Let Karma do the Work

At the moment, I’m seeing a pattern with clients who are recovering from incredibly stressful workplace dismissals.

Almost always, the dismissal is the final chapter of a much longer story: a prolonged legal battle, a toxic relationship with a boss, a breakdown with a team member, or months — sometimes years — of fighting to be heard, respected or treated fairly. Often its all of these combined.

They are broken but still fighting, and by the time they leave, they aren't just recovering from losing a job. They're recovering from the fight.

They want justice. They want the other person to understand what they did. They want the organisation to admit they were wrong. And sometimes, understandably, they want the person who hurt them to experience some of what they experienced.

But there comes a point when you have to ask yourself: How much more of your energy do you want to give them? This is where I believe in karma. Not karma as revenge. Karma as consequence.

There is a particular kind of freedom that comes when you stop trying to get revenge. Not because what happened to you didn't matter. Not because you shouldn't protect yourself, draw boundaries or seek justice when it's needed.

But because sometimes the most powerful thing you can do is get out of the way and let life reveal people for who they are. I learnt this the hard way.

Years ago, I took a full-time consultancy role with the biggest online fashion retailer. I was brought in to build an international sales offering, beginning with the business case for creating a sales operation in New York.

I threw everything at it.

I had the relationships, the industry contacts, the technical knowledge and the vision. I was building new business across America from a desk in London, often working until 3am in bed when San Francisco came online — then getting back to my office desk at 9am.

This was pre-pandemic. There was no working from home. We had to be there: full face of makeup, looking exactly like we worked in fashion advertising.

At one point, after suffering a miscarriage at three months, I left A&E at 9am, slept for a few hours and went into the office. I couldn't disclose what had happened. The culture was such that pregnancy felt risky; women knew that being seen as anything other than completely available and committed could affect how they were perceived and treated.

Looking back now, it's hard to believe there was so little room to be human. No room for the normal realities of being a woman.

My relationship with my boss was hot and cold but I kept moving. I believed that if I delivered what I had been brought in to deliver, the work would speak for itself.

The shiny deal eventually landed. It was an obscene amount of revenue for relatively short content campaigns — the biggest revenue drop that brand had ever seen. The New York sales office was going to have the funds it needed to open.

But it didn’t quite pan out the way I was expecting….

The email confirming the deal landed. Ten minutes later, I was sitting in a room with my boss and HR. Ten minutes after that, I was carrying my belongings out of the building in a brown cardboard box.

And somewhere along the way, my books of contacts — years of relationships with fashion and beauty marketers built across a global industry — disappeared from that box. It was a telling reminder that the relationships I had spent years building had become valuable to someone who hadn't built them herself.

For a while, I wanted the universe to punish her. Then I realised something. That wasn't my job.

My job was to keep moving. So I did.

I went on to work in places where I grew, broadened my experience into technology and continued building relationships. I kept putting myself in rooms where my experience, integrity and ideas had value.

And eventually, I watched life do what life does. My former boss left to pursue a career in nutrition that she had spent years studying for. The business failed almost immediately. She returned to sales, but into a very different part of the industry.

I didn't have to engineer any of it. I didn't make a phone call. I didn't expose her. I didn't sabotage her. I simply kept walking.

And within the next couple of years, I started receiving calls from former colleagues telling me they'd experienced the same pattern with the same boss. That, to me, is the real lesson of karma. Karma isn't revenge. It's consequence. You don't have to become the person who hurt you in order to defeat them. You don't need to pull someone down when you can build yourself up.

And don’t don’t do it entirely alone.

Some of my closest friendships have come from my working life and we’ve all been through it. Friends who get back to each other instantly on message — sometimes at midnight — when we’ve felt like we were about to lose it. The people who have heard the unfiltered versions and picked up the phone, talked the other into a stronger mindset and reminded each other who they were when they couldn't quite remember themselves.

That's another thing I've learnt about work: the right relationships can become part of your life, not just your career.

So when I say keep moving, I don't mean doing it alone. Find your people. Build relationships. Be generous with them. Stay connected. Let the people who know your value remind you of it when someone else tries to make you question it.

I’ve found that the very people you meet while burning down one chapter of your life become the people who help you into the next.

The ingredients for letting karma play out

1. Remove yourself from the drama.

Protect yourself. Document what needs documenting. Set the boundary. Have your say. Then stop feeding the situation with your energy.

2. Keep moving.

Karma isn't an excuse for passivity. Start the healing process but create the life. Build the business. Make the connection. Leave the relationship. Apply for the job.

3. Decide what you want.

Put your energy where you want your life to go. Attention is energy. Don't keep spending yours on someone else's behaviour.

4. Don't interfere with the consequences.

People eventually reveal themselves. Let them. Their true nature will become known — and so will yours. You need your reputation to be bullet proof.

5. Trust your trajectory.

You don't need to know how the story ends. You only need to keep moving in the right direction.

Sometimes the greatest revenge is not revenge at all.

It's becoming so busy building the life that is meant for you that you no longer care what happens in theirs.

Let people have their karma.

You have a life to build.