I Was Fired From My Role at Cotiviti

I was fired from my role at Cotiviti.

There.

I've written it.

Three words.

I was fired.

It's strange how such a small sentence can carry so much weight.

I've spent a considerable amount of time deciding whether I wanted to write about this.

Part of me wanted to ignore it.

Part of me wanted to pretend it didn't happen.

Another part wanted to write the most beautifully constructed explanation imaginable, one in which everything made sense, everyone behaved exactly as they should have, and I emerged from the experience with a perfectly polished lesson about resilience.

But that wouldn't be entirely honest.

So here is the honest version.

I was fired.

And it hurt.

The Word “Fired”

There is something particularly brutal about the word.

Fired.

Not “my role ended.”

Not “I moved on.”

Not “I'm exploring new opportunities.”

Fired.

It sounds final.

It sounds accusatory.

It sounds like a judgement has already been made.

You hear the word and, almost immediately, you begin wondering what people will think.

What will my friends think?

What will my family think?

What will future employers think?

What will people who know me think?

And perhaps the most difficult question:

What do I think about myself now?

Because employment is strange.

We spend so much of our lives working that our jobs can quietly become part of our identities.

Someone asks:

“What do you do?”

And you don't say:

“I exist.”

You say:

“I work in…”

You give them your title.

Your company.

Your profession.

Your role.

Your career becomes shorthand for who you are.

So when that career suddenly changes, it can feel as though something much larger has been taken away.

For a little while, I wasn't entirely sure where my professional identity ended and I began.

The Day It Happened

There are moments in life that divide themselves naturally into before and after.

Before the conversation.

After the conversation.

Before the email.

After the email.

Before you knew.

After you knew.

Getting fired is one of those moments.

Whatever else was happening in my life at the time, suddenly there was this enormous fact sitting in the middle of it.

My employment was ending.

And there is no particularly poetic way to describe the feeling.

It is uncomfortable.

It is embarrassing.

It is frightening.

It can make you angry.

It can make you question yourself.

It can make you replay conversations that happened weeks or months earlier, searching for clues you might have missed.

What could I have done differently?

Should I have noticed something?

Should I have said something?

Should I have worked harder?

Should I have spoken up?

Should I have kept quiet?

Should I have seen it coming?

The mind is remarkably talented at turning hindsight into an interrogation.

And when you are the person being questioned, it can become exhausting.

The Shame

Perhaps the worst part wasn't even losing the role.

It was having to tell people.

There is something strangely humiliating about saying:

“I've been fired.”

You can feel the sentence changing the way people look at you.

Even when they don't look at you differently.

Even when they're supportive.

Even when they say all the right things.

You still wonder.

Because shame doesn't necessarily come from other people.

Sometimes you bring it yourself.

You carry it into the room.

You sit with it at the kitchen table.

You take it to bed.

You wake up with it.

And suddenly ordinary things become uncomfortable.

Updating your CV.

Looking at LinkedIn.

Seeing someone announce a promotion.

Seeing people you know progressing.

Reading job descriptions.

Trying to explain what happened.

Trying not to sound bitter.

Trying not to sound defeated.

Trying to sound confident when you're not entirely sure you believe your own confidence anymore.

There is a particular cruelty in opening LinkedIn after losing your job and discovering that apparently everyone else on earth has just been promoted.

Congratulations, everyone.

Wonderful.

Thrilled for you.

I'll just be over here reconsidering every professional decision I've made since university.

But underneath the humour is something real.

Getting fired can make you feel left behind.

Especially when you're thirty.

Especially when you've spent years imagining where you would be by this age.

Thirty was supposed to be the decade where things started making sense.

Instead, here I was, having to reconsider something as fundamental as my career.

Was I a Failure?

This is probably the question I have wrestled with most.

Was being fired proof that I had failed?

The honest answer is more complicated than yes or no.

There are things I could have done differently.

There are things I could have handled better.

There are lessons I will carry forward.

I'm not interested in pretending otherwise.

But I have also learned that a professional setback and personal failure are not necessarily the same thing.

A job is something you do.

It is not everything you are.

That sounds obvious until you lose the job.

Then suddenly the distinction becomes rather important.

I was fired from a role.

I was not fired from being a human being.

I was not fired from my friendships.

I was not fired from my family.

I was not fired from my ability to learn.

I was not fired from my future.

The distinction may sound simple.

But sometimes simple truths are the ones we need most.

Anger

Of course I was angry.

I'd be lying if I said otherwise.

Anger is a strange companion.

It arrives loudly.

It tells you exactly who is to blame.

It builds an entire courtroom in your head and appoints you judge, jury and prosecution.

