I keep getting fired

What this looks like

You take the job. The first months are fine. You build relationships. You do the work. Then something shifts. The feedback gets pointed. Your boss starts questioning things you’d done well before. Eventually you get let go, restructured, performance-managed out, or asked to leave. The pattern repeats at the next job.

You’re the variable that’s been with you across all the jobs. The pattern is something you’re doing that you can’t see.

What you’ve already tried

• Different industries
• Different sized companies
• Smaller roles to “rebuild”
• Bigger roles where you’d have more autonomy
• Therapy that explored your patterns at work
• A coach who helped you with interview skills
• Telling yourself the previous bosses were the problem

You got let go again.

Why a new job hasn’t reset it

You very likely came out of childhood with a particular relationship to authority and to being seen as competent. You may have grown up with a parent whose approval was unpredictable, and you absorbed a way of relating to bosses that triggers a pattern. You may have learned to over-perform early and resent the over-performing later, which comes out in subtle ways that the boss reads as combativeness. You may have learned to defer too much, and bosses lose confidence in someone who can’t push back. You may have absorbed a story about yourself as the misunderstood one, and you bring the misunderstanding with you to each new role.

The behaviors that end each job are invisible to you because you make sense of them internally. To you, you were just being honest. To them, you were combative. To you, you were collaborative. To them, you were over-involved. The mismatch between your intent and your impact has been showing up at every job.

For related patterns, see I can’t focus at work and I’m jealous of my coworkers if either applies.

You’re not unhirable. The pattern that ends each job has a specific shape we can identify.

How we work with it

Strategic therapy makes the invisible behaviors visible. The shape of what you keep doing at month four or month seven gets named, and you start seeing the gap between what you intend and what your boss receives. You aren’t asked to become someone else. You change the specific responses at the exact points where each previous job started to come apart.

The next job ends on your terms or it lasts as long as you want it to.