When The Ground Gives Way Slowly: On Layoffs, Bad Leadership and Finding your Footing

A client of mine lost her job recently.

But that's not where this story actually begins.

She had reached out to me a few weeks BEFORE it happened. Before there was anything concrete to point to. Before she had a single piece of evidence she could put on a table and say, this, this is what I'm worried about. 

She reached out because she had a feeling. The kind that lives in your body before your brain has caught up to it. The kind that wakes you up at 3am and doesn't give you anything useful to do with itself.

She wanted to be ready. Prepared, “in case of”. Those were her words.

And so for a few weeks, that is where we lived together. In that in-between space. The one that has no name and no clear edges. Not crisis but definitely not safety either. Not knowing and not “not knowing”. And it was an unusual experience, because I was allowed to witness what she was going through in real time. Not in retrospect, not reconstructed after the fact, but as it was actually happening to her. Day by day, feeling by feeling, small thing by small thing.

Let me tell you something: it is not a comfortable place to be. And the fact that she showed a level of self-awareness to even recognize that she “was in it”, was admirable. Most people don't reach out in that moment. They wait for certainty. They tell themselves they're overreacting. They push the feeling down and keep moving until the moment the feeling turns out to have been right all along.

She didn't do that.

It also didn't happen all at once.

It started with small things. A slight tension when you walk into a room. A second of silence that lasts a bit too long. A meeting on someone's calendar that you used to be on but somehow, mysteriously, have been dropped from.

You tell yourself you're imagining it. You tell yourself work is stressful and you're reading into things. You go home, make dinner, try to sleep, and wake up the next morning and do it all again.

But the feeling doesn't go away.

It gets stronger.

A message you sent that didn't get a response. A colleague who used to stop by your desk and now walks past it. The particular way someone smiles at you that doesn't quite feel genuine. Small things, individually dismissible. Together, they add up to something you can't name but you also can't ignore.

And so you do what any reasonable professional does.

You keep showing up. You do your work. You send your emails and attend your meetings and contribute to projects as if none of it is happening, because what else are you supposed to do?

You don't have anything concrete. You don't have a conversation. You have a feeling, and feelings are not facts, and you've built a career on being someone who deals in facts.

But here is what nobody tells you about that period. The one BEFORE you know.

It is its own particular kind of hell.

Because you are doing two jobs at once. The job you were hired to do, and the invisible job of managing everything underneath it. Keeping your face neutral in meetings. Choosing your words carefully, wondering if everything you say is being noted. Watching for information in other people's expressions. Performing competence and calm while something in your gut is screaming that the ground beneath you is no longer solid.

And still, every time she asked directly, professionally, with the simple human expectation that the people leading her would be honest with her, she was told “everything was fine”.

Yeah, except everything was NOT fine.

She knew it. They knew it. And they all kept going through the motions together, playing out a scene that had already been written, with only one person in the room who hadn't been given the script.

Living through something like this makes you feel disoriented.  It makes you question not just what is happening, but whether you can trust your own perception of reality. Because the gap between what you are sensing and what you are being told grows wider every day, and at some point you have to choose which one to believe.

Your instincts? Or the people who are supposed to have your best interests at heart?

Most of us, trained to be professional, to be reasonable, to not make assumptions, choose to believe the people.

And then the conversation finally happens.

And everything you knew but were not supposed to know is confirmed in the space of a meeting that probably lasted less than thirty minutes, and that changed everything.

What Actually Happened Here

I want to name this clearly, because I think it matters.

What my client went through was not just a layoff. It was a sustained, if perhaps unintentional, betrayal of her right to honest information. The kind that leaves you not just out of a job but questioning your own grip on reality.

She did not misread the situation. She actually read it correctly. And she was told, over and over, by the people who knew the truth, that what she was reading wasn't real.

That is not a reflection of her perception.

That is a reflection of a culture that chose its own comfort over her dignity. That chose the easier path of deflection and delay over the harder one of simply telling a person the truth.

There is something else worth saying here:  What happened to my client was a leadership failure. Not a systems failure, not a communication breakdown, not an unfortunate byproduct of a difficult business decision. A leadership failure.

Made by people who had a choice, who knew what was happening, and who chose, day after day, to say nothing. That choice had a cost. And the cost of that choice was paid by her.

It cost her weeks of her life spent in a state of suspension and dread. It cost her the basic dignity of being treated like someone who deserved the truth. And it sent her into her next chapter not just without a job, but with her confidence shaken and her self-trust bruised in ways that will take real time and real work to repair.

That is not a small thing. That is not a restructuring. That is not an impersonal business decision communicated with regret.

That is someone being failed by the people who were supposed to lead them.

What an Exit Like This Does to You

Some layoffs are clean.

You get called into a room and someone is honest with you. The business context is explained. You may be devastated, but you understand what happened and why. The ground shifts, but it's still ground. You know where you are standing even if you don't yet know where you are going.

This was not that.

This was the experience of having the ground give way slowly, inch by inch, over days, while being told you were imagining it. The experience of arriving home each evening carrying something heavy that you couldn't put down because you couldn't name it. Of waking up in the middle of the night with a sense of dread and nowhere to put it. Of going back in the next morning and doing it all over again.

And underneath all of that, you carry a question around with you that doesn’t have an easy answer:

Who am I outside of this?

Not just what will I do next, or how will I pay my bills, though those fears are real and deserve to be taken seriously. But the deeper thing. The one about who you are when the title is gone. When the calendar clears. When the structure that has shaped your days and given your effort somewhere to land simply goes away.

