21. How to Handle a Layoff
Layoffs are most definitely not a fun subject to discuss, but with the pandemic this past year, I know many of y’all have either been worrying about it or have been laid off yourselves. As someone who has personally been laid off, I know how upsetting and unsettling it can be, so we’re going to jump into this topic today and I'll teach you some ways coaching can help you navigate this particular life experience in a way that does NOT result in you feeling totally crushed.
When I was laid off back in 2015, I didn’t have the coaching tools I do now and I was struggling. The five months I was unemployed included a lot of panic, anxiety, and overwhelm, and looking back, I can see exactly how I was making that time so much more painful than it needed to be. I was doing the best I could, but I’ve learned so much since then and I’m sharing everything I know so that you can skip that pain.
Tune in this week to discover why layoffs aren’t actually inherently bad, and the 3 most common painful thought patterns I see that make the experience of being laid off more stressful than it needs to be (and, of course, how to address these painful thought patterns so that you can have a much better experience than I did). This week’s podcast will help you shift the lens through which you see layoffs so if you find yourself faced with one, you can handle it with grace until you land your next job.
If you love the podcast and want to take this work deeper, I have great news! I have space for new one-to-one coaching clients starting this month, so click here to schedule a call with me and we’ll see if we’re a good fit to start working together!
If you want guidance in walking yourself through my deep dive strategy sessions, subscribe, rate, and review the show on Apple Podcasts! Make sure to follow the instructions here to receive an email from me with the PDF document!
WHAT YOU’LL LEARN FROM THIS EPISODE:
My personal experience of being laid off.
How I made my experience of being unemployed so much more painful than it needed to be.
Why I know that layoffs aren’t inherently bad.
3 painful thought patterns that make layoffs feel more stressful for people.
How to change the way you view a layoff and land your next job.
LISTEN TO THE FULL EPISODE:
FEATURED ON THE SHOW:
Leave me a rating and review on Apple Podcasts to receive an email from me with my deep-dive strategy session PDF document so you can walk yourself through it!
Feel free to ask me any questions over on Instagram!
FULL EPISODE TRANSCRIPT:
This week, we are talking about how to handle a layoff.
You are listening to Love Your Job Before You Leave It, the podcast for ambitious, high-achieving womxn who are ready to stop feeling stressed about work and kiss burnout goodbye forever. Whether you’re starting a business or staying in your day job, this show will give you the coaching and guidance you need to start loving your work today. Here’s your host, Career Coach, Kori Linn.
Hey y’all. I am so excited to talk to you today about layoffs. It’s not the most sexy, exciting topic, but that’s even more so why I’m excited to talk about it because I’ve been through one and I did not enjoy my experience of it. But I think that with what I’ve learned and with what I know now as a coach, I can help you have a much better experience if you happen to go through a layoff, and even if you don’t, I know that that’s something a lot of people worry about, especially this last year with COVID.
A lot of people who have had a job the whole time have spent a lot of time worrying about what might happen if they were to get laid off. So I think it’s a really important topic. But before we jump into that, I just want to take a minute to read a podcast review for y’all.
So I’m going way back in the vault. This one was actually posted right when the podcast launched and it’s such a good review, I love it so much, I want to share it with you. The podcast review is title is, “Yes, yes, all of the yes.” And it says, “The foundational basis of what Kori teaches is everything. And her approach makes it really tangible, which is crucial for applying the concepts to shift burnout, love what you do, and be able to create more fulfilling work. Listen to this podcast, subscribe, then hire her.”
Thank you so much, GrownupSexEd, who is the author of this review. I so appreciate you saying that and your support for the podcast. As y’all know, as I say every week, it’s my wish, hope, and dream that this podcast helps you love what you do, experience less burnout, experience less overwhelm, achieve more of your goals, and just have a great life at work and at home.
I know it’s a podcast about work, but as I’m always saying, how we do one thing is how we do everything, and I want you to use these tools at work but also anywhere in your life where you’re not experiencing what you want to be experiencing.
