Embarking: Small Steps to Reclaim Agency

A portion of this blog originally appeared as a guest feature on Career Pivot. Join me for a special AMA with Career Pivot on Friday, October 31st at 9:00 a.m. PT on the Substack App.

The call came on a Monday morning. I was still in bed, but when I saw that it was my boss, I jumped up, cleared my throat a few times and did my best to sound normal while saying “hello.”

It came out froggy and weak-sauce. I knew why she was calling. I’d been waiting for months to get the official notice of my firing. She sounded like she was reading from a script.

Later that week, boxes arrived from the office—my daughter’s photo in a freshly chipped frame, a half-full bottle of McCallans, a mug with lettering: Everybody’s Watching! It was both anti-climatic and gut-wrenching.

I spent the next several months in my bedroom cave, alternating between shame, humiliation, panic, depression and intense self-loathing. For the first time in ten years — really since I’d been with that company —there were no meetings to prep for, emails to craft with precision and diplomacy, or crises to be solved in a blink of an eye. So strange to have been stressed out and resentful of all that activity, and then to wish with every fiber of being I could have it back.

At the time, I didn’t know what to call what I was feeling. I was pretty sure I was broken because everything I did to feel better was a big fat turd ball. I took antidepressants, went to therapy, and worked with a life coach. I read books about igniting my passion, the art of letting go, and practicing gratitude. I went to Esalen (a holistic education center), worked with psychics and intuitives, and got a certification in Excel. Nothing worked no matter how great of a student I was because the books, workshops, readings, classes and teachings were missing a key element of my experience.

What I didn’t know then that I know now is that I was grieving.

The Grief No One Names

Turns out grief isn’t just for funerals. It shows up any time something meaningful ends—when a relationship fractures, when a home is lost, when a dream slips out of reach.

But the kind of grief that comes from losing your place in the working world? Most people don’t get it.

That’s because career grief is what bereavement experts call disenfranchised grief—a form of loss that society doesn’t officially acknowledge or validate. Instead, you get advice disguised as comfort: “You’ll land on your feet.” “It’s probably for the best.” “Everything happens for a reason.”

And at the same time, if you’re anything like me, you start to question yourself. Why can’t I just move on? Why does it still hurt? Why does everything, even sending a text, feel harder than it used to?

You may wonder if you’re overreacting. Well, you’re not.

What you’re feeling is a completely human response to loss.

Grief doesn’t mean you’re broken. It means something you were deeply attached to is gone.

You have permission to grieve your career losses.

The Myths That Keep Us Stuck

Once I tell people that, the next question usually comes fast: So how do I get over it? Getting over grief is one of several myths that cause harm. The world teaches us to treat grief like a bad cold. Take a few days off, drink lots of water, and pop a few aspirin if your head hurts.

Grief is not an experience you get over. Grief is an experience that gets integrated into your life. At the same time, that gaping hole in your torso cannot simply be filled with an alternate job.

Consider what happens when a tornado hits a town. Buildings collapse, trees uproot, familiar streets vanish. The landscape of the community is forever changed. Even when the debris is cleared and new structures are constructed, it’s not the same town—it’s a rebuilt one. Grief works the same way. When something you were deeply attached to is gone, it alters your internal landscape. You may rebuild, even thrive again, but you’ll always remember what once stood there—the job, the dream, the sense of belonging.

Then there’s the “five stages of grief” myth. You might’ve heard of them: denial, anger, bargaining, depression, and acceptance. They’ve been printed on posters, used in workshops, and turned into a cultural script for how we should grieve. But those stages weren’t meant to be linear—or even universal. Psychiatrist Elisabeth Kübler-Ross designed them to describe how terminally ill patients process their own mortality, not how the rest of us should manage loss. Somehow we turned that amazing research into a rulebook—and in doing so, we gave ourselves a new way to fail. If you have emotions outside of the five stages framework, you’re not doing grief wrong. Your range of emotions is completely normal.

