Professional Hurt and Finding Your New Favorite Cheese

I recently heard from someone who was completely distraught. Their company had been acquired and imminent massive layoffs had just been enacted. Their entire team, peers, and supervisor were now gone. Five years of work and relationship building, and now all safety and comfort at work utterly disappeared.

And, yet, after the tears and storytelling, this person began to describe a silver lining. The person’s tone shifted. An eagerness emerged about the potential new opportunity at their company. There was hope and hurt. And yet, they also circled back to the feeling of wanting to be uncomfortably comfortable and safe, rather than encountering risk.

Hearing those words, I thought of two valuable resources for anyone who has experienced professional hurt or unexpected, destabilizing change.

Professional Hurt

A fellow Antioch graduate of mine, Dr. Ruby Macksine Brown, wrote her dissertation on Professional Hurt: The Untold Stories. Through interviewing 20 public servants in the Caribbean Islands, she uncovered, explored, and explained the phenomena of professional hurt.

We’ve all heard the phrase, “It’s just business.” We make decisions that affect people, and it’s “just business,” not personal.

Yet, we know that it hurts to be laid off, fired, reprimanded, or asked to resign. Most of us have direct experience with this; some of us from both sides of the table.

But naming the experience is a radical exercise in understanding the lived experience of going through workplace hardship that personally affects us—it hurts!! Ouch!

Dr. Brown unpacks the common emotions (grief, anger, embarrassment), the causes (politics, money, broken systems), and the ways that people have navigated through professional hurt.

Navigating Professional Hurt

First, people recognized that the decisions were not personal. Our minds may circle around the situation over and over, looking for the cause, the “why”. That is not helpful. Dr. Brown found that the cause is almost always about the system in place, not the person.

For example, many of the recent large-scale layoffs in the technology industry were done to reallocate money to focus on the new breakthroughs in A.I. When one-thousand people are laid off so the company can utilize A.I., the layoffs were not based upon individual performance, behaviors, or tenure. They were about a system change. They weren’t personal.

Navigating our way through professional hurt requires us to lean into our support systems, our belief systems, and our ability to learn from experience.

Then, we can begin to find the silver lining in our experience.

But once we’ve found that silver lining, and learned through experience, it’s only the end of the previous story. We now must navigate the future.

Finding Your New Favorite Cheese

I always find the concept I’m presenting next as “cheesy,” because, well, it is. But it’s also extremely useful for navigating change. So here it goes:

In the book, Who Moved My Cheese?, a mouse lives in a maze. The mouse has a daily routine that involves a specific route through the maze from their bed to a pile of cheese and back. They love this cheese and eat it every day. It’s the best. Life is good.

But one day, the cheese is no longer there.

The mouse looks around, retraces steps, returns, circles around, goes back to their bed, walks all the way back, and still no cheese. The mouse returns home for the night hungry.

The next day the mouse returns to the location of the cheese, but still there is no cheese. Not even a crumb.

The mouse becomes afraid, hopeless, unsure of what to do. The cheese was here, always here, and now it’s not. “Who moved my cheese?” the mouse asks out loud. No one answers.

After a few days, the very hungry mouse decides that the only solution is to go in search of new cheese.

The mouse ventures out into the unknown territories of the maze.

After many dead ends, retracing of steps, and continuing out further than the mouse has ever gone before, the mouse eventually discovers a new scent. “Is that cheese?” the mouse thinks. “It smells like cheese.” The scent carries the mouse onward into the maze.

Then the mouse discovers a huge pile of cheese, much larger than the previous cheese. The mouse tastes the cheese, and it is delicious—the best cheese the mouse has ever had! The mouse sighs in relief and makes a nest nearby his new favorite cheese. Life is even better.

This story can offer us many insights into how to navigate uncertainty, leave old patterns behind, and develop confidence and trust in moving beyond our sources of happiness, safety, or monetary support. Instead of asking, “who moved my cheese,” we can remind ourselves that it may be time to venture out in search of even better cheese than anything we’ve previously experienced.

“And the day came when the risk to remain tight in a bud was more painful than the risk it took to blossom.” --Anais Nin

If you’re interested in moving beyond professional hurt and navigating your new leadership changes, contact me and we’ll set up a leadership discovery call.