These friends were fired from dream jobs decades into their careers—their best advice for surviving a layoff

Laura Brown and Kristina O'Neill were at the top of their games. They had dream magazine jobs as editors in chief, with Brown at Instyle and O'Neill at WSJ. Magazine.

Then they got fired.

That's the term they prefer, by the way. Not part of a restructure, made redundant or laid off.

"Same s---canning, different day," Brown, who was fired from Instyle via Zoom in 2022, tells CNBC Make It. "Here's an anvil that's smacked you on the head. And then you take another weight of shame [and] weird verbiage and construct some narrative for yourself that isn't even true, when everything [feels like] you're already three feet tall."

"It's the same feeling, no matter what you call it," says O'Neill, who was let go from WSJ in 2023.