Your Trauma-Wise Career Guide

Cyndi Bennett | Career Coaching for Trauma Survivors
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Traditional career development wasn't built for trauma survivors — and it shows. Your Trauma-Wise Career Guide, hosted by trauma survivor and career coach Cyndi Bennett, MBA, M.Ed., offers trauma-informed strategies for building a sustainable professional life alongside your healing. resilientcareers.substack.com

  1. 2d ago

    Trauma-Informed Career Development: What Kind of Work Would Jazz You? | Newsletter #11

    When was the last time you thought about what kind of work jazzes you? Not what you’re qualified to do. Not what someone would hire you to do. Not what you’ve already spent 10, 15, or 20 years doing. I’m talking about the kind of work that makes something in you come alive. The problem you can’t resist trying to solve. The conversation you could have for hours. The thing someone asks for your help with and, instead of feeling drained afterward, you find yourself thinking about three more things you could have told them. That kind of jazzed. Somewhere along the way, many of us learned to think about our careers from the opposite direction. * What can I do? * What am I qualified for? * What’s available? * What will pay enough? * What feels safe? Those are important questions. We have bills to pay and responsibilities to consider. There are practical realities involved in almost every career decision we make. But what if those aren’t the only questions we get to ask? Before We Go Any Further, Let Me Introduce Myself I’m Cyndi Bennett, a trauma-informed career coach and the founder of the Resilient Career Academy™. I spent more than two decades building my own corporate career before I began to understand how much our lived experiences can shape the way we navigate work. Today, I help trauma survivors explore what can become possible in their careers when we begin recognizing the patterns that may have been limiting our choices and start building careers around more than survival. And one of the things I believe deeply is this: Every person is uniquely equipped by the Creator with gifts and talents specific to them, and our lived experiences can deepen and enhance those abilities. That’s what I want to explore with you today. We’re going to look beyond job titles and résumés and begin looking for the clues that can help us identify our unique equipping: our gifts, talents, interests, lived experience, curiosity, and the things that make us come alive. Because maybe the question isn’t simply: What job should I do next? Maybe there’s another question worth asking first: What have I been uniquely equipped to contribute? We Don’t Have to Start With a Job Title Think about the way we typically approach career exploration. We pull up a job board. We search for titles similar to the one we already have. We read the qualifications and start sorting opportunities into two categories: * I could do that. * I couldn’t do that. And before long, the possibilities for our future have been narrowed by our past. We’re looking for the next version of something we’ve already done. But a résumé tells us where we’ve been. It doesn’t necessarily tell us everything we’re capable of becoming. That’s why I like starting somewhere else. I believe every person is uniquely equipped by the Creator with gifts and talents specific to them, and that our lived experiences can deepen and enhance those abilities. Our unique equipping is bigger than a list of skills. It’s the combination of the things that seem to have always been there and everything life has added along the way. Our natural gifts. Our talents. Our interests and curiosities. The way our minds work. The things we’ve learned. The experiences we’ve had. The problems we’ve solved. The perspectives we’ve developed. The skills we’ve practiced until they’ve become second nature. Put all of those things together, and the combination is uniquely ours. So instead of beginning career exploration with: What job should I do next? I think there’s another question worth asking first: What have I been uniquely equipped to contribute? Our Lived Experience Can Change How We Use Our Gifts I want to be careful here, especially when we’re talking about trauma. I don’t believe we need to call what happened to us a gift. We don’t have to be grateful for painful experiences or believe we needed them in order to become valuable. Our gifts don’t have to come from our trauma for our lived experiences to influence how we’ve learned to use them. Maybe you’ve always had a gift for recognizing patterns. Life may have sharpened your ability to notice things other people miss. Maybe you’ve always been a communicator. The experiences you’ve navigated may have taught you how to explain complicated things in ways people can understand. Maybe you’ve always been deeply curious. The problems you’ve encountered may have given that curiosity somewhere meaningful to go. Maybe you’re naturally good at bringing order to chaos, connecting people, creating something from nothing, seeing possibilities, teaching, organizing, advocating, analyzing, building, designing, listening, leading, or solving problems. Then life happens. We work. We learn. We struggle. We succeed. We make mistakes. We recover. We change directions. We encounter people and situations that teach us things we never would have learned in a classroom. Our lived experience becomes another layer of our equipping. And that creates a career question I find much more interesting than “What am I qualified to do?” Where could I use this unique combination of gifts, talents, abilities, interests, and lived experience in a way that jazzes me? But What If I Don’t Think I Have Any Special Gifts? Maybe you read all of that and thought: That’s a nice idea, Cyndi. I’m just not sure it applies to me. I think we need to talk about that. Because some of us may genuinely struggle to believe we’re uniquely equipped at all. When someone asks what we’re good at, our mind goes blank. We can identify talent in everyone around us, but when the attention turns toward us, suddenly we can’t think of anything. Or the things we’re good at seem so ordinary that we don’t count them. Anybody can do that. That’s not really a skill. It’s easy. It’s not anything special. But here’s something worth considering: Maybe it feels easy because it’s one of your gifts. We’re experiencing our abilities from the inside. We don’t necessarily know what it’s like for someone who doesn’t think the way we think or see what we see. And for some trauma survivors, there may be another layer. We may have spent years becoming experts at identifying what was wrong with us. What needed fixing. Where we weren’t enough. What we needed to do better. How we needed to change to be accepted, valued, successful, safe, or loved. When we’ve spent that much time looking for deficiencies, being asked to look for gifts can feel almost unbelievable. You mean there’s something already in me that’s valuable? Sometimes the idea that we might have been uniquely equipped feels too good to be true. So I’m not going to ask you to suddenly believe something about yourself that you don’t believe yet. Let’s look for evidence instead. Start Looking for the Clues Maybe you don’t know what your gifts are yet. That’s different from not having them. So instead of trying to declare what your unique equipping is, I invite you to become curious about it. Grab a notebook, open a blank document, or just sit with these questions for a while. What seems to come naturally to me? What do you do that feels relatively easy to you but seems harder for other people? Maybe you organize information quickly. Maybe you make people feel comfortable. Maybe you can connect dots like nobody’s business. Maybe you can look at a complicated problem and immediately see where to start. Don’t dismiss something because it seems too easy to count. That might be exactly why we need to pay attention. What do people consistently come to me for? Think beyond your job description. What do coworkers, friends, family members, clients, or leaders ask for your help with? * Advice? * Problem-solving? * Explaining something? * Making a decision? * Creating a plan? * Handling a difficult conversation? * Seeing something they’ve missed? Sometimes other people have been giving us clues about our gifts for years. What has my life taught me? Think about the knowledge and abilities you’ve developed through living. That can include your education and professional experience, but it doesn’t stop there. What have you had to figure out? What have you learned through relationships, challenges, transitions, caregiving, leadership, entrepreneurship, healing, failure, starting over, or navigating systems that weren’t designed with you in mind? What do you understand now that an earlier version of you didn’t? What am I deeply curious about? What subjects do you keep coming back to? What do you read about when nobody assigns it? What problems make you think, There has to be a better way to do this? What could you spend hours talking about without someone having to keep the conversation going? Curiosity can be a clue. What jazzes me? And now we get to my favorite question. Think about moments when you’ve been doing something and felt more energized afterward. What were you doing? Who were you doing it with? What part of the experience gave you energy? Was it creating? Teaching? Solving? Leading? Helping? Analyzing? Building? Connecting? Advocating? Imagining? Don’t worry about whether you can turn the answer into a job yet. We’re collecting clues. Now Look for the Intersections Once you have some answers, resist the urge to immediately search for a job title. Look across everything you’ve written. What keeps appearing? Where do your gifts and talents intersect with what you’ve learned through living? Where does your curiosity overlap with something you’re unusually good at? Where do your experiences give you a perspective someone else might not have? What kinds of problems allow several pieces of your unique equipping to come together at once? And perhaps most importantly: Where do you find yourself thinking, “I’d love to do more of that”? That’s where I would start exploring. Not because every interest needs to become a care

