I’ve always told my kids as they were growing up that it’s ok to feel sad, angry, anxious, disappointed, frustrated, or completely overwhelmed.
Feel the feelings. Be with them. They’re telling you that something about what happened doesn’t align with what you expected, needed, or wanted.
Feelings are not the problem. You’re human, and having feelings is part of how we function.
What matters is your bounceback rate.
And by that, I don’t mean how quickly you can shove your feelings aside, pretend everything is fine, and return to life as usual. No. It’s not about forcing yourself into a different feeling (or numbing your feelings) before you’ve had a chance to process what happened.
Your bounceback rate is about how easily you can move from being consumed by your reaction to having enough clarity to see what’s happening, determine what you need, and choose what you want to do next, even while you’re feeling whatever it is that you’re feeling.
You can still be scared or angry or sad or frustrated.
Just bounce back to your ability to see more clearly and choose more freely.
For me, the way back almost always runs through four questions: What’s going on? What’s the outcome I want? What would it take to get there? What can I do right now? We’ll walk through each one below. First, it helps to understand why it’s so hard to think clearly when everything goes wrong.
We all tend to have our own version of how we react to the unexpected.
Gasp! Oh crap! No, no, no, no, this can’t be happening! What the flip! You’ve got to be kidding me! I can’t deal with this right now.
The initial reaction may be emotional, physical, or both. Your heart starts racing, your stomach drops, your thoughts scatter, and maybe you freeze, cry, yell, shut down, or immediately start imagining every possible way the situation could get worse.
That’s human. The problem isn’t that you reacted. The problem comes when you get stuck inside the reaction and it becomes the only place from which you can see the situation. What happened, how you feel, and what you’re making it mean all collapse into one big weight on your shoulders.
So a flat tire means the entire day is ruined. An unexpected bill means you’re never going to be financially secure. The failed launch means the product is doomed. The email campaign with the wrong link means everyone is incompetent. Someone breaking up with you means you’ll die alone. Your child getting sick means every terrifying possibility running through your head is already happening.
One thing happened, but how you see and interact with the world (your operating system) is now processing it through fear, history, expectations, beliefs, and every other piece of context you carry. Before you know it, the thing that happened and everything you’ve made it mean have become one giant pile of doom.
And it is incredibly difficult to make useful decisions from inside a giant pile of doom.
To begin climbing out, I come back to those four questions: What’s going on? What’s the outcome I want? What would it take to get there? And what can I do right now?
I’ve relied on those questions throughout my life: through divorce, 16 years of single motherhood, financial strain, layoffs, and the difficult situations I’ve had to navigate while leading global teams. They help me separate what happened from what I’m feeling, what I’m making it mean, and what the situation may require from me now. They help me isolate the observable events from my current interpretation of them and move quickly from “oh crap” to “what now.”
But one experience tested this way of operating more than any other.
My oldest daughter suddenly ended up in the ICU with multi-organ failure. She was in a coma, on a ventilator, dying. No amount of clear thinking or problem-solving could give me control over whether her organs recovered, whether she woke up, or what would happen next.
I was terrified, but I still had to stay in contact with the reality unfolding in front of me. I needed to understand what the doctors knew and didn’t know, what required immediate attention, which decisions needed to be made, what they could do medically, and what remained available for me to do as her mom.
Those questions didn’t make the situation less horrifying, remove my fear, or guarantee the outcome I so desperately wanted.
And I didn’t find my way there alone. It was my sister who helped redirect my attention from that overwhelming, blinding weight to what needed to be seen or done in the moment, in the midst of my pain. She told me, “Baby steps. One day at a time.” That helped me focus and refocus over and over and over again: what’s going on, what’s the outcome I want, what would it take to get there, and what can I do right now.
She’s much better now. But at the time, I had no idea how it would end. Those questions gave me the focus, clarity, and grounding I needed to navigate something I couldn’t control.
That’s what I mean when I say there’s almost always something to figure out.
Many situations can be solved, repaired, redirected, or approached differently once we separate what happened from the panic accumulating around it. Other situations can’t be fixed or reversed. Some losses are permanent, some illnesses can’t be cured, and sometimes the outcome we wanted is no longer available to us.
But even when we can’t fix what happened, we can still try to understand it, determine what matters now, communicate what others need to know, ask for help, make the decisions available to us, grieve what has been lost, and choose how we want to move through whatever comes next.
