June 24, 2025 • 12 mins
What happens when you make a mistake at work, and everyone knows it? Whether a comment was taken the wrong way, an unfiltered moment in a meeting, or showing up unprepared, reputational hits can feel career-ending. In this episode, we talk about processing, recovering, and cleaning it up, without losing yourself in the fallout.
You’ll learn:
- How to handle the awkward “in-between” after a professional misstep
- Strategies to take ownership without spiraling into shame or defensiveness
- How your Leadership Identity can help you reconnect with your values, strengths, and next move
- 4 Tips to recover
Mentioned on the Show: Access the Make Your Power Move Assessment and Program, for $47. Designed to help you clarify your Leadership Identity, understand why it matters, and learn how to navigate your career authentically and confidently.
Jill Griffin, host of The Career Refresh, delivers expert guidance on workplace challenges and career transitions. Jill leverages her experience working for the world's top brands like Coca-Cola, Microsoft, Hilton Hotels, and Martha Stewart to address leadership, burnout, team dynamics, and the 4Ps (perfectionism, people-pleasing, procrastination, and personalities).
Visit JillGriffinCoaching.com for more details on:
- Book a 1:1 Career Strategy and Executive Coaching HERE
- Build a Leadership Identity That Earns Trust and Delivers Results.
- Gallup CliftonStrengths Corporate Workshops to build a strengths-based culture
- Team Dynamics training to increase retention, communication, goal setting, and effective decision-making
- Keynote Speaking
- Grab a personal Resume Refresh with Jill Griffin HERE
Follow @JillGriffinOffical on Instagram for daily inspiration
Connect with and follow Jill on LinkedIn
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Transcript
Episode Transcript
Available transcripts are automatically generated. Complete accuracy is not guaranteed.
Speaker 1 (00:00):
Hey, welcome back to the Career Refresh.
I am your host, jill Griffin.
This is the place where we areexploring reinvention,
leadership, career strategy, andtoday I want to talk about high
achievers good human beings whousually get it right until they
don't.
Yes, we are going to talk aboutwhat happens when you are
(00:21):
canceled at work.
Ready, let's get into it.
Maybe you said something alittle off, or there was a tense
exchange with someone above youon the org chart, or maybe you
blew it in a meeting and nowyou're being quietly benched, or
(00:43):
so it feels that way.
Whatever the reason, theoutcome feels the same.
You're in that awkwardin-between feeling and you're
not fired, but you're notexactly in favor either, and
you're feeling it and we're justgoing to say, for this episode,
whether it's true or not,meaning that you're feeling it.
We're going to believe that foryou.
It's true that you are feelingthat you are now on the sort of
(01:05):
a canceled list, the benchedlist.
You're on the outskirts, okay.
So let's talk about how toprocess it, how to recover for
it and when we need to clean itup.
So first, what I want you tothink about is the process.
Your nervous system is going tobe on very high alert and you
may be replaying that momentover and over again, wondering
who saw it.
(01:25):
If they're thinking, is itgossip happening, it's fixable.
I just want you to breathe and,before you perform an apology
or send a frantic follow-upemail that feels graspy and
clingy, I just want you to pauseright.
And why do I want you to dothis?
Because I want you to reallythink about what did you intend
with the action, inaction,reaction and was it received?
(01:47):
Get clear on what actuallyhappened and what your role is
in this.
This might be a time to likegrab pen and paper, open your
notes app and actually writedown versus just continuing to
think about it through your head.
And I want you to get clear onwhat you think happened.
And I'm going to ask you toresist the urge to outsource the
feedback.
Right, there's a.
(02:07):
We want to start asking peoplewhat they think.
Maybe our friend,professionally, that might've
been there, or what do theythink.
I don't want you to go fishingfor everyone's opinion.
However, if there is someoneyou trust who is very neutral
and maybe was there that mightbe a way to go about getting
some different perspective onthis, but this is not someone
(02:29):
who's going to tell you what youwant to hear.
