Kerrie
“Some stories don’t have a clear beginning, middle, and end…"
Life is about not knowing, having to change, taking a moment and making the best of it without knowing what will happen next. Delicious ambiguity.” - Gilda Radner
Looking back at the whole experience, the writing was on the wall from the very start. It began when I butted heads with my former boss (and the COO of the organization) over someone I had hired. My new employee wasn’t getting along with her team and wasn't a good cultural fit. The COO was concerned about our organization’s exposure to compliance issues since the employee had made some complaints. He feared she would call the Medicaid hotline, triggering millions of dollars in fines due to the innocent mistakes people made that stemmed from their lack of proper training.
This was the highest-level leadership role I'd had in my career, and I knew I needed to grow my decision-making skills. I was recruited by the person who had occupied the post before me, who was stepping aside to take on an important role in city government. When I had interviewed unsuccessfully two years earlier for a different job, she had told me, "You know you're perfect," even though, at the time, I wasn’t offered a role. Now, she had reached back out to me to backfill her own role, and I was flattered that she remembered me and thought so highly of me to make me her chosen successor.
When the COO started raising concerns over the new employee, I thought it was unfortunate that we hadn’t seen eye-to-eye since early on. I had left another job only nine months into it to start this job, and I had just recently admitted to myself my disappointment in how things were going. Despite my apprehension, I continued to do what I needed to do, but even so, my role lasted from September to May. In just nine short months, my experience as a Vice President overseeing all of the agency's clinical services, managing two Medicaid adult daycare programs, and starting up an Article 31 clinic ended abruptly.
To be fair, I knew early on that this job wasn't going to be a good fit. The other executives never seemed to see eye-to-eye when making key decisions. The agency also felt like it operated in a perpetual state of crisis, which was reflected in a high turnover rate among the staff. I made my share of mistakes. I didn’t trust my gut when I hired someone who wasn't my top choice. She was the person that the team she would be working with preferred. I was new, and I tried to make them happy, and in doing so, I ignored some red flags.
Sometimes, you don’t get to decide when it’s time to leave and move on to the next, better job. Sometimes, somebody else will choose for you, and then you're just rolling with the punches and going with it. But, of course, you can't control everything, and you have to let go when other people are making the decision. Often, they are looking out for what they think is best and right for the organization, the bottom line, and their mission, and somehow, you aren’t a part of that equation.
When I was laid off, I saw it as a sign that I wasn’t meant to continue in this direction. To be honest, I also felt a great sense of relief. It was a tough decision, and I was released from it, but of course, there was also an overwhelming feeling of uncertainty about what I would do next. After all, it’s even harder when somebody else makes decisions about your career.
I had a decent salary to survive in New York for four months with the severance they had given me. I said to myself, “Well, you’ve always dreamed of starting your own therapy practice. It’s now or never.” It was probably that same day or the day after when I told myself, "I'm going to do this." It was something I had already subconsciously been thinking about for a while. I had done some preliminary research a few years before and started dreaming about what it would be like to have my own practice. What would I need? What could I expect to earn? And so, I did it. I got started almost immediately. It was a helpful distraction from what had just happened to me. Now I had something to focus on that was positive and exciting, and I went for it.
My first transition:
I can’t believe I started my private practice in July 2015. Being laid off and going through that experience permitted me to start my own practice because I don't know if I would have done it for myself without that push. If I hadn’t been given four months' severance, maybe I wouldn't have had the courage, but all of these things did happen, and I looked at it as a sign telling me, “You need to do this." It was almost a spiritual thing, a sign that if I'm ever going to do this, I'm going to do it right now.
It's critical to look at your role in what happens to you. It doesn't mean I didn't have anything to do with the decision to let me go. It’s really important to mention that-- but I think it was positioned in a way that would require me to say, "Okay. What will I do differently moving forward, and what do you think you learned about yourself from this experience?” I was entering into my first transition period.
The first weekend after I was laid off, one of my good friends was visiting for the weekend. She was in town for work and staying at my apartment. So that was serendipitous, too, because she's always been a mentor to me and somebody I could reach out to about career dilemmas. When she arrived, I was feeling very vulnerable and just very sad. Like a failure. All those things. I think, contemplating, "Oh, is my starting a business now-- my own private practice, a mistake? Or is this truly the direction I need to go in?" I didn't have it in myself to think, have hope, or see something great that I would be building with my practice. But she had a vision for it and could see it and reflect it back to me. It was a vision of me that I needed to see at that moment.
There is shame and guilt associated with being laid off and inevitable thoughts like “what are people going to think?” To add to this, I would say that I tend to have core competency issues, and I am always striving to prove my competence. I would tell myself, "You can rely on me. I'm the one who will solve this problem. I'm the one who's going to make this decision and execute it perfectly." And a lot of that striving is to compensate for what I thought about myself. And I think I did a lot of that in my career very early on. Clearly, this would be something I needed to work on as I began my next chapter.
My second transition:
My second transition period forced me to think about the very idea of what a private practice represents. Until this point in my career, I had always worked in social justice, helping vulnerable populations. Unfortunately, in our professional community, doing the “private practice” thing is looked down on. It’s like you aren’t a true social worker if you're working with people who have money, especially since my practice would be primarily private pay instead of insurance. I chose to move forward and embrace the work, knowing I could find just as much fulfillment in helping people in need wherever I met them.
