How to Present Yourself After Redundancy (When Your Brain Has Other Ideas)
Robin Hood: Prince of Thieves is, objectively and scientifically, a great film. My household watched it again at the weekend and it has now permanently embedded itself in our domestic vocabulary — to the point where roughly half the time someone is laying the table, one of the kids will turn to whoever’s holding the cutlery and ask, completely deadpan, “why a spoon, cousin?”
Strange household catchphrase. But here we are.
Less strange, and considerably more relevant to what I want to talk about, is a different scene from the same film. There’s a moment where a group of men who, seemingly without calibration, operate a trebuchet to successfully launch the heroes over a castle wall.
Spoiler warning: it works. They land. They save the day.
What the film doesn’t dwell on is the fact that trebuchets are extraordinarily difficult to calibrate, that a miscalculation of any significance would have deposited them directly into the wall at considerable speed, and that their survival depended in no small part on some hay being in exactly the right place on the other side. Hay that, as far as I can tell, nobody had checked was there.
The point isn’t that they were reckless. The point is that at some stage someone had to decide that the risk of going was smaller than the certainty of staying put. And then they got in the trebuchet.
That is the most honest description I can offer of what presenting yourself after redundancy actually feels like.
The bit nobody warns you about
Most people navigating redundancy are competent. That’s not the problem. The problem is that redundancy puts you in rooms — interview panels, networking events, video calls with recruiters you’ve never met — where you have to do something most roles never asked of you before.
You have to present yourself. Not your team’s output. Not a slide deck of results. You. Your value, your story, your reasons for being the right person, delivered out loud, in real time, while someone looks at you and makes a judgment about it.
In a lot of roles, for a lot of people, the work spoke for itself. You did the job, the results followed, and the extent to which you had to actively sell yourself was limited to an annual review and the occasional presentation to people who already knew you. Fine.
And then redundancy happens. And that gap, between knowing your stuff and being able to perform your stuff under observation, opens up in a way that can genuinely catch you off guard.
It caught me off guard. It catches most people off guard. And the reason it does is that those are different skills.
Confidence is the wrong thing to go looking for
I spoke to Dave James about this recently on the podcast. Dave is a twice TEDx speaker and speaker coach — founder of Speaking Without Freaking — and his background before coaching was in healthcare. Nursing. A&E. Podiatry. Years of walking into rooms with people who were frightened and didn’t know what was coming next, and having to establish trust fast.
That experience, it turns out, translates directly into speaker coaching. And his starting point is one that runs counter to almost everything you’ll read about interview preparation.
Confidence, Dave argues, is not a starting point. It’s a consequence. You don’t feel confident and then go and do the thing. You go and do the thing, imperfectly, and confidence arrives later as a byproduct.
He calls it permission. He gives people permission to go and try something before they feel ready. They do it. It doesn’t go as badly as the version their brain had been rehearsing at two in the morning. They do it again.
For anyone who’s been waiting to feel ready before applying, or waiting to feel confident before going to a networking event — that’s the bit worth sitting with. The feeling doesn’t come first. The doing comes first.
Speaking from who you are, not what you know
The other thing Dave kept coming back to is the difference between leading with your credentials and leading with your story.
Most people, particularly people who are good at their jobs, default to credentials. Here is my track record. Here is what I have delivered. Here is evidence that I am a competent professional. And that information is necessary — but it doesn’t connect.
The hiring manager who’s been in back-to-back interviews since nine o’clock doesn’t light up at a list of competencies. They light up when they recognise something. When someone says something that makes them think yes, I know what that feels like, or yes, that’s exactly the problem we have, or just — yes, this person is real.
That recognition comes from story. From the version of your experience that has a person in it, not just an outcome. And Dave’s framework — Brain, Page, Stage — puts who you are first, the structure second, and technique last. Not because technique doesn’t matter. Because technique sorts itself out considerably more easily once you know what you’re actually trying to say and why.
Your redundancy story is not a liability
This is the one I keep coming back to. When someone in an interview asks about your current situation, every instinct is to get through that part as quickly as possible and move on to the stuff that makes you look like you’ve got it together. The competence evidence. The results. The forward momentum.
But Dave’s position — and his own experience backs this up — is that the stories we’re most afraid to tell are almost always the ones that land hardest when we actually tell them.
He talked about standing on a stage in 2018 to talk about something he’d been frightened of sharing publicly. Nearly didn’t share the link afterwards. Did share it. Got responses from people who recognised themselves in it completely. That talk led to his TEDx. The TEDx led to selling his practice. The practice sale led to where he is now. None of that happens if he’d kept the difficult bit quiet.
Your redundancy, framed right, is not the thing that disqualifies you. It’s the thing that makes you real. The art is in the framing — not hiding the chapter, but knowing which version of it to tell and to whom. That’s a skill. Which means it’s learnable. Which means you don’t have to wait until you feel ready to start practising it.
Back to the trebuchet
Robin and his men got away with the hay-and-hope approach because it’s a film and someone wrote them a landing. You don’t have that luxury, and neither do I.
But Dave’s spent years working out what to put where the hay should be. That’s what the conversation on the podcast is about. It’s worth your time before you go anywhere near the wall.
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