🧭 Grass Brief

A career break will change you. That may be precisely the point.

June 22, 20269 min readDennis Gorican

There is one sentence that many executives in transition never say out loud. Not to their coach, not to their partner, not within their network. It usually surfaces a few weeks in, once the initial adrenaline of activity has worn off and the calendar has become uncomfortably empty.

It sounds roughly like this: "I thought I would handle this better."

The surprise is not that finding the next role is difficult. Most senior professionals expect that. The surprise is that the break itself changes how they feel, often faster and more deeply than they had anticipated.

What work was quietly doing

The Austrian-British social psychologist Marie Jahoda set out an argument in the 1980s that holds up remarkably well to this day. Employment, she argued, delivers far more than income. It provides five "latent functions" that most people never consider until they disappear: time structure, social contact, collective purpose, status and regular activity. A recent meta-analysis testing Jahoda's model across multiple studies confirmed the pattern. Those in employment reported higher levels of all five functions, and each one was independently linked to mental health.

This matters for career transitions because it explains why the experience feels so much heavier than the practical situation would suggest. An executive leaving a well-paid role with a generous severance package and strong marketable credentials can nonetheless feel profoundly disoriented within a matter of weeks. The finances may be sound. The professional track record is intact. But the invisible architecture that organised daily life, supplied social proof and provided a sense of purpose and belonging has vanished overnight.

There is no longer a calendar to structure the week. No team expecting decisions by Friday. No inbox confirming that someone, somewhere, considers one's contribution indispensable. No title quietly doing social work in the background, answering the question "Who is this person?" before it is even asked.

A separate meta-analysis of 104 empirical studies on unemployment and well-being found that the psychological impact of job loss extends far beyond the financial dimension. Work-role centrality, coping resources, time structure and social support were all more strongly associated with mental health than demographic variables alone. The people who suffered most were not necessarily those with the fewest resources. They were those for whom work had carried the greatest psychological weight.

For executives who have spent decades in demanding leadership positions, that weight is almost always considerable. Work was not simply what they did. It was the organising principle of their identity. Losing it does not feel like losing a job. It feels like losing a frame of reference.

The activity trap

The most common response to this disorientation is immediate activity. Rewriting the CV, updating LinkedIn, calling recruiters, applying for visible positions, tracking advertisements, attending events. This is understandable, and some of it is genuinely necessary. But activity can also become a way of avoiding the deeper disruption rather than addressing it.

Executives are particularly susceptible to this because their entire professional formation rewards decisive action under uncertainty. In leadership roles, ambiguity is resolved by making a decision and moving forward. In career reorientation, that very instinct can prove costly. One may apply too early for roles that do not fit, activate the network with a message one has not yet clarified oneself, or accept a position because it swiftly restores status rather than because it suits the next chapter.

That last pattern deserves a moment's pause. A career break creates two distinct desires that are easily confused. The first is the desire for employment. The second is the desire to feel like oneself again. Sometimes both point in the same direction. Often they do not, at least not immediately. The executive who accepts the first available role because the uncertainty has become unbearable may solve the first problem while deepening the second.

Research on re-employment and well-being supports this. An assessment by the What Works Centre for Wellbeing concluded that well-being often recovers after returning to work, but that the extent of that recovery depends considerably on the quality of the new role. Returning to a poorly matched position can produce another short tenure, require another explanation and leave a deeper sense that something fundamental remains unresolved.

The aim of a transition is therefore not merely speed. It is direction.

Liminality: the state in between

There is an academic term for the psychological territory in which most executives in transition find themselves, whether they recognise it or not. It is called liminality: the state of being in between, no longer the previous role, not yet the next.

Herminia Ibarra's research on professional adaptation describes this state precisely. People in transition often need to experiment with what she calls "provisional selves": possible but not yet fully formed professional identities that they test through conversations, observation and cautious commitments. More recent work on career transitions and professional identity describes these movements as fundamentally non-linear, shaped by narrative reconstruction, multiple possible selves and a sense of discontinuity that can be both disorienting and generative.

Most executives dislike liminality because it is ambiguous, and ambiguity is precisely what they have learned throughout their careers to resolve quickly. But career reorientation does not reward the same reflexes. The ambiguity of the in-between state is not a problem that can be solved by speed. It is the space in which genuine reorientation takes place, if the individual can bear to remain in it long enough to learn what it holds.