  2. 4d ago

    Why Does My Boss Trigger Me? CPTSD, Authority, and the Workplace

    Have you ever had a reaction to your boss that felt much bigger than what was actually happening in the moment? I have. I had been with the company for almost 22 years when a manager told me she wanted me to start accounting for my time. By that point in my career, I was a tenured senior leader. I knew how to manage my workload. I knew how to get my work done. No one needed me to account for how I spent every hour of my day before. But my response to her request wasn’t simply, I disagree with this management approach. It felt much bigger than that. I felt insulted. Controlled. Diminished. It felt like I had suddenly gone from being a capable professional who had spent more than two decades building a career to being a child who couldn’t be trusted to manage herself. And that intensity was information. Because my manager wasn’t the first authority figure I’d encountered in my life. Long before I had bosses, managers, performance reviews, deadlines, or corporate hierarchies, I learned what it meant to live with adults who held power over me. My nervous system learned to pay attention to control, criticism, expectations, unpredictability, and the possibility of getting something wrong. So when I encountered some of those same dynamics at work, my nervous system didn’t necessarily experience them as isolated workplace interactions. Sometimes, it recognized something familiar. And I don’t think I’m alone in that. For those of us with histories of complex trauma or CPTSD, our relationships with authority at work can carry more weight than anyone around us realizes. A manager’s tone, a request for a meeting, unexpected feedback, being questioned about a decision, or even a message that says “Can we talk?” can activate a response that seems much bigger than the situation in front of us. That doesn’t mean we’re overreacting. It also doesn’t automatically mean our boss is doing something wrong. It may mean there is more information our nervous system is responding to than what is happening in this particular moment. And learning to recognize that difference can matter enormously for our careers. Because the goal isn’t to make ourselves impossible to trigger. The goal is to understand what’s happening well enough that an automatic response doesn’t have to be our only response. That’s where we begin to create choice. Before We Go Any Further, Let Me Introduce Myself If we haven’t met yet, I’m Cyndi Bennett. I’m a trauma-informed career coach, and I help professionals understand how the after-effects of complex trauma and CPTSD can show up at work and create obstacles in our careers. But I don’t come to this work only as a coach. I’ve spent more than 25 years building my own career in corporate America while navigating many of these patterns myself. For years, I didn’t understand why certain workplace situations seemed to affect me so differently, or so much more intensely, than they appeared to affect the people around me. It wasn’t until my own childhood trauma surfaced later in life that I began to recognize something I hadn’t understood before: the survival responses we learned long before we ever had a career don’t necessarily stay at home when we go to work. They can show up in how we respond to feedback, conflict, authority, visibility, boundaries, expectations, and even success. That’s what much of my work is about today. I help us get curious about those patterns without judging ourselves for having them, understand what may be underneath them, and explore what becomes possible when an automatic survival response doesn’t have to be our only response. Because I’ve experienced these patterns in my own career, too. Including with my bosses. Why Authority Can Feel Different When We Have a History of Complex Trauma A boss isn’t just another person we interact with at work. They may have influence over our workload, our performance reviews, our opportunities, our compensation, our reputation, and sometimes whether we get to keep our job. There is a real power dynamic built into the relationship. For those of us who experienced complex trauma in childhood, power and authority may already carry a history. The first authority figures in our lives were the adults we depended on for safety, care, protection, and survival. When those relationships were also a source of fear, control, criticism, neglect, unpredictability, or harm, we may have learned very early that being around someone with power required us to pay attention. * We learned to notice changes in tone. * We learned to anticipate what someone might need before they asked. * We learned to avoid mistakes, keep the peace, stay out of the way, become indispensable, or figure things out on our own. Those responses may have helped us navigate the environments we grew up in. And then we went to work. Suddenly, we’re in another environment with hierarchies, expectations, evaluations, consequences, and people who have some degree of power over what happens to us. Our circumstances may be completely different, but something about the dynamic can feel familiar. A manager who closely monitors our work may activate an old response to being controlled. A boss who is difficult to read may leave us scanning for signs that something is wrong. Critical feedback may feel like more than information about our performance. An absent manager may activate the familiar belief that when we need help, we’re going to have to figure it out on our own. And sometimes, we may find ourselves working incredibly hard to stay in an authority figure’s good graces by saying yes, overdelivering, avoiding disagreement, or trying to become the employee they could never be disappointed in. None of this means every difficult interaction with a boss is about our past. It means our past may be one of the things our nervous system brings with us into the interaction. And that can help explain why two people can walk out of the exact same meeting having experienced it very differently. One person may leave thinking, That was uncomfortable. Another may leave with their heart racing, replaying every word, wondering what they did wrong, worrying about their job, or already figuring out what they need to do to make things okay. The meeting may be over. But their nervous system may still be responding to what it believes is at stake. Your Nervous System May Hear Something Your Manager Didn’t Say Have you ever received a message from your boss that simply said: “Do you have a few minutes to talk?” That’s it. No explanation. No context. Just a request to talk. And suddenly, your mind is off to the races. * What did I do? * Did I miss something? * Are they upset with me? * Am I in trouble? * Am I going to lose my job? By the time the meeting happens, we may have replayed our last several interactions, reviewed everything we’ve worked on recently, and prepared ourselves for a conversation that hasn’t even happened yet. Then we get on the call, and our manager says, “I wanted to get your thoughts on this project.” Nothing was wrong. But the response we experienced before that conversation was real. This is one of the ways our past experiences can shape what we hear in the present. Our manager may say, “I’d like you to make a few changes to this.” We may hear, “You didn’t do it right.” They may say, “I noticed something I want to give you some feedback on.” We may hear, “You messed up.” They may disagree with an idea we proposed. We may hear, “Your ideas aren’t valuable.” They may make a decision we don’t understand. We may hear, “You don’t matter here.” The words our manager actually says and the meaning our nervous system assigns to those words aren’t always the same thing. And that doesn’t mean we’re making it up. Our nervous system has learned from experience. If criticism once came with humiliation, if mistakes had consequences that felt dangerous, if someone’s changing tone told us we needed to prepare for what was coming next, or if keeping an authority figure happy helped us feel safer, it makes sense that we became really good at noticing those cues. The challenge is that the meaning we learned to assign to those cues may continue showing up long after our circumstances have changed. That’s why I think curiosity is so important here. Instead of immediately asking ourselves, Why am I reacting like this?, we can begin asking: * What did my manager actually say or do? * What meaning did I attach to it? * What did I immediately believe was going to happen next? * And what about this feels familiar? Those questions aren’t about talking ourselves out of our response. They’re about getting more information. Because sometimes our nervous system is responding to an old alarm. Sometimes it’s picking up on something happening in the present that deserves our attention. And sometimes it may be a little bit of both. The more we can understand what we’re responding to, the more choices we can begin to see about what to do next. What Boss Triggers Can Look Like at Work Once we start paying attention, we may notice that it isn’t simply our boss who triggers us. It may be something specific about the way they lead, communicate, respond, or use their authority that our nervous system recognizes. And different behaviors may activate very different responses. Control or Micromanagement Being closely monitored, having our decisions questioned, or feeling like we constantly have to account for what we’re doing can be especially activating if control was part of our earlier experiences. We may find ourselves becoming angry or defensive. We may shut down. We may feel an overwhelming need to prove that we’re capable. Or we may comply while quietly feeling smaller and smaller. That was part of what was happening for me when my manager asked me to account for my time. It wasn’t simply the re