Another myth? “If I stay busy, I won’t have to feel this.” That one’s especially common in ambitious people. Productivity can numb pain for a while—it gives the illusion of control. But grief has a way of leaking through the cracks and can show up as distraction, burnout, cynicism, the loss of motivation, and overall grumpiness.

One of the most common myths is a close cousin to getting over grief: the belief that time heals all. Let’s debunk that from two perspectives. First, the word “heals” implies that grief is an illness to recover from, something that can be cured. It’s not. Grief is a transformative experience that changes how you see yourself and the world around you.

Time, by itself, doesn’t heal—but it does create space. Over time, your relationship to what was lost shifts and the pain may soften with distance.

I really do wish grief came with a timeline, but it doesn’t. What time can offer is room to integrate the loss—to make it part of your story rather than the whole story.

What I’ve learned, both personally and through years of coaching, is that grief doesn’t obey rules—but it does respond to tasks. Tasks are not formulas or stages. They’re simple, human actions that help you acknowledge what’s changed and make sense of it.

The framework I use to describe those tasks is called RISE—because that’s what we’re learning to do after loss. Rise through understanding. Rise through intention. Rise through agency.

The RISE Framework: A Roadmap Through Career Grief

The framework offers a different way forward—each task builds on the one before it, but you don’t have to move in order. Think of RISE as a loop, not a ladder. You can circle back as often as you need to.

R – Recognize the Loss

The first task of grief is recognition—acknowledging what’s actually gone. It sounds simple, but most people skip it entirely. They rush to update their résumés, reach out to contacts, or start applying for jobs, believing momentum will ease the pain. But you can’t rebuild on ground you haven’t cleared.

Recognition starts by naming the visible and hidden losses. The visible losses are easier to point to: the title, the office, the daily structure. These are the losses that are more readily replaced, but don’t reflect the entire picture.

Beneath the visible losses are the hidden losses. These are the ones that may take time to name, but you feel them intensely. The loss of belonging. The loss of confidence. The loss of purpose. The loss of belief.

When I was fired, it wasn’t just the loss of my title that gutted me—it was the loss of identity. For years, I saw myself as smart, strategic, and capable. When the parting of the ways call came, all of that vanished in an instant. My identity shifted from someone accomplished to being a loser and an idiot.

That became my secret and my shame. I didn’t tell anyone how small I felt, or how humiliated. I poured all that emotion into self-criticism instead. It wasn’t until I learned to name the losses, especially the hidden ones, that I could start to get a clearer view of how to rebuild.

I – Investigate the Meaning

Here’s the thing: When I told myself I was a loser and an idiot, that was me creating meaning about something that happened that didn’t make sense. Why do we do that ourselves?

It’s because the brain can’t tolerate not knowing, so it rushes to fill in the blanks. Each time it lands on an explanation—accurate or not—it releases a small hit of dopamine, the brain’s reward for “solving” a problem. It feels good for a moment, but the comfort doesn’t mean the meaning is true.

That’s why the “I” in RISE invites you to investigate the meaning you’ve created from your loss because that meaning will shape what comes next.

I avoided opportunities that scared me. I downplayed my experience. I stayed small because I worried that I’d get my head chopped off again. After all, I was a loser.

Investigating the meaning you’ve created doesn’t mean forcing positivity or rewriting history. It means pausing long enough to get curious about what you’ve been telling yourself about the loss—asking whether it’s true, or whether it’s just the brain hard-wired to come up with answers. That’s why this step matters: it helps you question the meaning before it hardens into identity.

Here’s a hard truth: grief isn’t only about what happened; it’s about what you believe it means. When a career disruption occurs, we’re often left in uncertainty and no answers. So our brain jumps in and creates any ol’ meaning regardless of whether it’s hurtful or helpful. Hurtful meaning sounds like: I suck. I’m not good enough. I’ll never recover from this. Helpful meanings sound like: My work mattered, even if the position ended. I served with integrity and skill, and those strengths don’t disappear. This change says more about the system than about my value.

For me, I realized that calling myself a loser and an idiot was not only harmful, it was inaccurate. In looking at the facts, it was tough to ignore that I went on to several high profile gigs post losing that one job. They weren’t hiring me because I was a loser and an idiot. They were hiring me because of my talent, experience and being a good cultural fit.

