What the Disruption Clarified

Retrenchment generates more noise than almost any other career moment.

Not just the external noise — the uncertainty about income, the questions from your network, the practical decisions that need to be made quickly. The internal noise. The doubt about what the decision says about you. The rumination about whether a different move, a better conversation, a more visible performance could have changed the outcome.

That noise is expensive. It is also where most of the energy goes.

What I have watched happen in the people who navigate this well is a single shift. At some point, often quietly, they stop asking what the decision says about them. They start asking what the disruption revealed.

Those are different questions. The first directs energy toward the organisation's verdict. The second directs it toward something that was already there but had been underweighted.

My own retrenchment taught me this.

When my function was no longer needed, I spent time in the doubt. If I was that good, why could they not find a similar role for me? I ran the rumination pattern. I tried to work out whether the decision was about the function or about me.

The turning point was smaller than I expected. It came when I asked myself what I would actually miss. Not the title. Not the travel or the seniority. What I would miss most was the coaching — the specific work of sitting with an analyst who could not yet see what they were capable of, and watching the moment when they began to.

That was the return that had been generating all along. The disruption had not created it. It had clarified it.

Disruption has a way of removing the noise and leaving only what matters.

This week's ROE Letter is the most personal in the series. And this Thursday, Brief 3 gives paid subscribers a three-stage tool to ask the same question — whatever form their disruption took.

https://substack.com/@charmianlong

If the noise were removed from your career right now — what would be left?