We don't talk enough about that question. About how much of our sense of self gets built into the scaffolding of a job, until the moment the scaffolding comes down and we discover how much weight it was holding.

And when that moment arrives the way it arrived for my client, not as a clean break but as a long, ambiguous unraveling followed by a too-short conversation, the question doesn't arrive neatly either.

It just sits there. Waiting. And you realize you don't have an answer.

The Core Insight

What happened to you is not data about your value.

It is data about the culture you were in and the choices the people in it made.

I know that distinction is easy to say and hard to feel. Because the mind, in the aftermath of something like this, does not naturally separate these things. It is looking for a story that explains what happened. And the story it finds too often is the one that centers on the person who was let go, not the organization that let them go badly.

I should have seen it. I should have been better. I should have done more.

And here is what I want to say directly: that story is wrong.

Not wrong in everything. There is always something to learn from a professional experience. But wrong in where it locates the failure.

Wrong in the way it takes what was done to you and turns it into something that was caused by you.

The failure was not yours.

The failure was in how YOU were treated.

And until you can feel that distinction, not just think it but actually feel it, in your body, in your confidence, in the way you talk about yourself in the next room you walk into, the weight of this will stay with you in ways that don't belong to you.

What Moving Forward Actually Looks Like

I want to be honest here. Because there is a version of "moving forward" advice that gets offered too readily and quickly, as if the right attitude and a revised CV are all that stand between you and being fine.

They are not.

Moving forward from a layoff like this is not linear. It is not tidy either. It does not happen on anyone else's schedule.

I also want to acknowledge something else that most of this kind of writing skips over, because it is uncomfortable and it doesn't fit neatly into a framework.

You may be reading this with a mortgage. With a family watching you try to hold it together. With a bank account that has a very specific and very unforgiving opinion about how long you can afford to “sit with your feelings” before you need to act.

The emotional work I'm describing in this article does not happen in a vacuum. It happens alongside the CV updates and the LinkedIn messages and the conversations you're having with people you haven't spoken to in years. It happens in the margins of a job search that already feels relentless.

And that is hard. Genuinely, practically hard, in ways that have nothing to do with mindset and everything to do with reality.

I'm not going to tell you that takes care of itself. What I will say is that doing the inner work, even in small doses, even imperfectly, alongside the practical work, is not a luxury. It is what keeps the practical work from hollowing you out completely.

So here is what I have seen actually work, in the people I have walked through this with:

Let yourself be angry, but don't live there. The anger is legitimate. What happened was not okay. You do not need to immediately reframe it into a learning opportunity or a plot point in your comeback story. But anger becomes a trap when it is the only response. When it keeps you tethered to what was done to you rather than moving toward what comes next. Feel it. Name it. And when you are ready, not before, start looking forward.

Separate the exit from your value. Your value did not change the day you were let go. The skills you have, the specific things you bring, the way you think and lead and move through problems, none of that disappeared because an organization made a decision that had far more to do with its own priorities than with your worth. That distinction needs to be rebuilt, deliberately, through honest conversation with people who know your work, through the sometimes uncomfortable process of identifying what you bring when the organizational context is stripped away.

Be careful about the story you tell. In the aftermath of a messy exit there is a version of the story that is very easy to reach for. The one that leads with grievance. That story is understandable. It is also not the one that serves you in the next conversation, the next interview, the next room where you are presenting yourself as someone worth backing. This is not about pretending the experience was something it wasn't. It is about finding the version of it that is honest without being bitter. That version exists. It may take some time to find.

Rebuild from the inside. When you have spent weeks being told that what you were sensing wasn't real, the aftermath leaves a residue. You start to doubt your own read of situations, your own judgment, your own sense of what is true. The antidote to that is not reassurance from outside, though that has its place. It is the slower, more deliberate work of reconnecting with what you actually know. What you are good at. What you have done that is real and solid and not contingent on whether one organization chose to see it or not.

Find the right support. People who can hold both things at once. The legitimate pain of what happened and the genuine belief in what comes next. Who will not rush you to be fine before you are, but who also will not let the story of what was done to you become the only story you know how to tell.

The Courage Shift

What happened to you required a tremendous amount of courage to survive.

The courage of continuing to show up, every day, in an environment that was not being honest with you. Of doing your job well when everything underneath it felt uncertain. Of trusting your instincts even when the people around you were telling you they were wrong. Of sitting in that room when the news finally came, absorbing something you had already been quietly absorbing for weeks, and walking out still standing.

That courage did not disappear when you left the building.

It is still yours.

And the next chapter will be built with it and on top of it.

Not despite what happened. In part, because of it. Because you now know things you didn't know before. About how organizations behave when things get hard. About what honest leadership actually looks and feels like, because you have felt its absence. About what you will and will not accept in the next place you choose to put your energy.

What was taken from you was a role.

What remains is everything else.

And that, even if it doesn't feel like it right now, is considerably more than enough to move you forward.

A Courage Challenge

This week, wherever you are in this process, I want you to do one thing.

Write down three things that are true about your professional value that have nothing to do with the organization that just let you go.

Not achievements. Not job titles.

Three things you bring, specifically and distinctly, that were true before you walked into that job and are just as true now that you've walked out of it.

Read them back to yourself.

That is not what was lost.

That is what you STILL have.

And it is more than enough to build the next thing from.