Last week I wrote about bullying. I shared my own experiences of being bullied at school and later at work, and talked about Amy Cuddy's recent work on bullying and social bravery. I wasn't expecting the response I got. I received a lot of private messages. Some were from people telling me what had happened to them. Some were from people who had witnessed bullying and never stepped in, and were still thinking about it years later. Some were genuinely disturbing. A few turned

When I was twelve years old, I was the most academically successful student in my classroom for a long while. Getting into our school was kind of a big deal. In Turkey’s high-stakes education system, we had all spent two grueling years — from nine to eleven years old — studying for a nationwide standardized test. We spent our weekdays, weekends, and endless hours at school, in cram schools and at home with private tutors to earn our seats. Everyone in that building was ambit

If you are in the middle of a job search right now and it feels worse than the last time you did this, you are not imagining it. Employer ghosting is at a three-year high, most candidates have now been interviewed by a machine, and half of job seekers say the process is damaging their mental health. The experience has genuinely deteriorated, and the data behind it backs it up. I have several clients in career transition at the moment. Most of the people I coach are senior exe

I remember things. I remember what someone said in a meeting four years ago, the exact phrasing, and the pause before it. I remember who promised to introduce me to whom and never did. I remember the tone of an email from 2019. I remember which song was playing in the taxi on the way to an interview in 2014. I remember the name of the person who was kind to me on my first day somewhere, and the act of kindness itself. For a long time I thought of this as an asset, and in

I start looking for my keys three streets before I reach the door. I've only ever been locked out once or twice in my life because I forgot my keys. And I've never had an emergency that required me to have the keys already in my hand, ready to be inserted into the lock the second I reached the front door. Yet there I am. Three streets away, rummaging through my bag. The bag is deep, the walk from the gate to the door is about eleven seconds, and I would rather not spend those

Someone called me out recently for how I talk to my AI agents. Apparently, I was being rude. My response was something along the lines of: It's software. It'll be fine. But then I did what I usually do when someone tells me something I don't particularly want to hear. I looked into it. And I ended up somewhere much more interesting than the question of whether I should say please and thank you to Claude. The genuinely useful question, in my opinion, is what happens to our jud

One of the most dangerous positions you can be in, in a career, in my experience from thousands of hours of coaching, is being exceptionally good at something you’ve secretly outgrown. When you excel at a complex skill, the modern workplace responds with predictable efficiency: it escalates that work to you, builds your performance targets around it, and holds you up as the definitive subject matter expert. Your last three annual reviews praise it. Your peers rely on it. BUT

I was seventeen, about to turn eighteen, when I landed in California to start college. I had a suitcase, a dorm assignment, and a class schedule with a required course on it called Literature 10. The first book assigned was The Odyssey. I had loved Greek mythology since I was a child, so on paper this was a gift. What I had not expected was to read it in that particular week, in a country I had been in for four days, at an age where I still had to do the arithmetic to work ou

A client of mine, a director at a global tech company, told me recently about the moment she understood why her VP promotion kept not happening. Her team had prepared a partnership proposal, and she rewrote it herself the night before the executive review because it was faster than explaining what she wanted. The proposal landed well. Her leadership praised the output. And her name still didn't come up when the VP seat opened three months later, because everyone in that room

What a summer of sport this has been. The World Cup wrapped up last night, the Tour de France is grinding through the mountains as I write this, Wimbledon crowned its champions just a week ago, and I've been loving watching the Turkish Men's Basketball team in the world cup qualifiers. I love watching sport for its own sake, but I will admit that the coach in me never fully switches off. Sport compresses everything I see in careers and leadership, the effort, the setbacks, th

A coachee of mine, a director at a large tech company, keeps a spreadsheet of reasons to leave her job. She started it in early 2025. It has grown to 23 rows: a manager she has outgrown, a product she stopped believing in, a promotion cycle that passed her over twice. She showed it to me in a session last month, and then she said the sentence that prompted this article: "I know all of this, and I still haven't applied to a single role in fourteen months." She has options and

A founder I coach, running a Series A fintech out of London, sat down for our session and pulled up her board update, still open in a draft tab from three nights running. The numbers were fine. She'd rewritten the same three paragraphs each night, trying to find a tone that sounded like she had a handle on things she genuinely did have a handle on. She finally sent it at midnight, unfinished, with a line at the bottom: "will follow up tomorrow with the rest." The board said n

A senior executive I coach recently sat in the armchair opposite me, took a long sip of espresso, and asked a deceptively simple question: “Merve, why am I so profoundly lonely?” This is a man with a striking curriculum vitae, a seat on two prominent boards, and an enviable global network. He is an expatriate, navigating life far from his Mediterranean roots. Yet, as he entered mid-life, he looked around his beautifully appointed living room and realized it was structurally h

When I was in high school, a teacher I deeply respected sat me down and told me I was like a duck. Not sure where he was going with it at first, I twitched uncomfortably but kept listening. A duck, he explained, can walk, swim, and fly. It doesn't out-swim a shark, out-run a cheetah, or out-fly an eagle, but it does all three competently. It survives, adapts, and gets wherever it needs to go because it isn't trapped in a single element. It was a complement. For a long time,

A while ago I started working with a newly promoted leader - let's call her Hannah. Thirty-two, sharp, and suddenly running a team where several people had a decade more tenure than she did. She came to me because meetings were going sideways. She would make a recommendation and watch it sit there, unanswered, until someone older repeated a version of it twenty minutes later and the room nodded. So she did what a lot of capable young leaders do. She worked harder at being cre

I talked to two people last week who had recently been laid off from Meta. Both are talented. Both have strong track records. Both have spent the last few weeks doing what most people do when they lose a job: updating their CV, setting up job alerts, and pushing apply on LinkedIn. Neither has had a meaningful conversation yet. I speak with a lot of job seekers and career transitioners who are looking for a new path, either because they were impacted by layoffs or because the

I was speaking to a business owner recently - smart, experienced, building something genuinely interesting - when he mentioned, almost in passing, that his web developer had told him his website would go offline if he stopped paying the monthly fee. He had believed it. For two years. I explained that he owns his domain. That the site sits on a server he can move. That none of what he had been told was true, and that the fee he had been paying was, at best, for services he had

Last week, Meta notified roughly 8,000 employees that they were being laid off — about 10% of its entire workforce. The stated reason: funding its AI push. At the same time, around 7,000 more employees were being redirected into newly created AI-focused teams. And quietly buried in the internal memo from Meta's Chief People Officer was a line that should have gotten far more attention than it did: the company is restructuring around "AI-native design principles," flattening m

A few years ago, I was coaching a senior leader at a multinational company — let's call her Diane. She had read all the right books, attended the right offsites, and genuinely believed she had built a psychologically safe team. Her direct reports liked her. The energy in team meetings felt warm and collegial. Nobody ever argued. Nobody ever pushed back. She came to me because her team kept missing the signals. Problems that should have surfaced in week one were showing up in

I've never met a leader who looked forward to a reorg. Not the ones who initiated it. Not the ones who had to implement it. And certainly not the ones who found out about it on a Tuesday afternoon via a calendar invite titled "Important Organizational Update." Over the last eighteen months, reorgs have become a near-constant backdrop for the leaders I work with. The reasons vary — AI-driven restructuring, cost pressure, post-merger integration, strategic pivots, new leadershi