Show Notes
thenowwhat.co.uk You walk out of an interview thinking you represented yourself well. You gave good answers. You sounded like yourself on a good day. Then someone asks how it went — and suddenly you hear yourself downplaying it, caveating it, softening it before the result has even arrived.
This episode is about that.
I’m exploring the strange way redundancy can affect confidence — not always by changing what you’re capable of, but by changing how willing you are to trust your own judgement. After enough rejection, silence and near-misses, it can become harder to say, “I did well there,” even when you know you did.
I talk about the quiet self-protection that can creep in after too many disappointing outcomes, why imposter syndrome is less of a one-off flaw and more of a long-running maintenance issue and how a brief but sincere period in my twenties as an almost-acoustic-singer-songwriter taught me something unexpectedly useful about confidence, competence and knowing your range.
I also share four practical things that have genuinely helped me rebuild confidence in a way that feels grounded, realistic and usable — not forced, not cheesy, and not dependent on pretending you’ve become the sort of person who starts the day by high-fiving their own reflection.
If redundancy has left you second-guessing yourself, underselling your strengths, or feeling oddly cautious about your own ability, this episode is for you.
If you’re asking yourself now what? — you’re in the right place.
More from Now What? - Life after redundancy
After the best part of a year and somewhere north of a hundred applications, I've been offered a role and this episode is the honest version of what that actually feels like, recorded a while before I've even started, with none of the hindsight smoothed in yet.
There's a particular kind of unlucky where one thing goes wrong and you can just about laugh about it. Then there's Dan Roberts's 2025, where the wrong things queued up to take turns; right up until the week he finally caught a break and then redundancy turned up two days later like it had been waiting for an invite.
Most people navigating redundancy have spent years being good at their jobs. The doing was never really the problem. The bit that catches people out is the presenting — interview panels, networking rooms, video calls with recruiters — where suddenly you have to articulate your value out loud, to strangers, in real time, without your brain quietly filing everything under unavailable.
Most people treat a recruiter like a fire extinguisher — ignore it completely until something's on fire, then hope it works first time. In this episode, I'm joined by Neil Johns, Director at Merje, a specialist recruitment business working with everyone from startups and FinTechs through to national banking groups and global organisations, to find out what the job search actually looks like from the other side of the desk.
The salary conversation is one of the most anxiety-producing moments in any job search — and when you're coming from redundancy, it's even more loaded. Your last salary exists but it may not reflect what the market currently pays. The pressure of needing a role changes what you're willing to say out loud. And the advice available is either negotiation-bro overconfident or so hedged it's useless.