Asking LLMs to do things in different ways does sometimes get them to answer correctly when they didn't with a previous prompt that is effectively equivalent but people really go nuts anthropomorphizing this behavior.

ChatGPT has no empathy for you keeping your job, you just lucked into a more helpful predictive text chain based on some combination of the input and the random temperature.

Asking it to just 'try again, dummy' could have worked equally well (or not, its all just probabilities after all).