Earlier this week I lost my job as Course Leader of the MIT xPRO India Post Graduate Certificate in Technology Leadership and Innovation.

(For those of you in India who are my current students, I will continue working with you through the end of the course.) 

The company I am contracted through ultimately decided they could hire another facilitator and pay them less.

When I first learned of the news, I was flabbergasted, especially since I had just received an award from that company a couple weeks earlier for my work with a particular cohort.

Apparently I had received a ‘perfect score’ for facilitation in all weekly live sessions (office hours and webinars) for six months straight.

In the end, the bottom line ruled the day.

I would be lying if I told you I was not initially angry. I felt wronged.

But as the hours wore on and the new information settled into my body, a startling and refreshing remembrance of a conversation rose to the fore, which I had with my new friend Mark McCartney a few days before this all went down.

He had shared with me that during a challenging season in his life, it became very important to him to stop forcing, to stop attempting to control, and instead ‘listen and observe’.

A couple days later, the day before I was told I would be losing my position, I walked my dog Coco to a coffee shop in Boulder. There, I ordered a ‘cold fashioned’ and sat down at a table outside to feel the sun’s kiss in the cool of afternoon. I flipped open my notebook, and wrote a kind of prayer for myself, words to put on and wear like clothing to grow into in the days that would lie ahead (little did I know).

“I want to accept whatever is coming my way this day,” I wrote. “I want to witness and observe. A man of words, I want to say less of them. I don’t want to rush to fill space.”

Instead of anxiously fretting about what’s going to materialize next, trying to force it into existence, or swirling in negative stories about the company that let me go or myself, I am choosing to be here.

To be.

And what am I noticing so far?

My friend Johnnie will often say regarding our Unhurried Design project: It is not about going slow, but “going the right pace at the right time.” And for some reason, right pace at the right time feels like what is happening to me in this shifting circumstance.

I am choosing to see the universe (God) and people and systems and processes (however flawed) as conspiring in my favor. Earlier this week, literally hours before I would receive the call to be let go, I finally completed a five-month-long project to revamp my website, getting ultra clear on the work that I do and my deeper why for it, something I’ve been excited to launch.

Just a month prior to that at the beginning of the new year, as some of you already know, I packed my things and, after saving up in 2023, funded my move across the country to Boulder, where I intended to hike new frontiers, meet new people, and immerse myself in enlivening adventures.

Seems one has found me.

As my mother once said, “Sometimes the ground has to be ripped out from underneath us to get our attention.”

Mine is piqued.

I am open to work, be it with clients or a full-time gig. Maybe you know of something, maybe not.

All I know is that I have no idea what is around the bend. And this sudden lack of work is becoming a kind of beautiful constraint, leading me to feel something strangely different than I thought I would.

You can get to know me and my work at jordansoliday.com, or if you’d like, we can set up a virtual coffee chat on Zoom. Simply reach out.