After being laid off, I jumped right in. I wanted to try a bunch of different things to see what would stick. I decided on two focus areas: working as a solo practitioner, seeing clients, and organizational consulting. At first, I had many irons in the fire for many different projects, but nothing ever fully came to fruition except for some work I did with a team at a school. I did a lot of individual work with one of the students, which helped me realize that I just wanted to focus on growing my private practice.
When I look back to the person I was then, I had to ask some really hard questions about who I am now. I would say I’m confident about who I am and what I bring to the table. I can look more honestly at myself now than I could then. I think I’m still the same work in progress. I think I'm more likely now to be able to go through something hard and say, "What can I learn from this?" And also to take responsibility. I think the biggest lesson is how to own your shit.
I can look at things now and say, "Oh, that's hard to look at, but I need to take a hard look." The things that are not going to serve me well. I'm more able to do that now.
How do we get people to do more self-exploration, not just when something happens and you’re forced to do it, but because it’s the greatest gift you can give yourself?
People have to do it when they're ready to do it. And sometimes, starting when you're in a better place will be better because you’ll be better positioned to do deeper work. But how do we get people to do that? The more people open up and talk about it, the more they say, "Hey, I can't meet Thursday night because I have therapy. But how about Friday night?" The more people are willing to talk about things, letting their guard down, the more people will see this as something they can also do and don't have to present as having some major mental health problem. They can choose to do therapy to learn to become more self-aware, learn more about themselves, and look at it almost like personal development.
They can also hire a coach. They will learn a lot about themselves and their abilities that way. They could sign up for newsletters, read self-development books, listen to podcasts, and then, with intention, say, "How do I want to apply these things that resonate with me to my life in an intentional way?" Just saying, "What's going to click with me, what do I like, and how does it help me look at myself differently? And can I grow from this?"
It's so hard for people to talk about being laid off. The more we talk about it, the more we learn from failure and disappointments. We can't grow without being uncomfortable and change without making mistakes or ups and downs. We can't be the people we want to be without something happening, without experiencing something that makes us realize what we’re capable of, of how we can survive and cope with something bad. We should listen and ask, "How did you get through that, and how are you stronger because of it? I want to learn from that. I want to see how hard you worked and what got you there. And I also want to do the same for myself."
I'm thinking of all the people I turn to in my life for clear advice, and they're all people who've been fired before and will all talk to me about it. And then I know that they've been through something hard, and they're people who I admire. I have that much more respect for them. They're the people who guide me when I'm going through something hard because they've been there and understand it. And if it can happen to them, it can happen to me, and so that's important. As far as how to get people to talk about being laid off - we need to talk about it. We need to write books about it, like this one, and that’s why people need to read this book.
If you have been laid off or have not experienced it yet, but it could happen to you, here’s what you should know.
Be open to what can come from it. Every situation is different. Everyone goes through various stages of dealing with it. When you talk about its stages versus its business, emotions flood in. Timing is important, too, because I won't tell them to be optimistic about what's around the corner for them if the universe is telling them a different story. Sometimes, you have to help people feel their feelings and deal with everything that comes with it because it is human to feel sad and attached to it, which is a really big hardship.
If I have a client going through a layoff, I will affirm that person and tell them everything that I see in them because they're probably not seeing it about themselves. It's helpful that you're just doing your best to be that person's cheerleader and build them up. If it’s someone you know, a family member, a friend, whoever it might be, be there with them in the muck of it. It's okay to get down to their level and to say, "Your boss sucks—what a shitty boss. You didn't deserve that to happen to you that way." It's okay to join in with them.
I do that when something immediate and shocking happens to my clients because that's what they need. They need to be validated. They need to be affirmed for who they are. When they're strong enough, I help them reflect on what happened to them. Only then will we explore the situation and investigate how it creates opportunities to do something different moving forward. As far as advice I would give to someone who has been laid off, your first instinct is to ask, "Oh, what did you do?" Or "What happened?” Of course, you want to know what happened, but it’s better to be there and to feel with the person. Be on their team. It doesn't matter what they did. Validate who they are outside of their job, outside of their career. Affirm who they are to you and who they are outside of your relationship.
Where are they now:
Kerrie loved looking back at who she was then to where she is now and how she has evolved. She loves the freedom of running a group practice and doing things that she loves to do that aren’t connected to her office hours. She has expanded her practice and is thinking about how to contribute to a bigger dialog about mental health and reducing stigma, how we are resilient, and how we have it within us to go through hard things. We can come out better and stronger on the other side. We can learn so much and be there for others in this way. She is inspired not just by mental health but also by the hard things that people go through. How do we combat loneliness? How do we help people break down barriers that help people truly connect in a healing connection? And how do we look at mental health as relational health? Answering these questions is part of her mission. She loves the idea that her practice has a mission.
Today, they focus very much on individuals and their work with CBT; they have expanded to be more relational. They work with couples, which she has been doing for several years, and she appreciates being able to work in that capacity. Kerrie would love to work more closely with families, whole kinds of family systems, and then organizationally with communities.
Kerrie loves to travel, and she and her husband Russ are always talking about going to live in Mexico City for a month because they can work remotely. For now, she feels so grounded in her practice every day. She loves having the flexibility to do something like that if they want to and giving herself permission to do that. She truly believes anything is possible. Who knows what’s out there for her, but she is excited and ready for the journey.
