There comes a moment in almost every career when something shifts. Sometimes it’s a layoff. Sometimes it’s a merger, a restructuring, a new CEO, a difficult economy, or a company going public. Other times, it’s simply the first year when the numbers aren’t what everyone hoped they would be. Whatever the catalyst, the feeling is remarkably similar. The ground starts to move beneath your feet, and suddenly the assumptions you’ve quietly built your career around no longer feel quite as certain.
I’ve watched this happen enough times over the last twenty years to recognize it almost immediately. This isn’t my first difficult sales cycle, my first public company, or my first time watching leadership become increasingly focused on growth, forecasts, productivity, and execution. Publishing has always been cyclical. Every few years the market shifts, adoptions slow, competitors gain momentum, and we all work a little harder to earn the business again. What makes this season feel different isn’t necessarily what’s happening—it’s that for many of you, it’s the first time you’ve experienced it. That can be unsettling, especially after years of strong pipelines and consistent success.
When things are going well, it’s easy to believe that’s simply how business works. Then, almost overnight, the conversations begin to change. Leadership starts talking about more activity, more meetings, more pipeline, more urgency, and more metrics. It can feel as though the company you’ve known has fundamentally changed. In reality, the company probably hasn’t changed as much as your perspective has. That’s not a criticism. It’s simply part of growing professionally. Every career eventually reaches the point where idealism meets reality, and how we respond to that moment shapes the kind of professionals we become.
One of the hardest lessons I’ve learned is that companies are not people. The people you work with can genuinely care about you. Your manager can care about you. Your teammates can care about you. Your customers can care about you. Those relationships are real, and many of them last long after jobs end. A company, however, has a different responsibility. Its job is to build products, serve customers, generate revenue, invest in its future, and make difficult business decisions when circumstances require it. Sometimes those decisions affect people we deeply care about, which is why they can feel so personal. But they’re still business decisions.
Understanding that distinction didn’t make me cynical; it made me realistic. For a long time, I believed loving my work meant believing the company would always love me back. Experience has taught me something different. Companies don’t tuck you in at night. They don’t become your identity, and they don’t determine your worth. They’re simply the place where your talents happen to create value today. Oddly enough, accepting that has made me appreciate the people around me even more because while companies evolve, reorganize, and change priorities, the relationships we build with one another often outlast all of it.
As we’ve navigated this season together, I’ve heard the same questions surface repeatedly. Are we focusing too much on growth? Are we measuring the right things? Are we trying to do too much? Do leaders really understand what’s happening in the field? These are fair questions, and they’re worth asking. I don’t know whether every decision leadership makes will be the right one. I don’t know exactly what the market will do next year. I don’t know whether the metrics will change again six months from now. None of us do. What I do know is how I want to lead through seasons like this.
Organizations rarely struggle because people don’t care. More often, they struggle because different parts of the business are optimizing for different objectives. Sales focuses on growth. Customer Success focuses on implementation. Marketing focuses on messaging. Operations focuses on systems. Leadership focuses on the health of the business as a whole. Sometimes the biggest challenge isn’t effort—it’s alignment.
I’ve become convinced that one of the greatest opportunities in any organization is improving the systems that allow talented people to spend more time doing the work only they can do. Every hour a salesperson spends manually correcting data, checking duplicate records, or cleaning up preventable operational issues is an hour they aren’t sitting across from an instructor solving a real problem. That’s not a question of working harder; it’s a question of designing better systems. Those conversations are worth having, and I believe they’ll become even more important as our industry evolves. But while those conversations happen, we still have a job to do.
If there’s one lesson I hope stays with you long after this sales cycle is over, it’s this: control the controllables. We can’t control quarterly expectations, Wall Street, organizational changes, executive decisions, or the economy. We can control how we prepare, how we build relationships, how curious we remain, how well we support one another, and how consistently we show up for our customers. Those things never go out of style, regardless of what the market is doing.
I’ve also learned that people spend enormous amounts of emotional energy trying to predict the future. They worry about layoffs that haven’t happened, restructures that haven’t been announced, and outcomes that may never come. Sometimes those fears become reality. Often they don’t. The people who navigate uncertainty best aren’t the ones who accurately predict the future; they’re the ones who remain adaptable regardless of what the future becomes.
There is another lesson this season has reminded me of, and it has nothing to do with sales.
For a long time, I thought feeling safe at work meant believing everything was stable. Good leaders. Strong numbers. A healthy pipeline. A company that seemed to know exactly where it was headed. As long as those things existed, work felt predictable, and predictability felt like safety.
But predictability isn’t safety. It’s comfort.
Real psychological safety is something different. It’s knowing you can acknowledge reality without pretending everything is fine. It’s being able to ask questions, admit you don’t know something, challenge an idea respectfully, or say, “I’m struggling,” without believing your value as a person suddenly changed. It’s trusting that difficult conversations make good teams stronger, not weaker.
Uncertain seasons have a way of revealing what was always true. Every organization experiences pressure. Every industry changes. Every career eventually includes disappointing quarters, shifting priorities, reorganizations, and moments when the future feels less certain than it did the year before. The goal isn’t to avoid those moments. The goal is to become the kind of professional who can navigate them with perspective instead of panic.
That starts by separating what you do from who you are.
The market may change. Leadership priorities may evolve. Strategies will be adjusted. Metrics will come and go. None of those things diminish your character, your talent, or the relationships you’ve built with your customers and teammates. They simply change the environment in which those qualities are expressed.
The people I’ve admired most throughout my career weren’t the ones who only thrived when everything was easy. They were the ones who stayed curious instead of defensive, collaborative instead of territorial, and focused instead of fearful when the pressure increased. They didn’t spend their energy wishing things were different. They invested it in becoming better.
That’s what I hope this season becomes for all of us.
Not the year we remember because the numbers were harder.
The year we learned that resilience isn’t something you discover after uncertainty passes. It’s something you build while you’re living through it.
Because eventually this season will end, just like every difficult season before it. When it does, I hope we don’t simply remember what happened. I hope we remember who we became while it was happening.
Your job is important, but it is not your identity. Your company deserves your best effort, but it does not determine your value. The most resilient careers aren’t built by finding a company that never changes. They’re built by becoming the kind of person who can thrive through change. That’s the kind of professional I hope each of us becomes, and if we can do that together, I think we’ll be just fine.
Rae Lyn Baker 
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