  3. Sep 26

    CPTSD at Work: When Being Capable Becomes Part of Your Armor | Newsletter #10

    Do You Remember Darth Vader? From the moment Darth Vader appears in Star Wars, there is no question that he is someone to be reckoned with. He doesn’t have to announce his power. You can feel it. The black helmet. The cape. The mechanical breathing that lets you know he’s coming before he even enters the room. He is intimidating. Commanding. Driven. Powerful. He walks into a room and people respond. He doesn’t appear uncertain. He doesn’t appear overwhelmed. He certainly doesn’t look like someone who needs help. He is strong in the dark side of the Force, capable of taking control of a situation without ever raising his voice, and seemingly unfazed by whatever stands in his way. For most of the original Star Wars trilogy, that’s the Darth Vader we know. Powerful. In control. A force to be reckoned with. And then, near the end of Return of the Jedi, something happens that changes the way we see him. Luke removes his father’s mask. For the first time, all of that armor is stripped away. And the man underneath looks nothing like the figure we’ve been watching. He is pale. Scarred. Frail. He is dying. Suddenly, there is this enormous contrast between the person everyone else could see and the person who had been underneath the armor all along. The armor hadn’t just protected him. It had hidden how vulnerable the person underneath it really was. We may not walk into work wearing a black helmet and cape, but many of us have learned to wear armor of our own. Armor that helps us look strong, confident, and in control, even when something very different may be happening underneath. And for some of us, part of that armor is being the capable one. * The person who can handle it. * The person who figures it out. * The person everyone can count on. * The person who never seems to need much from anyone else. And sometimes our armor can be so convincing that no one thinks to ask what it takes to keep wearing it. If We Haven’t Met Yet If we haven’t met yet, I’m Cyndi Bennett, a trauma-informed career coach and founder of the Resilient Career Academy. You’re listening to or reading Issue #10 of The Resilient Career Academy Newsletter, where we explore how the after-effects of complex trauma can show up in our careers and what becomes possible when we begin recognizing the patterns they can create. Today, I want to talk about one piece of armor I know well: being the capable one. Because being capable can be a tremendous strength. It can help us build successful careers, earn the trust of the people around us, and open doors to opportunities we worked incredibly hard for. But what happens when being capable becomes more than something we know we are? What happens when it becomes someone we believe we have to be? “I Can Handle It.” I can’t tell you how many times I’ve said some version of those words throughout my career. And most of the time, they were true. I could handle it. I could figure things out. I could walk into complicated situations, make sense of what was happening, and find a way forward. Give me something I’d never done before, and I’d learn. Give me a problem no one knew how to solve, and I’d start looking for answers. That capability has served me incredibly well throughout my career. It helped me become someone people trusted. I was given more responsibility because people knew I would follow through. I was invited into bigger conversations and given increasingly complicated problems to solve. And every time I handled the next thing, I reinforced something for the people around me and for myself: Cyndi can handle it. That’s where this gets complicated. Because there is a difference between knowing we’re capable of handling difficult things and believing we have to handle everything ourselves. For a long time, I’m not sure I recognized the difference. Being capable wasn’t the problem. My capability was real, and I’m proud of what it helped me accomplish. But somewhere along the way, “I can handle it” became part of the armor. It meant I could keep functioning without anyone knowing how much effort it was taking. I could solve the problem instead of admitting I didn’t know what to do. I could take on one more thing rather than acknowledge that I was already carrying too much. And because I kept handling it, the people around me had very little reason to believe I couldn’t. They could only respond to the version of me I was allowing them to see. When Being Capable Feels Safer For some of us, being capable became valuable long before we ever entered the workplace. Maybe we learned that the safest person to depend on was ourselves. Maybe asking for help didn’t always result in help. Maybe we learned to anticipate what needed to happen before anyone had to ask, or discovered that being responsible, independent, and easy to take care of earned us approval. We may not have consciously decided, I’m going to become the person who never needs anything from anyone. We adapted. We figured things out. We learned how to solve our own problems. We became resourceful. We learned how to keep functioning when things around us weren’t functioning particularly well. And then we entered the workplace, where many of those adaptations were rewarded. The employee who doesn’t need much direction can be seen as a self-starter. The person who always finds a solution becomes the problem-solver. The one who takes responsibility when something goes wrong becomes dependable. The person who can carry an enormous workload becomes the person everyone turns to when there is more work to be done. The workplace may have had no idea what it took for us to become that person. It just knew that we delivered. And every promotion, compliment, difficult assignment, and “Give it to Cyndi, she’ll figure it out” could reinforce something we’d already learned: Being capable works. It helps us feel in control. It reduces the need to depend on other people. It can protect us from the vulnerability of admitting we don’t know, can’t do something, or need support. And it may help us build a pretty successful career. That’s why I don’t think the answer is to stop being capable. The question is whether we still have a choice about when we put the armor on. Because there’s a significant difference between: I can figure this out myself. and I can’t let anyone see that I need help figuring this out. Between: I can carry this. and I can’t let anyone know this is too heavy. Between: I’m capable. and I have to be the capable one. And when that last one starts driving us, the armor that helped us succeed can also make it incredibly difficult for anyone to see when we’re struggling underneath it. What Happens When Everyone Believes the Armor? There is an interesting consequence to becoming the person who can always handle it. People start believing us. If we consistently show the people around us that we can figure things out, carry the extra load, solve the problem, and keep going no matter what is happening, eventually they stop wondering whether we need help. Why wouldn’t they? We’ve given them every reason to believe we’re fine. They may not see how much energy it takes to keep everything moving. They don’t know how long we stared at the computer trying to make our brain cooperate. They don’t see the anxiety before the meeting, the tears after we log off, or how little of ourselves may be left by the time we get home. They see the work getting done. They see capable. And this is where the armor can become incredibly isolating. We may desperately want someone to notice that we’re struggling while simultaneously doing everything we can to make sure they don’t. We may wish someone would offer to take something off our plate while continuing to reassure everyone that we’ve got it. We may feel hurt that nobody checks on us while presenting ourselves as the person nobody ever needs to check on. That’s a painful contradiction. And I don’t think it means the people around us are necessarily uncaring. They may simply be responding to what we’ve shown them. Our armor is doing exactly what we designed it to do. It’s protecting the parts of us we don’t feel safe enough to show. But protection can come with a cost. If no one can see that we’re struggling, they can’t respond to the struggle they can’t see. If no one knows we need support, they don’t have the opportunity to offer it. And if we’ve built our professional identity around being the person who can handle anything, taking off even one piece of that armor can feel incredibly vulnerable. Because then we’re faced with a different question: What happens if they see that I can’t handle everything? And maybe an even harder one: Will they still see me as capable when they see that I’m human? What If Both Can Be True? Somewhere along the way, many of us may have created a choice that was never really ours to make. * Either I’m capable, or I need help. * Either I’m strong, or I’m struggling. * Either I know what I’m doing, or I’m in over my head. * Either I can handle it, or I can’t. But what if those things were never opposites? We can be incredibly capable and still reach the edge of our capacity. We can be resourceful and still benefit from someone else’s expertise. We can know what we’re doing and still have moments when we don’t know what to do next. We can be strong and still need someone to stand beside us while we navigate something hard. Needing support doesn’t erase our capability. That has been an important shift for me. Taking off the armor doesn’t require me to hand over everything I’ve learned to do for myself. It doesn’t mean I suddenly become dependent on everyone around me or stop trusting my own ability to figure things out. Maybe it means I no longer have to prove my capability by how little I need from anyone else. I can ask the question instead

