How I turned my layoff into my exit plan
By Jess Lane, Founder of The Full Cup Co. [Career Design for the Future of Work] | 20+ Years Fortune 500 and High-Growth Tech | MA Psychology, Pepperdine University
I Applied to 496 Jobs After My Layoff. Here Is What I Learned About Defaulting.
Four hundred and ninety-six.
That is the number of jobs I applied to after I was laid off. I have the spreadsheet. I went back and looked at it recently and I am not going to lie, it was not a great feeling. Because I was no slouch. Neither were the 150 colleagues who got let go the same day as me. Neither were the thousands of other talented executives I watched go through the exact same thing at the exact same time.
And yet there we all were. Refreshing job boards. Tailoring cover letters. Defaulting.
Here is the thing nobody tells you when the rug gets pulled out: the instinct to immediately find the next thing is not resilience. It is avoidance. It is a very efficient way of never having to ask yourself the question you are most afraid to answer.
Do I actually want to go back?
The math was not mathing.
I was 40 when I got laid off from a financial technology company that had just hit billion-dollar unicorn status. We reached that milestone and later that year 150 of us were gone. I had spent 20 years building brands, starting in advertising on the agency side with Fortune 500 companies, working on Procter and Gamble, then moving into tech because I wanted something more mission-driven.
I thought I was doing everything right.
And when it fell apart I put my ego aside, my very bruised ego, and I looked around. I was having a hard time finding the next thing. So were thousands of other talented, experienced, capable people. And in my soul I did not even want to go back.
So I stopped. Because the math was not mathing.
That pause, that uncomfortable terrifying pause, is where The Full Cup Co. was born.
What I did instead of applying to job 497.
I went back to school and got my master's in psychology. I freelanced to pay the bills. And I made myself a promise: I was going to build something that combined the 20 years of marketing experience I had worked incredibly hard for with this new depth of understanding around human psychology and what actually drives people.
Because here is what I needed to hear back then and nobody was saying it: just because they took the title away does not mean the chapter is gone. All of that value, all of that expertise, all of that experience, is still yours. They cannot take that with you when they escort you out the door.
I was what I call beautiful minding it for a while. Post-it notes across the wall. Kerfuffling around in the messy middle. And I think that is actually part of the process. But what I wish I had was a framework. A way to take everything I had built and map it to where I actually wanted to go.
So I built one.
Interested to learn more about my messy middle and how I built The Full Cup Co.? Listen to The Wealth We Hold Podcast where I talk to Lynzie Smith of The Commonwealth Collective about kerfuffling around in my transition phase, how it led me to build my company and how I finally chose myself.
The intersection is where everything lives.
The Full Cup Method™ works like this. We map your unique blueprint, which is the combination of your skills and experiences, your passion and purpose, your desired impact in the world and the market viability of where those meet. The goal is to find the intersection. That is your career design sweet spot.
I use myself as an example every time because I think it is important to be your own best case study. I had strong marketing skills, a lot of market viability in that world. But I had this whole other side of me that was deeply passionate about helping people, about psychology, about building something with a mission behind it.
We mishmashed them. And here we are.
Your version is going to look completely different. It is supposed to.
That is career design. Not a lucky accident. Not a dramatic reinvention. The intersection of everything you already have, refined into the career meant for you.
Everything is made up anyway.
I want to say something that might sound a little wild but I genuinely believe it: all careers are made up. Someone made yours up. Someone made mine up. You agreed to the title and the scope and you said sure, okay, thank you.
I have fudged my title before because the accurate one did not exist yet. That is not dishonest. That is constructionist. Everything is made up and the question is whether you are the one doing the making.
Human sustainability, the idea that we should be designing work around actual human wellbeing instead of forcing ourselves round peg into square hole, is not a luxury. It is a requirement. Something is going to give eventually. It always does. Burnout is a symptom. The broken system underneath it is the problem.
You do not have to blow up your life to start designing it. You just have to decide to choose yourself. It sounds simple. It is actually really hard. But everything is downstream from that decision.
If you are in the messy middle right now.
First of all, you are not alone. My most popular LinkedIn posts are not about my program. They are about me. About the shame. About the three years it took to talk about my layoff. About the 496 applications. People pile on because they recognize themselves. That is the power of saying the thing out loud.
If you are kerfuffling around right now, that is okay. It is part of it. But what if you could condense that timeline? What if instead of beautiful minding alone for two more years you had a framework, a process, a map?
That is what I built. Because I needed it and it did not exist.
If you are ready to sit down and start mapping your own intersection, I have a 90-minute Career Design Clarity Session where we do exactly that. You bring everything you have. We find the thread. You leave with clarity and a concrete first step.
And if you want to keep getting this kind of conversation in your inbox, subscribe to The Refill below. It is my weekly newsletter for people who are done defaulting and ready to start designing.
If you’re ready to turn that layoff into an exit, you’re in the right place.
Book your 90-minute Career Design Clarity Session: https://www.fullcupco.com/clarity-session
Subscribe to The Refill newsletter: https://www.fullcupco.com/the-refill-newsletter-sign-up
Jess Lane is the founder of The Full Cup Co., the career design company for the future of work, creator of the Full Cup Method and Strategic Executive Exit. She has 20+ years of marketing and business leadership across Fortune 500 and high-growth IPO and unicorn technology companies including Porsche, Visa, Michelob ULTRA, and TheRealReal, and a Masters in Psychology from Pepperdine University. She helps experienced professionals design their next chapter and the career meant for them.