When Everything Ends Overnight
The Greatness Guide | 27th June
This week on A Life Of Greatness podcast, Jase Hawkins, one of Melbourne’s most recognisable breakfast radio voices, opened up about a moment most of us fear but rarely talk about properly. He was told everything would be fine. Then the number one show he had spent years building was gone.
Overnight, he went from everything to nothing.
I think about Jase’s story differently now, because it is not an isolated one. 268,000 Australians were retrenched last year, and right now 68% of Australian employees say they are anxious about losing their own job, even if it never actually happens. Whole industries once considered untouchable, health and education among them, are no longer safe from this. Tech alone could see over a quarter of a million layoffs globally by year’s end, much of it driven by AI reshaping entire teams overnight.
As a mindset coach, what interests me most is not the redundancy itself, it is what happens in the days and weeks after. Psychologically, sudden job loss behaves a lot like grief. There is the shock, the disbelief, often a strange kind of numbness before anything else arrives. The longer you have been in a role, the harder this tends to hit, because your identity has had years to quietly fuse itself to that job, the title, the routine, the version of yourself that everyone around you came to know. When that disappears overnight, it is not just income that goes missing. It is the scaffolding you built your entire sense of self around.
What struck me listening to Jase was how he spoke about the in-between, the space after everything fell apart and before anything new had arrived. That space is uncomfortable, and our instinct is usually to rush through it as fast as possible, to fix it, to fill it, to prove to ourselves and everyone else that we are fine. But some of the most meaningful reinvention happens precisely in that uncomfortable gap, when you are forced to ask who you are when the job title is gone. Jase eventually found his way back to breakfast radio, somewhere he still is today, but the version of him who got there was shaped entirely by what he learned in that gap.
If this is you right now, or someone you love, I want you to hear this clearly. The end of a role is not the end of your worth. It feels like it in the moment, because the brain conflates identity with structure, and the longer that structure stood, the more disorienting its absence feels. But you are not your job title, and you never were. You are the person underneath it, who is about to find out what they are capable of building next.
LISTEN TO MY EPISODE WITH JASE
Sarah x
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This week on A Life of Greatness
Jase Hawkins has spent decades as one of the most familiar voices in Australian breakfast radio. In this conversation he goes somewhere far more personal, opening up about raising a son with autism, and what that experience has taught him about patience, presence and why family is everything.
The Thoughts I Don’t Share Elsewhere
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A question worth sitting with
If your job title disappeared tomorrow, who would you still be?
I would genuinely love to know your answer to this. Hit message and tell me.
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