When Your Job Breaks Your Heart

Thanks to author Gretchen Gavett who is a senior editor at Harvard Business Review. 

With thanks to Harvard Business Review for this excellent article.

This is a timely article given the loss of USAID and thousands of jobs and millions of lives that will result. I like many grieve the impact on countries and projects that will suffer or be immediately cut off. Despite this being a corporate article this may provide some ideas on how to cope in the current situation. Most important is for you to remember the aid, development and humanitarian sector has been through many changes and many challenges but we will come back stronger and with greater impact. Stay strong and stay hopeful. 

Summary

Professional heartbreak is the loss of something work-related that feels as personally wounding as grief or heartbreak in your personal life. It might involve the death of a dream, like owning your business. Sometimes it’s when your identity seems to escape you through a layoff or a job loss. And sometimes it happens when you don’t get something that you really, really want. This interview with author and podcast host Morra Aarons-Mele delves into why a professional heartbreak can be so devastating, offering stories of people who have gone through them and suggestions for those who may be experiencing one now

This is a timely article given the loss of USAID and thousands of jobs and millions of lives that will result. I like many grieve the impact on countries and projects that will suffer or be immediately cut off. This may provide some ideas on how to cope. Most important is for you to remember this sector has been through many changes and many challenges but we will come back stronger and with greater impact. Stay strong and stay hopeful. 

There are times in our jobs where we may feel disappointment or frustration, but mostly on the surface. Think missing a deadline with your team or not getting a long-shot promotion. Usually, we manage to figure out a solution or next steps without the moment completely rocking our world.

Then there are moments when everything shifts and you lose something in your career that’s deeply meaningful. As author and host of The Anxious Achiever podcast Morra Aarons-Mele described it in a LinkedIn post, “sometimes it’s the death of a dream, like owning your business. Sometimes it’s when your identity seems to escape you through a layoff or a job loss. And sometimes it happens when you don’t get something that you really, really want.”

I wanted to learn more about this idea of “professional heartbreak” — how it manifests and how we can cope. So, Aarons-Mele and I had a conversation over a shared document and email. Here’s an edited version of what we discussed.

​​HBR: What is a professional heartbreak?

Aarons-Mele: Professional heartbreak is the loss of something work-related that feels as personally wounding as grief or heartbreak in your personal life. This can be because something happened that’s so deeply counter to your values system that you feel morally wounded. It can be the loss of something that you loved, like your business or a long tenure at a company, or a loss of a professional identity you’ve worked for many years to build. It can be a betrayal from a colleague, boss, or client you thought you knew.

Regardless of the circumstances, professional heartbreak brings up all the big emotions.

This idea crystallized for me a couple summers ago when a favorite writer of mine, Taffy Brodesser-Akner, wrote about the Taylor Swift song “My Tears Ricochet” in the New York Times: It’s “a song that poses as a love song but is really about a different kind of devastation.” The anthem is ostensibly about a lover’s bittersweet mourning of an ex who dies, but Swifties know the song’s true meaning: professional heartbreak. For many years, the artist’s original song masters were owned by a man she considered a father figure and a mentor and whom she trusted. Without telling her, he sold the masters to an industry figure Swift considered unethical. She tried to buy the masters back and could not, and so she began to re-record her albums one by one as an act of taking ownership of the art she had created. Swift felt her songs were stolen from her, and she couldn’t get over it.

The song helped Brodesser-Akner understand her own professional heartbreak, still raw in her heart: She’d learned she was being paid a third of what her male colleagues were being paid at a job she loved. “I was beloved by them, but also I loved them,” she told the Times podcastThe Daily. “I loved them so much. And when I hear this song, I cry… It was such a betrayal of me. And it was such a betrayal of what I thought of myself.“

That’s heartbreak.

Have you experienced a professional heartbreak? What did it feel like?

I endured one in 2022, after I sold the business I had started while on maternity leave in 2009. Everything about the sale turned out the opposite of what I’d hoped: for my team, my clients, and me. I blamed myself, and the grief was profound. In hindsight, I know that selling a business is almost always challenging for the founder, and acquisitions often go wrong. I’ve done a lot of healing since then. But when it happened, I had the worst mental health crisis I’d had in 13 years. 