Okay, now let’s get into how we handle a layoff. So over the past year, some companies have really struggled and there have been many layoffs across a variety of industries. And as someone, like I’ve said, who’s personally been laid off, I know how upsetting and unsettling it can be.
When I was laid off back in 2015, I didn’t have the coaching tools I use now and I experiencing a lot of panic, anxiety, and overwhelm during the five months I was unemployed and looking for work. I did the best I could at the time but looking back now as a coach, I can see how I made that whole experience much more painful than it needed to be, and I want to be clear that I’m not judging, shaming, or blaming past Kori for her experience.
When I say I made it more painful, I’m saying that more in that I can see the cause and effect now with the view that I have. It’s never to blame the person that I was. Because like I said, the person I was doing the best she could with the tools she had. I just have different tools now.
So when I look back, I’m like, oh, a lot of that pain was optional. Didn’t feel optional at the time. It’s not my fault because I was just using the tools I had. I just have new tools now and that really can help me see how different that experience could be.
Here’s the good news. Just because I struggled doesn’t mean you have to, and in fact, the best part of having lived through this experience for me is that I can use it to help others handle their own layoffs and other stressful work events much more effectively and I can help them skip that pain that I experienced that I can now see as optional.
I can’t go back and take it away for past me, but I can help you and other people, and that is what I would like to do. Most people think layoffs are really scary and upsetting, and I get it. That was 100% my experience.
But here’s what I know now; being laid off does not have to feel that way. It does not have to feel the way it felt for me. Now, I realize that this might seem a little farfetched, but hear me out. It’s not the layoff itself that is scary and upsetting. In fact, some people with jobs are dreaming of being laid off right now and some people who have been laid off in the past will say it’s the best thing that ever happened to them.
So if layoffs were inherently bad, how could that be true? But this shows us of course that layoffs aren’t inherently bad. Layoffs are just something that can happen and if we’re like, great, now I get my severance package, then we feel awesome. But if we have a different story like, oh fuck, what am I going to do now? Then we don’t feel awesome.
And this is because our experience of anything, including being laid off comes down to how we think about the thing that’s happening. It doesn’t come down to the thing itself. It always comes down to how we’re thinking about it, what story we are telling ourselves about it. Like what is the narrative that we are using to explain the thing that’s going on in our lives.
The reason that layoffs feel so stressful for most of us isn’t because of the layoff itself. It’s actually because of our thoughts about the layoff. For layoffs in particular, I mainly see these stressful thoughts, these stressful stories emerge in three specific patterns. We’re going to go through them one by one.
Number one is we think getting laid off means something bad about us as employees, maybe even as people. Even people who know that they’re high achievers struggle with this one. I know I did. I am a super high achiever and I really, really struggled with it, as I think I mentioned in the last podcast when I was talking about confirmation bias.
Now, there are many reasons why companies lay people off and most of them have little to do with employees’ performance. Yet, many people take layoffs very personally. They lay awake at night wondering, “If I’m as good as I think I am, why did they let me go?” And then instead of answering that question with a logical, helpful answer like, “Business went down 50% overnight so they cut half the staff,” we will answer the question with self-criticism, assuming it must mean something bad about us in particular.
So we’re like, why did they let me go? And when I was laid off, the company was actually closing its Seattle office. But I still was like, “How did I mess this up? Does this say something bad about me?” And even if we did mess something up, even if we did make mistakes before we were laid off, even if we’re not happy with our performance in a certain role and then we get laid off from it, it’s still not helpful to focus on that.
Now, if we think back to the episode about worrying useful content, we can pull out the useful content. We can think like, okay, I didn’t perform as well as I wanted to, that can be useful content, I can think about that neutrally, I can solve for that, I can learn new skills. But a lot of the time when people get laid off, that’s not even the case.
That’s a little bit more of an edge case. Usually when we get laid off it actually has more to do with the company and nothing to do with us as people. But no matter why you get let go, it’s not helpful to extrapolate that it means something about your personal value and to take it very personally.
The more we take it personally, actually the harder it is to show up to our current job search. It also makes it harder to sleep and do other things that are important to our wellbeing as humans.
