When You Can't Tell the Truth

Need to leave your job but can't tell anyone why? This is for you.

Sarah thought she was going to be fired for gross misconduct. Instead, her employer asked her to resign and sign an NDA. They didn’t want her telling anyone the real reason she left.

Negotiated separation agreements like this are not uncommon. They happen for various reasons, primarily ones that benefit both the institution and the employee. A formal termination carries legal and reputational risks for the employer, as a fired employee can more easily claim wrongful termination and is free to speak publicly about the circumstances. Allowing a resignation with an NDA reduces that exposure and keeps the underlying reasons quiet. For the employee, a resignation and references free from mentions of the reason they left preserve their professional reputation.

Until they don’t.

The Mistake

Resigning only protects your reputation in the context of what you did that necessitated it. The biggest mistake is assuming that reputational risk ends there. How you handle the narrative when you can’t tell the truth is actually your biggest reputational risk. People have a tendency to turn a ‘quiet’ resignation into a loud issue in the way they talk about what happened.

When you leave under a negotiated separation, the narrative is fractured. You have the truth (which you can’t tell) or silence (which feels unnatural). And then you have all the pieces surrounding the situation that could fit with the truth without explicitly sharing it, but don’t make sense as a stand-alone story.

We’re fundamentally uncomfortable with narrative voids and inconsistencies (both as the person telling the story and the person listening). That’s why, in reputation management, these are things we want to avoid. They make our story harder to ‘sell’ and create doubt in the minds of anyone listening. But an NDA that takes telling the truth out of the equation makes it extremely difficult to reconcile the narrative in a way that feels authentic. When asked, “Why did you leave?” we panic. Silence feels like an admission of guilt, even if we know the other person doesn’t know what we might be guilty of.

So we construct cover stories to fill that void, crafting plausible yet untrue reasons for the departure. The problem lies in the execution because we know the narrative is a fabrication, and that knowledge creates an overwhelming psychological need to make it believable, making us overexplain with unnecessary details and offer justifications without being asked. We might even bring up the job change ourselves and explain ‘why’ it happened to someone who would not even have known that we used to work there.

This is a mistake because it sounds defensive and rehearsed from the start. It tells the person you’re talking to that there’s more to the story and invites scrutiny, rather than what we actually want: to avoid questions. A long, contrived description invites questions. A boring one signals that there’s nothing to ask more about. When we’re asked questions and feel we have to double down on our explanation, adding even more to it to cover up the truth we can’t tell, we end up with an inconsistent narrative. Inconsistencies expose holes in our story, damaging trust. People don’t need to know what is in those holes to lose trust. They can sense when something doesn’t quite add up.

This happens a lot because we want to blend the truth in with our ‘cover’ story. Lying is stressful, even if it’s mandated, so we try to incorporate as many true elements as possible to make it feel more authentic.

Then, we have to do constant ‘maintenance’ on the narrative to avoid inconsistencies, and when we’re not telling the whole truth, that becomes extremely hard to do. If we tell one version of the story to one former colleague and then a slightly different one to another that we’re maybe slightly closer to, those inconsistencies will eventually surface because… people talk.

And then we get into a state of paranoia, terrified that someone will find out the truth (or, at least, find out that we’re not sharing it, even if they still don’t know what it is). We imagine people are much more interested in our lives than they are and will be looking for reasons (when they might not have thought about it at all if we didn’t say anything). So we talk about it more. Bring it up preemptively, thinking we’re ‘controlling the narrative’. Try to get ahead of the rumors... Each time, adding another layer of complexity that digs more holes.

The Fix, Part 1: Stop Self-Sabotaging

The core of this issue is psychological more than circumstantial. I’ve never met anyone who says they don’t value authenticity on some level. Even those who pathologically lie value authenticity, which I didn’t know until I worked with two people who openly admitted to doing so and said the fabricated version of themselves was more authentic to how they saw themselves than reality. So, when we’re forced to live a lie by signing an NDA that prevents disclosure (or another reason that blocks us from telling the full truth), we’re placed in a state of cognitive dissonance that threatens our values and sense of identity. That is the crisis you’re managing in this situation, not the issue that led to your job change. The problem is specifically that we can’t be authentic in this moment about this particular issue, so we try to get out of the discomfort that that causes by creating a different narrative.

Accepting the discomfort, that cognitive dissonance, is the only way to stop sabotaging yourself. You can't be authentic about this thing, so you're fracturing yourself trying to be authentic about something else. I’m calling this self-sabotage because it is, regardless of how much you believe you’re protecting yourself when you do it. You might be thinking that it isn’t your fault that you’re in this situation and that you can’t do anything about it. Especially if, perhaps, you didn’t actually do the thing that resulted in you having to leave, or you did do it but believe it only happened because of something someone else did. I’ve worked with clients in both situations. Believing yourself to be a victim of the situation is the enemy of reputation-protecting responses. I’m calling it self-sabotage because it gives you agency to take responsibility for something—if you can identify one part of the situation you can control, you can more easily get the rest to fall into place and take responsibility for your communications instead of feeling backed into a corner. You can choose not to self-sabotage. If you can’t control anything else, you can control that.