My anxiety and depression were debilitating.

The worst part is that most people in my life couldn’t understand the grief I felt. After all, on paper, I had successfully sold a business and made money. Isn’t that the dream? Why was I so devastated? And honestly I was ashamed that I had let my life come to a halt over my job.

But sometimes we feel loss in our work life very profoundly. People right now are getting laid off. That’s a loss, that’s grief. It’s a small death for a lot of people.

The reason why we need to talk about professional heartbreak is that it’s very painful and real, and yet often this heartbreak isn’t given the weight it needs. Many of us pour our heart and soul into our career. But when you go through professional heartbreak, even the people you love the most might just tell you to get over it. “A job will never love you back,” they say. Yes, obviously. But that’s not realistic either, because for many highly skilled professionals and people who have built businesses or do work that is very meaningful to them, their identity is deeply intertwined with their professional self. Not to mention, many of us have deep relationships with our colleagues. Having friends at work makes us feel good. There’s community, belonging, rewards. And so when we say “it’s just a job,” we’re denying very real feelings, which can only exacerbate the heartbreak.

You recently asked your LinkedIn followers to share their stories of professional heartbreak. What did you learn from their experiences?

Several themes popped up in all the stories I heard, both on LinkedIn and via email, and I think they’re instructive.

First, professional heartbreak often stems from a fundamental clash between your personal values and those of your employer.

A chief marketing officer at a nonprofit shared: “I led an ambitious rebranding initiative that promised transformation. The project consumed years of my life, resulting in a new logo, website, and bold vision supported by refreshed values. My pride in this achievement, however, turned to devastation when I confronted the CEO about failing to uphold these very values.

“His reaction stunned me,” the CMO recalled. “It hit me then that the entire rebranding — the project that had consumed so much of my time and energy — was just a façade. He wanted the appearance of change without any real commitment to follow through.”

Betrayal was also a big theme. Professional heartbreak can mirror romantic heartbreak in its power to fundamentally alter our ability to trust.

Farrah Bostic, CEO of the research and strategy agency, The Difference Engine, discovered this after a painful experience with a disingenuous startup founder. “It’s insulting to keep being asked for your insight, expertise, and experience and to find out it’s not worth anything tangible to someone you thought valued you,” she reflected. The repeated pattern of being asked for input while being “strung along” eventually destroyed both a potential business partnership and a friendship.

The damage went deeper than just one failed relationship, however. “Candidly, it’s made me extremely gun shy around taking on partners in the business I’ve built,” Bostic admits. The experience left her struggling to believe that others would follow through on their commitments or stay committed when challenges arose.

It sounds like this kind of heartbreak can have long-term ripple effects.

Exactly. The paradox of such betrayals is their double-edged nature. These experiences can teach valuable lessons about self-protection in business, but they can also permanently diminish one’s willingness to take risks. The loss of that “freedom of opportunity” and “going for it-ness'” represents a hidden cost of professional betrayal — a scaling back of ambition and trust that can limit future possibilities.

There are also times when identity and loss coincide. Professional heartbreak strikes deepest when our sense of self becomes inseparable from our work.

Lindsey Epperly’s story illustrates this intersection of professional and personal identity. As founder of a travel company, she had known only success: “I believed that because my business was a success, I was a success,” she recalled. Then the pandemic hit.

The crisis forced tough choices. Five months pregnant, Lindsey and her husband (also her business partner) had to walk away from their home to keep their company alive. But the real struggle was internal: “My identity was so intertwined with my business that those stark months of continued sacrifice, strategic attempts at gaining any momentum, and painstaking attempts to hold onto a dream were actually attempts to claw my way back to a semblance of success that made me feel worthy.”

Each business setback felt like a personal failure, each strategic decision a referendum on self-worth. It took hitting “rock bottom” for Lindsey to grasp a crucial truth: “Even in a season of professional failure, I did not have to view myself as a failure.”

This question of how the personal and professional intertwine really resonates with me. I left a job I loved once, and it felt like I was breaking up with it — and it took me a long time to get over. 

