At a moment when tech giants are cutting ranks, government jobs are disappearing, and the media industry is contracting (an estimated 1.1 million US jobs were cut in 2025), their advice remains timely. So much so that the two just launched a weekly series, The Cool Girl Briefing, offering notes on the current state of work, combined with their signature sharp advice. They spoke to SELF about career resilience—and the practical steps to take if you get fired.
SELF: What’s the first step in recovering from getting fired?
Kristina O’Neill: Getting fired is a highly traumatic life event. It’s akin to a death—of parts of your identity, your routines, all the rituals you’ve become very used to. There is an acknowledgement of loss that needs to happen. Start by calling it what it is: Say that you’ve been fired and own that language. We believe so much good comes from saying what it is and talking about it. It’s a word that people know means you’re going through something, but only if you’re not sugarcoating it with soft language and pretending like everything’s okay.
Laura Brown: You’ve got to rip that Band-Aid off and say it. Some people wince at the term fired. But I think in order to clear things, you have to be clear—about what happened and what help you need—and that is going to fast-track you to where you need to go once you’ve given yourself some time to think. The faster you claim it and stop spinning it—like, “Oh, it was a change”—the faster you reclaim everything you’re going to do afterwards.
How do you get past the shame and embarrassment—those feelings that make you want to spin getting fired into something else?
Brown: Number one, know you’re not alone. Sadly, no one has the exclusive on being fired, so don’t make this harder for yourself. You’re already carrying this ball of crap from losing your job, and all the responsibilities and all the things you have to manage—your money and your health care, and all the urgencies that you have to deal with in your life. So why would you take on another big heavyweight when you’re already carrying so much?
For women, sometimes the shame is because it’s taken us so much longer to get to where the dudes have been the whole time. But lose the shame. This is what I said to my team—35 of us got laid off at once: Everything you’ve learned, everything you’ve done, all your skills, all your achievements are yours. They [don’t belong to] the company that let you go. So that’s a mind shift that women have to make, and bring a bit of dude into it—a bit of ego and be like, now all this stuff you learned working is yours.
