Cheryl Dobbins Hege

What happens when the career you've spent decades building suddenly ends and you realize you don't actually want to rebuild the same one?

At 56, I found myself asking that question.

After years of building experience, relationships and a reputation in the home and furnishings industries, I was caught in a series of organizational changes that ultimately resulted in a layoff.

I knew layoffs happened. I had watched talented people go through restructurings and shifting business priorities throughout my career. Knowing that didn't make it any easier when it happened to me.

For a while, I felt as though I had lost part of my identity.

When your career has been an important part of who you are for decades, your title, your responsibilities and your daily routine can become intertwined with your sense of value.

Suddenly, I was no longer the person going to the office, planning the next Market, developing the next initiative or answering the questions people had always brought to me.

There were moments when I felt lost. There were moments when I questioned my worth. I wondered what came next in a difficult job market and whether everything I had spent years building still mattered.

Logically, I knew my experience had not disappeared overnight. Emotionally, it didn't always feel that way.

Eventually, I came to understand something that has stayed with me: how you feel in a difficult moment is not always an accurate measure of your value.

My circumstances had changed.

My value had not.

That realization allowed me to stop asking only, "How do I find another job like the one I had?" and start asking a more important question:

What do I actually want the next part of my career to look like?

The answer surprised me.

I Didn't Want My Old Career Back. I Wanted to Use It Differently.

I had spent years in marketing roles I enjoyed and in an industry I genuinely love. I knew I wanted to stay connected to home furnishings. I wasn't looking to walk away from marketing, public relations, communications, events or the relationships I had spent years developing.

But with some distance, I realized I didn't necessarily want another version of the job I had just lost.

Much of my work had followed a familiar rhythm. We would spend months preparing for Market, execute Market and almost immediately begin preparing for the next one. I was good at it. I knew the business. But I had become so used to that cycle that I hadn't stopped to ask myself whether it was still challenging and energizing me in the same way.

A layoff creates space for questions you may have been too busy to ask.

When I looked back, the parts of my work that had energized me most started to stand out.

One was creating a hospitality program from the ground up. I loved taking an idea, building a strategy around it, solving problems and watching something new take shape. I also loved what the program made possible: bringing people together, helping them make meaningful connections and creating opportunities for relationships to develop long after the event ended.

That told me something.

I was energized by creating.

I was energized by connecting people.

I wanted variety. I wanted marketing, public relations and communications, but I also wanted relationship building, development, new ideas and the opportunity to help others. I wanted to keep using the skills I had built throughout my career without simply repeating the same cycle in a different company.

Most importantly, I wanted my work to connect to something I genuinely believed in.

The layoff forced me to pay attention to something I might otherwise have ignored.

At this point in my career, success isn't simply about what I'm capable of doing. It's also about whether the work I'm doing feels meaningful to me.

When the Title Disappears, What Remains?

One of the hardest parts of losing a job is how quickly a title can disappear.

One day, it is part of how you introduce yourself. The next, it isn't.

That made me think differently about what we actually build over the course of a career.

A job title describes what you are doing at a particular moment.

Your experience is what you know how to do anywhere.

I wasn't starting with an empty page. I had decades of experience in marketing, public relations and communications. I understood the home furnishings industry. I knew how to build programs, create strategies, lead initiatives, solve problems, manage events, communicate with different audiences and bring people together.

I also had something that doesn't fit neatly into a résumé bullet: perspective.

Experience gives you pattern recognition. You have seen organizations evolve and priorities shift. You have watched strategies work and fail. You recognize problems earlier. You ask different questions. You understand that decisions rarely happen in isolation and that how you handle people is often just as important as how you handle the work.

Over time, you also build another kind of professional capital.

Relationships.

Reputation.

Integrity.

When I was younger, I probably underestimated how important those things would become. Skills matter. Results matter. Accomplishments matter. But so does the way you achieve them.

• Do you keep your word?
• Do people trust you?
• Do you help when there is nothing immediately in it for you?
• Do you treat people with the same respect regardless of their title?
• Do your actions reflect the values you say are important to you?

Every interaction becomes part of your reputation, usually when you're not even thinking about it.

I have always wanted to be someone people can turn to when they have a question, need help, want an introduction or need an honest perspective. Relationships like those usually aren't created through one big moment. They develop over years through small interactions, consistency and trust.