Absolutely, there are times when leaving work feels like a breakup. Professional heartbreak can mirror the intensity of romantic dissolution, as one former media professional explained to me. Her relationship with her dream job had all the hallmarks of an all-consuming romance: “My commitment to the brand instantly felt like a marriage. I lived and breathed it, even changing my lifestyle to match the mission (i.e., going from a non-athlete to a triathlete).”

Like many passionate relationships, boundaries blurred. “From day one, I had no boundaries (2 AM edits? no problem!), and my entire self-worth was wrapped up in the gig.” When her editor-in-chief resigned, it triggered what felt like a marital breakdown. Her response mirrored classic post-breakup behavior: She quit and fled to Italy to pick olives, seeking physical labor over intellectual work, with no plan beyond escape.

The healing process, too, followed a familiar pattern. It took three months of thousands of miles of distance before she could face returning to New York and rebuilding her professional life. This “divorce” from her dream job ultimately led to personal growth, however: She launched a freelance career that evolved into an award-winning creative agency.

How can you get to the other side of heartbreak, like this person did?

Start by working through your own complicated feelings. When professional heartbreak strikes, our harshest inner critic tends to emerge. One founder told me, “Leaving my startup was devastating. It cut to fears and griefs about how I understood myself as a leader and as a collaborator, which took some time to process…We don’t talk enough about what that can feel like.”

Similarly, after I sold my company, I was ashamed. I would constantly berate myself: “You acted too fast. You made a stupid decision. You were rash. You did what you always do.” This endless self-criticism, when left unchecked, becomes a form of internal abuse, psychologist David Bedrick told me. The critical voice inside us often completes this devastating equation: “This heartbreak happened because you are [insert your favorite negative self-judgment].” These thoughts don’t appear from nowhere, he noted. They emerge from beliefs already residing within us.

To heal, we must bring these critical thoughts into the open. Speak them aloud, said Bedrick. When criticism remains locked within, it goes unwitnessed and gains power. The path through professional heartbreak requires us to face our inner critic with compassion, allowing ourselves to feel fully while finding healthy ways to express and process our pain.

You probably also need space to grieve, right? 

Yes, you need to mourn it. Writer Amy Shoenthal described her own professional heartbreak to me upon coming back from maternity leave as one of the most transformational experiences of her career. “I had spent so many years slowly climbing a mountain, and the second I looked away I was pushed back down,” she said. “Turns out, one of the worst things we can do is fight through… If you let [the negativity] in and acknowledge what is happening, you can face your setback head on. Mourn it. Work through it. Most importantly, you may find it sets you on a path that leads to something greater than you ever expected. I had always taken so much pride in my work. I just had to find a new mountain to climb.”

I also think it’s important to accept what you can’t change, and change what you can. Tori Rhoades, an electrical engineer, was part of a mass layoff well beyond her control at the height of Covid-19. It was a profoundly difficult moment for her that left her feeling defeated and questioning her self worth. But to move forward, she decided to return to school at the age of 45.

“It was one of the most transformative decisions of my life,” she said, and she has since earned three additional degrees. “The journey hasn’t just been about education; it’s been about rediscovering my value and purpose. The layoff that once felt like a loss has turned into an opportunity for reinvention and growth. I’m proud of the person I’ve become through this journey, and I’m excited for the future ahead.”

Are there any parting words you’d leave someone who is currently going through a professional heartbreak, especially if it’s in the early stages?

You’re not alone, and what you’re feeling isn’t weird! If you can try to let yourself feel your feelings without assigning judgment to them, moving on will be easier and you’ll feel better. Give yourself the time to mourn, and if you’re mourning while also working full time and living your life, make some time in your day to feel your feelings. Stuffing them down just doesn’t work; they need to move through.

When you feel ready to get going again, it’s really important to spend some time thinking about what will help you gain momentum as you move forward or seek a new opportunity. Are you the kind of person who likes to create a plan, block out your time, and create a sense of momentum through action? Or do you need some time to try something totally new in your life and experiment? Understand your finances, what demands there are on your time and energy, and try to create a path forward that allows you to look ahead and get excited rather than looking back in regret and rumination. This too shall pass, and one day you might even credit it as a learning experience.