Okay, here’s painful story number two. We think getting laid off means that we won’t have enough money and something terrible will happen as a result. Now, at first glance this seems super logical, right? We’re like, yes, if the money stops coming in, then the money I have might not last for forever. In fact, logically it will not last for forever.
But here’s the problem; when we think this way, we feel really frantic and afraid and that is not the best energy for a thoughtful, effective job search. It’s also not the best energy for thoughtfully, effectively managing our money in the interim.
On a biological level, when we imagine not having enough money, we’re putting our body into a stress response. Our body can’t tell the difference between us worrying about money and us actually facing a physical threat in the moment, like a predator who wants to eat us. Once we’re in that fight or flight stress response, we actually can’t do a good job of managing our money or getting our next job lined up or doing anything else we might need to do in our day-to-day life.
Instead, we play out the fight or flight by alternately being really angry at the layoff and then trying to run away from it using numbing or avoiding behaviors.
So while response seems to be based in logic, the behavior it creates is highly illogical. And what’s more, it blocks us from accessing the inner creativity and wisdom and problem solving that we need to be able to tap into in order to get a new job and return to financial security.
Again, we can think about the useful content. Like we might want to make changes to our budget, we might want to cut expenses, but doing that from a fear space is not going to be as useful as kind of just pulling that useful content out, dismissing the worry, and then making choices from there.
Okay, the third painful story that comes up when we get laid off is that we think layoffs, especially big layoffs across many industries mean that we won’t be able to get a new job. The problem with this thought pattern is if you think you won’t be able to get a new job, it is difficult to show up to your job search with commitment and followthrough because you are always expecting it won’t work out and if we’re expecting it won’t work out, we don’t try and then guess what, it doesn’t work out.
To say it another way, if you show up to your job search with the expectation you won’t get a job, then it’s very likely that that is what will happen. Not because there aren’t jobs, but because you’re not really trying when you’re coming from that headspace, when you’re in that story.
Here’s the truth; you don’t need a ton of jobs. You only need one job. Most of us only need one. Maybe you want two. Let’s just start with getting one. Even during this past year with COVID and everything, there are jobs. People are hiring. Not everyone is hiring, but you don't need everyone to be hiring. You only need the one job, maybe two if you really want to have two. But most of us, it’s just one.
So instead of arguing for why it’ll be hard to get a new job, we want to argue for why you can do it. As we talked about last week with the confirmation bias episode, arguing for why it’s hard will make it hard. Arguing for why you can do it will feel much better and give you the resilience you need to keep showing up and doing the work for as long as it takes for you to do it.
So those are the three stories that come up that are really painful, that make a layoff feel really fucking scary. And those are the reasons why those thoughts don’t actually make sense or simply aren’t helpful, even if they do make sense.
So if those thoughts aren’t going to help you handle your layoff and get your next job, what is going to help you? The answer is learning to think intentionally. In order to feel better and in order to show up effectively as you manage being laid off and look for a new job, you have to learn to think intentionally.
Let me be very clear. You don’t have to like being laid off or think it’s a super fun time. This isn’t about bright-siding, it’s not about positive thinking. It’s definitely not about lying to yourself. I’m not saying that what you’re facing is easy. I am saying that you can handle it and learning to think about it intentionally can help you do that.
As a coach, part of what I do is I believe in my clients’ capacity to do whatever it is that they need to do. So if they come to me saying I don’t know how to do it, what if I can’t do it, I’m all in on believing that there’s a solution and that they can do the solution.
And that belief helps me just keep asking them questions and helping them untangle the situation until they figure out what it is they would like to do and then we take it apart piece by piece to make it handleable for them to do it.
So no matter what situation you are in, I’m here believing that there’s a way for you to figure it out and that you have the capacity to do that. Beyond believing in your own capacity, or maybe in conjunction with it, it’s also about how you think about you. If we go back to the painful thought number one was making it mean something bad about you.
So instead of thinking being laid off means something bad about you, you can think about it differently. You can think it means nothing about you as an employee and now you have a chance to go do something new. You may even find like I did that your next job is an even better fit for you and your skills.
