A Layoff Started Everything

In January 2024 Sports Illustrated laid off most of its staff. A legacy institution gutted overnight. I remember reading that and thinking how quickly things change.

That should have been a sign. My days at work were numbered.

One five-minute meeting later and I wasn’t thinking about sports illustrated anymore.

I genuinely loved that job. I was the director CRM and email marketing for a mid-size company in Ohio. They had a strong leadership team and were well respected. It was the first time in my career that I had experienced stable, adequate income relative to my professional value and education (without requiring overtime or burnout). That’s rarer than it sounds and I didn’t take it for granted.

But the industry shifted. The focus changed. Half the team was cut.

A year later, my boss was also let go too.

I hate to admit that this wasn’t my first rodeo. I’d navigated several career pivots: swapping long shifts in the medical field for marketing, retiring from professional sports and rebuilding from scratch. I knew the playbook: Update the resume. Work the network. Stay visible. Keep moving.

This time, I did all of that and the interviews didn’t come. When they did, they weren’t a good fit. Bills don’t stop just because income does. I started consulting. Small, low paid gigs to start.

What happened next surprised me.

My network showed up. Not in a “LinkedIn-connection” kind of way. In a real way. People I’d met over the years (some of the most remarkable people I’ve encountered, globally!) reached out. Checked in. Passed my name along.

2024 is the year I finally understood why we invest in networking. Don’t skip it. I mean it. Not the business card kind. The genuine, stay-in-touch, show-up-for-people kind.

Those connections led to bigger contracts. Longer contracts. An opportunity to hire and manage others. Slowly, steadily, building. It took two years of consulting and burnout to build a budget and find the bandwidth to stop working for others and start investing in me.

Write the book. Tell the story. Start the podcast.

When I was first laid off, a friendly connection offered me some advice: “You’ve already built something amazing. Why aren’t you sharing it?”

The honest answer was simple: I wasn’t ready. My story has layers like an onion. While I had climbed to the top of my sport, trauma had quietly robbed me of the joy I should have felt along the way. I was frozen. Surviving.

The layoff, as it turned out, was the thing that would crack the ice.

I’m not yet the person I want to be.

But I ‘m proud of the woman I’m becoming.

And she deserves to be celebrated.

So here I am. Follow along. It's going to be honest.