Chloe Hooper.
Chloe Hooper, founder, The Limitless Equation
Whenever someone calls to tell me they’ve been made redundant, I always say the same thing: congratulations.
I know how that sounds. But I mean it completely. Because if you’ve been made redundant, it means there was a misalignment between you and the business and in every single case I’ve seen, it works out best for the person who was let go. They always go on to do something that makes them happier. I’ve genuinely never seen it land any other way.
What I have seen, again and again, is people handle the aftermath badly. Not because they aren’t capable but because they’re using a framework that was never built for how humans actually process loss. Corporate grief is a real thing.
Over the last while, so many people have reached out to me for support with redundancy coaching. And it’s a cruel irony: redundancy is the moment in your career when you need a coach the most, but it’s also the moment you have the least financial security to pay for one. So I wanted to write down what I normally say in that first session; the framework I actually use so anyone reading this can use it if they need it. Given how many people are being made redundant right now, I’m hoping it offers an alternative to the way this is usually handled.
Here’s what I know works.
Stage one: feel it first. You’ve been hit with the biggest uncertainty of your career at the exact moment your confidence has been shattered. The instinct is to power through - stiffen the upper lip, get practical, immediately start defining the kind of company you want next. But you cannot strategise your way out of grief. You have to move through it.
So before anything else, let yourself acknowledge that this is genuinely sad. Sit with the anger and the disappointment. Name it. Because here’s what happens when people skip this step: the redundancy becomes part of their identity. They spend all their energy stuck in the emotion of it, and they never actually leave it behind. Then they go out into the world and lead with the hurt instead of leading with what makes them great. They’re trying to rush the process and you can feel it in the room.
Stage two: reclaim your value. Once you’ve processed the emotion, get clear on what you actually bring. Your strengths. Your impact. The reason any organisation would be lucky to have you. This is where you rebuild the case for yourself, on your own terms - not as a reaction to what you’ve just left, but as a genuine reckoning with how good you are.
Stage three: pitch with intention. From that grounded place, work out which organisations are genuinely the best fit for you, and go after them from strength, not scarcity. You’re not desperately applying to everything. You’re choosing where you want to be and showing them exactly why they’d be lucky to have you.
Do it in this order and you come out the other side clearer, more confident, and far more compelling to the right employer. Do it backwards; pitching before you’ve dealt with the grief - and you just carry the hurt into the next chapter.
I won’t pretend any of this is easy. Being made redundant is one of the hardest, most destabilising things that can happen in a career. It can make you question your worth, your decisions, your whole sense of who you are. That fear is real, and it’s allowed.
But this is exactly why I do the work I do, because underneath all of it sits one thing: your belief in yourself. A business decided a role was no longer needed. That is not the same as you no longer being needed. Your value didn’t disappear the day your job did - it’s still entirely yours to carry into whatever comes next. The redundancy doesn’t get to define you. Your belief in yourself does.
So yes. Congratulations. Now go and do this right.