When I was laid off, I was devastated. But the next job I got paid $20,000 more a year and I liked it better and I had better relationships and I actually had even better work performance. So even though I was a high achiever at the job before, maybe I actually didn’t perform as well as I was able to and maybe I would never have done that in that job.
But being laid off and getting into the next job, I was able to see that as a stair step up to being able to perform better, to being able to believe I’m an even better employee than I was able to believe before and that turned out to be true for me.
Alright, let’s talk about the money piece. Instead of thinking you won’t have enough money, you can decide to think about how you can use the money and resources you have available to you now. Like we talk about all the time, worrying solves nothing. Instead, look at the worst-case scenario and just decide what you will do.
Whatever that worst-case scenario is your brain’s obsessed about, that you are afraid is going to happen because you’ve been laid off or if you’ve never been laid off and you’re just imagining being laid off, follow that through all the way. Catastrophize it all the way out and then decide right now what you will do and how you will handle that situation so that your brain can see you know how to solve that problem and you don’t have to continue to be s cared of it.
And then we get to thinking about getting our next job. Instead of thinking you won’t be able to get another job, or that there are not other jobs out there, you can think about how you can be the one person who gets a job no matter the odds, no matter the current situation.
When we focus on why it’s impossible, whatever the it is, whether it’s getting a job, getting a promotion, being the first womxn to be a VP in your company, whatever the thing is, when we think it’s impossible, when we focus on why it’s impossible, we make it impossible because of confirmation bias and because of how we act when we have that belief.
But when we focus on how to do things no matter what, we make the impossible possible. Before someone ran a four-minute mile, people thought it was biologically impossible. Then this dude named Roger Bannister ran a mile in four minutes. Now tons of people have run a mile in four minutes or less.
Job searches are the same way. Do not look to everyone else to see what’s possible. Be the Roger Bannister who shows everyone else what can be done. And this applies to everything, y’all. No matter what it is that you want, don’t look in your past to see if it’s possible. Don’t look around at the outside world to see if it’s possible. Decide if you want to try to create it and then go all in on it.
Because maybe you will be the very first person to do it, and if you’re not, you’re probably going to wind up somewhere amazing anyway by being willing to take all that action to try to create the thing that you want to be possible in the world.
Alright, so to review, layoffs are painful and scary because of the thoughts we think about them and those thoughts, the ones at the heart of the scariness and the painfulness are usually this means something bad about me, I’m going to run out of money, and I’m never going to get another job.
And I understand why the brain wants to circle on those thoughts but circling on those thoughts is not going to help you feel better. It’s not going to help you get your next job. And so instead, I want you to do a reframe and think about how even a layoff could be a chance for you to be an amazing employee for the next company and to think about how you’re going to manage your money, even in this situation, and how you’re going to make sure to take care of yourself no matter what, and how you’re going to get that next job no matter what the odds are because you can do it.
And if you believe you can do it, that makes it much easier to do, versus what we said before, which is if you believe you can’t, you don’t try as hard as you could. And then you won’t get one, and your brain will be like, “See, it was impossible.” Not because it was impossible but just because of the story.
Alright y’all, that’s my lesson for you today. Stories are super important so pay attention to the stories you’re telling yourself. Pay attention to how those stories feel. Pay attention to what results you’re creating in your life when you think about things in the way you’ve been thinking about them. And if you want to create something different, change the story.
And if you love what I teach and you want some help taking things a little bit deeper and figuring out how this all applies to your own life, I’ve got good news for you.
I’ve got space for a few new one-on-one coaching clients starting this month, so let’s hop on a call. I’ll give you some coaching right away to help you get going and if it seems like a good fit, I will share with you how we can work together. Just head on over to my website and click on the Work With Me button and get started there.
Also bonus, my coaching offering is totally virtual so as to better serve my global audience, and yes, I do work with people who are not native English speakers and we’ve had great success doing that.
There’s even a testimonial on my website with someone in that category so you can check that out on the testimonials page. Alright y’all, have a lovely week and I will talk to you next time. Bye.
