Starting Over After Rock Bottom: Why Big Change Hits Women Hard and How to Move Through It

Erica Anderson Rooney is an ex-CPO turned executive coach and AI educator on a mission to get more women into positions of power and keep them there. She is the author of The AI Gap (2026), host of the Glass Ceilings & Sticky Floors and AI Voice or Victim podcasts, and NC Chapter Lead for Women Applying AI. Her SNAP and AI Continuum frameworks are taught to thousands of women through CHIEF, WICT, and Fortune 500 leadership programs. She is the sought-after speaker at the intersection of women, AI, and leadership.

You did everything you were supposed to do. You built the career, the family and the life you used to dream about at night. Then the ground moved under you, and nobody warned you it was coming.

Maybe it was a divorce. Maybe it was a reorg, a betrayal, a diagnosis or a new CEO with a very different plan. Starting over after rock bottom is hard enough. Doing it while everyone expects you to stay calm, positive and productive is a whole other level.

I have lived a version of this. I was a Chief People Officer at a stable company, making extremely good money. Then the company's core values shifted away from my own. Even with the CPO title, I could not change the direction the ship was going, because everyone reports to somebody.

I thought about leaving for so long. I planned it for so long. It never felt like the right time. And y'all, I knew that if I stayed on a ship headed somewhere I did not believe in, I was going to hit a breaking point.

When I finally decided to get off the boat, what I felt was certainty, deep in my soul. I had no clue what came next. I knew it was the right decision for me.

So if you are standing at the edge of a change you did not ask for, or you are already at the bottom looking up, this one is for you.

Raise Your Hand If You Are Supposed to Be the Steady One

Raise your hand if you are the person everyone calls when something falls apart. Raise your hand if you smiled through a team meeting the same week your personal life cracked open. Raise your hand if you have said "I'll deal with it later" so many times that later turned into a year.

Raise your hand if part of you keeps whispering that the old way is fine, because at least you know how to struggle in it.

Women are expected to be the steady ones. We are supposed to hold it together, stay empathetic, keep the team calm and keep the house running. On the episode I described it as always having to keep the right face forward while inside we are crumbling.

That expectation does not pause when your life falls apart. It gets louder. And when you finally hit the bottom, it can feel like you failed at being steady, on top of everything else that broke.

You're not crazy. You hit a stage of change that every single person goes through, and there is a way out of it.

Where This Conversation Started

This post grew out of my conversation with my friend Sara Schulting Kranz on Glass Ceilings & Sticky Floors. Sara is a best-selling author, keynote speaker, certified executive coach and elite adventurer. She has coached Fortune 500 executives and professional athletes, guided the USC men's water polo team through the Grand Canyon, and led a blind female para athlete rim to rim in 24 hours. Her book is Walk Through This, and her tagline is "The way out is forward." You can listen to the full episode here: How to Climb Out of Rock Bottom: The 5 Stages of Change.

Sara started over at 40. Her husband, a man she trusted and loved deeply, had betrayed her, their three sons and both of their families in more than one way. She had given up her teaching career to move across the country to be with him. Then came the divorce she never saw coming, and she found herself a single mom far from her family, rebuilding from the ground up.

She told me she was beyond her rock bottom. She could barely eat. She ruminated for an entire year on problems she could not solve, and there were moments when she thought about ending her life.

(If you are in that place right now, please reach out today. Call or text 988 to reach the 988 Suicide & Crisis Lifeline. It is free, confidential and open around the clock.)

Then came Labor Day weekend 2014. Her friends took her hiking in Sequoia National Park, and one of them, Steve, kept slipping rocks into her pack to slow her down. Every time the group stopped for a break, she reached in for a snack and pulled out a rock. (Two, three, four times! I would have had some words for Steve, and none of them would have been about trail mix.)

Partway up, she spotted a little side path and followed it to a huge outcropping of rock. She climbed on top, looked out over the valley below, and for the first time in a year felt completely disconnected from the problems she had been carrying. In that moment she understood that the problems placed in her pack were never hers, just like the rocks. She took them out, set them down, and started a business guiding people through the Grand Canyon.

How Do I Start Over When My Life Falls Apart?

The short answer from Sara: you go down before you come up. She built a five-stage framework from leading executives and athletes into the Grand Canyon. In her words, "You gotta go into the depth in order to rise."

You descend into the uncertainty and the resistance first. Then you reach the valley floor. Then you climb out. Knowing which stage you are in explains why you feel the way you feel, and it points you to the next step. We will walk through all five below.