We may not have power over what happened or how everything turns out, but we still have agency inside the moment. We can allow ourselves to feel what we feel while finding our way back to enough clarity to see what remains within our influence and choose what we want to do with it.
Because I tend to move from “oh crap” to “what now” fairly quickly, I used to expect everyone around me to move at the same speed.
I’d already be tracing what happened, separating what mattered from the noise, and considering what we could do about it. Meanwhile, someone else might still be scared, angry, disappointed, or trying to understand what the heck just happened.
And here I’d come with my invisible little clipboard, ready to get everyone focused and moving.
Sometimes that helped, but most of the time, I moved so quickly toward the solution that I failed to acknowledge the people standing inside the problem with me.
Their feelings and experience were part of what was happening too.
Needless to say, feathers were ruffled, and quite a number of folks got ticked off at me through the years. I was inadvertently dismissing their experience of the situation, which created unnecessary muck that piled onto the doom.
So when others are involved, we may need to first acknowledge what the situation is producing before trying to move everyone through it. That can sound as simple as, “I know this is scary,” or “I can see how frustrated everyone is,” or “This isn’t what any of us expected, and we don’t know exactly what happens next.”
The emotions aren’t annoying debris surrounding the “real” operating problem. They’re information inside the operating system, and they may affect what people can hear, decide, communicate, and do next.
This isn’t a rigid order of operations, by the way. In an emergency, you may need to act immediately and acknowledge what people are experiencing alongside the action or afterward. You’re also not responsible for regulating everyone’s emotions, making them feel better, or waiting until everyone arrives at “what now” at the same time. People can be angry, scared, or disappointed and still participate in making things happen.
And acknowledgment isn’t a box to check so you can hurry everyone along, either. If “I know this is frustrating” really means “There, see, I acknowledged you, can we move on now?” people will feel that too.
The point is simply to account for what is already happening in the system. It’s part of the answer to the question, “What’s going on?”
Acknowledging how people feel doesn’t make the problem bigger, nor does it mean we have to sit inside the reaction forever and let panic run the show. It lets people know we see them and what they’re experiencing, which gives us a better chance of figuring out what comes next together.
When everything feels like it’s going wrong, you don’t need to solve the entire situation at once. You just need enough clarity to identify the next useful move.
The four questions:
What’s going on? Separate what happened from what you’re making it mean.
What’s the outcome I want? Name what you’re working toward.
What would it take to get there? Identify what it would take to close the gap.
What can I do right now? Choose the next move your real circumstances allow.
Let’s say you’ve just been laid off.
Maybe you saw it coming, or maybe you logged into what you thought was a regular morning meeting and learned that your job no longer existed. Either way, you still have rent or a mortgage, groceries, health insurance, and maybe a family that depends on your income. Everything costs more, companies continue eliminating jobs, AI is changing both the work and how people get hired, and every open role seems to receive a gazillion applications before you’ve even finished reading the description.
This isn’t a little setback you can squeeze into a formula and magically reverse. This is real, it’s real heavy, and it has real consequences.
Asking four questions won’t make the job market easier, lower your expenses, eliminate bias from the hiring process, or guarantee that a recruiter will call you back. And it won’t stop you from feeling the fear, pain, fury, embarrassment, and rejection that may be part of your experience.
The questions just help you untangle the enormous reality in front of you so you can see what you’re dealing with and find somewhere useful to direct your attention. They help you move from “Holy crap, I’m screwed, how the heck are we supposed to survive?” to “Ok, this sucks. What do I do now?” The goal isn’t to make the situation less serious. It’s to help you move from “This is happening to me and I’m powerless” to “This is happening, it sucks, and I still have choices.”
This question helps you clarify the current state.
Start by collecting the observable information (or data points) already available to you.
Articulate what happened without judgments or interpretations. Ask yourself what you know and what you don’t know. What are you feeling or experiencing internally? What have other people told you? What are you assuming, predicting, judging, or making it all mean?
Maybe your position was eliminated, your last day is today, and your health insurance ends at the end of the month. You’ve been offered four weeks’ severance, but you don’t yet understand all the terms. You have enough savings to cover about three months of expenses, and you feel terrified, angry, and humiliated.
These are all data points.
“My career is over,” “I’m going to lose everything,” and “How the heck am I supposed to find another job in this market?” may be very real thoughts running through your mind, but they aren’t observable events that have already happened. They’re conclusions and predictions produced through the fear, history, beliefs, and information currently available to you.
That doesn’t mean you dismiss them. Some of those fears may point toward legitimate risks and barriers that need to be considered. Just don’t collapse them into what has already happened.
