In 2020, I was Executive Vice President at a major SaaS company. It was the last night of the quarter, and I was home alone, working through to midnight, closing a large strategic deal that I was the Executive Sponsor for. It was a must win deal for the quarter, the kind of deal you give everything to, because that's what the role asks of you. When it signed, there was real relief. Pride, too. I'd delivered.

A few days later, a regional restructure took my role and my direct reports' roles in the same swift decision. HR was clear it had nothing to do with my performance. It was a business decision. While I understood that intellectually, it didn't make it land any easier.

What I remember most isn't my own conversation with HR, that was a blur. It's what came after. I insisted on telling my direct reports myself. Not HR, not a generic email. Those people had sacrificed for me, believed in me, put in hours they didn't have to. If the business was ending that chapter for all of us at once, I felt it was my responsibility, not HR's, to look them in the eye and tell them.

I didn't feel resilient delivering that news. I felt absolutely gutted - for them more than myself, if I'm honest. And underneath that, a louder question arose for me. If I'd given that much and it ended with a line in a restructure spreadsheet, what exactly had I been giving it for?

One line from that period stayed with me. HR told me that even though I couldn't see it then, "this would end up being the best thing to ever happen to me". At the time, it sounded like something people say to soften bad news. In hindsight, they were 100% right.

So I did the work. Properly, for the first time.

So I built my leadership story - not a list of roles and titles, but the leadership thread connecting them, what I'd been solving for, what I wanted next. I rebuilt my CV around that story instead of just a bunch of keywords. I worked through an exercise to understand where I genuinely get my energy from at work, and what environment quietly drains it. And I did a values assessment. A real, ranked understanding of how I make decisions and what I'm not prepared to trade off again in the pursuit of another job.

That process let me reposition myself entirely. Not as someone looking for the next version of the same role, but as a General Manager. I went on to lead DocuSign, then HubSpot, across JAPAC. I never looked back from my redundancy.

That's the exact process I now take every leader I coach through.

Almost everyone I work with post-redundancy has the same two gaps I had:

1. No clear criteria for evaluating a company, role, or offer - beyond salary band and title, they can't tell you what they're actually optimising for.

2. No defined values to measure fit against - a real, ranked sense of what has to be true about a workplace environment for them to do their best work.

If you're six weeks into sending CVs and still can't explain why you'd take one role over another, that's not a motivation problem. That's a missing framework problem.

We start with developing your own leadership story, then rebuild your CV to reflect it, then work through the energy and values assessment to give you a clear set of criteria to evaluate your next step against. In that order, because rebuilding a CV before you know your own story just produces a more polished version of the same generic document everyone else is sending out.

The redundancy was never the injustice.

HR was right about one thing - it can become the best thing that ever happens to you - but only if you do the work to make it that, rather than waiting for the next role to accidentally be better than the last.

If you're a senior commercial or sales leader navigating this right now, message me. I'll tell you honestly whether coaching is the right next step for you. And if it's not, I'll tell you that too.