This is someone who's going tohelp you get perspective on the
situation.
This is not a defense tour.
This is not time to be seedingout what you want people to be
telling others.
Right, we're not doing this.
This is not getting them tolike, agree with you so that
they can help you clean it up.
That's not what we're doing.
This is about owning yourhumanity without spiraling into
(02:51):
shame or guilt or the.
However it's going to show upfor you, the I'm not worthies,
right?
So shame is the.
Sometimes I look at it as like.
It's the moment in which yousee yourself or the incident
through the eyes of someone elseand you're like oh my God, they
think blah, blah, blah about me, right?
That's the way I would thinkabout shame.
(03:11):
Brene Brown often defines shameas the belief that something is
inherently wrong with you,making you unworthy of
connection or love or theproject right?
The difference just from guiltbecause guilt is also out there
too is that the key differenceis the focus.
Shame is focused on you beingwrong, or you being unworthy, or
(03:34):
that you're bad, whereas Guiltis more about the behavior that
you did.
The behavior is wrong or bad ordumb, or insert adjective.
So while you can't rewrite whathappened, you can decide what
you're going to do next.
So the next thing I want you todo after your pause is I want
(03:56):
you to recover with intention.
So I'm going to give you a fewreal life examples and how
people in these examplesrecovered and how they moved
forward.
So we're going to break downdifferent scenarios.
The first scenario is thatthere was an aggressive exchange
, so maybe a senior exec, youfeel like they came at you but
you didn't back down and maybeyou even finished it.
(04:18):
Can I see anyone hand raise,hand raise, right?
So now you're wondering if youwent too far.
And recently a client shared howthey felt personally attacked
by an executive leader and Ihave their permission to talk
about this and this leader waspointing out an issue that was
continuing to happen.
So, while this clientunderstood that this was a
(04:39):
problem, it was nuanced.
So when the executive wasasking closed-ended questions,
limiting the response to simple,often binary choices like yes,
no, true, false, multiple choiceeither, or really backing my
client into a corner, the clientagain, they felt that this was
nuanced.
It wasn't as easy as a yes orno.
(05:00):
So as the pressure was rankingup, so did my client's response.
So as the executive was raisingtheir voice and really backing
them into a corner, so was myclient.
So I want you to think likeJack Nicholson, few Good Men,
that famous court scene whereJack yells you can't handle the
truth.
Pretty much how my clientresponded Whoops.
(05:23):
So here's what we did.
We didn't wait, we didn't hide,we waited Again.
We needed to pause, we waitedenough.
So the blood pressure got backto normal.
But then we addressed it.
They reached out.
They wrote an email that saidthe exchange got heated and I've
reflected on my part and how Icould have handled it
differently.
My intent was clarity, notconflict, simple, direct.
(05:44):
The executive did not apologizewe didn't expect them to but he
was able to clear the air andmove forward.
This is not groveling.
This is about leadership.
This is about takingaccountability and moving
forward.
So there's one scenario, anotherscenario, this one's about me.
You said somethinginappropriate.
It was a joke that was missed,a comment that crossed the line,
(06:05):
criticism that leaked outsideways.
Oh Lord, there was a time whenI knew that I was going to be
speaking to a new senior leaderfrom the London office and at
the time I was always traveling.
I was on the road.
My husband and I rarely saweach other, maybe once, twice a
week if we were lucky.
So when this leader asked whatI did over the weekend, I said I
(06:29):
had a conjugal visit with myhusband.
Like WTF, who am I?
I don't even know what thatcame from.
Well, actually I do know whereit came from, because at the
time there was a BBC show calledPrisoner's Wives and everyone
was talking about it, andbecause there was the London
connection, it probably in mybrain just made it click.
I was mortified and it gotsuper awkward.
(06:51):
So it's not about judging, itwas not about joking your way
out of it.