  4. Sep 23

    Workplace Triggers: Why Do I Get Triggered So Easily at Work?

    Sometimes the hardest part of the workday isn’t the work. It’s the deadline that suddenly gets moved up. The meeting where you’re expected to present without much notice. The manager who checks on your progress for the third time today. The project that changes direction after you’ve already spent hours getting it right. The performance review sitting on your calendar next week. The disagreement with a coworker you can’t stop thinking about. The vague announcement about “organizational changes” that leaves you wondering whether your job is safe. Any one of these could be a normal part of working. They can also be incredibly activating. And when we’re triggered by them, we may tell ourselves that we should be able to handle it. It’s just a deadline. It’s just feedback. It’s just a meeting. Everyone else deals with this. But knowing intellectually that something is part of work doesn’t necessarily change what happens inside us when we experience it. That’s what I want to talk about: why certain workplace situations can trigger such strong responses, what those responses might be telling us, and what becomes possible when we begin to recognize our own patterns. If we haven’t met, I’m Cyndi Bennett. I’m a trauma-informed career coach, founder of the Resilient Career Academy™, and a trauma survivor myself. I spent more than 25 years working inside corporate America, and much of the work I do now focuses on something I wish more of us talked about: the ways our past experiences can follow us into the workplace and quietly shape how we respond to pressure, feedback, uncertainty, conflict, authority, and the everyday demands of our jobs. That’s why I think workplace triggers are worth talking about. Not because we need to eliminate every uncomfortable reaction we have at work, but because understanding what activates us can give us more awareness and more choice about what happens next. What Do We Mean When We Say We're “Triggered” at Work? The word triggered gets used pretty casually. We might say a frustrating email triggered us, a coworker got on our nerves, or a difficult meeting ruined our day. But when I talk about workplace triggers, I mean something more specific. A workplace trigger is a situation, interaction, or experience that sets off a strong internal response. Something happens in the present, but our reaction may be influenced by what that experience represents to us, what it reminds us of, or what we have learned could happen next. And that distinction matters. A tight deadline can simply be stressful. But for someone whose sense of safety has become connected to getting everything right, that deadline might activate an intense fear of making a mistake. Micromanagement can be irritating. It can also leave someone feeling watched, controlled, or unable to trust their own judgment. A change in priorities can be inconvenient. For someone who has learned to rely heavily on predictability, that unexpected change may create a much stronger sense of uncertainty or loss of control. And criticism can be difficult for almost anyone to hear. But if criticism has historically been accompanied by humiliation, rejection, punishment, or shame, even constructive feedback in the workplace can sometimes activate a response that feels much bigger than the conversation happening in front of us. That doesn’t mean every strong reaction we have at work is rooted in trauma. * Sometimes we’re stressed. * Sometimes we’re exhausted. * Sometimes we’re dealing with unreasonable expectations, poor leadership, unfair treatment, or a genuinely unhealthy workplace. Our reactions can also give us important information about what is happening around us. That’s why I don’t think the most useful question is immediately, “Is this a trauma response?” I think we can start somewhere simpler: Something happened. I had a reaction. What can I learn by getting curious about both? We don’t have to judge the reaction, explain it away, or decide immediately whether it belongs to the past or the present. We can begin by noticing it. And when we start paying attention over time, we may begin to see that certain situations, people, dynamics, or experiences at work consistently create a stronger response for us. Those patterns are where workplace trigger awareness begins. Workplace Triggers Can Come From More Places Than We Realize When we think about being triggered at work, we may immediately think about the obvious moments: a difficult conversation with a manager, conflict with a coworker, harsh criticism, or someone treating us poorly. But workplace triggers can be much less obvious. A deadline can be a trigger. So can an unexpected change in plans, unclear instructions, being interrupted repeatedly, having too much work and not enough time, being asked to speak in front of a group, or waiting for the results of a performance review. Even things that might look positive from the outside can be activating. Being recognized for our work can increase our visibility. Being offered a new opportunity can create uncertainty. Getting promoted can change our relationships with coworkers and put us in a position where more people are watching, evaluating, or depending on us. What makes this complicated is that the same workplace experience won’t necessarily trigger everyone in the same way, or for the same reason. * A manager who frequently checks on our progress might activate feelings of being watched or controlled. * A vague assignment might leave someone else feeling anxious because they don’t know exactly what is expected of them. * A disagreement with a coworker might create an intense urge to restore the relationship as quickly as possible. * A heavy workload might activate the belief that we have to prove we can handle everything without asking for help. Sometimes the trigger isn’t even the event itself. It is what the event seems to threaten. Pressure and performance can bring up fears of making a mistake, failing, disappointing someone, or not being good enough. Power and control can show up through micromanagement, rigid policies, authority figures, or situations where we have little say in what happens next. Relationships and belonging can be affected by conflict, criticism, office politics, exclusion, lack of recognition, or changes in how someone interacts with us. Uncertainty and unpredictability can come from unclear expectations, changing priorities, organizational changes, poor communication, or concerns about job security. And capacity can matter too. Excessive workloads, constant interruptions, technology problems, competing priorities, and too little time to recover can leave us with far less capacity to navigate something that might feel manageable on another day. This is one reason simply asking “What triggers me?” may not go far enough. We can also become curious about: What is it about this situation that feels difficult for me? Is it the possibility of failure? The loss of control? Being evaluated? Disappointing someone? Not knowing what is going to happen? Feeling excluded? Being visible? Having to depend on someone else? We don’t have to know the answer immediately. In fact, we may discover that two situations that look completely different on the surface activate something very similar underneath. And that’s where tracking our triggers can become useful. Instead of looking at each difficult workday as an isolated experience, we can begin noticing what repeats. That pattern may tell us much more than any single trigger ever could. What triggers you at work? Sometimes we know we’ve had a strong reaction without recognizing exactly what set it in motion. And because our workplace triggers are personal, what activates one person may barely register for someone else. I created the free Workplace Trigger Tracker Toolkit to help you identify the situations that may be triggering you at work, track what happens when you’re activated, and begin noticing the patterns that repeat. Why Can an Ordinary Workplace Situation Feel So Intense? One of the most confusing things about workplace triggers can be the difference between what is happening around us and what is happening inside us. We may know that the deadline is manageable. We may understand that our manager is allowed to ask questions about our work. We may even recognize that the feedback we’re receiving is reasonable. And still, something inside us responds as though much more is at stake. For those of us with a history of complex trauma, that response may make more sense when we consider what our nervous system has learned from previous experiences. Our brains and bodies are constantly taking in information and trying to determine what deserves our attention. Past experiences can influence that process. If certain situations once came with consequences, we may become especially sensitive to cues that suggest something similar could be happening again. That doesn’t require the present situation to look exactly like something from our past. The connection might be how the experience feels. * Being micromanaged may bring up a familiar sense of having no control. * Being criticized may activate an old expectation that making a mistake will have consequences far beyond the mistake itself. * Unclear expectations may create the feeling that we’re responsible for getting something right without being given enough information to know what “right” is. * Conflict may feel less like two professionals disagreeing and more like a relationship is suddenly at risk. In those moments, our response isn’t necessarily waiting for us to consciously evaluate all the evidence. We may feel the tension in our body before we have words for what is happening. We may want to explain, fix, withdraw, defend ourselves, work harder, make someone happy, or regain control before we’ve consciously decided to do any

