"I was about to get promoted in banking. I bought a one-way ticket to Brazil"
Jon Sharpe knows how to leave banking. In 2017, two years into his equity research job at a European bank in London, he decided he'd had enough. He handed in his resignation and bought a plane ticket.
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"I bought a one way ticket to Brazil," says Sharpe. "I didn’t know where I was going. I had a faint idea that I might set up my own thing, but I had no idea what."
Sharpe had wanted to work in banking since he was 16. He got a first class degree in economics from the UK's York University and joined the London Stock Exchange Group's graduate programme. In 2015, he joined German bank Berenberg as a financials analyst.
As time went on, Sharpe says it became apparent that he didn't want to be a financials analyst after all. Nor did he want to be any other kind of analyst. In fact, he didn't want to work in banking at all. "When you go into a career like banking, it’s usually because you’ve been very good at doing what the system requires of you. You’ve done well at university and been a good employee," says Sharpe. This can lead to well-catalogued existential crises when previously unquestioning and eager to please students start questioning their choices.
Sharpe says he's glad that he did so when he was still young. “I looked at directors at my firm and just thought that I didn’t want their life," he says. "Some people genuinely love banking but it wasn’t for me. It was partly an issue of working in equity research – it’s quite a solitary and bookish job, and I like meeting people."
He was 26. "I was at a pivotal moment in my career when I was going to start my own team I would either have gone down that path and been trapped by the salary and bonus, or I was going to leave," says Sharpe.
He left. Sharpe went to Brazil, travelled and decompressed. He studied for a TEFL qualification and briefly got a teaching job before realizing that he didn't want to do that either, and then he came back to the UK and qualified as a personal trainer.
Today, Sharpe is based in South America again, but in Columbia instead of Brazil. He runs an online health and fitness coaching business and mostly works with people working in banking and on the buy-side. Many of his clients love their jobs and are thriving in the financial services industry. Many are men. "I understand their issues and how tough it can be to work long hours while also looking after a family," says Sharpe.
He puts them through a three-pronged training program involving sleep, training and nutrition. "Sleep is the first pillar," says Sharpe. "It has an impact on the other two. If you’ve slept poorly, you will make poor nutritional choices and will have poor emotional regulation."
Success is incremental and doesn't involve absolutism and self-flagellation for missed training sessions. "It’s about taking them from where they are now slowly so that their energy rises, and they make better decisions about nutrition until they reach a level they can maintain for 80% of the time," says Sharpe, of his approach to his clients. "I appreciate that it’s hard to find the time to work out in banking. If you’re working 17 hours a day on a transaction, we need to find a plan that allows for that."
Having abruptly left financial services himself, Sharpe's new purpose is helping other people - who are more suited to the industry - stay in. "It’s about learning how to work in banking without sacrificing your long term health and their emotional wellbeing," says Sharpe, before turning off the camera and reverting to his new life in Columbia.
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