It’s self-sabotaging because when you try to hint at the truth without explicitly violating the NDA or sharing something you can’t, not only do you create a narrative that invites questions, you may also make cryptic statements like mentioning ‘toxic workplaces’ or making passive-aggressive comments about ‘culture fit’, and these don’t come across well. Essentially, the ‘cover-up’ narratives create more reputational damage than the situation itself because they collectively make you come across as unprofessional or difficult to work with in ways that aren’t even related to your job change.

The solution to this is to notice when you’re self-sabotaging and ask yourself why you are doing it. It’s probably that you feel the need to be authentic and understood. OK… we all have that need. And you can meet it without overexplaining. Take one short piece of truth that you are going to share and stick with that (more on this in Part 2 below). Whenever you feel the need to add to it or explain, ask yourself if what you’re about to say is consistent with your single truth. If it’s not, don’t say it. For example, you might decide to say you left for personal reasons. This type of situation is personal… and it’s a reason. Decide that this is authentic to you and present it as your truth. Set a boundary with yourself that you won’t engage in further discussion about it beyond stating that personal reasons were involved.

You’re not required to make the story more detailed or emotional or comfortable for the other person, and most people who ask you things like “Why did you leave?” aren’t even looking for the full story. They won’t come away with a negative opinion about you if you share a super short explanation. Most will accept it and stop thinking about it entirely. They’re engaging in a social interaction; you’re seeing it as an interrogation because you know you’re hiding something. It’ll also make your relationships within your working network more difficult if you approach this with the assumption that they’re trying to ‘catch you out’. Most will just be interested in how you are and what you’re doing next.

To get to that single truth you’re going to use, you need to manage the internal psychological conflict. You not being able to tell the truth is reality, but it doesn’t reflect your integrity because you don’t have a choice in the matter. Signing an NDA is a business transaction. You’re not being inauthentic by not sharing the whole truth; you’re moderating your authenticity for the situation you’re in, which is a perfectly healthy way to practice authenticity. We talk about ‘being our whole selves’ in our professional lives as if that’s something we can do, but we can’t, even in less contentious situations. I’m sitting on the floor writing this right now because that’s where I like to sit and write. It would be authentic to me to do that in the middle of an office with other people in it, but it wouldn’t be the right choice... Showing up as our true selves is better approached as acting in a way that aligns with our overall values and goals, and if yours is to move forward and have a successful career after this setback, accepting that you can’t provide details and choosing a single true statement that you can stand behind is entirely authentic.

The Fix, Part 2: Change The Focus

The point of the single truth is narrative containment rather than control. We talk a lot about narrative control in crisis management, but control isn’t something you have in situations like this when another entity has decided for you what you can and can’t say. The desire to overexplain and invent cover stories stems from an attempt to control the narrative by providing details that fill the void left by the NDA (or other circumstances preventing you from telling the truth). That void is always going to be there unless circumstances change and you become able to talk about everything in detail (which is (a) unlikely and (b) a bad idea, but that’s a topic for another post). All you can do is accept it and work with what you can do. What we want to do here is contain the narrative: give people very little material to expand on.

Your one truth ideally gives people what they’re generally looking for when asking you why you left and what happened: a way to mentally categorize your situation so they can move the conversation forward. They want to know if it’s positive or negative so they know what to say to you and maybe how they can help you. Or they might have bad intentions and want to get information out of you so they can talk shit about you. Neither of those scenarios (and particularly the last one) necessitates a detailed response.

Your single truth should be:

• Short

• Neutral

• Consistent

Then, after you’ve shared it, immediately switch the topic to what you’re doing now to move the conversation forward. If you’re pressed for more details, you can directly say you can’t get into them and that you’re focused on what’s next, then shift back to talking about what you’re doing now.

This approach removes the cognitive burden of maintaining a lie as you’re no longer trying to remember which parts of the story you’ve told to which people. If your one truth is neutral and ‘boring’ enough, they’re unlikely to come back to it and press you. A short neutral truth is also not emotional. It protects your reputation because you’re not giving anyone anything interesting to speculate about. Rumors grow in environments where there’s a mix of partial information and emotional charge attached to the discussion. Without these, conversations readily move on to other topics.

Question: “I heard you left University X. What happened?”

Response: “I did! I left for personal reasons, and I’m focusing all my energy on my consulting work right now. It’s been a learning curve, but I’m really enjoying the challenge. What are you working on these days?”

‘Personal reasons’ is a great single truth because it’s hard for anyone to argue with it. It is a subjective truth that doesn’t require evidence and establishes a boundary that most people will recognize, especially in professional settings, as pressing someone for details about their personal life that they’re not offering themselves is widely considered inappropriate.

And whatever you do, if nobody is mentioning your previous position or asking you any questions about it, do not bring it up yourself. Just lead with what you’re doing now and what you want to do in the future. Nobody you meet at a conference is going to pull up your CV and quiz you on your previous position in the middle of a conversation. There is NO need to focus on the past if nobody else is even thinking about it.

Your career is defined by what you’re doing now and what you’ll do in the future, not how you left your last job. Protect your peace and reputation by focusing on what’s next.