Thank you for listening to Love Your Job Before You Leave It. We'll have another episode for you next week. And in the meantime, if you're feeling super fired up, head on over to korilinn.com for more guidance and resources.
You are listening to Love Your Job Before You Leave It, the podcast for ambitious, high-achieving womxn who are ready to stop feeling stressed about work and kiss burnout goodbye forever. Whether you’re starting a business or staying in your day job, this show will give you the coaching and guidance you need to start loving your work today. Here’s your host, Career Coach, Kori Linn.
Hey y’all. I am so excited to talk to you today about layoffs. It’s not the most sexy, exciting topic, but that’s even more so why I’m excited to talk about it because I’ve been through one and I did not enjoy my experience of it. But I think that with what I’ve learned and with what I know now as a coach, I can help you have a much better experience if you happen to go through a layoff, and even if you don’t, I know that that’s something a lot of people worry about, especially this last year with COVID.
A lot of people who have had a job the whole time have spent a lot of time worrying about what might happen if they were to get laid off. So I think it’s a really important topic. But before we jump into that, I just want to take a minute to read a podcast review for y’all.
So I’m going way back in the vault. This one was actually posted right when the podcast launched and it’s such a good review, I love it so much, I want to share it with you. The podcast review is title is, “Yes, yes, all of the yes.” And it says, “The foundational basis of what Kori teaches is everything. And her approach makes it really tangible, which is crucial for applying the concepts to shift burnout, love what you do, and be able to create more fulfilling work. Listen to this podcast, subscribe, then hire her.”
Thank you so much, GrownupSexEd, who is the author of this review. I so appreciate you saying that and your support for the podcast. As y’all know, as I say every week, it’s my wish, hope, and dream that this podcast helps you love what you do, experience less burnout, experience less overwhelm, achieve more of your goals, and just have a great life at work and at home.
I know it’s a podcast about work, but as I’m always saying, how we do one thing is how we do everything, and I want you to use these tools at work but also anywhere in your life where you’re not experiencing what you want to be experiencing.
Okay, now let’s get into how we handle a layoff. So over the past year, some companies have really struggled and there have been many layoffs across a variety of industries. And as someone, like I’ve said, who’s personally been laid off, I know how upsetting and unsettling it can be.
When I was laid off back in 2015, I didn’t have the coaching tools I use now and I experiencing a lot of panic, anxiety, and overwhelm during the five months I was unemployed and looking for work. I did the best I could at the time but looking back now as a coach, I can see how I made that whole experience much more painful than it needed to be, and I want to be clear that I’m not judging, shaming, or blaming past Kori for her experience.
When I say I made it more painful, I’m saying that more in that I can see the cause and effect now with the view that I have. It’s never to blame the person that I was. Because like I said, the person I was doing the best she could with the tools she had. I just have different tools now.
So when I look back, I’m like, oh, a lot of that pain was optional. Didn’t feel optional at the time. It’s not my fault because I was just using the tools I had. I just have new tools now and that really can help me see how different that experience could be.
Here’s the good news. Just because I struggled doesn’t mean you have to, and in fact, the best part of having lived through this experience for me is that I can use it to help others handle their own layoffs and other stressful work events much more effectively and I can help them skip that pain that I experienced that I can now see as optional.
I can’t go back and take it away for past me, but I can help you and other people, and that is what I would like to do. Most people think layoffs are really scary and upsetting, and I get it. That was 100% my experience.
But here’s what I know now; being laid off does not have to feel that way. It does not have to feel the way it felt for me. Now, I realize that this might seem a little farfetched, but hear me out. It’s not the layoff itself that is scary and upsetting. In fact, some people with jobs are dreaming of being laid off right now and some people who have been laid off in the past will say it’s the best thing that ever happened to them.
So if layoffs were inherently bad, how could that be true? But this shows us of course that layoffs aren’t inherently bad. Layoffs are just something that can happen and if we’re like, great, now I get my severance package, then we feel awesome. But if we have a different story like, oh fuck, what am I going to do now? Then we don’t feel awesome.