One quick note, because the phrase "stages of change" shows up everywhere. Sara's five stages are her own framework. The model most researchers mean by that phrase is the Stages of Change model, also called the Transtheoretical Model, which grew out of a 1983 study by Prochaska and DiClemente. SAMHSA, the federal agency for substance use and mental health, builds its guidance on motivating change in substance use treatment around that model and its stages: precontemplation, contemplation, preparation, action and maintenance. The two models share a starting point. Change happens in stages, over time, and nobody skips straight to the end.

What the Data Says About Change at Work Right Now

Personal change and work change do not stay in separate boxes. When your life cracks open, you still have to show up for the reorg, the new system and the new boss. And the research says workplaces are struggling with change too.

In October 2025, Gartner reported that just 45% of employees said they realized the change goals set by their organization. In a separate Gartner survey of nearly 1,000 mid- to senior-level business leaders, 39% of leaders said they believe change is a significant source of stress for their teams.

Ugh. Less than half.

The American Psychological Association's 2025 Work in America survey, released in May 2025, found that 54% of U.S. workers said job insecurity has had a significant impact on their stress levels at work.

Then Gallup's State of the Global Workplace report, released in April 2026, found that manager engagement dropped from 27% in 2024 to 22% in 2025. Say what? Five whole dang points in one year. Gallup says lower engagement among managers accounts for much of the recent downturn in employee engagement.

(This one did not surprise me, but I live in this work. Any HR leader has watched it happen. Managers are the ones asked to carry every change down to their teams, usually while they are still absorbing it themselves.)

So which one sounds most like your office right now? The change nobody finished, the job you are not sure is safe, or the manager running on empty?

Why the Steady One Pays the Highest Price

Here's the stat I wanted to share. The 2025 Women in the Workplace report from LeanIn.Org and McKinsey & Company found that six in 10 senior-level women report frequently feeling burned out, compared with half of men at their level. The same report found that only 31% of entry-level women have a sponsor, compared with 45% of men at their level.

Look closely at those two numbers together. Women are more worn down, and fewer of us have someone in the room speaking for us when the org chart gets redrawn. That is a hard combination to carry into a season of change.

Sara named something on the episode that really made me think. When change hits, she sees three kinds of people: the wait-and-seers, who watch what happens to everyone else first; the resistors, who fight every step; and the "let's go" people. She has found that people tend to assume women are the "let's go" type, that we will just figure it out.

That assumption is the glass ceiling part. It comes from outside you, and you did not create it. In my Sticky Floors vs. Glass Ceilings framework, the sticky floor is the part that lives inside us. For so many women, it sounds like "I'll do it tomorrow."

Sara sees this with women leaders all the time. They say yes, yes, yes to taking care of themselves. Then they get to the edge, decide they have too much to handle today, and push it to tomorrow. When I asked what the steady one should do, her answer was to take care of herself, quite frankly. I told her that was a basic answer, and then I admitted that none of us do it. (Girl! Why do we do that to ourselves???)

Taking care of yourself in the middle of change is modeling the behavior you want your team, and your kids, to learn. Sara told me the women who take care of themselves are the ones she sees as the greatest leaders.

How AI Put Every Office at the Edge of the Canyon

This part of the conversation hit close to home, because I am doing so much AI work with companies right now.

Sara pointed out that by the time a leadership team announces a big change, the leaders are usually already starting stage four. They have built the vision and the strategy, and they are excited to climb out. Everyone else is hearing it for the first time, which puts them in stage one, standing at the rim. Then the leaders wonder why nobody else is as excited as they are.

AI keeps creating that gap over and over. Every time we turn around there is a new tool, a new mandate or a new rollout plan, and Sara said that is exactly why people are so exhausted. Her advice to leaders was to slow down just a touch and find out how people are feeling about it before implementing it.

And women are not feeling great about it. A Pew Research Center survey conducted in February 2026 found that only 17% of women were positive about AI's future impact on them personally, compared with 29% of men. A third of women (33%) said the impact on them personally would be negative.

That is a lot of women standing at the rim, looking over the edge, and remembering they are afraid of heights.

(This is why I keep telling HR leaders they need a seat in every AI conversation. Before you roll anything out, get in a room with your executives and say, "Y'all have been thinking about this for a long time. Your people have not. They don't know how your decisions got them here, and they are freaking out.")

If you are the one standing at the rim, you are right on schedule for stage one, and stage one has a job. That is a big part of why I wrote The AI Gap: so more women make it down into the canyon and back out with AI skills that show up in their authority and their pay.

Starting Over After Rock Bottom: What to Do in Each of the 5 Stages of Change

Stage 1: Approaching the Change

This is where you feel your biggest resistance. Sara says people resist the difficult parts of change, and they often resist the success that comes with it too, because "a lot of times what we fear is our greatest success."

