Navigating the post-layoff life

Want an upgrade? Who doesn't! If you do then you are in luck. Give yourself an unfair advantage, to skip the line, to get that upgrade YOU deserve - in life, leadership, and in your career!

Join me as I share my insights, strategies, and lessons from working with some of the best and biggest brands and their leaders around the world. Are you in? Subscribe to not miss a thing.?

I just got off the call with one of my CEO coaching clients who was dealing with the aftermath of a layoff. He had been involved in the layoffs in his company. An act that did not sit well with him. He had been feeling sick both physically and emotionally. He had to font end many difficult but necessary such conversations. He had not gone there willingly and this was the first time he had engaged in this type of a process.

Soon after I had a call with another coaching client, this time this person "had been" laid off and she was reflecting on the experience that came as a shock to her. Her leadership style had been well appreciated by her team and she thought she was on solid ground. Her hypothesis was that the new leadership team had their own idea about the way the place should be run and she did not fit that bill. Whether this was true or not, it was not changing the hard emotional toll a lay off can take.

Let's face it. Whether you are at the giving end or receiving end of this experience, it is never an easy one. Either you or someone you know is likely at either end right now or may soon find themselves in this situation.

If you are human and in touch with your humanity it shakes you up. It shakes up your confidence in yourself as a leader and it shakes up your confidence in things you took for granted.

I want to share with you 3 practices I shared with them that might be of help to you when you find yourself at either end of the spectrum.

1. Do not waste this experience: While on the surface it may seem like there is nothing positive or worth appreciating about this experience of layoff, the truth is this is the perfect opportunity to reflect on a number of key questions that can set you up for success in the long term. Questions such as - what did I learn about myself as I went through the stress of this situation ? What does my reaction and response choices tell me about my agency, self leadership and self narrative that I was not aware of ? This is an opportunity to meet yourself at a deeper level than the day to day running around of getting things done on the corporate check list. What values were you able to uphold in this scenario despite the constraints of the situation ? What values about yourself did you discover as you got pushed against the wall ?

This is not just passive rumination - creating a coherent storyline of how we showed up in a crisis is vital to our well-being and mental health as well as for not being a passive by stander of our circumstances.

This is also an opportunity in that it may allow you to spread your wings and think about your career/job differently: It's easy to get tunnel vision and focus on finding a job that's identical to your previous role. However, this can limit your job opportunities. Instead, be open to exploring new industries, job roles, and locations to increase your chances of finding a new job.

2. Show up for yourself - The number one thing you need to do is to be your own biggest advocate and ally in this period. Given that our sense of self and identity is so closely tied up to the work we do that it is super easy to make this layoff all about us. I got one of my clients to write down on pen and paper 50 times - this layoff is not a judgment call on my capabilities as a leader or as a person.

The times we are moving through some of these calls are being made on parameters that are not in control of the people making the decision or are a result of bad judgement calls made at a time when the economic realities were different. Valuing ourselves when we feel devalued by others is an act of self leadership and compassion in a time like this. Do not make the mistake of making this all about your worth or competence.

Showing up for yourself can also take the form of finding ways to create structured time activities so that there is no whiplash from the sudden vast empty calendar that lies in front of you. One of my coaching clients signed up for a program to upskill himself, found a new meditation app to focus on and joined a few chamber of commerce to expand his network.

3. You will not think yourself out of this: You have to feel yourself out of this scenario. When we are under stress we can have a few set of responses - fight, flight, freeze. You can fight the reality but you have been laid off or you are involved in the process of laying people off and it is uncomfortable as hell. You can engage in flight and ignore the feelings that it evokes in you by minimizing them of brushing them under the carpet. Fleeing from your feelings is an option people exercise because it is too uncomfortable to look your feelings in the eye. Some folks freeze, in that they go into inaction and victim mode. They can't move forward with the shock of what happened.

It's okay to feel angry about losing your job. It's okay to feel sad about leaving behind coworkers who were important to you and projects that were meaningful for you. It's also okay if you don't quite know what comes next; there's no rulebook for this stuff!

No matter what your first response, you need to own and work through your emotions before you can come up with a balanced intellectual response. Bottling up the feelings will result in emotional and physical illness. So don't rush to your thinking-frame before you have worked through your feeling frame. Like the famous saying goes - you have to feel it to heal it. It is best to get some professional help in doing the same.

Layoffs are not going away in a rush and this is just a set of first suggestions to support yourself as you navigate the aftermath. If you want to refresh your thinking about your career and leadership journey think about engaging with an executive coach or joining an online program or even reading books that can help you continue to act with the positive agency toward your career.

If you have found this helpful please share it with your social networks because navigating this landscape is not easy. Many men and women are going about putting on a brave face for the world when internally they are anxious and truly fear the well-being of their family and their career.

To sign up to get my newsletter straight into your inbox and to get a list of top 5 books I recommend to read please sign up here: www.leadersupgraded.com and to deepen this conversation further watch this video on how to pick yourself up after you fall down here: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=a6FIrlmbpso