually needed was a relationship with myself. I learned to hear myself, and it turned out to be such a pleasure — doing things because I enjoy them, without pangs of conscience, without guilt and without the endless “have to” and “I owe it to them.”

The only one I owe anything to is me.

That phrase of mine still makes me smile, although back then I laughed until I cried bitter tears. In Russian there’s an expression for it — a woman who becomes “the man of the house” and carries everything herself. I was so used to handling everything, hauling it all on my back and controlling it that I thought it was the only possible way to live. So the first thing I did was take off the responsibility that wasn’t mine and stop being “the guy.” My old “I’ll do it myself” doesn’t interest me anymore. I try to be feminine, and it feels wonderful to sometimes be the soft one and let someone take care of me. I stopped adjusting to other people’s emotions, learned to manage my own, and sometimes I let them out — but now without guilt.

My relationship with my husband has gotten better. I’ve become calmer and learned to say, without aggression, what I don’t like or what doesn’t work for me. I used to think that to be heard I had to push harder; now I speak calmly and confidently, and I am heard — because I’ve learned to listen and truly hear, too.

I consider my biggest result to be this: I gave my husband back the responsibility I used to take on myself because, in truth, I didn’t trust him. After that, his earnings grew by about fifty percent.

When I realized I wanted to live differently, I didn’t yet know how. The first thing that came to mind was to look for ways to make earning money easier — how to help myself try a new direction painlessly, without losing income.

Somewhere online I came across an international school for studying ancestral family systems — I’ll describe it that way. In the early stages, it genuinely helped: it shifted my thinking a little and gave me a first understanding of myself. I earned a certificate as a family-systems practitioner and even tried consulting people.

But I kept feeling that I wasn’t giving what I wanted to give. Something was missing — a little puzzle piece. Now I understand what it was: at that school, the knowledge came with “notes” of magical thinking, and it lacked the depth I later found at Clirium ME. There I worked through my date of birth and — most important — how to step out of magical thinking. That’s when the missing piece fell into place.

I’ll say it with complete confidence: when you take responsibility for your own life and start doing things differently — because what you did before didn’t bring the results you wanted — your life changes dramatically.

If you put the old me next to the me of today, someone might not see much difference from the outside: I still work, I still commute to the factory, and I still have tough shifts. But inside, I live this life completely differently. I used to be proud of being strong and able to do everything myself. Today something else feels much closer to me: I’m calm, I understand what I truly want, and I can do things not only because I have to, but because they’re right for me. For me, that is the new life — and only from that state can I now think about a business and about how I can be useful to people.

And to a woman who is where I once was, I’d say: You don’t need to carry everything yourself; no one asked you to. Learn to trust and don’t be afraid to ask — just try it, and you’ll find plenty of people willing to help. Don’t be afraid to be soft, and don’t prove anything to anyone. Prove only to yesterday’s you that you’re moving forward, without looking back at your old life, your grudges and your defeats. For a new life to begin, you don’t have to change jobs or countries. Sometimes it’s enough to stop fighting yourself every single day.

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