I Still Have Something to Say

Prepping a talk for MBA grads facing an uncertain future ended up being exactly what I needed in this moment.

I’ve been working in digital media and marketing roles for nearly three decades, and during that time, I’ve had the opportunity to speak and write for a lot of audiences. Because most of my career has been in career, compensation, and HR-related businesses, many of those audiences have been work-related in some way — those navigating their career, job seekers, college students or recent grads, business leaders, HR professionals.

When I recently lost my job, like so many others, I felt myself adrift without title or employer or day-to-day work responsibilities to anchor to. It’s amazing how quickly decades of experience can feel inconsequential.

Part of what pulled me out of my tailspin was being asked by a friend who teaches parttime at a university to speak to a group of MBA students about to graduate. She didn’t want to hear from me because of my company association. She didn’t ask me because of my current title. She said she asked because she’s heard me speak before, and she knows I have something more to say.

She knew it before I did, but she was right. It turns out my voice did not belong to my employer, and the life experience and opinions and learnings I’ve gathered over time are still mine and still worth sharing — if only for my own sake.

I still have something to say.

I hope what I have to say can help someone else in some way.

Just the act of putting this talk on resiliency together has already helped me. It reminded me that part of what makes me who I am is an innate curiosity that drives me to ask questions paired with a desire to make the world a bit better.

Maybe I’ll end up using those skills again for an employer. Maybe I’ll start something new. Regardless, I plan to keep using my voice to ask questions, tell stories, and hopefully make the world a bit better along the way.

Full Resiliency Video Transcript Below

Let’s really examine that word.

Resiliency is an ability to recover from or adjust easily to adversity or change.

Do you adjust easily to change? I know I don’t.

We’re all facing some level of adversity or change in 2026. It’s scary out there for everybody, whether you’re currently working for a company, for yourself, whether you’re unemployed or underemployed. The workplace and job market feel unrecognizable in many ways. AI is suddenly everywhere, people are being laid off in huge numbers, whole categories of jobs are under threat (supposedly). We shall see what actually comes to pass there.

And knowing it’s not the only upheaval in the history of the workplace maybe helps a little, but it doesn’t make it a lot simpler to navigate what’s happening when you’re in the thick of it.

It is easy to suddenly feel “not enough” — that maybe we don’t have the right skills or education or experience; that maybe our boss or that next hiring manager won’t believe we can do the job; that maybe it’s too hard to climb that next mountain and learn that new technology.

The Ma Bell Experiment

I did come across this really interesting experiment though. It happened during the antitrust breakup of Ma Bell (better known as AT&T) and a bunch of other smaller companies (known as the baby bells).

And, it was a psychologist Salvatore Maddi who partnered up with an executive at Ma Bell since everyone could see the writing on the wall and knew the breakup was coming. They wanted to see how employees were impacted by this significant change and upheaval in their lives.

The majority of people — whether they kept their jobs or lost them during the transition — were devastated by the change. There were divorces, strokes, suicides, heart attacks, addiction. It was awful.

But one-third of people — whether they were in the group that stayed at the company or were laid off — didn’t just survive, they thrived. They either became high-ranking leaders at the newly formed company or became stars at their new companies. On paper, they looked like everyone else. They didn’t have less stressful jobs, more education, easier home lives, more privilege.

But they did something very differently than their peers.

They didn’t live in regret asking what they could have done differently or why it happened to them.

Instead, they looked to the future and asked, “what can I do now to improve my situation?”

Here’s the truth that ultimately we all know, but we routinely forget.

You are not the jobs you’ve held, the degrees you’ve earned, the places you’ve worked, the accolades you’ve received, the technologies you’ve mastered.

You are something more.

You’d think it’d be easy to remember who you are. It’s not always, when the world is changing and the voices outside yourself telling you who you ought to be are so loud.

Stripping everything away and defining who you are at your core can be hard work. The world is bound and determined to shake our foundations, but that core is what is truly unshakable, and it’s essential to developing resiliency. It’s work you’ll likely have to do more than once in your life. I’d encourage you to think about this and write it down at some point. Next time you need to remember, pull it back out.

