Sometimes you can feel redundancies coming long before anyone says anything out loud.

This morning, I knew. I was driving to work – running a bit late – when the meeting invite came through. All staff. Early. You don’t need many of those in your career to recognise the pattern. I turned the car around and went home. Logged in at the kitchen table. 

I had wondered if it was coming. It’s not my first rodeo – you feel it before anything’s said. The small signals, the half-questions, the sense that something is shifting, even if no one names it out loud. 

A hug from the CEO on a Friday evening – genuine, appreciative. Still, you wonder, was that the signal? 

There’s a point where you know you’re being asked to do something more, but no one can quite say what that is, and you can’t quite give it, because it hasn’t been defined. So you keep going. 

The environment becomes this kind of grey mist. Everyone’s searching for clarity, continuing to perform, keeping things moving. 

And underneath it, a quiet agreement: don’t show too much, not your uncertainty, 

not your limits, because in an organisation, vulnerability can feel like a risk, and 

in leadership it can feel like exposure. So you learn the dance. 

It had already been a hard year. One that asked more than I expected to give. If I’m honest, I’m not sure I would choose it again. Everything was harder than it should be. Everything was heavier. Strip away the business language and what I was really doing was putting my heart into leading people through a tough time. Trying to steady something that didn’t always feel steady. 

And so there I was at the kitchen table, trying to look calm, for myself, for the team, for what was coming. My daughter was still there, getting ready, moving around, distracted. Busy in her own world. 

I was aware of her in that way you are when you’re holding something heavy inside. The call started while she was still in the room. She didn’t really notice. She moved in and out, gathering her things. I smiled at her easily, confidently, trying to send her on her way without her feeling any of it. 

She left, the door closed, and it happened. 

Then the day just went on. I worked. I responded. I kept things moving. 

It wasn’t until later when I told my family that it felt different. It was their reaction, their hurt for me. That was harder than the news itself. 

This is the third time in my career my role has been disestablished. And I’m conscious I’m not the only one. Across Wellington – and across the country for the past couple of years – a lot of people have waited for emails like that, turned up at meetings they’d rather not attend. 

I’ve been on the other side of it too. I’ve had to make those calls about who stays and who goes, to sit in those meetings, carry those decisions. There’s a weight that comes with that. 

It brings a quiet tension to my position now – trying to hold my head high, while knowing what this moment feels like for others. 

What I keep coming back to is the way people showed up in those moments. There were people who delivered bad news to me and handled it with care and there were people who didn’t. When I was the one saying what nobody wanted to hear, there were people, who even in that moment, found a way to be gracious. So gracious. 

When I got home, I sat out on the deck with my daughter. She was upset, angry for me, and protective in that instinctive way. Not because I was falling apart, but because, in her eyes, I deserved better. I found myself trying to explain something that’s quite hard to explain. I told her it wasn’t personal, even though it felt deeply personal.

I understand more about what’s behind these decisions than I did the first time this happened to me. I understand the weight of it, the trade-offs, the bits you don’t see from the outside. But that doesn’t make it any easier to explain. 

As I was serving up dinner, my son asked me why. Why you, and what are you going to do? Simple questions, but I realised I didn’t really have a clear answer for either.

Not one that would make sense to him, or maybe not one I was ready to say out loud yet. 

Before I could find the words, there was a shift – a new Olivia Rodrigo song had just come on, and suddenly that was the most important thing in the room. The conversation moved on, and the mood lifted just long enough for me to catch my breath. But the questions are still there, waiting. 

I know there’s more to come. Today I feel steady, but I know that I won’t feel like this every day. At some point, my confidence will slip, my grip on this will loosen. I’ve felt that shift before. A bitterness creeps in if you let it. I can feel it sitting there already.

I just don’t let it take up space. Not yet.

I don’t know if I’ll still feel this neutral in a week. Or in a month. What I do know is this: I’m ok for now. I’ll try to hang onto that … until I can’t pay the bills.