While they were talking, I wasn’t fully listening.
My boss and the HR rep were explaining the terms of my exit — the four months of paid leave, the options, the paperwork I’d need to review. And somewhere in the middle of all of it, I was having a completely different conversation in my head.
I don’t like working for this guy anyway.
I already knew I wasn’t going to stay when my contract ended.
Is this actually… a good thing?
I didn’t say any of that out loud. I took the paperwork, thanked the HR rep — who was visibly uncomfortable, because she was good at her job and this wasn’t her favorite part of it — and I left.
By 9:30, I was home. Sweats on. Sitting on the couch with a strange mix of shock and something I couldn’t quite name yet.
If this is hitting a nerve, save this — you may want to come back to it later.
A few hours later, my phone rang. It was two women from my team — Jolene and Cheri. Word had gotten out, and they were calling to check on me.
Before I could say much, one of them said: “We already know what you’re going to tell us. You’re better off than we are.”
I had to laugh. Because those were my words.
About a year earlier, we’d had to let someone go from the team. They were devastated about it, even though, honestly, they hadn’t loved working with her. And I had said to them: look, I know it feels bad. But she’s better off than you are. She gets to move on. You’re the ones who have to pick up the slack and keep going through all of this.
And now here they were, handing those words back to me.
I told them no, no — you’re going to be fine, things are going to work out. I was sitting on my couch in sweats, freshly fired, reassuring my team that everything was okay.
It was equal parts absurd and kind of perfect.
That afternoon I went to the gym. My trainer looked up and asked how my day was. I said: “I got fired.” Without missing a beat, he said: “Well… now you can work out twice a day.”
Something shifted in that moment. Not because the comment was profound. But because it was so completely unbothered by what had just happened to me.
It moved the frame from this happened to me to now I get to decide what’s next.
And what I realized, sitting with that over the days and weeks that followed, was this: I had already known I didn’t want to stay. I had already made a quiet decision that when my contract ended, I wasn’t going to continue working for that leader. But I hadn’t acted on it. I kept delivering. I kept moving forward inside a structure I had privately decided to leave.
Getting fired didn’t just remove a job.
It removed a direction I hadn’t been willing to walk away from on my own.
I didn’t rush into another role. I went on a few interviews, but I couldn’t bring myself to step back into the same pattern. I had spent years in corporate America working hard, delivering results, being the person organizations could count on. And I was exhausted in a way that another job title wasn’t going to fix.
So I took the time. I sat with it. I let myself think about what I actually wanted — not what made sense on paper, not what the next logical step was, but what I genuinely wanted to build next and who I wanted to be in that work.
That period was uncomfortable. It was also the most clarifying stretch of my career.
Because up until that point, I had built everything on performance. What I hadn’t developed was how to position myself intentionally, how to define my own direction, and how to make decisions before they got made for me.
That shift didn’t happen overnight. But it started on that couch, in those sweats, with a phone full of people checking on me and a trainer who couldn’t have cared less that I’d just lost my job.
And it’s the reason I do the work I do now.
I see so many high performers doing exactly what I was doing — delivering, executing, staying focused on what’s directly in front of them — without ever stepping back to ask:
Is this still the direction I want?
Am I positioned for what’s next?
Or am I waiting for something else to decide that for me?
Sometimes the thing that forces the question is a choice you make.
Sometimes it’s a meeting at 8 a.m. with a stack of binders you won’t be needing.
Either way, the question is worth asking before someone else answers it for you.
That’s what getting fired gave me that the job never could.
Confidence was never the lever.
Clarity, visibility, and intentional direction are.
P.S. Here’s a link to download the Value Vault — a simple Wins Tracker to help you document and communicate your impact.:
