Chloe Hooper.
Chloe Hooper, founder, The Limitless Equation
Lose the job and you have to walk into the room without a brand behind your name. Here's why the blank line under your name was never the part that mattered.
You've lost your job. You've felt the grief. Now the part most people hate - it's time to network, and you have to do it without a job title.
That's the moment I hear it. Someone walks into a room, glances down at a name badge with nothing underneath it, and thinks: there's nothing behind my name.
I wrote recently for AdNews about corporate grief, and so many of you reached out to say it helped. This is the part that comes next. Because once the grief has had its moment, you have to walk back into a room full of people - and that's where the fear shows up loudest.
I know it, because I've stood in it myself.
When I started my business, I went to an industry event and felt genuinely embarrassed looking down at my badge. Underneath "Chloe Hooper" that it was blank. I hadn't even decided what I was building. I missed my old badge. "Head of New Business and Marketing, PHD" that line used to make me feel like I was worth more, like a big brand was vouching for me. Now it was just my name on a lanyard, and it felt thin.
Here's what that taught me. I hadn't been made redundant. I'd chosen this. Nobody took anything from me and I still felt that flush of embarrassment at the registration desk. Which told me the fear was never about losing a job. It was about standing in a room feeling like your name needs a brand behind it to count.
It doesn't. You're just looking at the wrong line.
A name badge has two lines. The top line is your name. The line underneath is your title and we spend whole careers fixated on that bottom line, when the truth is it can say anything. Head of New Business and Marketing. Group Account Director. Founder. Between things. It's a variable. It changes every time you move. The meaning was never down there.
The meaning is in the line above. Your name holds it. The title is just whatever label happened to be sitting underneath it this season. So the bottom line can say "nothing" for a while and you haven't lost a thing because nothing you care about was ever stored there. Your experience, every lesson and campaign and relationship you built, lives with the name, not the role. None of it walked out the door.
So what actually got taken? Not your worth. Your pride.
Inside a business, a lot of our pride points outward, at the brand. That's not a flaw - it's the point. You should feel proud of where you work; you should want to say the name out loud. But it means your pride gets tangled up with a logo. So when the brand goes, the pride goes with it, and you mistake that for your worth disappearing. It didn't.
The work is to switch that pride over - from how proud you are of where you worked, to how proud you are of yourself. Same pride, pointed at the person who earned the experience in the first place. You.
That's what self-belief actually is. Not pretending your name was always full of meaning, but deciding to give it meaning. What does it mean to be you - not your title, you? That's not a question the company was ever going to answer. It's yours.
And you don't answer it at home. You answer it in a room, in front of people.
There's never been a more important time to network, or a worse time to hide from it. As Jodi Murray-Freedman Baker's Delight said to me on The Limitless Equation podcast: it's called networking because you actually have to work at it. It's not a thing you have. It's a thing you do.
A client told me recently that someone she really valued blanked her at an event; a person she'd have expected to stop, smile, make time. It stung. There's a famous piece of research about this - the Dartmouth scar experiment. Participants were given a fake scar on their face with makeup and sent out to talk to strangers. Just before they left, the researchers said they were "touching up" the scar, but actually wiped it off completely, without telling them. Every one came back convinced people had stared and flinched. At a scar that wasn't there. The difference was entirely in their own heads.
That's usually what's happening when someone seems cold. Nine times out of ten it's because they've got their own stuff going on - everyone does at the moment. But if that person genuinely did blank you, someone who used to make plenty of time for you, back when they wanted something, then you've just learned not to waste your precious time on them again. That's not a loss. It's information.
So go along anyway. Reach out to the people you've been meaning to. Say yes to the coffee. Peel the backing off the badge, walk in, and put your name in front of someone with no logo underneath it. That embarrassment I felt at my first event as a founder didn't last. It got replaced, event by event, with the quiet certainty that the name was doing the work all along.
Soon enough you'll be handed a new badge with a new title on the bottom line. Wear it, say the brand name loud, build something you're proud of. But this time, remember which line actually mattered.
The line under your name can say anything.
It was always the name that held the meaning.
Chloe Hooper is the founder of The Limitless Equation and host of the podcast of the same name.