It was really being clear andhumble and I said something like
oof, I see how that landed.
I'm sorry.
It wasn't my intention to causeany discomfort and I'm
committed to doing better.
Simple, easy, moved on.
I owned it and then made apromise to do better.
Another scenario was youweren't prepared and it showed,
(07:13):
and now you're feeling you froze, you fumbled and now you're
feeling like you're being leftout of things.
There was a time in my career,very early on, where I was often
referred to as a rock star andI was given an opportunity to
build and design an innovationday, a thought leadership day.
I wrote the hook, I pitched topspeakers and journalists and
(07:36):
authors and I designed a thoughtleadership event.
And then you know what I did.
I didn't think that I would bedoing the opener for the event.
I kept putting myself in thejunior box and when the
executive leader thought that Iwas going to open it and I was
going to look like a champ, Ididn't think that that was going
to be me.
I'm used to the executiveleader taking the opening, them
(07:58):
taking the credit, showing thatthis is what they put together
and taking that win.
At this point, just to a littlebit of my defense at this point,
I had ghostwritten articles forleaders.
I had provided quotes in theirvoice for the Wall Street
Journal and various trademagazines.
I wrote copy for the earningscall and someone else reported
it.
So I just assumed that wasgoing to continue.
(08:19):
I'm just the thought personwho's putting things out there
and someone else is going to bethe front person.
But except that in this casethey were giving me the chance
to lead the whole thing, oofgosh.
So I quickly welcomed.
Everyone set the tone.
Definitely not my best work,but it was a great lesson in
always being prepared.
The day ultimately wentfantastic and I will tell you,
(08:43):
my opening sucked and I felt it.
I felt like uh-oh, they gave mea chance and I blew it.
So what did I do?
I dressed it, just said clearlyI wasn't my best, that was on
me and I've already taken stepsto ensure that that will never
happen again.
And then I over-deliveredconsistently, quietly,
(09:03):
confidently, did it until I gotback into you know, went back to
neutrality and eventually wentback up to that status.
These are real world scenariosthat happen that I hear people
talk about often and yourreputation recovery is really
showing about who you're goingto be next.
You show up on time, prepared,you show up with emotional
(09:24):
intelligence, there's no sidecomments, there's no gossip, you
don't blame.
There are two books I also findreally helpful if you're in
this experience.
One is Dare to Lead by BreneBrown, and this is really
helpful if you're workingthrough sort of the
vulnerability and some of thatshame that may happen with
leadership missteps.
And then the second is Presenceby Amy Cuddy, and that's
offering you tools for regainingconfidence with yourself and
(09:47):
trust both internally andexternally, after a public
embarrassment or failure.
But listen, there's alsosomething else you can do, and
if you feel like you've lostyour footing or you're
questioning who you are as aleader, I want you to go back
and think about who you are as aleader and what I call
leadership identity this is thework that I often do with
(10:08):
clients is when everything feelsscrambled and this is not about
your title or your resume.
It's about your values, yourstrengths, your voice and how
you lead.
Even when the spotlight feels alittle bit shaky, it's hitting
that reset button.
It's coming back andreconnecting with all the
amazing bits of you becausethey're still there, even after
a stumble.
And if that's something youneed, if that's something that
(10:29):
you're interested in, I'm goingto put the information in the
show notes because I have builta tool and a guidebook.
It's an assessment that willtake you through this.
I'm going to drop that.
The exact link in the shownotes is on my website.
But this is the strategic,practical dare I say, a little
bit of a wink and a smile way toreconnect with who you are.
It is designed to get you backin alignment when you feel like
(10:51):
you weren't necessarily at yourbest right.
So you may not recover therelationship.
You may not always be forgivenand that's going to be painful.
But what you can recover isyour sense of self.
You can work through that guilt, that some shame, without
making it part of your identity.
And, to recap, I want you toname the feeling.
I want you to name it.
