The Agony of Irrelevance: Losing Your Job + Finding Yourself Again

Listen to this episode on Apple Podcasts or Spotify

After 25 years in senior operational roles, most recently as a COO leading teams through growth and culture change, Rosi Bremec's career ended with a short conversation and a locked laptop. 

In this raw, honest conversation, Rosi returns to Leading Through Crisis to talk about what happens after the polished LinkedIn goodbye post: the silence, the identity loss, and the slow, unglamorous work of rebuilding a sense of self when the title, calendar, and sense of daily purpose disappear overnight.

Rosi opens up about hitting rock bottom, the "agony of irrelevance," and why she finally decided to write publicly about job loss, redundancy, and executive burnout instead of hiding behind a professional facade. 

She also shares a perspective few leaders admit out loud: what it's like to have been the person delivering layoff news to others, and how experiencing job loss herself changed how she understands the impact of those conversations.

This episode is for anyone navigating career transition, job loss, layoff, or an identity shift after leaving a leadership role. It's also for any leader who wants to understand what's really happening on the other side of the table when someone is let go.

Listen in on my conversation with Rosi Bremec…

—

Rosi Bremec is a writer, speaker and operator whose work draws on more than two decades in senior operational and C-suite roles across technology, SaaS and iGaming. Her work explores what happens when business decisions become lived human experiences: the conversations leaders avoid, the responsibility quietly left with HR, the identities people build around work and the stories they carry when that work changes.

Rosi's flagship keynote, The People Part Is Leadership: Confessions of an Operator, grew from her own reckoning with the distance between caring about people and remaining present for the consequences of leadership decisions. The essay behind its central idea reached more than 127,000 people on LinkedIn, entirely organically, and opened a wider conversation among HR and people leaders.

She also writes The Agency Letters, a more personal body of work about identity, shame, agency and the meaning we make from what happens to us.

You can learn more about Rosi and her work at rosibremec.com. Or connect with her on LinkedIn: linkedin.com/in/rosibremec.