When Life Breaks You, Here's What You Do Next...

Some days you wake up and it feels like the world is singing your name. The sun is shining, you walk down your main local street and everyone is giving you that warm smile as you pass by. Even the barista remembers your coffee order, your clients and customers say yes to any new and returning business, your kid hugs you without being asked.

Then there are days where even your own reflection feels like a stranger.

You stare at your phone hoping for a text that never comes. You scroll through social media, staring at the shimmering charade of life people paste on the feed and wonder if you are the only one fighting to breathe.

This is life. It’s not a motivational poster. It’s not always progress or peace. It’s messy, unfair, and sometimes deeply cruel. It doesn’t care how hard you’ve worked or how much you’ve sacrificed.

And if you're reading this with a lump in your throat or a weight on your chest, I want you to know something, you are not broken.

You are in the boxing ring. And this is where it matters most.

The Curveballs That Break Our Bones

There are moments that hit like a road-train in the outback. Death. Divorce. Betrayal. Job loss. Moments where everything you trusted as stable suddenly crumbles.

Like the woman folding her laundry in silence, the same pile of children's clothes her late husband used to tease her for hoarding. He isn't around anymore. She's trying to be two parents and barely feels like one.

Or the man who built a multi-million-dollar business with his bare hands, who now avoids the office without his stomach dropping. Knowing he has to layoff staff and that creates a shame that burns worse than the loss itself.

Or the former executive, suit in the closet, inbox cleared out, reputation smeared by a boardroom morality play. He sits on his couch in an empty house, asking himself if it was worth telling the truth. Maybe he confided something human, an affair, a failed marriage, a history of addiction. It wasn't illegal. It was just real.

But real makes people uncomfortable.

Look at the headlines. The Coldplay affair saga wasn’t about legal wrongdoing. It was about public perception and the hidden hypocrisy in our institutions.

We love redemption stories until they remind us that we need redeeming in our lives too. We love honesty until it shows up in our own backyard, asking us to take a hard look at the lies we live with.

This is not a blog to wrap it all up in a nice red bow. There are no bows here. Just waking up to the reality that life is messy, bloody and filled with grit, sweat and choices and that's ok.

THE UNSEEN WAR: Identity Under Fire

When we talk about grief or loss, we often talk about what happened to us. But what really breaks us is what happens within us.

Chris Argyris, one of the fathers of organisational learning, coined the idea of Double Loop Learning. I have spoken about it before. In essence, it’s this: most people, when faced with a problem, try to fix the action. That’s single loop learning.

But those who truly grow? They question the governing variables beneath those actions. The values, the rules, the identity structures they’ve built their lives upon.

Let’s say you’ve always seen yourself as the provider. Then you lose your job. You don’t just lose income. You lose identity. You fall. And you stay down longer than you want because you’re grieving a self that no longer fits.

Or maybe you built the business from the ground up, with him by your side. People saw you as a team. You saw you as a team. Then the marriage ends. But the business? It doesn’t.

Now, he still owns part of what you run, every day. You didn’t just lose a partner. You lost the picture of how it was all meant to look. And the hardest part? You keep showing up to something that reminds you daily of what no longer is.

You are not just managing operations. You are managing grief, identity, and a version of yourself that's had to grow teeth.

Double loop learning invites you to go deeper. To ask: Why did I believe I had to be that? Who told me that was my only value?

And that’s where Peter Senge’s Ladder of Inference kicks in. Your brain is climbing that ladder every day—filtering data, attaching meaning, making assumptions, drawing conclusions, forming beliefs, and acting on them. That executive who lost their job? The ladder tells them they’re a failure, unworthy. But maybe the real belief that needs rewriting is: My worth is not dependent on the morality of others or the seat I hold at a boardroom table.

Grief Is A Strategy, Too

Let’s get something straight: grieving is not weakness. Sitting in your pain isn’t wallowing. It’s processing.

Psychologist Elisabeth Kübler-Ross taught us that grief is nonlinear. Denial, anger, bargaining, depression, acceptance they don’t march in order. They come like storms. But what she didn’t always get credit for is that grief done well becomes growth. It forces us to recalibrate what we truly desire. It strips away the falseness of productivity, perfection, and public approval.

Grief is waking up at 2 a.m. in a sweat and not knowing whether it was a nightmare or your real life. It’s going to the supermarket and seeing their favourite food and freezing in the aisle. It’s lying on the bathroom tiles because the cold is the only thing that numbs. It’s texting their old number knowing it won’t ping back, but doing it anyway because the silence is a comfort now.

But You Can't Stay There Forever

Martin Seligman, the father of Positive Psychology, argues that the most resilient people aren’t the ones who don’t break, but the ones who rewrite the story of their breakage. They find agency in the ruins.

So what do you do when you don’t want to get out of bed?

You don’t think about climbing Everest.

You don’t chase ten-year plans.

You think: Can I get up? Can I shower? Can I hug my kid? Can I go for a walk? Can I drink water?

A friend once told me how, in the thick of it, she would walk to the end of each street. At every corner, she’d stop, plant her feet, and take deep, deliberate breaths like she was anchoring herself to the earth. No phone, no distraction. Just air in her lungs and the reminder: I’m here. I’m still standing. Even when everything felt like it was falling apart, that ritual grounded her. Street by street. Breathe by breath. It didn’t fix the mess, but it made space for it to be okay. For herto be okay. Mess and all.