  5. Sep 19

    CPTSD and Entrepreneurship: How Complex Trauma Can Show Up in the Businesses We Build| Newsletter #9

    Have you ever thought, “Maybe I should just work for myself”? Maybe it came after another difficult interaction with your boss. Or after leaving a workplace that had become unbearable. Maybe you were exhausted from constantly managing triggers, personalities, expectations, office politics, and trying to hold yourself together while still doing your job. Maybe you lost a job and couldn’t imagine putting yourself through another workplace like the one you’d just left. And somewhere in all of that, entrepreneurship started to look like an answer. If I work for myself, I can control my environment. I can choose who I work with. I can set my own schedule. I won’t have a boss triggering me. I can finally do things my way. That possibility can hold a tremendous amount of hope. And maybe some relief, too. But there’s something I don’t think we talk about nearly enough: We may leave the workplace. But we don’t leave our nervous system, our history, or the survival strategies we developed there behind. A quick introduction, if we haven’t met If we haven’t met yet, I’m Cyndi Bennett, a trauma-informed career coach and founder of the Resilient Career Academy. You’re reading or listening to The Resilient Career Academy Newsletter #9, where we explore how the after-effects of complex trauma can show up in our careers and what becomes possible when we begin recognizing and removing the obstacles they can create. Today, I’m starting a new conversation about something we haven’t talked about nearly enough: what happens when trauma survivors become entrepreneurs. Leaving a difficult workplace and building something of our own can change a lot about our working environment. We may have more control over our time, the people we work with, the work we choose to do, and even the conditions under which we do it. But becoming an entrepreneur doesn’t give us a clean slate. We bring ourselves with us. Our experience. Our strengths. Our resourcefulness. Our hopes for what this business might make possible. And we may also bring some of the adaptations we developed long before we ever thought about starting a business. Over the next several months, I want to explore what that can look like, not because there is one universal experience of entrepreneurship as a trauma survivor, but because I think there are conversations we need to start having. And today, I want to start with a simple question: What happens when the survival strategies that helped us get this far become part of how we build a business? We Don't Start Our Businesses From a Blank Slate When we start a business, we bring decades of experience with us. We bring the skills we’ve developed throughout our careers, the things we’ve learned about people, the problems we know how to solve, and the experiences that have shaped what matters to us. For trauma survivors, some of those experiences may have helped us develop strengths that serve us incredibly well as entrepreneurs. We may be resourceful because we’ve spent much of our lives figuring things out. We may notice things other people miss because we’ve learned to pay close attention to what’s happening around us. We may understand people deeply, anticipate needs, adapt quickly when circumstances change, and keep going when things don’t go according to plan. Those things come with us. But so do the strategies we developed to protect ourselves. And here’s where entrepreneurship gets interesting. Some of the very same adaptations that helped us navigate difficult circumstances can look remarkably useful when we’re building a business. * Self-reliance can look like independence. * Hypervigilance can look like being exceptionally prepared. * People-pleasing can look like outstanding customer service. * Perfectionism can look like having incredibly high standards. * Over-functioning can look like the work ethic entrepreneurship supposedly requires. Sometimes the things that helped us survive can also help us succeed. Until they don’t. That’s what makes these patterns so difficult to recognize. They don’t necessarily show up in our businesses looking like trauma responses. They may look like the qualities of a really committed entrepreneur. And that’s what I want us to start becoming curious about. I Thought the Triggers Would Go Away One of the things I didn’t expect when I started my own business was that the things that triggered me would change. In my corporate career, I had become pretty familiar with the situations that could knock me off-center. I understood what it felt like to navigate difficult workplace relationships, authority dynamics, conflict, feedback, and the unpredictability of working inside a large organization. Entrepreneurship gave me more control over many of those things. I could decide what kind of work I wanted to do, who I wanted to work with, how I spent my time, and what I wanted to create. And yet, I discovered that having more control over my working environment didn’t mean I stopped getting triggered. The triggers were just different. Suddenly, I was navigating things I hadn’t encountered in quite the same way as an employee. * I had to put a price on my own work. * I had to talk publicly about what I could offer. * I had to make decisions without knowing whether they would work. * I had to invest time and money without any guarantee of a return. * I could create something I believed deeply in and have nobody buy it. And because I didn’t initially recognize some of those experiences as triggers, I didn’t necessarily recognize my responses to them as protection strategies either. I just thought I was trying to figure out how to be an entrepreneur. When Survival Strategies Put on Entrepreneurial Clothes The tricky thing about survival strategies in entrepreneurship is that they don’t always look like survival strategies. They can look like working hard. Being committed to our clients. Doing our research. Caring deeply about the quality of our work. Being careful with money. Wanting to make the right decision. Trying to build something we’re proud of. And sometimes, that’s exactly what they are. But sometimes there may be something else happening underneath. * We might spend months perfecting an offer because putting something into the world before we’re certain it’s good enough feels incredibly vulnerable. * We might give clients far more than we promised because the thought of disappointing them is difficult to tolerate. * We might keep our prices low, not because the market won’t support more, but because asking someone to pay us more brings up something we weren’t expecting. * We might research a decision endlessly, ask multiple people what they think, or sign up for another program because making a decision without knowing how it will turn out feels uncomfortable. * We might spend weeks figuring out something ourselves because asking for help doesn’t even occur to us until we’re already overwhelmed. * And we might work far beyond our capacity because no one is standing there telling us to stop. That’s part of what makes this so complicated. Entrepreneurship can actually reward some of these behaviors, at least for a while. * The over-functioner gets a lot done. * The perfectionist produces exceptional work. * The people-pleaser has happy clients. * The hyper-independent entrepreneur becomes incredibly resourceful. Until the very thing that helps us build the business starts making it harder to sustain. And if we don’t recognize what’s happening, we may assume we simply need a better business strategy. Maybe sometimes we do. But sometimes the business problem and the protection pattern are sitting right next to each other. The Same Strategies May Also Be Some of Our Greatest Strengths One of the things I want to be careful about in this conversation is turning every behavior we developed because of trauma into something we need to fix. Because I don’t believe that’s true. Some of the adaptations we developed to survive difficult circumstances may have also helped us develop qualities that serve us incredibly well as entrepreneurs. We may be resourceful, adaptable, persistent, and deeply attuned to the people around us. Our lived experiences may help us see problems other people overlook or understand the people we serve in ways that can’t be learned from a business textbook. Those strengths are part of what we bring to our businesses, too. Our experiences may have given us tremendous empathy for the people we serve. They may have helped us recognize a problem that other people weren’t seeing. For some of us, they may even be part of the reason we started the business in the first place. I don’t want us to lose any of that. The question isn’t whether a particular trait is good or bad. Maybe the more useful question is: Is this helping me build the business I want to build, or is it helping me feel safe while quietly getting in the way of what I want? And sometimes, the answer may be both. * The self-reliance that makes us resourceful can also make it difficult to ask for help. * The empathy that helps us understand our clients can make boundaries more complicated. * The ability to anticipate problems can help us prepare, but it can also keep us preparing long after we’re ready to act. That’s why awareness matters. We don’t have to reject the parts of ourselves that helped us get here. But we can begin noticing when they’re serving the business we’re trying to build and when an old protection strategy may be making decisions for us. And once we can see the difference, we have more choice about what happens next. What Could Change If We Started Noticing? I think one of the most powerful things we can do as trauma-survivor entrepreneurs is begin noticing what we’re bringing into our businesses without immediately deciding that something is wrong with us or that we ne