This is perhaps the most counter-intuitive aspect of career breaks at senior level. The break feels like an interruption, something to be put behind one as quickly as possible in order to return to normality. But the break also offers information that is barely accessible from within a demanding role. It reveals how much of one's identity was carried by the title rather than the person. It reveals which structures need to be rebuilt and which never served the individual particularly well. It brings to the surface ambitions that are still alive, and distinguishes them from obligations that had merely become habit.

That information is valuable. It is also uncomfortable, which is why so many people try to outrun it with activity.

What a career break actually changes

The concrete losses of a career break at senior level are more specific than "not having a job", and understanding them clearly is the first step towards rebuilding.

Status is the most visible loss. A title is not mere vanity. It is a social shorthand through which the world reads authority, competence and relevance. Without it, even routine social interactions become somewhat more taxing. The question "What do you do?" ceases to be a conversation opener and becomes a source of discomfort.

Usefulness is a quieter loss, but often a sharper one. Executives are accustomed to being needed: to decide, to approve, to advise, to challenge, to represent. When the telephone rings less often and the inbox no longer overflows with requests for a view, the sudden silence can be more painful than the busyness ever was.

Belonging disappears gradually. Even difficult organisations provide a tribe: a shared language, recurring rituals, familiar conflicts, collective memory. Leaving a role often means leaving an ecosystem that provided social anchoring, even if it was frustrating.

And perhaps most subtly, the future loses its grammar. A role gives the coming months a structure: next quarter, next board meeting, next budget cycle, next phase of the transformation. Without that scaffolding, the future becomes abstract in a way that can be surprisingly tiring, even when the calendar is emptier than it has been in years.

None of this makes a career break purely negative. But it does make it real. And treating it as a simple logistical problem, find the next role, update the documents, activate the network, misses the actual challenge: rebuilding the inner architecture that work had quietly maintained.

What good outplacement actually protects

This is where outplacement is most often misunderstood. From the outside it looks like job-search support: CV, LinkedIn, interview preparation, recruiter contacts. These elements matter. But the deeper value is something else.

Good outplacement protects the individual from becoming smaller during the transition.

It replaces lost structure with a transition rhythm that prevents urgency from taking charge. It replaces lost status with a clearer, more specific value proposition that does not depend on the old title. It replaces lost belonging with the right conversations, through a curated network of people who are genuinely relevant to the transition, rather than an undirected strategy of reconnecting. It replaces vague hope with real market evidence. And it replaces the silence surrounding what is happening with language that makes the experience manageable rather than shameful.

That last point is perhaps the most important. Many executives in transition do not need more tactical advice. They need to understand that the strange emotional weight they are carrying is not a personal failure. It is the predictable consequence of losing the visible and invisible functions that work provided, exactly as Jahoda described decades ago.

Once that is understood, the work of the transition becomes more precise. The task is no longer simply "find a job". The task becomes: rebuild a professional identity that can stand without the old title, long enough to choose the next chapter well rather than merely quickly.

Where we stand

A career break will change you. This is not a motivational slogan. It is a realistic description of what happens when the visible and invisible functions of work are interrupted simultaneously.

The discomfort is real. Research is unequivocal that unemployment and job loss can impair well-being, particularly when the period is long and unsupported. There is nothing romantic about it.

But the discomfort also contains information that is hard to access by any other route. It reveals how much identity was borrowed from the role. It clarifies which structures need to be rebuilt and which were never right. It distinguishes ambition from habit. And it shows, sometimes uncomfortably, where the next role needs to differ from the last.

The aim of a career break is not to return to where one was. It is to become clear enough to move forward without needing the old title to prove one's worth.

For executives, that is perhaps the hardest part of the transition. It may also be the most important.

Sources: Marie Jahoda, latent deprivation model and meta-analytic findings on employment status, psychological needs and mental health; McKee-Ryan, Song, Wanberg & Kinicki, "Psychological and Physical Well-Being During Unemployment: A Meta-Analytic Study"; Herminia Ibarra, "Provisional Selves: Experimenting with Image and Identity in Professional Adaptation"; Annual Review of Organizational Psychology, "Career Transition and Professional Identity: Dynamic Processes, Multiple Selves, and Nonlinear Trajectories", 2026; What Works Centre for Wellbeing, "Unemployment, (Re)employment and Wellbeing".