This Is Grief Too with Laverne McKinnon

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How do you know when you’re giving yourself a necessary break versus putting off something you need to face?

Three ways to look at this: energy, compassion and fear.

Is the break restoring you or draining you?

One reason it’s tricky to know whether you’re resting or avoiding is that it can look exactly the same from the outside.

But what’s happening on the inside? This is where we can dete...

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You don’t have to swim when you can float.

My kid’s been missing a lot of school lately due to a medical challenge. I’m worried and uncertain whether she’ll be able to complete the school year.

On top of that, I’m still navigating the disruption from moving out of the family home that we’d been in for 28 years. And it’s not clear how the transition will ultimately fall out.

There’s more...

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If you’re familiar with the 110 freeway in Los Angeles, you may know that the on-ramps are unbelievably short and ridiculously tight — because they were designed when cars topped out around 45 mph. Some of those on-ramps require a full stop and then a balls out sprint to get to at least 60 mph within 15 feet before merging into speeding traffic. Yowsa.

So you might be able to imagine my terror on a lovely Saturday morning when my car broke down just...

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I’m a late-to-the-party big believer in taking a break from the normal routines and structures of life to gain fresh perspective. This year, I took about five weeks off from Substack and client work over the summer. The intention was to create space to move out of the home we’ve been in for 28 years so we could radically downsize and try a completely different lifestyle.

We’ve left the gorgeous wildlife corridor and serenity of Laurel Canyon in the...

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I’m in a contorted cat-cow pose holding a toothbrush with my right hand, leaning heavily on my left to take the pressure off my legs, wondering if this is a good choice at this moment in time. The white tile I’m scrubbing is pretty, but man, it is unforgiving on my bones, especially my knees, which are already showing signs of bruising.

When I was in high school, I cleaned houses for a summer to make extra cash...

Hi friend.

When I was fired from a job I cared about deeply, I was devastated.

At the time, I didn’t have language for what I was experiencing. I thought I needed to get back on the horse, get a thicker skin, and get over it. It took me ten years to realize that I was carrying grief.

Career grief.

Once I understood that, I got unstuck. I gave myself permission to mourn what had happened and all that had been lost alongside my job title.

Today, I’m wr...

The week I got fired from a job I loved, I kept opening my laptop and staring at a blank screen.

I didn’t know what to update. I wasn’t sure who I was updating it for. My job title had been the answer to so many questions, including, it turned out, the question of who I was.

That’s the thing nobody warns you about: career disappointment. The professional loss is real. But the identity loss is the one that knocks you sideways.

And somewhere in that fog, a question surfaces. Usuall...

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Robert got the call on a Friday afternoon. After trying to find a job in his industry for eighteen months, he faced the hard truth that for someone at his level, there were no viable openings. So he pivoted to Pharma doing sales. A far cry from Vice-President of Marketing at a film studio. He would start the new gig in two weeks.

Robert was elated to have a gig, but he was dejected because his degree, his experience...

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I asked a room full of smart, ambitious professionals to rate how important relationship building is to their careers right now. On a scale of one to ten, the answers came back: Seven. Eight. Nine. Ten.

Then I asked a follow-up question: how does that actually show up in your day-to-day? My favorite response: “Actual importance: ten. How I’m treating it: three.” We all laughed. Because we recognized ourselves.

It may seem like that gap between knowin...

I asked a room full of smart, ambitious professionals to rate how important relationship building is to their careers right now. On a scale of one to ten, the answers came back: Seven. Eight. Nine. Ten.

Then I asked a follow-up question: how does that actually show up in your day-to-day? My favorite response: “Actual importance: ten. How I’m treating it: three.” We all laughed. Because we recognized ourselves.

It may seem like that gap between knowing relationships matter and actually building them is an issue of will-power, discipline, or follow-through, but it’s actually...

If you want to know where you stand with someone, don’t listen to what they say. Watch what they do.

It’s taking me years to learn this. And I got a great reminder of it a few weeks ago. It was late afternoon in Mammoth Lakes, California, fifty degrees with a little cloud cover, and the trails near our favorite place to stay, Tamarack Lodge, were enticing. I mean, the mountain looked absolutely pristine, birds were chirping like they were auditioning for Pitch Perfect, and there was hardly anyone around. Ideal conditions.

So I’m...

Rebecca, a senior executive at Warner Bros., just wants to know the truth of what’s going on with the Paramount merger and when she’s going to be axed. The uncertainty is “killing her.”

She’s not alone. Not even close. 2026 is packed with mergers and consolidations across industries: Devon Energy and Coterra. SpaceX and xAI. Engie and UK Power Networks. Tens of thousands of people going to work every day inside organizations mid-transformation, wondering the same thing Rebecca is wondering.

