When the Ground Shifts · Post 1 of 8
Before the next step, there is this step.
If you’re reading this, something has shifted. Maybe a letter arrived. Maybe your role disappeared in a restructure. Maybe nothing official has happened yet — but you’ve been in enough meetings, seen enough changes, read enough between the lines to know that the ground is moving.
Before anything else — before the job search, before the financial calculations, before the question of what’s next — we want to say something that doesn’t get said often enough in Singapore:
This is hard. And you’re allowed to find it hard.
The thing nobody says out loud
In the conversations we’ve had with people who’ve been through retrenchment or restructuring, one thing comes up again and again — quietly, and usually only after some trust has been built in the conversation.
It’s not the financial worry, though that’s real. It’s not the uncertainty about what comes next, though that’s real too.
It’s the shame.
“Am I not good enough? Is that why they let me go? If I had performed better, worked harder, been more indispensable — would this have happened?”
These thoughts feel too vulnerable to say out loud, especially in a culture that equates career success with personal worth. So people carry them quietly, while presenting a composed face to the world and trying to get on with the practical business of figuring out what’s next.
Let’s name it properly
Retrenchment at this stage of life tends to produce a particular cocktail of feelings. You may recognise some of these:
Shame and self-doubt. The feeling that this is somehow a verdict on your value, your contribution, your worth as a professional. It isn’t. But the feeling is real, and it needs to be named before it can be examined.
Grief. Not just for the job, but for the identity, the structure, the colleagues, the sense of purpose that came with knowing exactly what you were there to do. These are real losses. They deserve to be grieved, not just managed.
Fear. About money, about prospects, about whether the market still wants what you have to offer. About what you will say at the next dinner party when someone asks what you do.
Anger. At the organisation, at the process, at the timing, at the inadequacy of what was said in the room when it happened. This is legitimate.
And sometimes — relief. Which can feel like the most confusing emotion of all. Because if part of you is relieved, what does that say? (It says that a part of you already knew something needed to change. That’s worth listening to.)
None of these feelings are wrong. All of them are information.
The reframe that actually helps
Here is something worth sitting with: retrenchment is almost never a verdict on the person. It is almost always a decision about the organisation.
Companies restructure because of strategy shifts, budget pressures, technology changes, market contractions, leadership changes, or geopolitical forces that have nothing to do with whether you are good at your job. The person who loses their role in a restructure is not, in most cases, the weakest performer in the room. They are often the person whose function was eliminated, whose team was consolidated, whose role was made redundant by a decision made three levels above them.
This is not a comforting platitude. It is simply a more accurate description of how restructuring works.
The shame that attaches to retrenchment in Singapore — and it is real, and it is cultural — is largely borrowed from a story that doesn’t fit the facts. You are allowed to put that story down.
What we heard from people who’ve been through it
One person we spoke with — BL, 45, who works in the events industry — described how she had quietly anticipated her retrenchment for months, and what the actual moment felt like when it arrived:
“I was just thinking maybe I should just let it settle a bit, and take in the information, and maybe grieve about it first. Then I realised — I’m not ready to grieve about it, because I think I already pre-grieved the whole thing in January. January was the most difficult time for me, because you sort of know that it’s going to happen.”
— BL, 45, Events industry
The grief, in her case, had already begun before the letter arrived. When it finally came, what she felt was something closer to release. That is not weakness. That is someone who had been carrying the weight of uncertainty for months, and finally got to put it down.
Another person we spoke with — LC, 54, a veteran of the media industry — described a different response to her redundancy notice. When her company downsized and her role was merged with someone else’s, she wasn’t surprised. Retrenchment in your 50s, she said, is common enough that she had seen it happen to others around her. What struck us about LC was not her reaction to the news itself, but what she did next.
She told people. Openly. Friends from the gym. Classmates from professional training courses. She didn’t hide it or dress it up. And her community — the one she had quietly built over the years — kicked into action immediately, offering leads, connections, and suggestions.
Some of the suggestions were unexpected. Receptionist roles. Admin positions. Not what a veteran media professional might be expected to consider. But her response was characteristically grounded:
“Just try lor. If I can manage complex media plans, I think I can coordinate meetings and admin stuff.”
— LC, 54, media industry veteran
That attitude — open, pragmatic, unbothered by what the role was called — turned out to be the thing that unlocked what came next. But we’ll come to that in a later post. For now, what matters is this: she didn’t let the redundancy become a story about her worth. She let it be what it was — a business decision — and got on with finding out what she was capable of.
A stronger sense of self is what makes the next steps possible
Here’s what we’ve observed, both in our research and in coaching conversations: the people who navigate forced pivots most successfully are not the ones who move fastest. They are the ones who maintain — or rebuild — a grounded sense of who they are, independent of the role they just lost.
When your identity is tightly bound to a title, a company, or a function, losing that role doesn’t just feel like losing a job. It feels like losing yourself. And from that place — disoriented, ashamed, uncertain — it is very hard to make good decisions about what comes next.
But when you have a clearer sense of who you are beyond the role — your values, your strengths, what you actually care about — you bring something more durable to the search for what’s next. You evaluate opportunities differently. You negotiate differently. You don’t settle just to make the discomfort stop.
That work — the identity work — is not a detour from getting practical. It is what makes the practical steps work.
One thing before you do anything else
If you are in the immediate aftermath of retrenchment — the first few days, the first week — we want to gently suggest this:
Give yourself a week before making any major decisions.
Not because there’s no urgency — there may be real financial timelines to attend to. But because decisions made from shock, shame, or panic tend to be decisions you revisit later. The job you take in the first two weeks because it was the first thing that came up. The opportunity you dismiss because you couldn’t see your own value clearly yet.
A week of breathing, processing, and letting the initial shock settle does not cost you much. It may save you a great deal.
A question to sit with
Underneath the practical questions — the money, the next role, the timeline — what feeling are you most avoiding right now?
You don’t have to solve it. Just name it. That’s enough for today.
Post 1 of 8 · When the Ground Shifts
→ Post 2: First Things First — What You Actually Need to Know in the Next 30 Days
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