Divorcing Your Job: A Guide for the Recovering High Performer: Healing from Overachieving, Career Enmeshment, and Finding Who You Are Without Your Job - Softcover

J. Cole, Marcus

Softcover

ISBN 13: 9798249278939

Publisher: Independently published, 2026

Synopsis

You didn't lose a job. You lost the answer to who you are.

For high-achieving professionals, career isn't just what you do. After years of promotions, performance reviews, and all-in commitment, it becomes who you are — your self-worth, your social world, your reason for getting up. The system is designed to make it so. And for the most capable, most empathetic, most driven people in any organization, it works. Until it doesn't.

Whether you've been hit by a layoff, burned out inside a role that still pays well, or simply realized you've been performing a life you no longer inhabit — what you're experiencing isn't a career problem. It's an identity crisis. And it requires something different from a resume update and a morning routine.

Divorcing Your Job names what is actually happening — and provides the specific, evidence-based framework for rebuilding a self that no system can own.

You'll discover:

• Why high performers are the first to be consumed — and why it's not a character flaw
• The neuroscience of the freeze: why you can't think your way out of career identity collapse
• How to grieve what was genuinely real — without being told to "move on" before you're ready
• The Identity Portfolio: a six-asset framework for building a self distributed across multiple sources of meaning
• How to recognize the Trojan Horse offer — and write a New Contract that no organization can override

This book does not end with inspiration. It ends with architecture. Something you can actually use.

You were never just the title. It's time to find out who you actually are.

Edition details

• Publisher: Independently published
• Publication date: 2026
• Language: English
• ISBN 13: 9798249278939
• Binding: Paperback
• Number of pages: 202