Navigating the Emotional Landscape of Job Loss and Retirement

You’re more than your job. Much more. But it takes some time to transition once you retire. It can be especially challenging if you were forced to retire. Laverne McKinnon knows what it’s like to process job loss and what it takes to move forward.

Laverne  McKinnon joins us from Los Angeles.

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Bio

Laverne McKinnon’s journey reflects a sincere commitment to helping individuals and organizations rediscover their capacity for impact and creativity. She balances multiple hats, integrating her experience and expertise as both a Career Coach and Grief Recovery Specialist with her extensive background as a Film & Television Producer.

With an understanding that unaddressed setbacks and grief can erode resilience, Laverne specializes in guiding people and companies to reconnect with their core strengths and aspirations. Her approach is grounded in the belief that clarity of values and purpose lies at the heart of fulfillment and meaningful impact.

As an adjunct professor at Northwestern University’s MS Leadership for Creative Enterprises program, Laverne’s highly regarded course on Persuasion & Pitching stands out for its experiential nature, pushing students to engage actively and think on their feet. She imparts the philosophy that pitching is not a contest to be won, but a connection to be made, emphasizing that people invest in individuals before ideas. This philosophy stems from her background as a television programming executive.

A significant portion of Laverne’s career was spent on the corporate side, notably as Senior Vice-President of Drama Development at CBS and Executive Vice-President at EPIX. Her involvement in the CSI and CRIMINAL MINDS series highlights her ability to identify and develop highly commercial and financially lucrative franchises. As the inaugural programming chief for EPIX, she earned the platform its first Emmy nominations. Her tenure as Head of Television at Charlize Theron’s production company, Denver & Delilah, further showcased her ability to bring projects to life including three direct-to-series orders.

As the Executive Producer of the Netflix series GIRLBOSS and co-founder of K&L Productions with filmmaker Kay Cannon, Laverne’s passion for championing marginalized and underserved stories and communities is informed by her Japanese heritage and growing up in a lower-income household. Laverne’s academic foundation, encompassing a BS in Radio-TV-Film from Northwestern University and an MBA from Pepperdine, underscores her commitment to being a lifelong learner. Along with certifications as a coach and grief recovery specialist, she’s also a practitioner of cognitive behavioral therapy and neuro-linguistics.

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For More on Laverne McKinnon

Moonshot Mentor

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About The Retirement Wisdom Podcast

There are many podcasts on retirement, often hosted by financial advisors with their own financial motives, that cover the money side of the street. This podcast is different. You’ll get smarter about the investment decisions you’ll make about the most important asset you’ll have in retirement: your time.

About Retirement Wisdom

I help people who are retiring, but aren’t quite done yet, discover what’s next and build their custom version of their next life. A meaningful retirement doesn’t just happen by accident.

Schedule a call today to discuss how The Designing Your Life process created by Bill Burnett & Dave Evans can help you make your life in retirement a great one – on your own terms.

About Your Podcast Host 

Joe Casey is an executive coach who also helps people design their next life after their primary career and create their version of The Multipurpose Retirement.™ He created his own next chapter after a twenty-six-year career at Merrill Lynch, where he was Senior Vice President and Head of HR for Global Markets & Investment Banking. Today, in addition to his work with clients, Joe hosts The Retirement Wisdom Podcast, which thanks to his guests and loyal listeners, ranks in the top 1 % globally in popularity by Listen Notes, with over 1.6 million downloads. Business Insider has recognized Joe as one of 23 innovative coaches who are making a difference. He’s the author of Win the Retirement Game: How to Outsmart the 9 Forces Trying to Steal Your Joy.

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Wise Quotes

On Grief from Job Loss

“I mentioned having worked at CBS for 10 years. And that was an incredible ride. I was promoted every 18 to 24 months and then wound up being the head of drama development, was part of the team that developed the CSI franchise and Criminal Minds. And then I was fired and I did not see it coming. And that was a really rough and abrupt transition. And I also know from talking with people and many of my clients that they’ve also felt an experienced transitions where they’ve been pushed out as opposed to making a choice. And sometimes it also looks like early retirement as well. And that was honestly like my first awareness of like, whoa, transitions can be really challenging and bring up a lot of emotional stuff. And for full disclosure, Joe, I didn’t know what was going on. I didn’t understand my emotional experience. And it took me about 10 years to realize that I was grieving the loss of my job.”

On Visible & Hidden Losses

“In my work in helping people with what I call career grief, also known as professional heartbreak, is that we have visible losses and then we have hidden losses. So the visible losses, I lost my job, I lost my title, I lost my parking spot, I lost benefits. But underneath that are those things that you’re talking about, Joe, about people’s sense of belonging, confidence, esteem, identity, dreams, hopes. And it’s those hidden losses that I think in many ways are more piercing than the visible losses because, yes, I went on to a lot of other fancy pants jobs. But even with those jobs, I still had lost who I was, my identity. It’s like that was ripped away from me. And so I’m so glad that you spotlighted that because it’s one of the first things that we do when we start to look at how do I mourn a career setback is to really examine what are the visible losses and then what are the hidden losses.The first thing is to really recognize that career grief is real, professional heartbreak is real. You and I are not making this up. Bereavement experts actually have a term for this. It’s called disenfranchised grief. And it’s any type of grief that is not publicly acknowledged, socially validated. mourned by a community and And again, this is very anecdotal, but I think that retirement it can have a component of disenfranchised grief If not all of it where some people might say oh How wonderful that you’ve retired without really understanding the losses that come with that whether it’s by choice or or not?”

On Processing Grief

“it’s agency, and tell me, Joe, if I’m defining it in the same way that you are, it” just like, is regaining a sense of control that I actually can make decisions and choices on my own. And so that is, if there are tasks to grief, so there are no rules to grief, everyone grieves uniquely, but there are tasks which are like the acknowledgement of the loss, actually giving oneself permission to mourn, having a mourning process, and then regaining agency. And so some people are head grievers, some people are heart grievers. So heart grievers, I’m a heart griever, I talk about my emotions, I journal, I love to be in group, but I do all sorts of things that allow me to spout out how I feel. Head grievers are less inclined to talk about how they feel. And there’s absolutely nothing wrong with that. There’s no rule. There’s no part of the task of grief that says that you have to talk about your feelings. However, like head grievers will take action in order to help process and to mourn their loss. And in doing that, that’s also regaining agency as well. And so that could be something small, it could be something big, it might be, you know, and these are all things that you’ve talked about quite a bit in your podcast, but it’s, you know, anything from volunteering, from deciding to unretire, it could be finding purpose in a hobby and family and friends. So there’s so many different ways for us to take action and regain a sense of agency.”