Workers are in the middle of ‘post-traumatic growth,’ says former USA Today editor-in-chief

When the pandemic first hit, some people turned to baking bread or redecorating their apartments to occupy their time. But Joanne Lipman, former editor-in-chief of USA Today and The Wall Street Journal’s Weekend Journal, began writing a book: NEXT! The Power of Reinvention in Life and Work. 

“I literally woke up in the middle of the night thinking, ‘we’re all going to have to figure out the new normal when this thing is finally over,’” she recalled to Fortune’s Peter Vanham during an executive session on Fortune Connect on Monday. “There’s no guidebook, and we need to understand how we get from here to wherever we’re going.” 

Lipman characterizes the book as a working guide to making meaningful transitions and reinventions in work and life. In it, she dedicates a whole chapter to post-traumatic growth, “a concurrent event with PTSD” Lipman says the country—workers in particular—are currently undergoing. It’s a relatively new field that the American Psychological Association defines as experiencing trauma that challenges our core beliefs and results in positive growth during the aftermath. That’s not to be confused with resilience, which simply refers to someone’s ability to recover. 

As a society, we all have this opportunity” after the pandemic, Lipman told Vanham. Regardless of whether you were intimately affected, she continued, the pandemic was a “giant trauma” for everyone. “It stopped us in our tracks, took us all out of our routines, and gave us this space to rethink our priorities and relationship to our jobs,” she said.

It resulted in a new era of mindfulness that has been dubbed the Great Rethink, or the Great Reflection, in which workers stepped off the hamster wheel and pondered what they really wanted out of both their personal and professional lives. On a micro level, employees questioned companies about their values. On a macro level, it often meant joining the Great Resignation in search of greener pastures—or even a fresh start entirely. For many others, though, rather than making a grand leap, they simply pulled back from their unfulfilling work altogether. (That’s where we got the much-maligned, but spot-on term quiet quitting.)

“We started rethinking everything we knew about our lives—and our careers in particular,” Lipman said. “We thought, how do we move forward in a way that could be more productive, and grow in a forward direction?” 

Once that desire for growth is there, Lipman said, people often seek out a new path that might involve leaving their current role for a better-paying gig or even making a complete career shift. In any case, a four-step process begins. She called it the Reinvention Roadmap.

Search, struggle, stop, solution

Lipman’s Reinvention Roadmap starts with the search, when you’re just starting out and collecting the information that will lead you to your transition. In most cases, you may not even realize you’re in this phase.

Rather, you’ll realize you’re on the Roadmap once you hit the struggle phase. That’s when you’ve left behind your previous identity, but haven’t quite yet figured out your new one. Lipman called the period equal parts uncomfortable and “kind of miserable.” Because of that, and because it’s unglamorous, most people don’t discuss this phase. 

“Great business stories tend to leave it out, which is incredibly damaging,” she said. “It seems like Mark Zuckerberg went from college kid to tech billionaire, right?”

Not discussing the struggle means that when most people are in this stage, they’re potentially left feeling like there’s something wrong with them. On the contrary, Lipman said. It’s the most integral part of the process and doesn’t end until you reach the third phase: Stop, which pulls you out of your routine. 

It could be something you choose, like quitting your job, or it could be imposed on you, like losing your job. What’s important is that it stops you dead in your tracks. To Lipman, that’s when you have the opportunity and the perspective to consider everything that’s been happening in your life and make a definitive step forward. 

It all coalesces and finally leads you to phase four: your solution, where you’ve completed the transition. It’s up to each worker, she said, to decide what they make of it.