You replay events.

You imagine what you should have said.

You construct conversations that will never happen.

You win arguments against people who aren't even in the room.

And then eventually you get tired.

Because anger can only carry you so far.

At some point you have to put it down.

That doesn't mean deciding everything was fair.

It doesn't mean agreeing with every decision.

It doesn't mean pretending you weren't hurt.

It simply means recognising that you cannot build your future while permanently arguing with your past.

Fairness is a beautiful concept until you are the person waiting for it.

What I Learned

I have learned that your career can change much faster than you expect.

I have learned that no role is guaranteed forever.

I have learned that professional relationships matter.

I have learned that communication matters.

I have learned that criticism, even when difficult to hear, is worth listening to.

I have learned that your CV should never be something you only look at when you desperately need it.

I have learned that you should keep connections alive even when you aren't looking for a job.

And I have learned that your sense of self needs foundations outside your employment.

Because companies change.

Teams change.

Managers change.

Roles disappear.

Departments restructure.

People leave.

People are promoted.

People are dismissed.

People move on.

The world of work is not particularly sentimental.

Nor should it necessarily be.

But you need something inside yourself that survives the organisational chart.

Something that remains when the email account is closed and the laptop is returned.

Something that cannot be taken away by a meeting.

Perhaps that is character.

Perhaps it is resilience.

Perhaps it is simply knowing who you are when nobody is paying you to be anything.

The Cotiviti Chapter

My time at Cotiviti is now a chapter in my professional story.

It wasn't the chapter I expected.

It didn't end in the way I wanted.

And yes, there are things about that chapter that I will think about for a long time.

But it happened.

I was there.

I worked.

I learned.

I experienced things.

I met people.

I developed.

And eventually, the chapter ended.

I don't want to rewrite that history.

Nor do I want to make it into something it wasn't.

It was simply part of my career.

One chapter.

Not the entire book.

And perhaps that is one of the hardest things to remember when something goes wrong professionally.

You are still writing.

Thirty

There is something particularly interesting about being fired around the same time you're turning thirty.

The two experiences seem to speak to one another.

I've been writing about regret.

About shame.

About guilt.

About mistakes.

About the things I didn't understand in my twenties.

And now I have another uncomfortable subject to add to the collection:

failure.

Or at least what feels like failure.

Perhaps thirty isn't the age when everything suddenly comes together.

Perhaps it's the age when you finally realise that things falling apart isn't necessarily the end.

Maybe growing up is less about constructing the perfect life and more about learning how to rebuild when something collapses.

I don't have it all figured out.

Clearly.

I was fired.

There isn't much way of dressing that up.

But perhaps I don't need to.

Maybe the lesson isn't that getting fired was secretly wonderful.

Maybe it wasn't.

Maybe it was simply painful.

And maybe something good will eventually come from it.

I don't need to know what that is yet.

What Happens Next?

I don't know.

That's the truth.

I don't know exactly where this career goes from here.

I don't know what the next role will be.

I don't know whether I'll stay in the same field.

I don't know what the next year will look like.

And, strangely, I'm beginning to think that's okay.

I've spent a lot of my life wanting certainty.

I wanted to know where I was going.

What I would become.

How successful I would be.

What my career would look like.

Who I would be at thirty.

And now I'm discovering that certainty is often an illusion.

The road changes.

You change.

The destination changes.

Sometimes the map becomes useless.

And sometimes you simply have to keep walking.

For Fortune is a fickle mistress, and the road she lays before us is rarely the road we first intended to travel. Yet oft it is upon the unexpected road that the traveller discovereth himself.

I don't know what comes next.

But I know it isn't nothing.

I am still here.

Still capable.

Still learning.

Still ambitious.

Still curious.

Still embarrassingly optimistic about what might happen next.

I Was Fired

So yes.

I was fired from my role at Cotiviti.

I'm embarrassed by it.

I'm angry about parts of it.

I've questioned myself because of it.

I've wondered what I could have done differently.

I've wondered whether it says something about me.

Perhaps it does.

Perhaps there are lessons I needed to learn.

Perhaps there are things I will never do again.

But it doesn't get to become the definition of me.

I refuse to let three words become the entire story.

I was fired.

That's what happened.

It isn't all that I am.

Perhaps this isn't the end of my professional story.

Perhaps it is simply an unexpected turning of the page.

The hand that closes one chapter knoweth not always what waits upon the next.

And so I turn the page.

Not triumphantly.

Not perfectly.

Not with some grand speech about how everything happens for a reason.

Just honestly.

I lost a job.

It hurt.

I learned.

And now I have to decide what I do with what comes next.

The story continues.

It has to.