I don't want you tocatastrophize right.
(11:12):
Yes, it's possible to co-minglefailure with your success.
One moment in your career doesnot cancel.
It's not all or nothing.
Talk to someone safe, getperspective.
This might be a mentor or coach, keeping it neutral.
This is not finding a hypesquad.
This is really talking tosomeone who will help you
through this with truth andkindness.
And I want you to be gentle onyourself and know that you're
(11:34):
allowed to be long, you'reallowed to repair, you're
allowed to grow.
And getting canceled doesn'tmean it's forever.
It just means it's a moment ofreflection and recalibration.
I want you to be thinking aboutso from this place.
Where do I want to go and whodo I want to be next?
All right, friends, I want tohear from you.
Have you been canceled?
How did you work through it?
(11:54):
You can email me at hello atJill Griffin coachingcom and, as
always, stay intentional, bekind and do the work.
All right, I'll see you nexttime.
Hey, welcome back to the Career Refresh.
I am your host, jill Griffin.
This is the place where we areexploring reinvention,
leadership, career strategy, andtoday I want to talk about high
achievers good human beings whousually get it right until they
don't.
Yes, we are going to talk aboutwhat happens when you are
(00:21):
canceled at work.
Ready, let's get into it.
Maybe you said something alittle off, or there was a tense
exchange with someone above youon the org chart, or maybe you
blew it in a meeting and nowyou're being quietly benched, or
(00:43):
so it feels that way.
Whatever the reason, theoutcome feels the same.
You're in that awkwardin-between feeling and you're
not fired, but you're notexactly in favor either, and
you're feeling it and we're justgoing to say, for this episode,
whether it's true or not,meaning that you're feeling it.
We're going to believe that foryou.
It's true that you are feelingthat you are now on the sort of
(01:05):
a canceled list, the benchedlist.
You're on the outskirts, okay.
So let's talk about how toprocess it, how to recover for
it and when we need to clean itup.
So first, what I want you tothink about is the process.
Your nervous system is going tobe on very high alert and you
may be replaying that momentover and over again, wondering
who saw it.
(01:25):
If they're thinking, is itgossip happening, it's fixable.
I just want you to breathe and,before you perform an apology
or send a frantic follow-upemail that feels graspy and
clingy, I just want you to pauseright.
And why do I want you to dothis?
Because I want you to reallythink about what did you intend
with the action, inaction,reaction and was it received?
(01:47):
Get clear on what actuallyhappened and what your role is
in this.
This might be a time to likegrab pen and paper, open your
notes app and actually writedown versus just continuing to
think about it through your head.
And I want you to get clear onwhat you think happened.
And I'm going to ask you toresist the urge to outsource the
feedback.
Right, there's a.
(02:07):
We want to start asking peoplewhat they think.
Maybe our friend,professionally, that might've
been there, or what do theythink.
I don't want you to go fishingfor everyone's opinion.
However, if there is someoneyou trust who is very neutral
and maybe was there that mightbe a way to go about getting
some different perspective onthis, but this is not someone
(02:29):
who's going to tell you what youwant to hear.
This is someone who's going tohelp you get perspective on the
situation.
This is not a defense tour.
This is not time to be seedingout what you want people to be
telling others.
Right, we're not doing this.
This is not getting them tolike, agree with you so that
they can help you clean it up.
That's not what we're doing.
This is about owning yourhumanity without spiraling into
(02:51):
shame or guilt or the.
However it's going to show upfor you, the I'm not worthies,
right?
So shame is the.
Sometimes I look at it as like.
It's the moment in which yousee yourself or the incident
through the eyes of someone elseand you're like oh my God, they
think blah, blah, blah about me, right?
That's the way I would thinkabout shame.
(03:11):
Brene Brown often defines shameas the belief that something is
inherently wrong with you,making you unworthy of
connection or love or theproject right?
The difference just from guiltbecause guilt is also out there
too is that the key differenceis the focus.
