Your Job Is Not Your Identity: Recovering From Workplace Trauma
The job market has been brutal for a while now with redundancies that feel rushed and poorly handled and disciplinary processes that leave people shaken, sometimes after decades of unblemished careers. Grievances that drag on, take over your headspace, and make you dread Monday mornings. These things are happening to a lot of people, and yet when they happen to you, it can feel completely isolating.
I set up Klar to support employees navigating exactly these kinds of situations. The HR support side helps people understand their rights, their options, and what to do next. The coaching I now offer does something different but just as important, it helps people separate what happened at work from who they are.
When you go through a formal process at work, especially for the first time, it gets inside your head in a way that is hard to explain to anyone who hasn't been through it. You replay conversations, you second-guess yourself, you wonder what you could have done differently, or whether you were actually ever any good at your job, or whether this makes you unemployable. A redundancy that felt hasty and disorganised can leave you convinced that you must have done something wrong, even when the evidence says otherwise. A disciplinary or grievance can knock your confidence so much that the person who walked into that meeting room doesn't always quite come back out.
I know what this feels like because I have lived it. My whole team went through a redundancy that was poorly managed, with very little empathy and very little room to present a case to avoid redundancy. While our consultations were still happening, management were advertising new roles replacing our team and openly excited about bringing in a brand new one. It was disorganised, it was rushed, and it was deeply difficult to be part of, especially as it seemed they couldn't wait to get rid of us. None of that reflected anything about how good our team was at our jobs. The process reflected the people running it and not the people going through it. That distinction matters enormously, and it is often the hardest one to hold onto.
I offer coaching for people who are trying to find their way back to that distinction.
If you have been through a redundancy, you may be quietly terrified it will happen again. You may be going into job applications or interviews carrying doubt you didn't have before, or struggling to talk about yourself with any confidence. If you have been through a disciplinary or grievance, you may be trying to reconcile the person you know yourself to be with what was said in that process. These sessions are for you.
My coaching is focused and practical and most importantly, non-judgemental. The first thing you'll know when you speak to me is that even if I don't know you, I won't define you by what happened at work. We work across three sessions, and we work on what matters most: rebuilding your confidence, separating the process from your professional identity, and making sure that a difficult chapter in what is likely a long career doesn't get to define the rest of it. A redundancy, a formal process, even a really painful period at work, these are moments. They are not you, but you can reflect on them, learn from them where that is useful, and still walk away knowing they don't tell the whole story.
If that resonates, I would love to hear from you. Contact me here so we can arrange the next steps.