"My life is over” gives your attention nowhere useful to go. It keeps directing you back toward doom and gloom.
By contrast, “I was laid off, I have four weeks’ severance, my insurance ends this month, and I need to understand how long my savings can cover my expenses” gives you something you can begin working with.
This question helps you identify the desired state. What are you trying to make happen?
Maybe the answer is simple: I need another full-time job ASAP.
That’s a completely valid outcome. It gives you a destination to work toward even though you can’t guarantee the result.
You may also have other outcomes that support or exist alongside it. You might need to create enough short-term income to keep your household afloat, maintain health insurance, protect your savings, or find freelance work while pursuing a full-time role.
Not every desired outcome carries the same urgency or importance, so it can help to distinguish the primary goal from the secondary outcomes supporting it.
Your primary goal may be to secure another full-time job. A secondary one may be to generate freelance income within the next month. Another may be to reduce your expenses enough to extend your financial runway.
You’re not forcing yourself to see your layoff as a blessing, nor are you pretending you can control the hiring process. You’re deciding what you want to work toward from where you are now.
This question helps you identify what may be required to close the gap between where you are now and where you want to be.
If you need another job as quickly as possible, you may need to update your resume and online profiles, identify the kinds of roles you’re looking for, apply consistently, contact people in your network, speak with external recruiters, create a portfolio of work, and prepare for interviews.
If you also need income while the search continues, you may need to calculate your financial runway, apply for unemployment, explore freelance or consulting work, take on a part-time job, drive for Uber, or find another temporary source of income.
Different outcomes require different actions.
The goal isn’t to do every possible thing you can. It’s to determine what lines up with the outcome you’re focused on and decide which actions deserve your attention and which ones can be tabled for now.
Maybe you commit to a set number of targeted applications each week and to reaching out to five people in your network. Maybe generating freelance work requires you to create a simple website, contact former colleagues, package a service, or test paid advertising.
Those are your current hypotheses about what may help produce the outcome you want, not guarantees. You’re experimenting. You won’t know how well they work until you begin taking action and observe what happens.
This question helps you convert what you identified in question 3 into action within your current reality.
Here’s where you bring 'what it would take to get there' into contact with your actual circumstances.
How much time, money, energy, support, and information do you currently have? What can you do today? What requires help? What needs to happen first? What simply isn’t possible yet?
Maybe today you can review your severance agreement, calculate your immediate expenses, update the first section of your resume, and contact one person you trust. Tomorrow you might file for unemployment, identify ten job openings, or reach out to a former colleague about freelance work.
The next move doesn’t need to solve your unemployment or reveal how the rest of your career will unfold. It needs to move you toward one of the outcomes you identified, or produce information that helps you determine what to do next.
Life doesn’t stop after you answer the four questions once. You do something, something happens, and that result becomes new information.
Maybe two months go by and you’ve submitted dozens of applications without receiving a single interview. That doesn’t automatically mean you’re unemployable or that nothing will ever work. It means the approach you’ve been using hasn’t yet produced the outcome you wanted.
So you return to the questions. You reassess.
What’s going on now? Are your applications reaching actual humans? Are you targeting the right roles? The right companies? Is your experience being communicated clearly? Are automated systems screening you out? Are referrals producing different results than online applications?
Is the outcome still the same, or does something need to change? And then, what would it take to get there based on what you know now, and what can you do right now that's aligned with that?
Maybe the outcome stays the same (you want a full-time job ASAP), but now you change how you position your experience, focus more heavily on introductions and referrals, pursue contracting work, learn a missing skill, broaden the roles you’ve been considering, or elevate a secondary outcome, like part-time work, while continuing toward the primary one.
That’s not failure. That’s the process working.
And it can still feel exhausting and scary. The difference is that those emotions and the doomsday story around them no longer have to take up your entire field of vision.
That’s what bounceback rate really is. It’s not how fast you stop feeling things. It’s how quickly you can find your way back to the questions.
Ask what’s going on, identify the outcome you want, determine what it would take to get there, and find one thing you can do right now. Do something, observe what happens, and go through the questions again.
It’s not magic, and it won’t solve every problem.
The questions just pull you out of the heap long enough for you to see a bit more clearly, recognize your options, choose something, and move. What happens next gives you new information, and then you use that information to find your next move again.
You still have agency within your life. Agency doesn’t mean pretending structural barriers don’t exist. It means refusing to let their existence make your own remaining choices invisible.