The move here is one courageous step toward the rim. One. Book the appointment, have the conversation, open the document you have been avoiding. (I coach women through imposter syndrome all the time, and I tell them the same thing. If you feel like an imposter, you are on the edge of growth. That uncomfortable feeling is a signal that you are approaching your next level.)

Stage 2: Descending Into the Change

About a mile and a half into the Grand Canyon, Sara says at least one person in her group will tell her they want to go back up. This is the free-fall stage, where everything feels out of your control. It is also where blame shows up, because blaming feels like a way to grab some control back. I asked her whether that blame points inward too (I should have known better, I should have seen the signs), and she said it can definitely go both ways.

The move here is ownership. Ask yourself, "What is mine to do in this change?" Sara also shared that people get led into change in one of three ways: persuasion, coercion or activation. Activation means getting the behavior moving first, because once people start moving, their belief starts to shift. So pick one action you can take this week and let the belief catch up.

Stage 3: The Valley Floor

Sara calls the bottom the transition stage. It is where change is no longer happening to you, and you begin building the leadership and resilience to climb out. This stage asks you to look at where the resistance lives inside you and what you are holding back from.

The move here is to get quiet enough to hear yourself. Sara found her clarity on that rock in Sequoia when she slowed down and noticed the present moment. Yours might be 15 minutes outside before anyone else in the house is awake. Write down one answer to this question: What am I still carrying that was never mine to carry?

Stage 4: Ascending Out

Climbing out is where the tools come in and where you stop doing it alone. In Sara's groups, this is where people come together as a team. It also helps to know where people tend to quit. Sara says people usually leave in stages one, two and sometimes three, when everything feels like free fall. Her most important point: someone who walks away in the middle of a change can still come back someday. They are just not ready right now.

The move here is to build your crew. Who is climbing with you? A friend who will tell you the truth, a coach, a group of women who have been through their own canyon and know the trail. You do not have to carry the pack by yourself.

Stage 5: Continue the Climb

Once you have climbed out, your benchmark is raised, and the next change is not as difficult. Sara lives this. Every year since 2017, she has spent at least seven nights in a row alone in the backcountry, with no phone. She told me that doing the hard thing out there gives her permission to do the other hard things in her life.

The move here is to keep your receipts. Write down what you survived, what you learned and what worked, so the next time the ground moves you have proof that you have done this before. Receipts matter, especially the ones you keep for yourself.

What I Want You to Take From This

Rock bottom is a stage. It has a floor, and it has a way out. You go down before you come up, and every stage has a next step you can take, even on the worst day.

When I asked Sara what she would tell the woman she was back then, she said she would hug her and hold her, without saying much at all. Then she would tell her she was going to be just fine.

So consider this your hug. You are going to be just fine. Nothing changes until you do, and you can start with one step toward the rim.

If you want women around you while you climb, come see what HER Collective is about. We meet live every week for group coaching, hands-on AI training is built in, and you get a private network of women who act like your career and business board of directors. Read through what is included and see if it feels like your room. We saved you a seat.

I am cheering you on.

Erica

Frequently Asked Questions

How do I start over after hitting rock bottom?

Start by naming where you are. Sara Schulting Kranz teaches that change happens in five stages, and you go down into the uncertainty before you climb out. Take one courageous step, own the part that is yours, get quiet enough to hear yourself, build a crew, and keep track of what you learn so the next change is easier. If you are in crisis, call or text 988 to reach the 988 Suicide & Crisis Lifeline.

What are Sara Schulting Kranz's 5 stages of change?

Sara's five stages are approaching the change, descending into the change, the valley floor, ascending out, and continuing the climb. They come from her years of guiding executives and athletes through the Grand Canyon. They are separate from the Stages of Change model, or Transtheoretical Model, from researchers Prochaska and DiClemente, whose stages are precontemplation, contemplation, preparation, action and maintenance.

Why do women feel pressure to hold it together during big change?

In my Sticky Floors vs. Glass Ceilings framework, that pressure comes from two places. The expectation that women will just figure it out is a glass ceiling, an outside barrier you did not create. The habit of pushing your own needs to tomorrow is a sticky floor, and that is the part you can start working on today.

Erica Anderson Rooney is an ex-CPO turned executive coach and AI educator on a mission to get more women into positions of power and keep them there. She is the author of The AI Gap (2026), host of the Glass Ceilings & Sticky Floors and AI Voice or Victim podcasts, and NC Chapter Lead for Women Applying AI. Her SNAP and AI Continuum frameworks are taught to thousands of women through CHIEF, WICT, and Fortune 500 leadership programs. She is the sought-after speaker at the intersection of women, AI, and leadership.