You are meant to turn your phone off when attending a silent retreat at the Archbishop of Canterbury’s residence, Lambeth Palace, as part of training in monastic life. But you are never meant to turn your phone off as a corporate tax lawyer at an American legal giant — a client could need you at any time.
That was one of the culture clashes that Eloise Skinner, 30, faced as she juggled her job as a £140,000-a-year newly qualified corporate tax solicitor at Cleary Gottlieb with 12-month training dubbed “monk school”, where she was “trying to find my own personal sense of direction.”
“It was an integrated programme,” Skinner said of the Archbishop of Canterbury’s monastic-inspired The Community of St Anselm. “I’d leave the Cleary office in Moorgate [in the City] one evening a week to head to Lambeth Palace and attend week-long, silent retreats in a monastery in Cornwall for a few weeks during the year too.”
There, Skinner would wear monastic robes called albs — “they really remove any sense of personal ego” — and sleep in a simple room. “We went really deep into the traditional types of monastic practice, and how to apply some of them to your life as a modern monk. Coming straight from [work in] central London, it was quite disorientating to move into a fully silent monastery. When I went back to ‘normal life’ afterwards, I noticed that I’d become a little bit more intentional about what I said when I spoke.”
Skinner had become a Christian as a teenager, when she also decided to pursue a career in law. Her first home was on the 19th floor of an east London council estate — and growing up, her parents were touring musicians, “so we didn’t really have any money”. She successfully applied to read law at Cambridge, and undertook seven work-experience placements at US and Magic Circle law firms before settling at Cleary Gottlieb.
Skinner found her two worlds hard to reconcile. Although her monastic training had updated the traditional vows — the monastic “poverty” order, for example, was interpreted as “not buying things you didn’t need” — there were still jarring contrasts with days spent dealing with huge sums of corporate money.
“My job [as a tax lawyer] wasn’t that sort of perception of firms getting out of paying tax, more about helping people understand what their obligations were,” Skinner said. “Law, especially the way I was practising it, is full-on. You need to give it all of your time and the hours are very unpredictable. Most of the cases were cross-border transactions, so you’re on UK time and, say, US time and Japanese time; you can’t always say, ‘I’m not available — I’m in a monastery.’ ”
Gradually — and in a process accelerated by Covid lockdowns — Skinner’s monastic year helped her realise that tax law wasn’t her calling; she left in January 2021. “For many, the pandemic was an opportunity to reflect on what you actually want to do — you, not society or your family or university. [It was about] carving out some time to actually think, ‘What is it that I care about? What are my values? What are my priorities?
“When lockdown happened, it felt like it was OK to change your entire life because so much had already changed.”
Now Skinner’s work involves helping others to do the same. She runs One Typical Day, an education technology start-up that helps students find out more about potential careers, and The Purpose Workshop, a social enterprise that helps people reconsider their lives and careers; clients include Cambridge and Oxford universities.
“My lifestyle obviously had to change after leaving law,” she said. “When I started, I had really wanted to use my salary to save up. Now it’s just about covering my basic needs, and seeing where the business builds from that.”
Skinner admitted to missing some elements of her corporate lawyer life: “I really miss being in a big team — the fast pace, constantly having people asking you to step up. Being self-employed, you have to create that for yourself. While it was stressful, it was also incredibly rewarding because you’re always improving.”
Still, for anyone else looking to escape corporate life, Skinner has some advice. “It doesn’t need to happen overnight. When I read about other people’s career changes, it seemed so dramatic and intimidating, [but] if you go step by step, over time it takes you further than you had imagined.”