We like to think we can keep our personal lives separate from our working lives. But when something big happens — divorce, grief, redundancy or another major life change — it can affect how we show up at work long before we fully recognise it ourselves.

Divorce and identity coach Jonathan Burston knows this firsthand. During his own divorce, compounded by the death of his mother, Jonathan believed he was still functioning at work. Looking back, he realised he was barely surviving — and carrying uncertainty, loss and fear into his meetings, decisions and relationships at work.

Jonathan joins Lucia Knight to explore what happens when the weight of what we’ve been through starts shaping how we work — and how a difficult chapter can become an opportunity to reset rather than something we continue carrying into the future.

You’ll hear:

• Why major life events can affect our work even when we think we’re coping
• How career and identity can become intertwined
• The “invisible baggage” we can keep carrying long after something has happened
• Why a reset isn’t about pretending the past didn’t happen or trying to become who you were before
• The simple question Jonathan uses to shift attention toward what comes next
• Why meaningful change rarely begins with one enormous decision

Not sure what needs to change in your own working life?

Take Lucia’s free Boost Your Joy at Work Quiz to discover your Joy Readiness Score, your easiest quick win and the biggest blind spot getting in the way of work you might want to do forever:

https://lucia-trqb5gnw.scoreapp.com/

Going through divorce?

Jonathan’s free RESET Quiz is designed to help you identify where you are in your divorce journey and what you need most right now:

https://reset2breakthrough.com/ready/

Divorce didn't stay at home.

It followed me into every meeting, every interaction, every decision,

every conversation that I had.

I thought I was functioning at work, but actually just barely surviving.

We are not robots.

It's absolute madness to imagine that we can compartmentalise giant life events

like divorce by putting it in a box while we continue to thrive at work.

Work gets much harder when we're going through emotionally

painful experiences beyond work.

So when I heard Jonathan Burston talk really powerfully about the vulnerable

experience of his divorce, followed by an unexpected redundancy, I had

to invite him to share his ideas with you on resetting post divorce.

Let's dive in.

Jonathan, when we were chatting recently, you said something about

when you were going through your divorce, it had a huge impact on your

performance at work, and I don't think many people talk about that very often.

I wonder, could you share a little bit more about that?

Yes, absolutely.

I used to think that I was really good at separating work

from my personal and home life.

Then divorce happened and I realised perhaps looking back now, it was

completely impossible because if I reflect on it now, divorce didn't stay at home.

It came and followed me into every meeting, every interaction, every

decision, every conversation that I had.

And what I hadn't realised at the time was that I was processing

uncertainty, loss, fear.

So even though I was physically at work, mentally I was somewhere else,

but I didn't recognise that at the time.

I was simply functioning to get through the day.

And that really impacted how I showed up for what I did in the day to day,

how I interacted with clients, how I interacted with the team that I

managed, and how I managed that team.

And then compounded by my mother's death through the same period.

Suddenly I thought I was functioning at work, but actually just barely surviving.

That ultimately, I think it had a a major impact on me being

made redundant by that company.

And if I look back trying to juggle all those things at the same time and

not acknowledging it actually really had an impact on my performance at work.

Just trying to cope with all those things going on at the same time.

It sounds impossible, but I rarely see people acknowledging that, they might just

say, oh, this is hard, but we're just on the train to keep going, keep everything

moving, spinning all those plates.

So what, in reflecting about that, because it's been some years since that situation,

what, what have you learned, or what new thoughts do you have about that?

In many ways now, looking back, what happened to me in that

role was probably a blessing.

What happened in terms of that redundancy.

I know at the time it felt really rubbish, because you think your

identity is wrapped up in your career, who you are, and that is me.

And and I can't say I was overly happy in the role that I was in, but probably

I was probably a little bit too lazy to go and look elsewhere because

I was in a senior management role.

I had a decent salary, had a good team.

And I liked the company, but I'd been there eight years at

that point, in the same role.

It was probably time to move on.

Just so happened it wasn't decided by me when to move on.

It was decided by the company.

And I can understand why they did.

It, once I got over that sort of piece around my own identity and the ego

feeling bruised, which, is there to try and protect us, it's not about me

looking back to try and create who I was, its who do I now want to become as

a result of what has happened to me here?

