Here’s your latest issue of Influence Anyone—where you get a playbook each week to shape decisions, change behavior, and become impossible to ignore, from Howie and the Behavioring Company team.

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It's Friday, March 31st, 2022. I'm wrapping the week, heading into spring break. My phone rings.

"Howie, this is not gonna be good news for you."

Two minutes. That's how long it took to delete a job I loved, a team I built, nearly 10 years of an identity I'd been building and living in. Managing Director of Brand Strategy… poof, gone. That day I realized no matter how good you are at your job, you are never safe.

But the first thing that popped into my mind wasn’t actually about me. It was the painters working in my house. Did they hear that? Are they wondering if they're still getting paid? I felt ashamed. I was broken.

Today: the three things I'd do/redo if I could go back in time. The science behind why losing a job feels painful. And why the people who build something of their own outside their job stand a little taller, anywhere they go.

(If you want the deep dive, keep scrolling 👇🏽)

Being good at your job will not protect you

82% of executives have lived through a reorg at their own company. Not 82% of companies — 82% of the people running them. Seventy percent of them in the last two years.

The average person now stays at a company under four years. The shortest it's been in two decades. Your employer already treats the relationship as temporary. Start treating it the same way back. I’m not saying “be lazy at your job” or “watch Netflix while you work”, I’m saying “do a great job, but also invest in YOU”.

I spent two decades in healthcare marketing and branding. Helped launch a multi-billion-dollar spinout. Shipped products that touched millions. Sure, I got the experience, but all the skills gained were reduced to a few bullet points. Bullet points that no one reads.

Am I talking about personal branding? Not exactly. I’m talking about professional branding and this is how I differentiate them:

A personal brand is about you — your personality, your interests, your follower count. Most professionals I talk to cringe at the idea of “entertaining” or “selling”. I want to instead talk about a professional brand.

A professional brand is about the people you help — the problems you solve, the trust you've earned, whether the right ten people call you first when they have an opportunity.

So yes, work hard, but build a professional brand before you need it. Because brand is the influence mechanism that speaks for you when you’re not in the room, and it’s the difference between panicking and getting offers lined up in your inbox when you lose your job.

As promised, influence in 60 seconds.

In the deep dive below I share the 3 things I’d redo if I had the chance and the science behind why layoffs are painful.

Here are three things I would do differently:

One. I would have decided what I actually wanted before I chased a single client. I was so busy trying to make money that I never sat down and finished the sentence: in three years, I want ___.

Without a target, you meander and end up in a place you don’t mean to.

Two. I would have built a professional brand that made money, instead of chasing a following. I got sucked into the creator economy hype. Chasing views, impressions, followers. Don’t be mistaken, I learned a ton and these are skills I’m using daily. But the creator game is a totally different game, one you typically build when you can fund it without return for awhile.

A professional brand pays you while you build it, because it's built on problems people already have budget to solve.

Three. I would have started two to three years before I needed it. Nobody who's built real influence has ever said, "I wish I'd started later." You always wish you'd started sooner — because by the time you need it, it's already too late to build it in time.

That's the list. Said as plainly as I can say them. But none of them explain the question that actually kept nagging at me, though: why did losing a title wreck me this badly? There's a real, physical reason for that. Here it is.

Your brain doesn't separate "I lost my job" from "I lost myself." For years, when someone asked what I did, my answer was a company name and a title. That's not just a description of your day. Psychologists call this identity fusion — your sense of self quietly merges with your role, your team, your title. It's efficient. It's also a trap. When the role disappears, your brain doesn't file it as "lost a job." It files it as "lost a piece of who I am."

There's a reason it feels like actual pain and not just disappointment. Neuroscientist Naomi Eisenberger ran an experiment where people were excluded from a simple game with strangers while sitting in an fMRI machine. The same brain region that lights up when you stub your toe lit up when they got left out. Social pain and physical pain run on the same piece of hardware. Getting cut from your team, to your brain, is actual pain.

And it goes back further than corporate layoffs. For most of human history, getting cast out of your group wasn't an inconvenience. It was a death sentence. No group meant no protection, no food, no odds of surviving the week. Your nervous system is still running that old software. So when the title, the team, the desk all disappear at once, some ancient part of your brain reads it as you have been cast out of the tribe. That's why it doesn't just feel like a career setback. It feels like an emergency.

Here's the part that I found really damn cool. Psychologists who study resilience have found that people with several independent sources of identity — not just their job, but a skill, a reputation, a body of work that's theirs — take a hit like a layoff and they stay standing. Lose one pillar, and the others hold the roof up. Lose the only pillar, and the whole structure comes down with it. Does that make sense?

That's not a personality trait you either have or don't. It's math. Building something outside your job title increases your identity resilience.

The other thing is, desperation isn't invisible. Recruiters and decision-makers pick up on it whether they can name it or not — the eagerness, the over-explaining, the way someone with no other options negotiates against themselves before anyone even asks them to. Negotiators call your fallback position your leverage. No fallback, no leverage. You take what's offered because you have to.

But when you've got a body of work, a reputation, and a few inbound conversations already happening on the side, you walk into that same room as someone choosing, not someone begging. Same resume, but completely different posture.

Building your professional brand builds your career resilience, and the best part is when you start attracting opportunities, you begin to feel more empowered, as you’ve now reclaimed that power of choosing what to say yes to and what to say no to.

That call happened almost four years ago. I still think about the painters more than I think about the title I lost that day.

Your title can be deleted in the time it takes a phone to ring twice. The thing is, your title was borrowed, never actually owned. What you build outside of it is the only thing that's actually yours.

And psst… I have a secret, I'm building a community for exactly that — but I don't want to build it in a vacuum. If any part of this issue hit close to home, tell me your wishes and what’s in the way. My goal is to build what you need. Takes 3 minutes, and I read every response myself: Tell me your wishes and what’s in the way →

That's really the whole ask this week. The 3 minutes you give will help me give back to you. Take the survey →

Or if you'd rather just talk it out, hit reply and tell me: what's the one thing stopping you from building a professional brand that attracts the opportunities you want?

🎁 I still have unclaimed copies of Owen’s new book Inner Propaganda. All you have to do is reply to this email and say “I want it!” and if you are the first 20, you get a free book.

Unfortunately this will only be for folks in the USA. I’ve tried to mail someone a free book in Europe the last time. I paid $60 to mail the book (with a handwritten note), after I bought it for $30, and the person who was receiving it was met with a bill of $50, she declined and the book came ALL the way back to me! Yeah, not doing that again (sorry).

Ok beautiful professionals of influence, I’ll see you next Sunday!

Change behavior, change lives 🤘🏽

Howie Chan

Creator of Influence Anyone

P.S. What's one belief about yourself you've quietly outgrown, but haven't rewritten yet?