How a Career Setback Led Me to Reinvent My Professional Identity

The phone call lasted less than ninety seconds. I was staring at the rain sliding down the window of a hotel room in Sydney, the harbour a grey smudge beyond the glass, and feeling the floor tilt beneath me in a way that had nothing to do with jet lag. A role I had poured myself into for years had simply evaporated, and with it the version of me that everyone, including myself, had come to recognise.

For most of my adult life, my identity had been stitched tightly to my job title. The moment that thread was cut, I had no idea who I was supposed to be at dinner parties, in interviews, or even in the mirror each morning. I had spent decades becoming a recognisable name in British television, and now I was sitting in a quiet room wondering whether any of it had been about the work at all, or simply about the safety net of being known.

What followed was a long, messy, sometimes joyful process of rebuilding. It taught me that a setback is rarely the end of a professional story, and more often the moment a far more interesting one begins. These are the lessons I now share with women across Australia and beyond, from corporate boardrooms to community halls in regional New South Wales, whenever someone asks me how I found my way back to a version of myself I actually wanted to live inside.

The morning the script I knew was torn up

Setbacks rarely arrive dressed as catastrophe. Mine came wrapped in the language of opportunity, a restructure, a "new direction", a friendly handshake across a mahogany table. It took me a few weeks to understand that I had been removed from my own narrative, not by a single dramatic moment, but by a series of small editorial decisions that slowly edged me towards the exit.

I had experienced what many Australian professionals call a career curveball, that uniquely uncomfortable space where your LinkedIn headline no longer matches your lived reality. A mate in Melbourne put it more bluntly over a flat white in Carlton: "Love, you've been benched. Now what?"

That phrase, benched, stayed with me. Athletes understand it immediately. You are still on the team, technically. You still turn up to training. But your number is no longer being called, and the only way back into the game is to rebuild whatever it was that the coach stopped trusting. I began to see that my professional identity had been built on being chosen, and that the whole structure was vulnerable to one quiet decision in a boardroom I would never see.

When the mirror starts to argue back

The hardest part of a career setback is rarely the practical mess. It is the argument that begins the moment you catch your own reflection. I would look in the bathroom mirror of whatever hotel I was in, whether it overlooked the Brisbane River or the Shard, and see a woman I did not recognise. My shoulders had changed. My smile felt rehearsed. I had become a parody of the confident broadcaster I had spent years training to be.

I know now that this is what psychologists call identity foreclosure, the moment the self you built around a role starts to collapse inward. In Australia, there is a phrase that captures it rather well: the tall poppy syndrome. We are quick to cut down anyone whose success has been too visible, and there is a quiet version of that which we turn on ourselves, slicing away the parts of our identity that once felt triumphant because they have become uncomfortable.

The work of that period was largely interior. I journalled, I walked for hours along coastal paths that felt miles away from the studios I had grown used to, and I sat with coaches and mentors who gently refused to let me skip past the grief. A setback, they kept saying, is not a malfunction of your career. It is information. And information, handled carefully, becomes the raw material for reinvention rather than the rubble of an old life.

Small rituals, big identity shifts

I have always believed that transformation happens in the small daily acts, not in the dramatic keynote moments. One of the rituals that saved me during those months was a habit I had picked up from a producer in Surry Hills, who insisted on ten minutes of morning pages before any conversation, any decision, any email. You can read more about why i use morning pages to clear my head before a big event, but the short version is this: the page catches everything your mouth cannot yet say.

Writing by hand every morning forced me to befriend the new version of me before I had to perform her in public. Some days the pages were furious. Other days they were tender. Almost always they were honest in a way I would never have allowed myself to be in a meeting, or over a long lunch with a publicist in Double Bay. Over time, the woman who emerged on those pages started to look less like the broadcaster I had lost and more like the woman I had been quietly trying to become for years.

I built other rituals around her. A walk before any phone call of consequence. A cup of tea brewed in the same pot, borrowed from a friend in Adelaide who swears by slow steeping as meditation. A rule that I would say no to anything that did not align with this emerging identity for at least ninety days. None of it was glamorous. All of it was scaffolding for a self I could finally stand on.

