Her Career Unplugged | Career Advice for Women, Leadership & Real Stories
Sep 28, 2026 · 38 min · 10 segments
What happens when you do everything right and the career you built still stops feeling like yours? Joanne and Vimala talk with career coach Erica Rivera, who spent years reading resumes inside Indeed…
Erica RiveraGuest
Vimala PydiHost
Joanne SkilesHost
So when you coach women, they follow the playbook, right? To the letter, top schools, as you said, strong track records, loyalty to their companies, working a zillion hours, just doing everything right and also reaching their goals.
And as you said or shared, there are some pivots that happens, like, which is not in our control.
When you go through this, so what's actually happening when all these steps kind of stops be working, right? You reach your goal and it just stopped working.
Where is this playbook failing? How do you pivot from all the steps that you have gone through, right? Like maybe from your learning or from your coach? Can you share like tidbits on that?
Yeah, I will say for myself, but also in a lot of women that I've coached, the biggest thing that I've seen personally is that there's this sense of failure.
And internalizing to what I think you said earlier was like, hey, it's no... no hard feelings, right? It's just like, it was a business decision and, and you were impacted by an unfortunate business decision, but there's a lot of internalizing of what has happened to them.
And I, you know, where a lot of times we're having to work twice as hard to really show up and, you know, to excel and to be seen in rooms and, And that part of it, when you kind of combine those factors and know that you've taken all the steps that you were told to take, you've achieved the goals, you've gotten the ratings, and then all of a sudden your name comes on the list.
It must be something I did versus taking that narrative and taking a step back.
which, you know, it takes time to do because you're coming from a place of being hurt.
You know, for some people it's, hey, I failed or it's the maybe feeling betrayed, like all of these emotions and trying to sort through what is the actual truth of what happened versus the story that you're telling yourself.
And a lot of times the stories that we as women tell ourselves is that it's us, that we're the problem.
And so then that creates this ecosystem of, you know, kind of in this vacuum of, oh, well, How do I get out of this? And I feel like I'm suffocating.
And so the very first thing that we focus on really is being able to separate what is the actual truth of what happened in what is the story that you're telling yourself and how do we start to reshape that narrative?
Like the identity trap, right? Like we do feel like it might have been me that might have caused to be part of this layoff.
And also when you kind of do everything right, just losing your job is very emotional too, right? Like your household is kind of like maybe banking on you to have that paycheck coming in.
So when you coach women, they follow the playbook, right? To the letter, top schools, as you said, strong track records, loyalty to their companies, working a zillion hours, just doing everything right and also reaching their goals.
And as you said or shared, there are some pivots that happens, like, which is not in our control.
When you go through this, so what's actually happening when all these steps kind of stops be working, right? You reach your goal and it just stopped working.
Where is this playbook failing? How do you pivot from all the steps that you have gone through, right? Like maybe from your learning or from your coach? Can you share like tidbits on that?
Yeah, I will say for myself, but also in a lot of women that I've coached, the biggest thing that I've seen personally is that there's this sense of failure.
And internalizing to what I think you said earlier was like, hey, it's no... no hard feelings, right? It's just like, it was a business decision and, and you were impacted by an unfortunate business decision, but there's a lot of internalizing of what has happened to them.
And I, you know, where a lot of times we're having to work twice as hard to really show up and, you know, to excel and to be seen in rooms and, And that part of it, when you kind of combine those factors and know that you've taken all the steps that you were told to take, you've achieved the goals, you've gotten the ratings, and then all of a sudden your name comes on the list.
It must be something I did versus taking that narrative and taking a step back.
which, you know, it takes time to do because you're coming from a place of being hurt.
You know, for some people it's, hey, I failed or it's the maybe feeling betrayed, like all of these emotions and trying to sort through what is the actual truth of what happened versus the story that you're telling yourself.
And a lot of times the stories that we as women tell ourselves is that it's us, that we're the problem.
And so then that creates this ecosystem of, you know, kind of in this vacuum of, oh, well, How do I get out of this? And I feel like I'm suffocating.
And so the very first thing that we focus on really is being able to separate what is the actual truth of what happened in what is the story that you're telling yourself and how do we start to reshape that narrative?
Like the identity trap, right? Like we do feel like it might have been me that might have caused to be part of this layoff.
And also when you kind of do everything right, just losing your job is very emotional too, right? Like your household is kind of like maybe banking on you to have that paycheck coming in.
The rest of this transcript — segmented and speaker-labeled, so you land on the exact moment something was said
Search every transcript — by keyword, by phrase, or by meaning, across every show Radar indexes
Trends — what is surging across podcasts, measured against its own baseline
Alerts — when a name you follow appears in a newly indexed episode
No account is needed to search Radar.
