Everyone becomes an ex-something eventually. The hard part isn’t the leaving, it’s the stretch in between, writes Holly Ransom.
The night before Jacinda Ardern announced she was resigning as Prime Minister of New Zealand, she sat down with the president of her party and told her why she was leaving.
The president took it in, and then she asked Ardern what she would tell the country. Ardern still remembers being almost startled by the question. “The same thing I just told you,” she said.
When I sat down to interview Ardern last month, she told me that it had never occurred to her that the answer should be different. She wasn’t burned out, she said at the time, but she didn’t have a full tank with enough in reserve for unexpected challenges. Her account was so honest and so… sensible that people had a hard time believing it and kept looking for something more dramatic.
After leaving New Zealand’s top political role, Arden took 3 months to commit to the first step of what was next. She described it as a necessary period — one where she deliberately took her time rather than jumping at the first offer to come along.
Since then she has published her memoir ‘A Different Kind of Power’, served as an inaugural Knight Tech Governance Leadership Fellow at Harvard, and now runs the Field Fellowship, a yearlong international leadership program she launched to equip senior political leaders to govern with empathy, kindness, and pragmatic idealism. Her experience – and the story of her transition, her conviction about why it was right to leave before she had decided what to do next– really struck me.
I’ve seen many people move from one big role to another, but I’m not sure I’ve seen a more perfect example of ownership of the difficult middle part when you’re no longer one thing, but you’re not yet another. Most writing about career transition treats it as a logistics problem: how you get from here to there. But the hard part, which Ardern did so well, isn’t logistics; it’s authorship.
What’s your story?
Taking ownership of our story matters across our entire careers, and the stakes are always high – as Harvard’s Marshall Ganz puts it: “If we don’t author our story, others will, and may tell our story in ways that we may not like.” But it’s when we are in a transition that it matters the most, and at the same time, is the hardest to do.
The clearest version of this is in the work I do in elite sport. Many athletes have a strong sense of who they are as competitors, but the story they tend to tell is monodimensional – they think of themselves as athletes first, sometimes only, so when the vocation disappears, the self disappears with it. A 2026 study followed 194 retired Major League Baseball players and found exactly that pattern: the more tightly a player’s sense of self was wrapped around being a ballplayer, the harder the disengagement after he left the game.
I have found that the athletes who transition well are usually the ones who were quietly writing the next version of themselves years before the contest ended, like America’s greatest sprinter Alyson Felix, who found her voice as an advocate for women’s rights during her athletic career and then built the trailblazing Saysh, a sports apparel company that specialises in something Felix saw to be an industry blindspot: running shoes for women.
Actively pursuing other roles pre-transition is one way to take more authorship, but sometimes, like Ardern, we don’t pre-plan; we just know one thing is over. I went through this in 2015 when I was a young Chief of Staff at a major bank, and I decided to leave. I knew it was time to move on but I was stuck, unsure whether I should take one of the job offers in front of me and move overseas or stay put and instead have a crack at an idea I couldn’t shake that I was meant to do my own thing.. I gave myself three months to work out what was next, and every time someone asked where I was going, the honest but impossible-to-say answer was, “I don’t know yet. I’m giving myself time to find out.”
I had made my peace with my reasons, but everyone else seemed to have a version of my story that made it harder to talk about what I wanted to do. They all assumed I’d signed on the dotted line for something better. But I hadn’t. I was leaving to ‘figure it out’, which felt like a completely unacceptable answer to continual probing about ‘why’ I was leaving and ‘where’ I was going. I remember feeling dread about those conversations, and I often tried to change the subject quickly to avoid the awkwardness and the inadequacy I felt about my non-answer.
This is what Ardern did with so much grace. She understood and accepted where she was, and she recognised that one role had come to an end before she knew what the next would be. Because she was so clear in her conviction, it may not have stopped the disbelievers, but it made it easier for her to not be shaken by their disbelief. In the press conference the day she announced her resignation, she spoke directly about having ‘absolutely no Plan B’ with a assuredness I wish I could have mustered.
The Missing ‘In-Between’
If you’ve found the in-between part hard, or maybe you’re staring into the foggy middle-distance right now, you’re not alone in not knowing. This territory is seriously under-mapped. After all, nobody publishes a memo about who they are between roles. They just live it.
Helen Rose Fuchs Ebaugh, a nun-tuned-sociologist, published “Becoming an Ex: The Process of Role Exit” in 1988 after she interviewed 185 people leaving roles that had defined them, nuns, convicts, spouses, retirees. All had experienced the interim as a “vacuum”, a lonely place of suspended identity, interrupted routines, and conflicting expectations. But since Ebaugh’s investigation, even researchers themselves seem to be uncomfortable with the vacuum, and mostly focus either on the reason that people leave a role or what happens when they start another, and they treat the middle like a black box.
Since my career transition – it took me 81 days (or put another way, two particularly defining conversations that took 81 days to occur!) to realise that I wanted to start the business I still run eleven years later! – I’ve interviewed a lot of “exes” and sat in rooms with plenty of CEOs mid-transition. The ones who come out of it well, I’ve noticed, set themselves assignments for the in-between, so that it’s quite obvious to everyone – themselves included – that their story is being drafted, not delayed.
Take the managing director who set himself a target of 100 conversations in the three months after he left his role. He wasn’t just networking for a job; he used the conversations to test whether his skills would transfer to industries he had no background in, and that process let him reinvent himself in a completely different business from the one he’d had a highly successful career in immediately before. He’d more or less landed on his next role by the mid-40s conversation, but he kept going anyway, all the way to 100, because it had become so interesting and too valuable to give up early. He told me he’s better for having finished, and I believe him.
The far more common instinct is the opposite: slam the manuscript shut and chase the next CEO title fast, because an unfinished draft is uncomfortable to hold in public and a finished one, even a mediocre one, is not.
Writing Your Story
Ardern had some useful advice for how to think about your story when you’re the ‘black box’. The first: resist the pressure to make the next thing look like your last thing. When you leave a big job, she told me, there’s an unspoken expectation that you justify it by doing something equally big next, otherwise it looks like the leaving wasn’t fully intentional, or like you weren’t capable of more. Ardern said she had to consciously stop measuring the scale of her next chapter against the one she’d left.
The second thing she did was to ask a different question entirely, not what her next title should be but: what do you want your day to look like? How do you want to be spending your time? Or how do you not want to be spending it? Ardern joked with me that after years of every minute of her life being scheduled, she knew she didn’t want that for her next chapter.
English only gives you one prefix for all of this: ex. Ex-partner, ex-Prime Minister, ex-Chief of Staff, and it doesn’t distinguish between a breakup and a resignation, a divorce and a retirement, a scandal and a term of office gone perfectly well. It just tells you the thing used to be true and now isn’t — and leaves you to sort out the rest yourself. But everyone’s an ex-something, eventually. Try not to let the X mark the next spot.
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