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“You’re unemployable. My wish for you is that someday you love that.” 

I did not expect to hear this while walking across a parking lot with my former boss, as we discussed if and how to work with each other now that neither of us worked for the same organization anymore. 

How does one take that as a compliment, rather than defend against it? Who can afford, much less wants to be unemployable? I can honestly say that it took me a long time to believe or understand what my colleague was teaching me about myself. 

Before then I would go on to accept and leave many more jobs and get a graduate degree in the study of people at work, or Industrial-Organizational Psychology. In my academic study, my own lived experience related to work in response to domestic violence and sexual assault was not informing the scholarship.  

I am an observer of patterns and trends. Situated as an independent contractor, I can notice different things and ask different things than I might as an employee. I can take deep and shallow dives into subject areas, and each time I come up with resonant, pertinent, and sometimes insubordinate questions. Those questions help me set the terms of my working relationships, projects, and ethos for how to engage with my professional skill sets. 

But what do these things have to do with being unemployable? Let me first clarify that unemployable and unemployed are two different things, even if in common they both include a disorientation, and at times periods of instability and transition.

Over the years, what I came to understand is that when you’re unemployable, your relationship with risk has been altered to the point where keeping your job is not independently motivating. Even preserving your professional reputation isn’t motivating. In this process for myself, I’ve cultivated self-awareness, initiative, and situational/environmental analysis skills. These are qualities that can create conflict and tension in your workplaces, particularly when organizational cultures are built on a “cohesion of values, myths, heroines, and symbols that…mean a great deal to the people who work there.” (Vivian and Hormann, 2002) These qualities were reflected back to me as perfectionism, controversy, defiance, unfriendliness, or being disaffected or unsociable. 

Our systems of work have only so many descriptions and understandings of people and their motivations. Fear, and specifically insecurity, is a driving influence, creating a dread of anything that feels risky. This fear is both hugely real and incredibly impractical. The primary commitment of our workplaces is not to provide us security. We can choose to perceive security in having a job, but only to a point. 

For me, financial insecurity, or professional ambiguity, is not just a recent experience. For others experiencing institutional dismantling, this may offer a new concern to face—What if my workplace closes? What if I lose my job? What if I don’t have the career I’ve had? What if jobs like mine don’t exist in the same ways as before?

Each of these realities is daunting. They can make it extremely difficult to be reflective and strategic, to stop and ask ourselves—how do I feel about my job?

How do I actually feel about email hell, and meeting burnout? About infighting and restructuring? About microaggressions? About transitions and terminations? About redirection and disappointment and loss? About unknown priorities? About shrinking budgets and unspecified timelines? About toxic bosses?

I’d like to offer some additional questions:

What if you could go back to work differently? 

What if we could practice recognizing the characteristics of mutuality and transparency?

What if we could choose how to take risks, instead of only responding to decisions taken on our behalf, often without our consent?

What if we could be validated for the harm that we’ve experienced, and even enacted in our work places?

What if we could expand our network for peer relationships?

What if we could invest in independent learning spaces?

What if we could gain new knowledge? What if we didn’t have to do it alone?

In 2025, work is destabilized. External factors haven’t happened suddenly. They’ve accumulated. The conditions we’ve always been working under have been unveiled and intensified. On one hand, that is devastating. And… this creates an opportunity to step back and notice what’s not working, why it’s not working, and to invite us to consider other options and available choices. 

One of those sets of questions is—What can we invest in? What can support me right now?

Survival is a worthy, stand alone goal. And yet, surviving as individuals and as organizations are two different things. Organizations in the social good sector are meant to combine talent, structure and resources for incredible reasons – to prioritize the needs of marginalized humans over any institutional entity. When organizations are failing us and that mission, we get to consider how the circumstances have changed. We get to imagine that there are still choices available to us, and to organizational leadership.

Steadiness in leadership is a precious thing, and also an incredibly hard one. It is made that much harder right now. Balancing how to hold yourself and hold your responsibilities, remaining aware of external conditions and construct focused practices internally, and building relationships and letting them evolve are each individually hard things to do. They are made additionally challenging when you’ve had experiences of work that have taken a negative toll, and if those experiences have not been validated. 

Maybe this is exactly the moment to take inventory and to invest in new ways?

Maybe this is exactly the moment to check on each other, to get to know our capacities better, to add to our skill sets, to be learning with other people.

When I replay that conversation about my unemployability with my former boss now, I add in several years spent gaining self-understanding and observing organizational behavior. I add in the personal emergencies I’ve experienced and the collective emergencies that I’ve survived. I add in the creative and relational resources that I’ve been motivated to gather and construct collaboratively. I add in the fear that remains, but not without reminding myself that there are open questions and choices to ponder.

There are many models and role models that predate our questions, conversations in a parking lot where someone has pointed out something to you about yourself. There are lessons to reach back for, that may feel risky, but represent a future that includes autonomy, consent, and connection at work.

The knowledge and talent is ours to cultivate, to expand, and to trust.

And maybe most importantly, to invest in together. 

Reference

Vivian, P. and Hormann, S. (2002). “Trauma and Healing in Organizations.” OD Practitioner, Vol. 34, No. 4.