  6. Aug 13

    When CPTSD Makes You Question Everything, Including Your Career| Newsletter #4

    Last week I had a discovery call with a man who has spent almost three decades in the financial sector. He's the kind of person people trust in a room. Steady. Reliable. The one everyone assumes has it together. He was diagnosed with CPTSD last year. He told me that in the months since, nothing has felt safe. Not the people he works with, not the meetings he used to walk into without a second thought, not even his own reactions. He’s found himself questioning everything he thought he knew about himself. The way he reacts to feedback. The way he reads people. The way he’s built his entire career on staying in control. All of it suddenly looked different to him, like he was seeing his own life from outside of it for the first time. Here’s what he described, and what I hear so often from people in the early days of a CPTSD diagnosis. Suddenly, everyone feels like a threat. Not because anything around him actually changed, but because his nervous system is finally being honest about how much it’s been protecting him, for how long, from how far back. A coworker’s tone in a meeting. A boss’s silence after he speaks. Things that used to roll off him now land like something is wrong, something is dangerous, even when he knows, logically, that it isn’t. That’s a dysregulated nervous system at work, and it’s showing up for him in ways I recognize from so many conversations like this one. Common Workplace Struggles for Trauma Survivors: * A hyperactive threat-detection system that reads colleagues and leaders as adversaries, even when no real threat is present * A running fear about job security, about losing the income and stability built over years of hard work * The daily exhaustion of managing an internal alarm just to keep functioning * Defensiveness that others perceive as overreacting, while it feels like a necessary safety response from the inside * Performing well on the outside while feeling like everything is falling apart on the inside * A pull between ambition and the need to heal, unsure how to hold both at once * Not feeling safe naming any of this at work, even in cultures that claim to value mental health * A workplace moment reopening something much older, making ordinary stress feel exponentially heavier * Hypervigilance that makes even routine, safe situations feel like something is about to go wrong Do any of these sound familiar to you? They do to me, because I experienced the same things. He has done what many of us do when we get this diagnosis…we research the heck out of it. We do a deep dive on Google, YouTube, Discussion Forums, Podcasts, and so, so many books. I did the same thing, because I felt compelled to figure out “what was wrong with me and how to fix it.” Can anyone relate to that? Of course, you can. The first couple of years on the CPTSD healing journey are the hardest and most vulnerable, because you have all the emotions and very inadequate coping strategies. If you find yourself on this healing journey, I want you to know that you are not alone. You are really in good company, with over 80% of the workforce experiencing trauma at one point in their life. Regulation is the Foundation As someone who has walked this journey myself, and walked alongside countless other survivors, the first order of business is to get your nervous system regulated, because the rest of your healing journey is based on this foundation. To help with this, I created a FREE tool called “The Workplace Trigger Tracker Toolkit”. It is a template you can use to create awareness of the workplace situations and scenarios where you are triggered, what set it off, and the intensity. Additionally, there is a picklist of coping strategies you can choose from to address the triggers. Almost 2K subscribers have requested this tool to help them in the workplace. You can get yours for FREE here: 🌱 Become Grounded Pattern Pivots Is this fire, or is this toast? Years ago, I set off my own smoke alarm making toast. Not burnt toast. Slightly golden, barely-there toast. The alarm didn’t know the difference. It just knew smoke, and smoke means danger, so it screamed the same way it would if the whole kitchen were on fire. That’s what a dysregulated nervous system does at work. You think the alarm is telling you: * “That email was hostile.” * “She’s building a case against you.” * “This meeting is a threat.” * “You need to defend yourself right now.” Oftentimes, the alarm isn’t reading the room. It’s reading old smoke from a fire that happened somewhere else, a long time ago. Let’s imagine you get a slightly terse Slack message and your whole body goes on alert before your eyes even finish reading it. How much of that reaction actually belongs to the message? Listen, you don’t need to silence the alarm. Silencing it isn’t the goal. The win is when you can hear it going off and ask, “Is there fire, or is there toast?” The win is catching the half-second between the alarm and the reaction. The win is when your body eventually learns the difference between smoke and danger, the same way it learns anything else, through repetition. That takes more than white-knuckling through the moment. That takes naming it. Like catching yourself mid-sentence and starting over, the kind of small correction that changes the whole outcome of the conversation. 🎬 Your Grounded Action Step The next time your body reacts before your mind catches up, ask yourself one question: Is this fire, or is this toast? Not “am I overreacting.”Not “what’s wrong with me.”Be specific. Examples: * Is this person actually a threat, or does their tone remind me of someone who was? * Is this deadline actually dangerous, or does urgency itself feel unsafe to me? * Is this silence from my manager actually a bad sign, or does silence itself put me on alert? Naming the alarm is what starts to change how loud it rings next time. That's the first skill, not the last one. If you're bracing before meetings, holding back what you actually think, or running on empty by noon just from managing what nobody else can see, that's the cost of staying here. Emotional Regulation in the Workplace walks you through how to build this into a lasting practice, so naming the alarm stops being something you do once and starts being how you move through your day. 👁️ Become Seen Spotlight Strategy Stop Translating, Start Telling For the first few years I coached, I described my work in the most polished way possible. Trauma-informed methodology. Nervous system regulation. Resilient career advancement frameworks. It sounded impressive. It also sounded like nobody, including me on a hard day. You think being seen means: * “Let me explain my expertise more clearly.” * “Let me use the right terminology.” * “Let me sound credible.” * “Let me have the polished answer ready.” Oftentimes, the polish is the thing keeping you unseen. People don’t connect with your credentials. They connect with the one true sentence underneath them. Let’s imagine you finally tell someone, plainly, “I don’t feel safe most days at work, and I don’t know why yet.” No framework. No explanation. Just that. How much more real would that conversation become? Listen, you don’t need the perfect language to be seen. You need one honest sentence. The win is when someone hears you and thinks, “she’s not performing this, she’s actually in it.” The win is when the polished explanation stops being the thing standing between you and being understood. That takes more than finding the right words. That takes telling the true one first. 🎬 Your Seen Action Step Before your next hard conversation, whether it’s with a therapist, a coach, or someone you trust at work, answer this one question: What is the one true sentence I’ve been avoiding saying out loud? Not the polished version.Not the explanation.Be specific. Examples: * “I don’t trust my own reactions right now.” * “I’m exhausted from holding it together all day.” * “I don’t know how to ask for what I need.” Saying the one true sentence is what turns being unseen into being understood. Learning how to build the rest of that language, and say it plainly to the people who could help you carry it, is exactly what I walk through inside the paid tier of The Resilient Career Academy. 🚀 Become Limitless Ceiling Breaker The Week You Don’t Split Down the Middle A friend of mine trains for marathons. Every training plan she’s ever followed has the same rule: some weeks you build, some weeks you rest. Never both in equal measure, every single week, forever. She told me the runners who get hurt are the ones who try to do a little of both, every day, permanently, afraid that resting even once means falling behind. That’s the same trap I see with healing and career. You think becoming limitless means: * “Balancing healing and work equally, every single day.” * “Doing a little bit of both, all the time.” * “Never letting one take more than the other.” * “Proving you can carry everything at once.” Oftentimes, that’s the exact plan that keeps people stuck, or hurt. Let’s imagine you gave one full week to healing, on purpose, and let work be just enough to get by. Not forever. Just one week. What would you actually learn about what you’re carrying? Listen, you don’t need to hold healing and work in perfect balance every day. The win is a week where healing gets more of you, on purpose. The win is a week where work gets more of you, because you have the regulation to give it that, without it costing you everything. The win is proving you can move between the two instead of forcing both at once, forever. That takes more than willpower. That takes a plan with a season to it. 🎬 Your Limitless Action Step Pick one week on your calendar and answer this question honestly: Does this week need t

