Cognitive scientist Maya Shankar knows that few professional disruptions hit as hard as a layoff. It can shatter your sense of security, bruise your ego, and spark genuine fear about what comes next. But that same fracture can also create space for reinvention—pushing you toward entrepreneurship or career paths you might never have considered otherwise.
In a recent episode of *Masters of Scale*, Shankar—who serves as senior director of behavioral economics at Google, served as a senior advisor in the Obama White House, and authored *The Other Side of Change*—shared her framework for navigating unexpected professional pivots. Her advice proves especially valuable for anyone channeling job loss into a new venture.
**Process the Loss Before Planning the Future**
Your first impulse might be to immediately polish your resume or draft a business plan. Shankar advises resisting that urge. Give yourself permission to grieve the loss and acknowledge how it affects your identity and self-worth. Only then can you decouple your previous role from your intrinsic value.
Look past the bullet points on your CV. Consider the lives you've touched and the insights you've gained. "You feel like you’ve lost everything when you lose your job," Shankar noted. "But so much of what you’ve built is going to serve you in wonderful ways moving forward."
**Progress Beats Perfection**
The leap from employee to founder often stalls under the weight of unrealistic expectations. Obsessing over the perfect business plan or final product creates paralysis. Shankar suggests embracing incremental progress instead.
Even minimal daily effort reinforces your new identity. As she explained: "The difference between writing zero minutes a day and writing one minute a day is that in the one-minute world, you’re a writer. And when you prime that identity, it’s self-reinforcing."
**Shrink the Middle**
Grand ambitions rarely collapse at launch; they wither in the messy middle, where momentum fades and motivation plummets. Shankar recommends dividing overwhelming projects into manageable micro-milestones.
A new venture can look "very overwhelming and intimidating when seen in the aggregate," she said. "But if you break it into a bunch of mini milestones, a bunch of mini steps... [That] helps us avoid what’s known as the middle problem."
**Build Resilience Through Perspective**
Setbacks are inevitable for founders. Shankar speaks from experience—her own detours included abandoning a promising violin career after a hand injury as a teenager, and later, the heartbreak of multiple failed surrogate pregnancies. During her darkest moments, her husband introduced a simple practice: writing down what she was grateful for.
The exercise revealed how narrowly she had fixated on single goals at the expense of her broader life richness. "I had been so single-mindedly focused on achieving my goal of becoming a parent that I had completely lost perspective of how otherwise rich and multidimensional my life was, and my identity was," she recalled.
Her recommendation? Maintain a running list of what matters to you, regardless of your current circumstances. "It doesn’t matter if you’re in the throes of a change, write down an affirmation list of things that matter to you and add to it as you live your life."