AI, layoffs, and constant workplace disruption have made “reskilling” the word of the moment. Dr. Jessica Mack thinks the harder work is happening somewhere else entirely. “Reskilling is the easy part,” she says. “The harder work is changing the story we’ve been telling ourselves about who we are.”
Mack has lived this twice over. As an occupational therapist, she spent her career helping patients rebuild their lives after illness, injury, or major life changes. Then a health crisis pulled her out of clinical work herself, and she had to go through the process she’d spent years guiding others through. That experience became the foundation for her new book, The Realignment: A Proven Method for Your Most Powerful Pivot, along with a framework she calls the REAL Method.
When a Job Becomes an Identity
Mack says the trouble starts long before a layoff or a diagnosis. For most people, “‘ This is my job’ quietly turns into ‘this is my identity,'” she explains. So when work changes unexpectedly, whether the cause is AI, a layoff, illness, burnout, caregiving, or a shifting industry, the disruption reaches further than a person’s career. It reaches how they see themselves.
Her point is that a role and a person are not the same thing, even when it feels that way. “A job can disappear without your value disappearing with it,” she says. The task, as she describes it, is “carrying forward what is still true about you and letting go of the form it used to take.”
Realignment as an Ongoing Practice
Mack argues that treating career change as a single, dramatic reinvention misses what’s actually happening. She defines realignment as “noticing when the ground has shifted, reassessing what still fits, and redirecting your skills intentionally instead of reacting after the fact.”
That distinction matters to her. Realignment is about keeping what still holds up and building forward from there. “You are not throwing out everything you built,” she says, “you are deciding what still belongs and repositioning for what is next.” In practice, she says that looks like noticing an industry shifting before it forces a decision, taking stock of which professional skills carry over, and testing a new direction before locking in an answer.
When a role does disappear, Mack says the deeper question people run into isn’t logistical. It’s “Who am I if I am no longer this?” She sees that question as disorienting, but also as an opening. Rather than asking only what job comes next, she encourages people to ask “what has always been true about me, regardless of the job.” That’s where she locates real resilience: identity anchored to something steadier than a title.
The REAL Method
Mack built a four-part framework to help people work through that question with more structure than panic. She calls it the REAL Method: Recognize, Examine, Align, Launch.
Recognize means naming what has genuinely changed before rushing to fix the discomfort. Examine asks you to sort your professional identity into what truly reflects you versus what you’ve kept out of habit or obligation. Align is about paying attention to the ideas that keep resurfacing, including the ones dismissed as impractical. Launch is a single, concrete step forward, whether that’s one conversation, one course, or testing an offer.
“I describe the REAL Method as a compass, not a map,” Mack says. “The method does not tell you where to go; it helps you orient when the old directions stop applying.”
Before the Résumé Update
Conventional advice tends to push people straight into action after a setback. Mack pushes back on the timing. “Traditional career advice moves people into action too fast,” she says. Instead, she recommends sitting with a set of questions first: “What still fits? What doesn’t fit anymore? What did I learn? What do I want the next chapter to keep, and what am I finished carrying?”
Mack sees this as a period of examination, paired with real movement. “Clarity is not the prerequisite for action; it is the reward for it,” she says. Her test for telling a rough patch apart from a real misalignment is simple: “If the external problem disappeared tomorrow, would I still want this life?” A yes points to a hard season. A no is worth paying attention to. As she puts it, realignment “usually starts quietly, long before anyone makes a dramatic move.”
Contribution Over Title
Looking ahead, Mack’s advice is to loosen your grip on job titles altogether. “Anchor less to what you do, more to what you contribute,” she says. Tools and industries will keep shifting, but judgment, creativity, empathy, and the ability to navigate complexity move with a person regardless of what role they’re in.
Her own career is the proof. Occupational therapy, media, writing, consulting, and now a book look like separate chapters. Still, she sees one thread running through them all: helping people understand themselves and move through change. As she frames it, the real question is “What do you want to contribute, and in how many ways can you learn to express it?”