Eventually, they add up to something incredibly valuable.

Projects end. Companies change. Titles disappear. Integrity travels with you.

So does the reputation you have earned.

That is career equity no organizational chart can erase.

You Don't Always Feel Qualified Before You Contribute

The layoff wasn't the first time I had to separate how I felt about myself from what I was actually capable of doing.

Earlier in my career, I sometimes sat at a conference table and assumed everyone else had more of a right to speak than I did.

• They had more experience.
• They knew more.
• They were more senior.

Surely I should listen rather than be the person raising my hand.

Sometimes you have to play a little mind game with yourself. You have to remind yourself that you are qualified even when you don't feel qualified.

• You earned your seat at the table.
• Your experience has value.
• You have something to contribute.
• Raise your hand.
• Offer the idea.
• Ask the question.
• Provide the feedback.

Over the years, I learned that confidence does not always arrive before action.

Sometimes you act first, and confidence catches up.

That lesson became important again when I was deciding what came after my layoff.

I didn't have absolute certainty about what my next role should be. There was no clear path telling me which direction to take. I only knew I didn't want fear, disappointment or a temporary loss of confidence making the decision for me.

Resilience, I've learned, isn't pretending that difficult experiences don't hurt. It's being willing to feel the disappointment without letting yourself stay there.

Eventually, you have to push forward. You have to take a risk. You have to believe there may be something different, and maybe even something better suited to who you are now, on the other side.

Reinvention Doesn't Have to Mean Starting Again

My answer eventually came from a place that was already part of my life.

For more than six years, I had been involved with WithIt, the Women's Leadership Development Network serving the home and furnishings industries. I knew the organization. I believed in its mission. I had experienced firsthand the relationships, mentoring, education and connections it creates.

Joining WithIt as Director of Advancement and Marketing gave me an opportunity I hadn't originally known I was looking for.

I could stay in an industry I knew and loved while using my experience differently.

Marketing, public relations, communications, events, strategy and relationships were still part of what I brought to the table. But now they could intersect with development, mentoring, creating opportunities and helping strengthen an organization whose mission mattered deeply to me.

I could contribute to something that supports women across the arc of their careers, from students preparing to enter the industry to emerging professionals finding their voices to experienced leaders continuing to grow, lead and give back.

It didn't feel like walking away from the career I had spent decades building.

It felt like finally understanding how many different ways I could use it.

I've come to see reinvention as less about becoming someone new and more about deciding what you want to carry forward.

• You keep the skills.
• You keep the relationships.
• You keep the judgment you've developed through success and failure.
• You keep your reputation and your integrity.
• You keep what still energizes you.
• You also get to leave some things behind.

That may be one of the advantages of changing direction later in a career.

At 26, I was still figuring out what I could do.

At 56, I had a much clearer understanding of what I could do, what mattered to me, what I didn't need to prove anymore and where I wanted to make a difference. That clarity was earned.

You Are More Than the Role You Lost

I would never tell someone going through a layoff that she should immediately look for the silver lining.

Sometimes losing a job simply hurts.

It can shake your confidence. It can make you question your identity and your worth. It can make an accomplished person wonder whether she is still accomplished when the company, title and business card are gone. I had those moments.

What I eventually understood was that losing a role didn't undo the career that came before it.

My skills were still mine. So were the relationships I had built, the reputation I had earned and the integrity I had worked hard to protect.

• I could still learn.
• I could still adapt.
• I could still connect people, create something new and contribute in a meaningful way.
• Most importantly, I could still choose.

Knowing your value doesn't mean believing you are above change. In many ways, it requires the opposite. It means having enough confidence in what you have built to believe you can use it somewhere new.

It also means realizing that being capable of doing something doesn't obligate you to keep doing the same thing forever.

• You are allowed to want something different.
• You are allowed to take a risk.
• You are allowed to choose work that better reflects who you are now.

At 56, I didn't start over.

I took the relationships I had built, the reputation I had earned, the skills I had developed, the integrity I had protected, the lessons I had learned and a much clearer understanding of what mattered to me.

Then I asked myself what I wanted to build with all of it.

That turned out to be a much better question than asking how I could get back what I had lost. Changing direction didn't erase what came before.

It gave me the opportunity to decide what deserved to come with me.

You are not beginning again with nothing. You are beginning with everything you know.