  7. Aug 12

    The Question Every Manager Skips Before a PIP

    "He's been a little fussy lately," the mom said, handing her baby over to me in the church nursery like it was nothing. I’ve rocked six grandbabies to sleep over the years, so by the time she passed him to me, I was confident I could handle it. I know the bounce that works, the hold that works, the lullaby that buys me another ten minutes. And this baby was normally the calm one, the one who’d smile at you from across the room before you even picked him up. So when she said “a little fussy,” I wasn’t worried. I had this. Except nothing worked. Not the bounce, not the hold, not the lullaby that had never once failed me with any of my six grandsons. This baby, who usually lit up the second you picked him up, would not settle. And somewhere in there I remember thinking, this isn’t fussy. This is something else, and none of my tricks are touching it. I think about that Sunday a lot now, when I talk with managers about high-performing employees who’ve suddenly stopped showing up the way they used to. Because most managers aren’t new at this either. They’ve handled missed deadlines, skill gaps, off days. They’ve got a toolkit too. But nobody trained them for a high performer who’s quietly unraveling, someone who’s usually the calm, capable one, and none of the usual moves are working. That’s a different kind of unsettling than a straightforward problem employee. It’s the gap between what you know how to fix and what’s actually in front of you. That gap is where most managers make the decision that ends up defining everything that comes after. Standing there, not knowing what’s actually wrong, feels unbearable. Doing something, even the wrong something, feels safer than doing nothing... and most managers aren’t careless; they’re just caught in that discomfort. So they reach for the form. The Performance Improvement Plan (PIP). The tool that’s already sitting on a shared drive somewhere, filled with deadlines and checkboxes, because at least it looks like leadership. At least it looks like they’re handling it. But there's a way to close that gap before it turns into a document. It comes down to three moves, and none of them require you to already have the answer. The Pause, Plan, Pivot Framework Most performance issues get documented before anyone actually understands them. That's not because managers are bad at their jobs; it's because there's no built-in step for finding out what's really going on before the process kicks in. This framework gives you that step. It doesn't replace formal processes when they're genuinely needed; it just makes sure you're not reaching for one before you know if it's the right tool. Pause Before anything gets documented, there’s a question worth asking that most managers skip entirely: Is this a performance problem, or is this a human problem showing up as performance? They look identical on paper. Missed deadlines are missed deadlines. But a skill gap and a person quietly struggling through something require completely different responses, and you can’t tell them apart from a spreadsheet. The pause isn’t about waiting indefinitely. It’s about resisting the pull to document before you understand what you’re actually documenting. Sometimes what looks like a sudden drop in performance is actually a nervous system working overtime somewhere else, and the work in front of them just couldn’t compete. Plan This is where curiosity gets built into the process instead of skipped over it. A conversation that starts with “I’ve noticed a change, and I want to understand it” lands entirely differently than one that opens with a PIP already drafted. The plan isn’t the paperwork. The plan is deciding how you’re going to find out what’s actually going on before you decide what tool the situation calls for. This is also where safety matters more than most managers realize. People don’t tell you what’s really happening in a room that feels like it’s building a case against them. They tell you in a room that feels like it’s trying to understand them. Pivot Sometimes the answer really is a formal process, and that’s fine. But sometimes the pivot is smaller than that. An adjusted deadline. A reduced load for a few weeks. A direct, human question asked once instead of a form filled out by default. The pivot is choosing the tool that matches the problem, instead of reaching for the one tool you already know how to use. That baby in the church nursery wasn’t fussy. He needed something none of my usual tricks were built for, and I only found out what by staying with him instead of running through the same routine faster and louder. Employees aren’t babies, and managers aren’t grandmothers with a lifetime of bounces and holds. But the instinct is the same. The tools that have always worked will keep getting reached for, right up until someone decides to pause long enough to ask if this situation actually calls for something else. Bringing it together Pause before you document, so you find out what’s actually happening instead of assuming you already know. Plan a conversation built on curiosity, not a case built on evidence. Pivot toward the response the situation calls for, whether that’s a formal process or something much smaller and more human. None of it requires you to have the answer before you start. It just requires you to be willing to find out. That baby settled eventually, not because I found the right bounce or the right hold, but because I finally stopped cycling through my usual moves and just held him, quiet, and let him show me what he needed instead of telling him what I thought that was. That’s the whole shift. From having the answer to being willing to find out. From the tool you already know to the one the moment actually calls for. Want the full toolkit? Everything in the Pause, Plan, Pivot framework works on its own, but if you want the scripts, the self-assessment, and the trigger response guide that go deeper into trauma-informed management, I put it all together in the Trauma-Informed Management Quick Reference Guide. It’s available to Paid Members of the Resilient Career Academy. Joining gets you this guide along with the rest of the Premium Content Library, and it helps keep this work sustainable so I can keep writing pieces like this one. Get full access to Resilient Career Academy at resilientcareers.substack.com/subscribe

