From Fired to Released: How to Own the Way Forward

This month’s post is going to be a little different from the norm. I’ve been thinking through some ideas for a few years now and this is a first step in threading them together publicly. This will be a three-part series of sharing a personal experience and unpacking the change that came with it. After numerous conversations and a lot of feedback, I think this is timely, and my hope is that it may be helpful. I do want to preface this with the understanding that I had a unique experience, and everyone’s career path carries its own uniqueness. Please take this for what it is and thank you, as always, for being part of the Building Momentum newsletter. It’s been a fun ride and there’s a whole lot more ahead.

The Pandemic, Parental Leave, and Re-finding Identity

I took a call on April 15, 2021 that changed everything. After two and a half months of paternity leave, I was transitioning back to the office. Over the previous eleven weeks, I’d had an incredible opportunity to unplug from work at one of the most important spans of time in the life of my family. We’d been isolated for months due to the pandemic and needed space and time to be fully present, together. Our third child was born at the end of January, and my wife and I went from being plugged-in almost constantly as we kept our kids learning and our jobs running to breaking away to understand our identity as a family of five. We’d also just moved from Boston to the Rhode Island suburbs, leaving friends and familiarity for a new space that was closer to our parents and siblings.

Life was full of optimism, finally. It was a new year. Vaccines were on the way. I’d begun planning for an MBA.

Then I took a Thursday afternoon call in preparation for my return to work, and this is what I heard: “Today is your last day of employment with us.”

The shock of being separated from part of my identity

No matter how prepared you might be – and I felt especially prepared – to hear these words, it’s still shocking. Even today, knowing everything I know now and have experienced since, it is arresting to repeat those words out loud. Those are the words that I heard on Thursday, April 15, 2021, the day I was reborn into professional life, and my actual life.

Those nine words liberated me from a life I felt tied to and opened me to a life I now lead.

To understand everything after this, I need to share what came before. How I arrived at this place, how my identity got wrapped up in my job, and how I worked to free it over a remarkable eight months of parental leave and unemployment before moving to my next phase of life.

The Great Recession (2007-2009)

When I joined that company, I was 28, fresh off two hundred ignored job applications and three total interviews over a span of two years of trying and applying every week. One was for a sales job that equated to in-person Groupon sales, one was for a teaching job where I didn’t get past the first-round despite being a licensed and experienced teacher and Fulbright scholar, and the last one was this amazing opportunity where they not only interviewed me but actually wanted to hire me.

After 739 days of rejection, someone wanted me, but I had to leave Philly and move to Boston, which I didn’t feel ready to do. Thankfully, timing is everything; the phrase exists for a reason. I received the offer on my birthday, which also happened to be the start of my 5-year college reunion weekend, where I learned that one of my best friends was moving to Boston a few weeks later.

The difficulty of the choice changed quickly. I made my decision, uprooted my life, and was living on a couch in Boston ten days later. As I write this, I’m fresh off my 20th reunion with the friends that helped shape that decision 15 years ago. So cool how life works out.

The Work Identity

Within three weeks of making my decision, I was on a plane to Caracas, Venezuela as I started a six-week journey across South America and the Caribbean to gather prices and interview real estate and relocation agents, while enjoying personal adventures like some scuba diving, visiting historic sites, and generally loving life because traveling – especially off the beaten path – is one of my favorite things ever.

That job and that time in life was unique and wonderful, and it made me unique and wonderful to others. I was a global scavenger-hunter, going all over the world to collect cost of living data. It sounded like a made-up job.

And that part of it was beautiful.

Fast forward two years, and I was feeling a travel weary. My siblings had started having kids, and I wanted to be around to see them grow and get to know them. I switched from roughly six months of travel during the year to roughly four and took on a more office-based roll. After another year of that, I met my future wife and transitioned to traveling two months a year and then, not long after, only on an occasional basis.

By 2014, things started to lose that initial luster, and I started to lose my identity in the role. I was no longer traveling and was working in an office day in and day out. It was no longer the job I’d wanted, but really a role that I fell into and tried to shape to meet my needs. We had good health care and amazing flexibility. It seemed like the place to stay – why would I leave a role that gave me the things that supported me and my family, even if it wasn’t fulfilling in the way I wanted it to be?

Making a choice to not make a choice

I had an amazing work-life balance. I got married. We had our first child. And the company had great health insurance. How could I leave? This company made me unique and everyone knew me as the exotic and interesting traveler – at least that’s how I identified whether it was still a reality or not. What was I to do?

I leaned into who I’ve always been. I’ve always appreciated having multiple balls in the air, irons in the fire, so I applied to jobs and figured out an entrepreneurial approach by getting my real estate license to supplement my income and interests. I began investing in properties in 2011 and this was a natural progression to take control and vertically integrate my operation, while also increasing my income to account for my growing family.

This approach worked for the next several years. We had another child and were able to afford having two kids in daycare in Boston. We were able to own a home with enough space for our growing family, making us very fortunate.

But my identity got lost in this part-time marketing, part-time real estate, and part-time frustrated with my professional life role. That continued for years, but I was too busy – or, I should say, I was very good at making myself too busy – to think about it too much. Regardless, it ate away at me. It ate away at my soul. It ate away at who I was and who I wanted to be.

Fast forward to April 15, 2021.

Disbelief, Turned Relief, Turned Excitement

I daydreamed of being fired. It’s sick, right? But I bet there are many others out there doing this exact thing today, all the time. After twelve years at the same company with no space to move, I was stuck.? I’d applied to jobs frequently, but never got many interviews and also never got meaningful offers. In hindsight, I may have been aiming too high, trying to capture more in a transition than what was realistic with salary, job title, etc. I was in a niche industry and struggled mightily with articulating how to frame my company and role in a clear and digestible way.

When I got paid to leave my company, not only was I given a long runway to sort out my next steps, but I was finally forced to do things that I was not doing all along.

Being Released

I’m not positive I said it this way and, if I didn’t, it was for a lack of articulation in how I felt, but the end of my employment felt like an immediate release into the world of possibility, which I’d been detached from for far too long. April 15, 2021 was a rebirth of who I was and an opportunity to rethink everything about my identity. I was given an opportunity to redirect who I was as a professional and reimagine who I really am as a person, a husband, a father, a friend, a son, a brother, a coach, and all the other roles we all fill on a daily, weekly, monthly, seasonal, and yearly basis.

In the next installment, I’ll unpack the steps I took to own my release and find my best way forward.

Thank you for reading this far. If you did read this far, please consider recommending this newsletter to someone you think would appreciate it like you do.

Thanks again and have a wonderful Labor Day Weekend!

Gerry