When Life Gets Very Real, Very Fast

Some seasons do not feel like “career development.” They feel like standing on a trapdoor.

• You get the calendar invite from HR with no agenda.

• A board member asks for “a quick word” after the meeting.

• Your firm starts an investigation.

• A regulator writes to “seek clarification.”

• Your spouse says, “We need to talk,” and you already know what comes next.

Work, marriage, professional standing, reputation: suddenly everything that looked solid starts to wobble. You are too alert to call it a bad week. Something fundamental is shaking.

This page is for that moment.

When the story you’ve been living turns on you

In calm times, high-functioning professionals tell themselves a tidy story: work hard, act with integrity, follow the rules, stay loyal, and the world will roughly behave.

Crisis exposes the gaps.

You can follow the rules and still land in the crosshairs. You can give your best years to a firm and still be told you are “no longer a fit.” You can honour your vows and still watch a marriage walk away. You can hold yourself to high standards and still face a complaint, a review, or a disciplinary process.

The first shock is disbelief. Surely there has been a misunderstanding. The second is shame. You start rehearsing what other people must be saying about you. The third is fear: not only of what you might lose, but of who you will be if you lose it.

Underneath all that, another quiet truth usually waits: something unsuitable has been brewing for a long time. A role you outgrew. A firm that never really saw you. A marriage that only worked on paper. A way of living that your body and conscience had been protesting for years. The crisis hurts precisely because it forces what you have been holding at arm’s length onto centre stage.

Reputation, fear, and the story in other people’s heads

One of the cruellest parts of these seasons is how external everything feels.

Your name may travel farther than you do. Boards talk. Partners talk. Firms leak. Families speculate. People who barely know you build entire stories out of fragments. You cannot chase them all down. You cannot “correct the narrative” in every room. Reputation is always external and largely out of your control, and in crisis you feel that truth in your bones.

You also discover who was there for you, and who was only there for the version of you that was useful, impressive, or untroubled. Some people quietly step closer. Others go missing. The fair-weather colleagues drift toward the new favourite. Former allies become “busy.” That hurts, but it also clarifies.

Fear multiplies in this space. Not only fear of losing income, role, or status, but fear of fear itself: “If I let myself really feel this, I will not cope.” Your mind races ahead to worst-case scenarios, many of which never happen, but the nervous system does not know that. Sleep fractures. Concentration frays. You begin to think in headlines: ruin, disgrace, failure.

Part of our work together is to name that storm honestly and then stop letting other people’s imagined thoughts run your life. Their story is not the same as your story. It never was.

Hope, humour, and small joys in the wreckage

I do not romanticize these experiences. They are brutal. They will change you. You may lose more than you ever wanted to risk.

And yet, amid the shock, there are usually small, stubborn signals that life is not finished with you. A friend who does not flinch when you tell the worst part. A walk where your shoulders drop for the first time in weeks. A song on a bus that briefly makes you feel like yourself again. The strange pleasure of waking up, realising the world did not end overnight, and making a very ordinary cup of coffee.

I know this terrain from the inside. I have had seasons where health, work and relationships all demanded hard endings and I had to choose between clinging to what looked “impressive” and protecting my actual life. There were days when I was deeply hurt. There were also days when my underlying cheerfulness still found gaps in the clouds.

I believe in hope, but not the poster version. Not manifesting. Not “shoot for the moon” slogans. Real hope is quieter. It notices that even now, not everything is broken. It notices that lawyers and institutions can play theatre for months, and that sometimes the only sane response is to laugh at the absurdity of it. It notices the moments when you think, “If this had not happened, I would never have seen this, or met this person, or learned this about myself.”

Part of my role is to hold space for those small, sane pleasures while everything else feels like chaos, and to remind you that a future worth living is still possible, even when you cannot yet sketch the shape.

Learning who you are under pressure

Crisis is a brutal teacher, but a good one. Under enough pressure you will meet parts of yourself you did not know existed.

You may discover you can negotiate in rooms that used to terrify you. You can stand your ground with people who always intimidated you. You can compromise on money and assets more readily than you expected, and refuse to compromise on self-respect more fiercely than you ever have.

The darker emotions show up too. Revenge, rage, the longing to humiliate those who humiliated you. We do not pretend those impulses are beneath you. They are human. We give them names. We trace where they come from. Then, slowly, we decide what you want to do with that energy.

Over time, something interesting often happens. The raw desire to “win” at all costs starts to feel hollow. In its place, a different stance begins to grow: concern for other people caught in similar knots; compassion for colleagues you used to dismiss; a refusal to pass the hurt forward just because it was handed to you. The wish to destroy turns into a wish to build differently.

The whole experience can feel like a roller coaster with no brakes. Steep drops, blind corners, sickening speed. But roller coasters do stop. You step off shaken, marked, but far more aware of your own strength and range. The scars remain and do not need to be airbrushed away. They become part of your authority. You know what a bad day really looks like now. Lesser storms do not rattle you in the same way.

Not going back to what broke you

One of the most dangerous instincts in any crisis is the urge to rewind. To negotiate your way back into the old firm. To plead for the relationship. To settle for a cosmetic tweak to an environment that was never suitable in the first place.

That impulse often masquerades as kindness, loyalty, or being “reasonable.” For people who were raised to please, it can feel almost immoral not to try. But sometimes the most honest, generous move is to let something fade away because it was never capable of holding you safely.

Part of our work is to notice that pull and test it. Are you trying to repair something that can genuinely be rebuilt, or are you trying to avoid the grief of letting go? Are you walking back into a house that is structurally sound, or one where the foundations have already given way?

This is where suitability returns as a central theme. The crisis is rarely the whole story. It is the moment when longstanding mismatches finally demand an answer. Together we try to honour that demand rather than smother it.

What our work together looks like in these seasons

This is not a “crisis coaching package.” There is no script or fixed arc, and I will never pretend that a few conversations make everything tidy.

What I offer is calm, confidential companionship from someone who understands both the technical world you move in and the human cost of watching it shake. I know enough of high-stakes finance, professional standards and regulatory pressure that you do not have to waste energy translating the acronyms or justifying why this matters. I also know enough of endings, grief and rebuilding to take your health and sanity seriously.

We talk about immediate triage: what truly cannot wait, what can be parked, who needs to hear from you and who does not. We look at lawyers, notices, settlements, severance, investigations, not as destiny but as moving parts in a longer story. We pay attention to sleep, body, faith, friendships, and practical anchors when everything feels provisional.

And we keep one eye, always, on the longer horizon: the person you are becoming through this, the kind of work and relationships that might be more suitable on the far side, the kind of leader you might be precisely because you did not escape unscathed.

I will not tell you what to do. I will stay in the room while you decide, and I will remind you, when your imagination goes dark, that people do come out the other side of these seasons with more courage, more kindness, and a far cleaner sense of what they will and will not accept.

Some choices hurt in the moment and still feel, in your bones, like the first honest cut you’ve made in years.

When life gets very real, very fast, you do not need a slogan. You need one clear, steady other mind with you while you walk through it. That is what this part of my practice is for.