I went to NYC to celebrate a friend among enemies.  The reception was overflowing with colleagues I was truly happy to see—alongside a few whose past behavior had left its mark and who stirred up memories I’d rather not revisit: the ones I call the Triggers.

Instead of wearing detour signs, the Triggers embraced me with suffocating hugs and hellos and began a talk track that was missing only the canned laughs.  They had clearly delivered their script many times.  It was about them and their new, big dream featuring them.  As I watched their animated performance, what I heard instead was the trash talk about me that I wasn’t supposed to know about.  I could imagine them saying those words as easily as they were spouting their talk track now between sips of burnt breakfast coffee.  They looked the same, but I knew too much.  

The Beauty of Time Passing

So how did I feel when I heard them speak? Was there a sense of betrayal? Anger? A flicker of the old charge?

Yes—but barely.

On a scale of 1–10, I’d give it a 1.

It was as if the triggers had morphed into artifacts—historical, culturally bound. Impotent.  I had a new level of comfort with betrayal.  I didn’t have to perform to hide it.  I wasn’t interested in their stories anymore.  I had moved on.  

This is what it will be like for you, once you have moved on to another stage of your life that is percolating with new people, new ideas, and maybe even new locations.  The past power structures and movements of former colleagues will no longer be the main event of your narrative. This is hard to believe if you’ve just been let go and are still in shock.If you’re about to be let go and are dealing with negotiations that bring out the ugliest of corporate machinations, it will likely be impossible for you to imagine having a brave new world where heartbreak isn’t the daily currency. And yet, in time, what feels unbearable now will lose its grip.

Three Levels of Exposure

Seeing the people who let you go, actually seeing them at an event, is the toughest challenge of all.  Against all logic, you expect them to register on their faces the knowledge of how they treated you.  You don’t expect them to ignore you, or worse give you a hug and say how nice it is to see you.  

Hearing about people who have gone on to continue their bad leadership elsewhere is still painful, but at least it’s not a tactile, in-your-face-at-a-party painful. 

Having to ask someone for a reference or a favor who has done you wrong takes a solid amount of fortitude and compartmentalization.  You know who they are.  Others don’t.  You must put the ugly truths in a soundproofed mental vault for the time it takes to get what you want.  Later, you can open this and scream to your heart’s content but you got it, didn’t you, you got what you needed.

Habit of Mind

This is a lovely phrase a friend of mine uses when she speaks about change.  It’s been defined as “knowing how to behave intelligently when you don’t know the answer.” (Harvard Graduate School of Education.)

Core Characteristics: They include patterns of intellectual behaviors, such as thinking about thinking (metacognition), striving for accuracy, questioning, and communicating with clarity.Purpose: The goal is to develop critical, creative, and self-regulated thinking skills that allow individuals to navigate, adapt, and act effectively in the face of ambiguity.

 

Doesn’t that sound like a beautiful pathway to a trigger-less existence?

The Work Shows

Years earlier, before I had done the work of recognizing and tackling triggers, I might have been tangled up in swirls of anger and resentment for hours after running into an old non-friend.  I would have called my go-tos to say “I saw that piece of crap who acted like nothing had happened when he knows exactly how badly he behaved.  And do I think it affected his day at all?  Absolutely not.  So why is it affecting mine?”  

That’s no longer the call-and-response.  

My day in NYC ended with the comical news that one of my former bosses had written a book about his own separation from his job and how he was grieving.  I looked up the book on my phone, thinking, this can’t be real, but of course it was. 

My BFF asked, “Was that triggering for you?”  

“Not at all,” I said, smiling. “It was being promoted with another book, Why You Suck as a Leader.”  We burst out laughing.  My new habit of mind, in its pursuit of accuracy and clarity, filed the entire day under one word: karma.  

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