What To Do When Change Comes Out Of Nowhere

After working sixty-plus hours a week, sacrificing time with friends and family, and giving my all, I was completely blindsided.

There I sat, between the executive chair of the board and human resources, with my boss, the CEO, on speaker phone.

He said some words about company performance and then the dreaded, awful, stupid words, “Because of this, today is your last day.”

Wow.

Just like that – I was fired.

I don’t remember being thanked. I don’t remember much about them being sorry. I don’t remember anything that made me feel like a human.

I only remember it like a heartless transaction like I was some sort of worthless employee who was performing poorly. 

It was pretty awful. And I know … there are harder things to deal with, but this was definitely one of the worst for me. 

Looking back, I thought it would never happen to me, which is a silly idea because I was growing in my career. I was at an executive level—and I was in charge of sales. And no matter what, if numbers are not met, heads roll, and it’s almost always the head of sales’ fault. 

But this was different – or so I thought.

It was a young (ish) company—ten years old—and private equity just bought it, hoping to turn a 3-5x gain. And if you’ve never been a part of PE firm purchases, you know they’re out for blood. They want their returns, or else. 

And still, I just didn’t realize what I signed up for. As far as I was concerned, I had time—after all, I had to build a team, processes, systems, and tools. 

Plus, I joined an amazing team I loved. We had talent, humor, ambition, guts, and experience—we had it all. We were going to make it—we just knew it. We had swagger. It was the best you could ask for as far as a team was concerned.

Unfortunately, it didn’t work out how we thought it would—and I was one of the first who took it, and I took it hard. 

If you’ve ever experienced something so frigging jarring, I probably don’t even have to explain it. You can probably feel my experience deep in your gut, in your bones. Because if you’ve been fired, you know what it does to you.

You know the hit your ego takes.

You know the questions that will never be answered, like, “Why me?” 

You know the aftermath – oh my god. The aftermath.

You go from a million miles per hour every single day living off caffeine, adrenaline, Teams calls, and fear to absolutely frigging nothing. 

The silence pierces you like a shard of glass – right in your chest, then on your arms, and legs and ears.

The pain is everywhere, and it won’t go away.

It might even feel better to pull on your teeth than to sit in that f’n silence, with no purpose, no one to talk to – because no matter who you cry to, they don’t get it. They want to. They feel bad. But they don’t get it.

The fears that come rushing in about money, shame, losing it all are so powerful. They rock you and push you over even though they’re not even real.

It’s awful.

For days I wondered around lost and confused.

Then I turned a corner – I wanted revenge. But what the hell was that going to do? Give me a black eye in the industry? Make me feel better? Probably not…because honestly not much does. 

Besides, I signed a paper in exchange for two measly months of pay that said I wouldn’t take revenge.

It’s so fucked.

And I know, this is not the only kind of change that rocks us.

There are all kinds of change:

• divorce
• death of a loved one
• kids leaving to college
• news you’re terminally ill or chronically sick

Change will slap you  – and hard. And it hurts. 

It’s such a whiplash; the best part is you must keep going. You can’t give up. YOu must march on for yourself, your dignity, your family, and for your mortgage to be paid. 

And there’s nothing worse than having to just keep going. Especially when it’s something like a death in the family. There’s nothing that’ll make you feel people’s dumb deadlines at work are dumb more than when someone you love is gone. It all seems so pointless and annoying.

Nonetheless, we must move through the change – even when it hurts.

So what do you do? What’s to be done when it all comes crashing down?

• First, and probably most importantly, let yourself sit in the shit for a minute. And I say this because I didn’t. I was so scared, so I mobilized immediately. The day I was fired, I was on the phone with a potential employer THAT DAY, and I started reaching out to friends in the industry so they could help me find a new job.

This was such a mistake. I didn’t let myself mourn, which prevented me from healing and even understanding what had just happened. 

And if you’re dealing with something more tragic, like the death of a family member or your spouse cheating on you-you’re gonna need a minute to sit with it for a bit. There is no use in pushing yourself through the pain and shoving it aside as if it doesn’t exist. This will just lead to pain coming out sideways, and at times that don’t work-like your next relationship or next interview.

Take your time, let all the feelings cycle through, and don’t be afraid if you feel like complete dog shit for several days in a row. You’ll come out of it; if you don’t, your friends and family will call you out (if you’ve got good ones.)

• Process it safely. Most of us, most of the time, don’t process anything. We do the above (give ourselves a minute) then we pull our boots back up and march on. And if the change wasn’t good and it was tragic or traumatizing in some way-it’s going to be hard to just carry on without it negatively affecting you. A safe person you can talk with is hugely recommended. A therapist, a friend, a coach, or anyone who can help you work through it by sharing how you really feel because we’re usually pretty embarrassed about how we really feel. For me, I wanted revenge so bad I could taste it, and that made me feel like a bad person! I needed a judgment-free zone to move through what was going on inside my head. So, release it by letting it out with a nonjudgemental, safe person. And if you can’t find one, journal it and burn it so you don’t need to hold anything back.

• Give yourself a gift. I know this one might seem odd, but one of the hardest things about change is that you almost always feel it’s your fault. If you’re fired, you think you did something wrong. If you’re cheated on, you feel you could’ve loved better. If someone dies, you wish you could’ve done more – like not let them drive home that night or checked in with them more frequently. You’re not to blame so proactively do the opposite and give yourself a gift of comfort to show yourself she’s not to blame because there’s nothing worse than change combined with self-loathing, hatred, or blame. Show yourself that you can comfort her by giving her some sort of gift. 

• Console yourself. Initially, you’ll almost always need someone to support you because the shock is so intense. But eventually, you’ll need to switch to you supporting you because you can’t overburden someone. Plus, people just move on with their lives and don’t have the space to help you and themselves simultaneously. So, eventually, when they move on to live their own life, you’ve got to have the ability to console yourself. Otherwise, you’ll end up doing it with things like alcohol or something else that numbs out the pain. Picture yourself like a child who’s just taken a hard fall, scraped their knee and thinks their world is going to end. Calming, soothing, loving, and anything else that’s needed to be there for yourself. Its weird at first, but it works.

• Ask for a higher power to hold you. Now I know not everyone believes in this, but, for me, I had to lean on something much bigger, greater, and stronger than myself. Because this change, this jolt I experienced without seeing it coming did so much to me. It hurt my feelings. It hurt my ego. It killed my confidence. It made me feel unlovable, rejected, and incompetent. There was a certain level of this pain I could take on and spread it out by giving it to others but there was a big part of it all that I couldn’t handle nor could my friends, family, and coaches. Even admitting that hurts – but it’s true. And I forgot, like most of us do, I had something bigger than me that had a plan. A plan just for me. And I needed to believe that what I was doing wasn’t for me. I also needed something stronger than me to get through it. I asked for help, and it came through so powerfully, even I couldn’t believe something so amazing existed. Lean on something that’s outside of yourself – you won’t regret it. 

Personally, I’m still working through this, and it’s been over a year. And I accept that. I know when something big happens, it doesn’t just get better overnight. It takes time. It takes processing. 

And we know that no matter who we are, life will surprise us. There’s nothing stopping it. But what we also know is that we can get through it because we’re strong and we have a higher power. Is it easy? No, of course not. But it is possible, especially when we know what to do and have the tools to reach for to move on and up, making us stronger every time we get through it. 

I hope for your sake, some of this helped and if it did, please share with others. We all will experience shock – and we need the support to ensure we cross the bridge to happier and more peaceful times.