To complete this task, you create a new meaning based on the truth. My truth and new meaning: I was no longer a fit for that job and the universe tough-loved me so I could re-align and honor my values and purpose.

S – Signal the Shift

Once you have a helpful meaning in place, even if it feels tender, it’s time to signal the shift from what was to what’s next.

Neuroscientist and grief researcher Mary-Frances O’Connor, author of The Grieving Brain, writes that our brains form “attachment maps” to the people, places, and roles that make us feel safe. These maps help us navigate our world. When something we’re attached to disappears—a job, a community, a dream—our brain doesn’t immediately understand that it’s gone. It keeps looking for it, trying to reconcile a world that no longer fits the old map.

That’s why ritual is so powerful. Rituals teach the brain that something has ended. They signal, both physically and emotionally, that it’s time to redraw the map.

In Western culture, we’re familiar with rituals for death—funerals, memorials, anniversaries—but we rarely create them for professional endings. When a job ends, a dream collapses, or a role is taken away, there’s rarely a ceremony or even a chance to have a good good-bye. Career grief rituals help retrain the brain and calm the heart—they confirm, at every level, that what’s ended is real and that you’re ready to begin again.

Rituals give shape to what otherwise feels shapeless. Whether it’s writing a letter to the job you’ve lost, lighting a candle, burying a symbol of what’s ending, or taking a long, mindful walk to reflect—rituals externalize what’s been internal. They tell the brain: this chapter has closed. And once the brain understands that, the heart can begin to follow.

I encourage you to create a bespoke ritual like my client Rebecca did. She took the paystubs she’d kept from thirteen years at the same job and origami’d them into a bird. The process was methodical and deliberate. It was also meditative and allowed her to intentionally say good-bye to the job she’d once seen as safe and secure. The repurposed check stubs became an invitation for her to take flight.

Your ritual doesn’t need to be public or elaborate. It just needs to mean something to you. The goal isn’t to erase what happened—it’s to honor it, mark it, and make space for whatever comes next.

When you consciously signal the shift, you begin to reclaim your agency. You stop being the person something happened to and start being the person choosing how to carry it forward.

E – Embark on What’s Next

Once your brain understands what’s ended, space opens for something new to rise. You might feel a little more spring in your step, a hint of excitement to reach out to an acquaintance or readiness to take a class you’ve been intrigued by. That’s you like the little green plant sprouting out of a cement wall. Unstoppable.

The final task in the RISE framework is embark on what’s next. To take one small step toward agency — which is all about choice. Your choice. Agency doesn’t mean having control over the outcome. It means remembering you have say in what comes next.

Maybe that looks like getting a haircut, reaching out to an old colleague, or starting a new morning routine. Maybe it’s giving yourself permission to rest.

As you begin to act, your brain starts mapping new attachments—new routines, new communities, new ways of being. That’s how integration happens: the brain learns safety again through experience.

When I began coaching, it wasn’t part of a grand plan. It was a way to use what I’d learned from my own heartbreak to help others. I didn’t know it then, but that was my version of embarking.

In moving through the RISE framework, you integrate your loss into your life. The grief becomes part of your landscape, but it no longer defines you. You carry it differently. And in that carrying, you rise.

Rise, Don’t Rush

Nineteen years after that Monday morning phone call, I can still feel how scared I was to hear the words that my job was over — and at the same time, relief that what I knew was coming, had finally arrived.

It took me a decade to recognize my loss as legitimate. Which is what drives me to share my story with you today: I don’t want anyone else to ever believe that they are less than due to a career loss.

There’s no expeditious way through this. No timeline, no formula, no five stages to check off. But there is the RISE framework. Tasks, not rules. And with every act of recognition, every honest reflection, every small ritual, and every brave step forward, you move closer to a version of yourself that carries both loss and possibility.

Questions or comments? Come join me on Friday, October 31st at 9:00 a.m. PT for an Ask Me Anything with Career Pivot.

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* Some Things You May Not Know About Grief 🤔

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