You’re Gonna Get Fired (at Some Point)

“…change is situational. Transition, on the other hand, is psychological. It is not those events, but rather the inner reorientation and self-redefinition that you have to go through in order to incorporate any of those changes into your life.”

— William Bridges, in Transitions

Perhaps my single biggest insight from business school was sparked by a comment by a CEO who had come to talk about a case study on his former company.  

The case study started with news headlines about his appointment to the CEO role and how he was going to take the company to the next level. And the case study ended as the guy was being fired, with news headlines—some from the very same publications—calling him essentially a bum. 

This wasn’t the point of the case study, but my takeaway from it was this: No matter how good you are, if you’re trying to do big things and constantly stretching yourself, you’re going to get fired. The only way to avoid getting fired is to walk the comfortable path. Else, no one goes out on top.

When that CEO was talking about the aftermath of his firing, he said something else that was revealing. He first described how it was a letdown when he no longer commanded an army of staff and wasn’t surrounded by people who were solicitous of him. 

But then he described his insight, which I’ll paraphrase: When you have a big job, you have to realize that people are not interacting with you; they’re interacting with the office. So if you cannot keep your ego separate from the office, you’ll have a problem. 

But why wait until we get fired to protect our self-esteem?

Our jobs often come with frameworks for success that are emotionally laden. Promotions that confer status, performance management systems that force comparison with others, and various forms of in-groups and out-groups—all of these can slowly warp our personal definitions of success. 

As a result, our self esteem can start to become correlated with our sales growth numbers. We can start to see feedback not just as a judgement of our performance, but as a judgment of our human worth. 

In other words, work can tempt us to unduly identify with our professional pursuits, and it can create a false sense of what’s important. 

In Transitions, William Bridges describes three phases of transitions. He writes: “All transitions are composed of (1) an ending, (2) a neutral zone, and (3) a new beginning.”

Bridges also identifies two elements of endings that are relevant to this point. He writes that endings create disidentification: “In breaking your old connections to the world and taking apart the internal structures required by those connections, you also lose your old ways of defining yourself.” 

And they create disenchantment: “The lesson of disenchantment begins with the discovery that if you want to change—really to change, and not just to switch positions—you must realize that some significant part of your old reality was in your head, not out there.” 

In other words, after the inevitable firing, we’re going to have to redefine ourselves beyond just work, and we’ll have to wrestle with how much of our “reality” is real or fake.   

And that begs the question: Shouldn’t we do that now?

We can both go for the promotions and rewards and recognize that they aren’t central to our overall happiness. We can be all-in with our minds and avoid being all-in with our self-esteem.

But what happens when we do get fired?

Bridges writes, “Every transition begins with an ending. We have to let go of the old thing before we can pick up the new one—not just outwardly, but inwardly, where we keep our connections to people and places that act as definitions of who we are.”

For me, a key point of the book is that while the end of an experience often happens suddenly—changing jobs, ending a relationship, losing a friend—the emotional process of accepting that end is often drawn out and messy. That’s why there’s the neutral zone, in which we’re figuring out What the hell just happened and asking What is this world I’m living in? 

Bridges recommends questions we should ask ourselves when dealing with an ending:

“1. What is it time to let go of in my own life right now?”

“2. What is standing backstage, in the wings of my life, waiting to make its entrance?”

And here too, I think: Shouldn’t we ask ourselves that all the time?