Shame is focused on you beingwrong, or you being unworthy, or
(03:34):
that you're bad, whereas Guiltis more about the behavior that
you did.
The behavior is wrong or bad ordumb, or insert adjective.
So while you can't rewrite whathappened, you can decide what
you're going to do next.
So the next thing I want you todo after your pause is I want
(03:56):
you to recover with intention.
So I'm going to give you a fewreal life examples and how
people in these examplesrecovered and how they moved
forward.
So we're going to break downdifferent scenarios.
The first scenario is thatthere was an aggressive exchange
, so maybe a senior exec, youfeel like they came at you but
you didn't back down and maybeyou even finished it.
(04:18):
Can I see anyone hand raise,hand raise, right?
So now you're wondering if youwent too far.
And recently a client shared howthey felt personally attacked
by an executive leader and Ihave their permission to talk
about this and this leader waspointing out an issue that was
continuing to happen.
So, while this clientunderstood that this was a
(04:39):
problem, it was nuanced.
So when the executive wasasking closed-ended questions,
limiting the response to simple,often binary choices like yes,
no, true, false, multiple choiceeither, or really backing my
client into a corner, the clientagain, they felt that this was
nuanced.
It wasn't as easy as a yes orno.
(05:00):
So as the pressure was rankingup, so did my client's response.
So as the executive was raisingtheir voice and really backing
them into a corner, so was myclient.
So I want you to think likeJack Nicholson, few Good Men,
that famous court scene whereJack yells you can't handle the
truth.
Pretty much how my clientresponded Whoops.
(05:23):
So here's what we did.
We didn't wait, we didn't hide,we waited Again.
We needed to pause, we waitedenough.
So the blood pressure got backto normal.
But then we addressed it.
They reached out.
They wrote an email that saidthe exchange got heated and I've
reflected on my part and how Icould have handled it
differently.
My intent was clarity, notconflict, simple, direct.
(05:44):
The executive did not apologizewe didn't expect them to but he
was able to clear the air andmove forward.
This is not groveling.
This is about leadership.
This is about takingaccountability and moving
forward.
So there's one scenario, anotherscenario, this one's about me.
You said somethinginappropriate.
It was a joke that was missed,a comment that crossed the line,
(06:05):
criticism that leaked outsideways.
Oh Lord, there was a time whenI knew that I was going to be
speaking to a new senior leaderfrom the London office and at
the time I was always traveling.
I was on the road.
My husband and I rarely saweach other, maybe once, twice a
week if we were lucky.
So when this leader asked whatI did over the weekend, I said I
(06:29):
had a conjugal visit with myhusband.
Like WTF, who am I?
I don't even know what thatcame from.
Well, actually I do know whereit came from, because at the
time there was a BBC show calledPrisoner's Wives and everyone
was talking about it, andbecause there was the London
connection, it probably in mybrain just made it click.
I was mortified and it gotsuper awkward.
(06:51):
So it's not about judging, itwas not about joking your way
out of it.
It was really being clear andhumble and I said something like
oof, I see how that landed.
I'm sorry.
It wasn't my intention to causeany discomfort and I'm
committed to doing better.
Simple, easy, moved on.
I owned it and then made apromise to do better.
Another scenario was youweren't prepared and it showed,
(07:13):
and now you're feeling you froze, you fumbled and now you're
feeling like you're being leftout of things.
There was a time in my career,very early on, where I was often
referred to as a rock star andI was given an opportunity to
build and design an innovationday, a thought leadership day.
I wrote the hook, I pitched topspeakers and journalists and
(07:36):
authors and I designed a thoughtleadership event.
And then you know what I did.
I didn't think that I would bedoing the opener for the event.
I kept putting myself in thejunior box and when the
executive leader thought that Iwas going to open it and I was
going to look like a champ, Ididn't think that that was going
to be me.
