Fired Up - Paperback

What do you do when the very things that make you great at your job are the reasons you get let go? Lanett Austin Kesse built a career doing exactly what she was trained to do: protect people, speak the truth, and hold leadership accountable. She was let go for it three times. Fired Up is the story of what came after, and the framework she built from it. Blending memoir with a practical resilience system, the book introduces the 5 R's: Rest, Reset, Rebuild, Reward, Repeat. Drawing on her own three terminations and her work as founder of the HR consulting firm People Equals Profits, Kesse shows how the same framework that rebuilds a person can rebuild a team, a culture, or a company. Part career resilience guide, part personal transformation memoir, Fired Up helps readers turn job loss, betrayal, or being overlooked into a structured rebuild rather than a rushed "bounce back," and shows the difference between surviving a broken system and building a better one. Whether recovering from a layoff, leading a team through change, or starting a company after corporate life fell short, readers will find both the story and the system here. Being fired up was never about anger. It's about waking up to your value and refusing to build anything again that doesn't honor it. After being unjustly fired three times, HR leader Lanett Austin Kesse built a 5-part framework: Rest, Reset, Rebuild, Reward, and Repeat for turning career rupture into resilience. Part memoir, part leadership guide, Fired Up shows professionals and leaders how to rebuild themselves and the workplaces they lead without burning out doing it.