Reframing failure as the beginning of a braver chapter

Australians have a particular genius for understatement, and I lean on it often now when I talk about failure. We say "she'll be right" when we mean "I am terrified and I have no plan". We say "no worries" when we mean "I am holding myself together with sticky tape and good humour". Reframing failure, for me, meant learning to speak that quieter dialect of resilience out loud, instead of pretending I was fine when I very clearly was not.

I began to treat every rejection, every polite "not quite right for us", as data rather than verdict. I asked myself, with genuine curiosity, what each closed door was trying to teach me about the door I actually wanted to walk into. It is a practice I now write and speak about often, including in a piece on how to reframe failure as a stepping stone to success, because I think we underestimate how much of reinvention is simply permission to see things differently.

The shift was subtle but seismic. Failure stopped being a thing that happened to me and became a thing I was using. I said yes to a speaking engagement at a women's lunch in Perth that terrified me, and walked off stage understanding, for the first time in years, that my value had never lived inside a particular studio or a particular desk. It lived in the way I listened, the questions I asked, and the rare ability to make a complicated truth feel simple enough to act on.

A mission statement that actually moves with you

Once the dust settled, I realised I needed more than rituals. I needed language. Not the corporate sort, not the polished vision deck sort, but a personal mission statement that could survive a bad week, a difficult flight, and the inevitable self-doubt that creeps back at three in the morning in a hotel room in Parramatta. I sat down and wrote the version that has stayed with me ever since, and you can find the full process in how to create a personal mission statement that actually sticks.

The exercise itself was simple. I asked three questions. What do I want to be known for when nobody is watching? Who do I want to be in the rooms where decisions are made? And what would I do tomorrow if nobody was going to pay me for it? The answers were honest in a way that surprised me. They were not the answers of a broadcaster. They were the answers of a woman who wanted to make other women feel less alone in their own reinventions.

That mission statement has been rewritten twice since. It bends, it flexes, and I now encourage every woman I mentor to treat hers the same way. A static mission statement is a mausoleum. A living one is a compass. It points you back towards yourself when every external marker, every job title, every byline, has been stripped away, and reminds you that identity is something you build with intention, not something you inherit from the next contract you sign.

Listening to the women in the room

The most unexpected gift of my own setback was how many women recognised themselves in my story. After a keynote at a leadership summit in Sydney, a queue formed of women wanting to tell me, quietly, about their own pivots. One had been made redundant from a Pilbara mining company. Another had walked away from a Hobart law firm partnership. A third was a former flight attendant turned grief counsellor, rebuilding a life after years of being defined by her uniform.

What struck me, sitting with them over flat whites in a café off George Street, was how universal the language of reinvention has become. We do not need a fancy framework to talk about who we are becoming. We need permission, a little structure, and the honest admission that career setbacks are often the moment a more interesting professional identity emerges. The Australian women I meet are particularly good at this kind of honest conversation, perhaps because the culture here rewards authenticity over polish.

I left that weekend with a deeper commitment to the work I do through This Girl Is On Fire and beyond. Reinvention, I now believe, is not a solo project. It is something we do alongside other women brave enough to say, out loud, that they are no longer sure who they are, and who want to find out together. That honest companionship is, in many ways, the opposite of the polished broadcast persona I once inhabited, and it is the part of my professional identity I am proudest of today.

Becoming the woman on the other side

If you had told me, on that rainy morning in Sydney, that the setback I was living through would become the foundation for the most fulfilling chapter of my working life, I would have politely asked you to leave the room. I was too bruised, too humiliated, too lost in the gap between who I had been and who I was expected to become.

Years on, I can see that the setback did not take anything from me. It returned me to myself. It handed me back the curiosity, the appetite for risk, and the appetite for joy that had slowly been sanded down by the comforts of a familiar role. I became a writer, an author, a speaker, a host, an advocate, a mentor, and eventually the founder of a community that helps women navigate exactly this kind of transition. None of that would have fit into the previous version of my career.

If you are standing somewhere similar today, perhaps in a kitchen in Geelong or an office in North Sydney, watching the version of yourself that you built around a job slowly come apart, please hear this. The identity you are losing was always too small for you. The one waiting on the other side is quieter, stranger, and far more your own. The work of getting there is not quick, and it is not painless, but it is the most worthwhile reinvention you will ever undertake.