The adjectives here reflect kind of what came up for me as I thought through this exercise. They may look different for you. But, stay away from job titles or areas of study. And, if you’re having a hard time, ask the people around you how they’d describe you. Once you have your list, think about how those descriptors translate to skills. What does that core make you innately good at?

You know, a great example is:

• If you’re curious, you’re likely great at telling stories.

• If you’re empathetic? Fantastic at relationship-building.

• Bold? You’re a leader.

• Candid? Providing feedback.

• Tech savvy? Great at building things.

The other piece to consider is your non-negotiables or your values. Any fans of “The Bear”? It’s a show originally on FX about a restaurant and its staff (but also so much more). Carmy, the chef, had a list of what he called “non-negotiables.” Were they his values? Maybe, or maybe super unrealistic standards he held the people around him to. It’s OK, though, to have a set of things that are so core to who you are and how you operate that they’re not something you can compromise on, because when you do, you feel a sense of dissonance.

In moments when you feel you have less agency and room to negotiate, remember that there are still things that can make a situation more or less tolerable. Even if the pay or the job title isn’t quite what you need it to be, you know, maybe after a layoff, can you find an employer that at least shares your most important values? Your non-negotiables.

Build Authentic Relationships

The reason people don’t like networking is often that it’s not built on authenticity. And, often, when you’re in a room of people networking, everyone is trying to figure out who the “right people” are to connect with who can help them in some way. That’s the exact wrong way to think about building your professional network, or at least that’s what I’ve always found. When you approach professional relationships in the same way you do personal relationships, to a degree, magical things can happen.

I’ve found this to be true throughout my career.

You really, you know, you want to get curious, ask questions, seek to understand someone for the sake of just being in that moment and that conversation.

And, as you’re building that network:

• Show up for people in the moments that matter to them, even when it feels inconvenient for you.

• Go out of your way to make a connection.

• Follow through on what you say you’re going to do.

That’s what creates real connections and people who will show up for you when you need it most.

Keep Learning

As your career progresses, you can get complacent and decide you’ve mastered all you need to master, but if this most recent wave of AI in the workplace has taught us anything, it’s that everyone, at every level, still has more to learn.

And, if you’ve recently experienced a layoff, it can be hard to see that as an opportunity of any type, but it may be one of the only times in your career when you have dedicated time to deep dive into growing your skills in a way that can feel really challenging when working fulltime.

Stay Open to Different Paths

I have never been a fan of the concept of a 5-year plan, and at the pace of change in our world, who can see that far down the road?

If you’re locked into a particular path, you might miss the turnoff that could represent a major opportunity.

There are so many more potential income streams than there used to be, and that can feel really unsettling, but it’s also exciting. Your next career move doesn’t have to look one way. Maybe you want to launch a startup, or work at multiple companies in a fractional capacity, or switch careers.

We can’t stop change from happening, but we can be more ready for it when it does.

Ask for Help When You Need It

This is a hard one for so many of us. No one wants to have to ask for help, but we all need it sometimes, especially during times of change, and especially when we’re struggling.

You’ll find that when you reach out, the people reaching back aren’t always the ones you expected. But, if you never try, you’ll never know. And, in my experience, vulnerability is strength.

The Formula for Change

I’ll leave you with this. Apparently there is a formula for change. I know, I know how did I slip math in here? But, back in the 1960s, it was created by a change management consultant at the Arthur D. Little firm, and it underwent several revisions over time.

Ultimately, though, it landed here:

C = D x V x F x S > R

C = Change

D = Dissatisfaction with how things are
V = Vision of what’s possible
F = First concrete steps toward vision
S = Support for follow through

R = Resistance to change

That when you combine a dissatisfaction with how things are along with a vision of what’s possible, and the first concrete steps toward that vision, along with the support to follow through, you are able to overcome our very human resistance to change.

But, I realized, those also feel like the makeup of resiliency. And, resiliency is what allows us to overcome our resistance to change and adjust to the transitions that will inevitably come our way.

It’s what allows us to move from living in the past, and living with regret, to moving toward the future.