And that’s the fight.

Because what you’re doing in those micro-actions is rewiring your belief system: I am still here. I am still choosing.

And if you do that enough, that identity that got shattered begins to reform. Not around a title. Not around someone else’s approval. But around your ability to adapt.

Who Are You When You Have Nothing Left to Prove?

My life has had challenges. Building organisations and businesses hasn’t always felt like growth, it’s felt like a boxing match. Right hooks of betrayal. Uppercuts of pain.

And sometimes, knives in the back from people I've shared meals with. The worst hits didn’t come from enemies. They came from people I trusted. People who once applauded me in public and then slandered me behind closed doors. People who said nothing when it mattered most. Not all the losses were betrayals. Some were quieter. More permanent. Like the people I didn’t lose to politics, but to life itself.

Grief isn’t always dramatic. Sometimes it’s slow. Private. It shows up in a silence that wraps itself around your chest and stays.

Grief doesn’t just live in cemeteries. It lives in boardrooms. In bedrooms. In special spaces that once felt like home. It shows up when the community you gave everything to begins to turn its face. Not overnight. Not with clarity. But through sideways glances. Muted conversations. You feel it before you ever hear it.

I gave my heart to it. Time, vision, sacrifice. I held up the walls, swept the floors, carried more than I should have. Not for credit. But because I believed in what we were building. But over time, the atmosphere shifted. The values that once felt solid started leaking. Whispers grew legs. Gossip got dressed up as 'concern'.

What once felt like welcome turned into quiet resistance, you became too much, too often.

You try to stay. You try to redeem it.

But there’s a moment, undeniable, when staying costs you more than leaving. When you wake up and realise the thing you helped build is no longer safe for the person you have become. So I walked. Not in bitterness. But in grief. Because I knew what it could have been. And I had to let it die.

Or in my experiences in being an investor and a co-founder? It’s like living in two houses at once, one has your name on the mortgage, the other throws parties you’re never invited to.

You’re in it, but not of it. You put in real money, not just words, and slowly, people stop telling you the truth. Not out of cruelty. But out of fear. It’s not malice. It’s self-preservation.

Successes are shared. Failures? Tucked behind safe-sounding phrases like “still exploring options”, "pivoting" or “navigating the next phase.” Eventually, you realise you weren’t on the inside. You were just close enough to be useful, until you weren’t. And when the power shifts, because it always does, it doesn’t come with a conversation. It comes with silence. A new Chair. A rewritten narrative. And despite a profitable exit, your name, is quietly edited out.

But here’s the thing: despite all that, you keep getting up anyway. Even with bruises. Even with silence from those you once called friends. Even with the sting of absence, the death of a community, the slow unravelling of a partnership, the grief that wakes you at 3:00am, demanding to be felt.

You show up. You keep breathing. You keep building. Not for applause. Not for revenge. But because you’ve stopped waiting for permission. Because pain, real pain, burns away your need to be understood.

And the moment you realise you’ve got nothing left to prove you become dangerous. Because your next move? It’s no longer about survival. It’s about purpose. And purpose doesn’t flinch.

Don't Outsource Your Morality

If you are trying to live up to someone else's version of right and wrong, you will eventually collapse.

You can't win at a game where they change the rules halfway.

Viktor Frankl, the Holocaust survivor and psychiatrist, wrote, "Everything can be taken from a man but one thing: the last of the human freedoms to choose one’s attitude in any given set of circumstances, to choose one’s own way."

This isn’t toxic positivity. It’s existential power.

So stop waiting for others to validate your next step. You get to decide what matters now.

The Flywheel of Momentum

Jim Collins talks about the Flywheel Effect in business. You push the wheel, and it barely budges. But with consistent pressure, the momentum builds. It becomes unstoppable.

Life works the same.

One action. Then another. Then the little moments build into momentum. And before you know it, you’re living inside something you thought you’d never feel again: progress.

Progress doesn’t mean the grief is gone. It means the grief is no longer your ruler.

Practical Steps When You Are In The Pit

1. Journal your beliefs: What do I believe about myself right now? Where did that belief come from? Is it true or inherited?

   
   

2. Audit your ladder: What facts am I ignoring? What story am I telling myself? What conclusion am I jumping to?

   
   

3. Grieve intentionally: Make time to sit in the anger. The sadness. Get professional help. Scream in the car if you need to. But do not numb it out. Pain not faced becomes pain you pass on.

   
   

4. Find the smallest next right action: Shower. Text a friend. Walk around the block. That’s enough.

   
   

5. Anchor into something eternal: Whether it's a bigger purpose, or a legacy you want to leave, get out of the shallows of the water. You were made for depth.

   
   

6. Speak the truth, even if your voice shakes: Your silence won’t save you, it will suffocate you. Truth isn’t about revenge, it is about reclaiming your identity.

   
   

You Get To Choose Your Story

You didn’t choose the loss. You didn’t choose the betrayal. You didn’t choose the punches.

But you do get to choose what happens next.

Will you let it define you? Or refine you?

Will you crawl into shame? Or climb into meaning?

You are not alone. And you are not out.

The bell hasn't rung. The fight is still on.

Take the breath. Throw the next punch. And when you don’t have the strength, lean on someone who does. But don’t ever confuse pain for failure.

This is the soil where true identity is reborn. This is where the real ones rise.

Your life is not over. Not even close.

It just got honest.

TK