Career & Money

Getting Fired Might Actually Be A Good Thing, According to ‘Girls Gotta Eat’

November 12, 2025

If you’re reading this article, chances are you’ve been there. The unprompted Zoom meeting invite, that gut-punch feeling when you actually hear the words “you’re fired,” and the fog that follows as you try to figure out what’s next.

On Girls Gotta Eat, hosts Ashley Hesseltine and Rayna Greenberg sit down with Laura Brown and Kristina O’Neill, co-authors of All the Cool Girls Get Fired, to unpack the messy, liberating reality of career loss. This convo dives into what happens when your identity, paycheck, and purpose all get pulled out from under you. Because maybe being fired isn’t a fall from grace, but the universe handing you a clean slate.

‘Your value is yours’

“Your value is yours. What you’ve created and learned in this job is yours…you own this. Do not give them power.”

That’s what Brown told her team after a company-wide layoff—a message that became the heart of All the Cool Girls Get Fired. In the episode, she reflects on how many people, especially women, hand over their sense of worth to their employers without realizing it. When that job disappears, it can feel like your identity does too. Everything you built—your skills, your relationships, your instincts—still belongs to you.

But here’s the thing. Losing a job doesn’t erase what you’ve done; it just means you get to decide where to take it next.

Burnout is canceled

Looking back on her years at InStyle, Brown doesn’t sugarcoat how much it took out of her. “Through my tenure there…it was not simple. And we did great work through COVID. We just did really, really great work,” she says.

But that nonstop pace came with its own cost. She shares how the company changed hands a few times, which ended up coming with its own set of stress. After years of shifting ownership and expectations, Brown describes feeling like a “dog with the head out the window”—still moving, barely breathing. It’s the perfect image for burnout. The thrill of momentum masking total exhaustion. When the layoffs came, she didn’t just lose a job; she finally exhaled.

Reinvention > reputation

O’Neill and Brown both make it clear that losing a job can be the push you didn’t know you needed. “The workplace isn’t linear and that corner office doesn’t need to be the goal anymore,” Brown says. “Not everyone is an entrepreneur. But there’s so many different things the individual can do based on their individual skills that don’t rely on a [corporation], a 401k, and that sort of structure which is so challenged right now.”

Later, O’Neill shares how she registered her own company—LB Media—years before getting fired, admitting she was “becoming a little bit tired” of having her fate, mood, and day controlled by “publishing overlords.”

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It just goes to show you don’t need to bounce back to the same title as before. Maybe you launch into something different, maybe you pursue something you had going before the “big gig.” Flipping your mindset to view the loss as a positive is power—a whole new world of discovery is waiting at your fingertips.

Cool girls get fired

The book’s title All the Cool Girls Get Fired wasn’t some corporate brainstorm. It started after Brown and O’Neill “went for drinks and posted this half-drunk photo with the caption, ‘all the cool girls get fired.’”

What began as an off-the-cuff post turned into a book that resonated deeply with women everywhere. “I can’t even tell you how emotional it’s been to kind of connect with all these women who’ve reached out to us,” Brown says. “That part when we realized just how necessary this book is and the timing being what it is, our hearts are full.”

If getting fired gave these women anything, it’s the permission to start again, this time on their own terms. And if you’re currently in that boat, use this episode as your sign to do the damn thing.

For the full unfiltered interview with Brown and O’Neill, listen to Girls Gotta Eat—available now.