If you are reading this in the weeks after a senior role ended, this is for you. It is a map of the five stages you are about to move through, in the order they arrive, and what to do at each one before it costs you the next role.

I have sat with enough senior people through this to know the stages are not personal. They happen to almost everyone. Knowing they are coming is most of the work.

Stage one: shame

You update the headline to Open to Work and you feel the whole platform watching you do it. You rehearse what you will say to the people who ask. You decide who to tell and who to protect from the news, and the people you protect are usually the ones who would have helped you most.

The shame comes from being seen as the kind of person this happens to, far more than from the firing itself.

What to do: tell three people in the first week, before you tell the platform. Pick three specific people whose judgement you respect and who have nothing to gain from your situation. The shame loses most of its weight the first time you say it out loud to someone whose opinion of you does not change. Wait longer than a week and the shame compounds into silence, and silence is stage four.

Stage two: the math

The salary that came off their balance sheet did not disappear. It moved onto your mortgage, onto the school fees, onto the medication that was covered last month and is not covered this month. The company called it a cost reduction. In your house it is called rent.

What to do: in the first ten days, sit down and write the actual runway, the real one rather than the one you tell people. Then write the runway after one specific cost is cut, and the runway after a second one. Nothing gets cut yet. The point is to have the data that lets you make decisions from clarity instead of from panic. The senior people who under-price themselves at offer stage are the ones who never did this exercise and were negotiating against a fear they had not measured.

Stage three: the failure audit

You start to wonder if they were right. You go back through the last two years and find the meetings where you should have spoken up, the project you should have pushed harder on, the relationship you should have built. You audit yourself with the same brutality the market is about to.

What to do: run the audit, but finish it. Most senior people start this and never close it, which means it runs in the background for months and corrodes how they interview. Give yourself a single afternoon. Write down what you would do differently. Then write down what was outside your control. Both lists exist. Both are true. The audit is finished when you can hold both at once without one cancelling the other.

Stage four: the silence

Your peers are busy. The recruiters who used to call have gone quiet. The people who said let me know if I can help meant it, but they do not know what help looks like, and you do not know how to ask.

What to do: stop asking for help and ask for specific things. The default ask from senior people in this stage is "can I send you my CV", and it almost never works. The person on the other end opens it, has no context for what would actually help you, and replies with something polite and forgettable. Say this instead: "I am preparing for a CFO conversation at a series B fintech next Tuesday. You sit on a board with someone who runs that kind of company. Would you be willing to spend twenty minutes telling me what they will care about that I might miss?" That ask gets answered. The senior network answers specific requests and ignores vague ones.

Stage five: the compromise

You walk into a room and you under-price yourself, because the mortgage is louder than the market rate. You take the first offer, because the second one might not come. You accept a title half a level below what you held, because half a level feels safer than the silence.

This is the most expensive stage and the one most senior people do not realise they are in until two years later, when they are trying to climb back to the level they left.

What to do: before any offer conversation, write down the floor you will not go below. That floor covers title, scope, base, and who you would be reporting to. Write it before the conversation, not during. Then write the reason for each floor. The reasons are the part that holds when the conversation gets hard. Without the reasons, the floor collapses under the first counter-offer that uses your fear as leverage.

What I want you to know

You are not the person the exit conversation made you feel like. You are the person who built a career substantial enough that losing a piece of it hurts this much. That person is still here. The five stages are a passage, and you are already moving through it.

The hardest part of all of this is the story you build about the firing itself, in the first weeks, when you are alone with it. The version of that story you walk into the next interview with, decides almost everything that happens next. Most senior people never get to revise it, because no one ever sits with them while they tell it for the first time.
​
If you are inside this and want to think through how you are framing your own version, that conversation is available here, and it is free.

Sometimes the most expensive stage is the one you walk through alone when you did not have to.
​
Anca