I'm used to the executiveleader taking the opening, them
(07:58):
taking the credit, showing thatthis is what they put together
and taking that win.
At this point, just to a littlebit of my defense at this point,
I had ghostwritten articles forleaders.
I had provided quotes in theirvoice for the Wall Street
Journal and various trademagazines.
I wrote copy for the earningscall and someone else reported
it.
So I just assumed that wasgoing to continue.
(08:19):
I'm just the thought personwho's putting things out there
and someone else is going to bethe front person.
But except that in this casethey were giving me the chance
to lead the whole thing, oofgosh.
So I quickly welcomed.
Everyone set the tone.
Definitely not my best work,but it was a great lesson in
always being prepared.
The day ultimately wentfantastic and I will tell you,
(08:43):
my opening sucked and I felt it.
I felt like uh-oh, they gave mea chance and I blew it.
So what did I do?
I dressed it, just said clearlyI wasn't my best, that was on
me and I've already taken stepsto ensure that that will never
happen again.
And then I over-deliveredconsistently, quietly,
(09:03):
confidently, did it until I gotback into you know, went back to
neutrality and eventually wentback up to that status.
These are real world scenariosthat happen that I hear people
talk about often and yourreputation recovery is really
showing about who you're goingto be next.
You show up on time, prepared,you show up with emotional
(09:24):
intelligence, there's no sidecomments, there's no gossip, you
don't blame.
There are two books I also findreally helpful if you're in
this experience.
One is Dare to Lead by BreneBrown, and this is really
helpful if you're workingthrough sort of the
vulnerability and some of thatshame that may happen with
leadership missteps.
And then the second is Presenceby Amy Cuddy, and that's
offering you tools for regainingconfidence with yourself and
(09:47):
trust both internally andexternally, after a public
embarrassment or failure.
But listen, there's alsosomething else you can do, and
if you feel like you've lostyour footing or you're
questioning who you are as aleader, I want you to go back
and think about who you are as aleader and what I call
leadership identity this is thework that I often do with
(10:08):
clients is when everything feelsscrambled and this is not about
your title or your resume.
It's about your values, yourstrengths, your voice and how
you lead.
Even when the spotlight feels alittle bit shaky, it's hitting
that reset button.
It's coming back andreconnecting with all the
amazing bits of you becausethey're still there, even after
a stumble.
And if that's something youneed, if that's something that
(10:29):
you're interested in, I'm goingto put the information in the
show notes because I have builta tool and a guidebook.
It's an assessment that willtake you through this.
I'm going to drop that.
The exact link in the shownotes is on my website.
But this is the strategic,practical dare I say, a little
bit of a wink and a smile way toreconnect with who you are.
It is designed to get you backin alignment when you feel like
(10:51):
you weren't necessarily at yourbest right.
So you may not recover therelationship.
You may not always be forgivenand that's going to be painful.
But what you can recover isyour sense of self.
You can work through that guilt, that some shame, without
making it part of your identity.
And, to recap, I want you toname the feeling.
I want you to name it.
I don't want you tocatastrophize right.
(11:12):
Yes, it's possible to co-minglefailure with your success.
One moment in your career doesnot cancel.
It's not all or nothing.
Talk to someone safe, getperspective.
This might be a mentor or coach, keeping it neutral.
This is not finding a hypesquad.
This is really talking tosomeone who will help you
through this with truth andkindness.
And I want you to be gentle onyourself and know that you're
(11:34):
allowed to be long, you'reallowed to repair, you're
allowed to grow.
And getting canceled doesn'tmean it's forever.
It just means it's a moment ofreflection and recalibration.
I want you to be thinking aboutso from this place.
Where do I want to go and whodo I want to be next?
All right, friends, I want tohear from you.
Have you been canceled?
How did you work through it?
(11:54):
You can email me at hello atJill Griffin coachingcom and, as
always, stay intentional, bekind and do the work.
All right, I'll see you nexttime.
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