Am I going to be okay?

And here’s the thing: she’s not be...

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I was having lunch on the patio at Kiwami with a long-time colleague — we'd served together on the board of the Coalition of Asian Pacifics in Entertainment — and we were debating whether to order the Kiwami tray or go à la carte. 

And then, I felt the energy around me shift. I didn’t turn my head, but I could see her outline in my peripheral vision. The boss who fired me. OMG, she was seated close enough to hear us order...

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You know what you’ve lost. But can you name your wins?

Most people in a career transition can recite their losses on demand. The VP title. The 401K contribution. The Friday happy hours with the work family. The satisfaction of knowing what the job is and how to do it.

Ask them to name their wins? Awkward silence then a short, apologetic list they immediately start walking back. “I mean, it wasn’t that big a deal.”...

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Remember when lockdown happened and there were all those stories about people showing up to Zoom meetings looking perfectly presentable from the waist up — and if you got a peek below the camera line, you’d find them in their underwear and socks?

I loved that. It was so human. So real.

It was a great contrast to the pressure to get my wardrobe choices right. All those spoken and unspoken rules: Women wear heels, men keep shir...

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Most of us are gonna hit turbulence at one point or another in our careers. A faceplant. A missed opportunity. A project that goes sideways. A job that ends in a way that feels unfair or messy.

The painful part is not just what happened. It’s what happens inside of you afterward.

When a professional failure goes unprocessed, it turns inward. It shows up as imposter thoughts, burnout, low confidence, and that weird dread that kicks up...

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Okay confession time. When I was getting my MBA, I had to take my statistics course twice.

The problem wasn’t my capacity or that I was “bad at math.” I’m actually quite good at it. The issue was the teaching method. It was lecture heavy, and that’s not how I learn. It didn’t matter how hard I worked or how tenacious I was. Nothing stuck.

And I really wanted my MBA because I believed it...

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You got the interview. Yay.

You prepared. Well done.

You had great rapport with the hiring manager. Love that.

You left thinking, “That went really well.”

You send your thank you email. You tell them you felt energized by the conversation, you’re excited about the opportunity, and you’d love to be considered. You add the classic closer: let me know if you need anything else.

Then crickets. What the heck hap...

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What if the reason you’re not getting what you want at work has nothing to do with your talent and effort? What if it has everything to do with where and how your actual workspace is set up?

Maybe you want more money. More growth. More work-life balance. More freedom. More stability. More belonging. More meaning.

Most people try to close that gap by doing more. More special projects to prove your worth. More networking to me...

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There’s a moment that hits a lot of people right after a promotion or a new role.

You have the new title. The bigger scope. The visibility.

And then your brain goes: who do you think you are?

If that’s happening to you, I want to offer one reframe that changes the whole experience.

Imposter syndrome is not proof you’re unqualified. It’s what doubt sounds like when your courage puts you...

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Mental health is a hot topic these days - as it should be! According to the World Health Organization anxiety disorders are the most common mental disorder with approximately 4% of the world’s population affected. And stress is right there on its heels. According to the American Institute of Stress, around 35% of the U.S. population is feeling stressed. I get it! 

But what many people don’t get is that stress and anxiety are not the same thing. They...

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Career grief is not just an emotional experience. It’s a physiological one.

Most of us expect grief to look like tears, sadness, maybe anger. But a lot of the time, grief shows up as: “What is wrong with me lately?”

For me, it’s looked like this.

I wore my pants inside out and didn’t realize until I was already out in the world.

I left the faucet on.

I ate an e...

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If your career is shifting, your money story gets a vote in every decision you make. And it’s not because you’re bad at math or you “should have planned better.”

It gets a vote because money is not just money. Money touches safety. Options. Identity. What you can say yes to. What you have to say no to. And when work gets uncertain, money stops being background noise. It walks right up to the microphone and says, “Hello, hel...

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My birthday is this Wednesday.

I usually like to fly under the radar but this year I’m trying something new. Instead of hiding out feeling self-conscious about my warped relationship with age and time, I’m choosing to go on a mission to spread joy along with cool things I’ve been learning.

Take a full watch of this YouTube video that made me laugh so hard I cried. And then I watched it a second time a...

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Most of us think the problem is energy.

If we could just get a little more, we’d update the résumé, write the cover letter, follow up with a former colleague, get the certification.

But when you keep making promises you don’t keep, the real cost isn’t momentum. It’s self trust.

And once self trust takes a hit, your brain and body get conservative with energy. Not to punish you. To protect yo...

