Giving up that financially lucrative position for something you enjoy doesn't have to be scary, writes Kim Kind.

When people meet Iranian-born Ghazaleh Lyari, they assume she has a passion for baking cakes. Why else would an internationally successful investment banker give up life on Wall Street (and a lucrative pay packet) to open a cupcake shop?

For Lyari, the answer lies not in a love of baking but in a long-held desire to run her own business. She worked for blue-chip companies in the US and Australia for 16 years, handled multibillion-dollar deals and worked 120-hour weeks.

But eventually she reached a point where she felt "this just doesn't do it for me any more".

"It wasn't satisfying enough," Lyari says.

The director of the Centre for Work + Life at the University of South Australia, Professor Barbara Pocock, says: "Meaningful work is incredibly important given that more of us are working more and we construct our identity and our sense of self in work."

But Pocock says people want to feel their work is about more than just a pay packet.

"I think a lot of people are thinking that the equating of happiness with money and career success is a mistaken concept. Research shows that past a certain point - comfortable housing, food and clothing, for example - the positive relationship between more money and more happiness falls away," she says.

After examining a variety of successful business models, Lyari settled on gourmet cupcakes for grown-ups, opening her bakery and two Ghermez Cupcakes shops a year ago. But no, she does not bake the cakes. "The dream is not necessarily the cupcake thing," she says. "The dream is creating something from nothing. I cannot tell you how satisfying that is. It never feels like work. When I was in investment banking, I always felt like I was working hard."

Lyari suspects that most of her colleagues in the investment banking world would like to do other things but are too afraid to take the risk and leave their jobs.

"People get too complacent - their bonus cheques are too fat and they might not get enough elsewhere," she says. This trap is what Pocock calls the work-spend cycle. More work drives more spending, which drives more work and so the cycle continues.

Dave Woolbank had an enviable career in marketing and advertising but still found himself caught in this trap. "I had a great salary but I was working 12 to 14-hour days. I was getting up at 4.30am three times a week just to clear emails," he says.

"The only reason I did it was that I was chasing money. I wasn't being true to myself. I wasn't living and chasing my passion," says Woolbank, who has two young children and a wife who also works.

"You've got to be earning good money to pay for nannies and childcare. You earn all this money, then you pay all this money to essentially farm out your kids and it's like 'what are we doing?"' he says. Last year, Woolbank took the brave step of leaving his corporate career behind and taking a part-time job at an agency while he studied to qualify as a secondary school teacher.

"I loved being a student," he says. "If your brain is a sponge, the corporate world has a really good knack for wringing it out.

"When you go and study, it's like you're soaking your brain again."

Now he teaches economics and business studies part-time, looks after his children and writes a blog for fathers who want to be more involved in their children's lives - dadsclub.com.au. Woolbank says although he now earns in a day what he used to earn in an hour, the trade-off has been worth it.

"I like teaching and coaching people, I really like just making a difference and the camaraderie of students ... it just feels so right and it's a great thing to be in that situation," he says.

The director of career coaching firm PeopleNet, Mark Burnicle, says people looking to escape corporate life should ask themselves "what do I really love doing?"

"If you can do something you really enjoy and someone's going to pay you for it, then that's where you should go," he says.

He advises clients to evaluate their skills, plan ahead and bounce ideas off people.

Career counsellors and the government-subsidised Business Enterprise Centres can also help people redirect their skills.

Some people, like Woolbank, will need to work part-time while they retrain and may have to adjust their lifestyles for a while.

Woolbank says his family go on a lot more camping holidays now but also have a lot more fun.

"I think in the corporate world, they squeeze so much out of you, it's really hard to find time and energy to give back," he says.

He likes this lesson from Winston Churchill: "We make a living by what we get; we make a life by what we give."