  8. Aug 4

    Stuck At Work? Here's How to Plan Your Next Move on Purpose

    Summary In this episode, Cyndi Bennett uses a simple but honest metaphor to open the conversation: the moment you realize the house you loved no longer fits. That same tension, loving where you are and knowing you have outgrown it, is exactly what a lot of people are feeling in their careers right now. Cyndi gets personal here too, sharing what hitting the ceiling of her own knowledge with this podcast taught her about effort versus strategy, and walking through the three-step process she used to move forward on purpose rather than out of panic. The Pause, the Plan, and the Pivot. This is also a season finale of sorts, with the podcast going on a planned break until October while Cyndi works with a coach to redesign the show. She is not going anywhere, just building something better. Key Thoughts * The moment you stop asking whether to grow and start asking how to grow is the moment the real work begins. * Effort alone hitting a ceiling is not a sign of failure. It is a sign that a different kind of knowledge is needed, one that effort cannot substitute for. * A pause is not the same as stopping. It is the space that lets you see clearly before you commit to what comes next. Without it, most of us default to the fastest fix available just to make the discomfort stop. * Planning requires your executive functioning brain to be online. If you are still in the middle of the storm, trying to plan from that state usually means reaching for the fastest exit rather than the right one. * The clearer you get about what you are moving away from specifically, the less likely you are to walk into the exact same situation wearing a different name tag. * You do not need the whole staircase figured out before you are allowed to move. You just need enough clarity to take the next right step. * A pivot built from a real plan is different from a leap made out of frustration. You know what you are moving away from, what you are moving toward, and what is within your control. When you move, you are not moving blind. What This Means For You If you are sitting in that in-between space right now, here are some things worth working through: * Check whether you are trying to plan from inside the storm. Before you map out next steps, ask yourself honestly whether you are regulated enough to think clearly. If the answer is no, giving yourself more time is not avoidance. It is information, and it is the smarter move. * Get specific about what you are moving away from. Not just “unhappy” or “stuck.” Is it the role itself, the environment, the ceiling on growth, the mismatch between what you do and what lights you up? Specificity here protects you from repeating the same chapter. * Get honest about what is actually within your control. You cannot control the job market or how quickly something shows up. You can control how you prepare, who you talk to, what you sharpen, and how intentionally you use the space you are creating. * Bring in outside eyes if you have been inside the situation too long. When you have been standing in something for a long time, it can be genuinely hard to see the shape of it clearly. Someone outside the situation often can. * Trust that you do not need the whole picture before you take the next step. The moving itself is often how the rest becomes clear. Come Journey With Us If this resonated with you and you would like to go deeper with the exact tools, resources, and community built specifically to support trauma survivors navigating their careers, consider joining us in the Resilient Career Academy. You don’t have to figure this out alone. There is a place where people understand exactly what you are carrying, and where your pace, your healing, and your story are not just welcomed, they are honored. If you are ready to move from understanding what you are feeling to knowing what to do about it, the rest of this article is waiting for you inside The Resilient Career Academy. I would love to have you there. Get full access to Resilient Career Academy at resilientcareers.substack.com/subscribe

    Stuck At Work? Here's How to Plan Your Next Move on Purpose
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About

Traditional career development wasn't built for trauma survivors — and it shows. Your Trauma-Wise Career Guide, hosted by trauma survivor and career coach Cyndi Bennett, MBA, M.Ed., offers trauma-informed strategies for building a sustainable professional life alongside your healing. resilientcareers.substack.com

Information

  • Creator
    Cyndi Bennett | Career Coaching for Trauma Survivors
  • Years Active
    2025 - 2026
  • Episodes
    75
  • Rating
    Clean
  • Copyright
    © Cyndi Bennett
  • Show Website
    Your Trauma-Wise Career Guide