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Your career isn’t broken. Your heart is.

And if you’ve been feeling this heartbreak for a while, you may also be feeling stuck and not sure what to do to get your mojo back. I’ve been there. And I want to talk about the kind of stuckness that doesn’t respond to a new resume, a new routine, or a new burst of motivation.

It’s the kind of stuckness where you’re doing your best, b...

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Before you decide what to do next in your career, it helps to understand why you’re doing it at all.

Career strategy gets a lot of attention. Especially from me. I love vision boards. Five year plans. Action steps. And all of that has its place. But strategy on its own is not going to hold up for the long run. When things get hard, fuzzy, or take longer than you expected, your strategic plan is not going to...

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If you’re anything like me, downtime doesn’t come naturally. I get the value of stepping away from work and yet I still find myself filling open space with something productive. Over the weekend I found myself filling downtime with re-organizing the pantry. And when I say downtime, I mean the kind of pause that has nothing to do with goals, perfectionism or making things better.

Years ago, after I’d started a new gig, I headed into winter...

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What It Really Takes to Pursue a Moonshot

Let’s be honest. Ambition is exciting until you’re staring down the possibility that you might fall flat on your face. Moonshots bring that tension out of hiding. They ask more of us. They stretch us. They expose the gap between who we are now and who we’d need to become.

Earlier this month, I stood on a TEDx stage in the Philippines and delivered a talk on car...

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You know that moment when you say yes to something, you mean it, you see the upside… and then you can’t get yourself to actually do it?

Procrastination is unbelievably frustrating. And demoralizing. And confusing. Because you care. You’re committed. So why does the follow-through stall?

Most of us don’t even pause long enough to ask that question. We go straight to self-judgment. We beat ourselves up, try to muster more willpower, and promise that tom...

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Let’s be honest—most of us don’t plan our careers. We react to opportunities, chase what looks good on paper, and hope it all somehow adds up.

But if you want to stop winging it and start steering it, you need a strategic career plan—think of it as your personal GPS—connecting where you are today to where you want to go, so every step actually moves you closer to your goals.

Take my client Jer...

Today is a departure from the usual career strategy talk, but still applicable to anyone who’s going after a moonshot and is in need of inspiration. I’m joining a community experiment launched by producer Ted Hope to bring together NonDē filmmakers on Substack. You’ve heard of independent filmmaking? This is non-dependent filmmaking and honestly I find that inspiring in itself – to boldly state we are no longer depending on the systems that have kept people on the outside, repressed, and denied.

The idea behind the experiment is simple: each day, a member of the non-de fi...

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Ever notice how some days you’re able to handle stress, communicate well, and keep your cool, while other days you feel overwhelmed and in a spiral of mercury in retrograde? In this week’s blog, I dive into how you can stay in an awesome, cool, and balanced state more often – so you can achieve your career goals and not get derailed. 

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“I can’t find a job.”

If that’s what you’ve been saying to yourself, you’re not alone. It’s one of the most common things I hear from people in transition. What’s really underneath is that mix of dread and “oh no, what if I’ve peaked?”

Here’s the truth: often, the problem is that we’re looking for opportunities too narrowly — using what’s called foveal vision.

What Foveal Vision Gets Wrong

Foveal...

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Have you ever hit a big milestone—one you thought would feel amazing—and instead, you’re like, “Wait, that’s it?”

You got the job. You crossed the finish line. You checked the box. And five minutes later, you’re already on to the next thing. Or worse—you feel a little empty, maybe even disappointed.

I don’t think that’s because you’re ungrateful. I think it’s because you’ve been living by someone else’s definition...

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Here’s the thing about growth: quick wins will get you moving, but mastery? Mastery changes you.

Don’t get me wrong. Quick wins are great. They give you that hit of momentum, a shot of confidence, the little push that says, “Hey, I can do this.” But they only take you so far.

Mastery though is a game changer. It’s when a skill or a practice stops being something you check off a list and becomes pa...

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A portion of this blog originally appeared as a guest feature on Career Pivot. Join me for a special AMA with Career Pivot on Friday, October 31st at 9:00 a.m. PT on the Substack App.

The call came on a Monday morning. I was still in bed, but when I saw that it was my boss, I jumped up, cleared my throat a few times and did my best to sound normal while saying “hello.”

It came out...

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It’s been two months since my little dog Roo died. Not exactly a strong hook for a post about career strategy. But I feel compelled to share this personal information because life keeps on life-ing despite the plans we make for our professional lives. And I think it’s important to make that okay and carve out space.

I think most of us are pretty good at holding boundaries when a personal commitment pops up — a friend comes into t...