So seeing it as a turning point, seeing it as a reset, and in that way,

not pretending that those difficult things didn't happen, but trying to

accept that those things happened without allowing it to dictate or

decide what my future was going to be.

We've got this invisible baggage that we never seem to get

rid of, that weighs us down.

Whether it's regrets or whether it is resentment, old stories, the things that

people say, the things that happen to us.

And the problem isn't about experiencing those things.

The problem is we keep carrying them.

In the early days of being made redundant and everything that's going on, I had

the bag with me carrying all the stones in it that you were carrying with you

and then trying to get rid of some of these stones as you were going along to

lighten, lighten, lighten up the bag.

I love when you used the word reset, and I know that you use that

word in your work and it's part of the philosophy of how you do it.

And I love the imagery that you've just described, this heavy bag.

I read a childhood book once called The Big Bag of Worries.

Yeah.

And you, I've just seen you carrying the big bag, but somehow this

reset that you're talking about helps you to lighten that load.

Tell me a little bit more about that reset.

So reset to me was all about how do you have those challenging times

in our life, particularly in the likes of divorce, which is, up

there with grief . How do you use them as the reason to move forward.

We can't change what's behind us, but we can change what is ahead of us.

And that's about giving more focus to what we want from life.

My father used to say, you can't go back and wonder what if because you can't.

And you're just wasting a lot of energy do doing that.

Not dismissing the fact that divorce is hard and it is a real challenge for

people to go through as is going through redundancy, going through grief, to

acknowledge them and then say, where do I go forward in my life so that I

just don't keep carrying this bag with me and it just weighs me down and

I'm not living something positively.

And that's sort of the reset and everything you've said.

It's got this real, it feels as if it's got momentum.

Yeah.

So that the slowing down of the heavy bag gets lightened because you're focusing on

the future and walking into a new future that you've decided love, love that.

So if someone is listening, yeah.

And they themselves are either experiencing divorce, going through

it or at the end of it, or beginning of it, but they're thinking about,

ooh, that idea of reset resonates.

Is there something really practical or easy or just fast that they could

do now to begin to experience a little bit of that gorgeous reset philosophy?

Yeah, I think that's a really good question.

I think there's one question I would suggest that people answer

reflectively is if nothing changed, where would you be this time next year?

Now, most people know the answer to that question, and that's not about making

necessarily some substantive change today.

'cause people think that a reset comes from some big decision.

And my experience of it, it rarely does come from a big decision.

It starts with something really small that it could be a phone call, it could

changing the route to work, it could be moving something in the house, doing

something that is solely for ourselves to try to create those new neural

pathways to demonstrate the brain that I can do something that is different

from the thing that I did yesterday.

And those small changes, and I've seen this multiple times over the

years of those small changes, can change our identities and they

build up to being bigger things.

Because , back to your point earlier of momentum of change,

and I changed yesterday.

I'm changing something today and I'm changing something tomorrow, really small.

And then suddenly within a week, two weeks, even in that short

period, you've come a long way further than where you were.

So my question then would be to somebody is, so what's that one small decision,

one small change that you can make today?

You don't have to know where you're going that the full path ahead of you.

You just have to stop standing still and taking that next step.

Because our futures aren't built by one huge decision, invariably they're built

by multiple small steps to get there.

One more tiny question.

What does Joy at work look like or feel like for you?

Helping people fulfil a positive life to overcome the thing

that is challenging them.

And just to help them on that path is not about me, it's about them.

Everybody is okay and everybody has the thing inside them that

they need to move forward.

All they need sometimes just somebody giving them that little bit of a nudge.

And to me, I get a huge amount of fulfilment outta that.

So what if I was looking at Jonathan, who was getting a huge amount of fulfilment

out of the work that he has done at the end of the day, how would I know?

Oh, that's a good question.

How would I know?

You would see me at the end of any session with somebody smile,

but you would hear the words that you've done this work, not me.

You've done this work.

When you're ready for more, take the Boost Your Joy at work quiz.

I built it for experienced people who know that more joy at work is possible,

but they're just not sure where to start.

This is where to start.

You'll discover your joy readiness score, your easiest quick win, and

your biggest blind spot so that you can start moving immediately towards

work that you might want to do forever.