And this is because our experience of anything, including being laid off comes down to how we think about the thing that’s happening. It doesn’t come down to the thing itself. It always comes down to how we’re thinking about it, what story we are telling ourselves about it. Like what is the narrative that we are using to explain the thing that’s going on in our lives.
The reason that layoffs feel so stressful for most of us isn’t because of the layoff itself. It’s actually because of our thoughts about the layoff. For layoffs in particular, I mainly see these stressful thoughts, these stressful stories emerge in three specific patterns. We’re going to go through them one by one.
Number one is we think getting laid off means something bad about us as employees, maybe even as people. Even people who know that they’re high achievers struggle with this one. I know I did. I am a super high achiever and I really, really struggled with it, as I think I mentioned in the last podcast when I was talking about confirmation bias.
Now, there are many reasons why companies lay people off and most of them have little to do with employees’ performance. Yet, many people take layoffs very personally. They lay awake at night wondering, “If I’m as good as I think I am, why did they let me go?” And then instead of answering that question with a logical, helpful answer like, “Business went down 50% overnight so they cut half the staff,” we will answer the question with self-criticism, assuming it must mean something bad about us in particular.
So we’re like, why did they let me go? And when I was laid off, the company was actually closing its Seattle office. But I still was like, “How did I mess this up? Does this say something bad about me?” And even if we did mess something up, even if we did make mistakes before we were laid off, even if we’re not happy with our performance in a certain role and then we get laid off from it, it’s still not helpful to focus on that.
Now, if we think back to the episode about worrying useful content, we can pull out the useful content. We can think like, okay, I didn’t perform as well as I wanted to, that can be useful content, I can think about that neutrally, I can solve for that, I can learn new skills. But a lot of the time when people get laid off, that’s not even the case.
That’s a little bit more of an edge case. Usually when we get laid off it actually has more to do with the company and nothing to do with us as people. But no matter why you get let go, it’s not helpful to extrapolate that it means something about your personal value and to take it very personally.
The more we take it personally, actually the harder it is to show up to our current job search. It also makes it harder to sleep and do other things that are important to our wellbeing as humans.
Okay, here’s painful story number two. We think getting laid off means that we won’t have enough money and something terrible will happen as a result. Now, at first glance this seems super logical, right? We’re like, yes, if the money stops coming in, then the money I have might not last for forever. In fact, logically it will not last for forever.
But here’s the problem; when we think this way, we feel really frantic and afraid and that is not the best energy for a thoughtful, effective job search. It’s also not the best energy for thoughtfully, effectively managing our money in the interim.
On a biological level, when we imagine not having enough money, we’re putting our body into a stress response. Our body can’t tell the difference between us worrying about money and us actually facing a physical threat in the moment, like a predator who wants to eat us. Once we’re in that fight or flight stress response, we actually can’t do a good job of managing our money or getting our next job lined up or doing anything else we might need to do in our day-to-day life.
Instead, we play out the fight or flight by alternately being really angry at the layoff and then trying to run away from it using numbing or avoiding behaviors.
So while response seems to be based in logic, the behavior it creates is highly illogical. And what’s more, it blocks us from accessing the inner creativity and wisdom and problem solving that we need to be able to tap into in order to get a new job and return to financial security.
Again, we can think about the useful content. Like we might want to make changes to our budget, we might want to cut expenses, but doing that from a fear space is not going to be as useful as kind of just pulling that useful content out, dismissing the worry, and then making choices from there.
Okay, the third painful story that comes up when we get laid off is that we think layoffs, especially big layoffs across many industries mean that we won’t be able to get a new job. The problem with this thought pattern is if you think you won’t be able to get a new job, it is difficult to show up to your job search with commitment and followthrough because you are always expecting it won’t work out and if we’re expecting it won’t work out, we don’t try and then guess what, it doesn’t work out.
To say it another way, if you show up to your job search with the expectation you won’t get a job, then it’s very likely that that is what will happen. Not because there aren’t jobs, but because you’re not really trying when you’re coming from that headspace, when you’re in that story.
Here’s the truth; you don’t need a ton of jobs. You only need one job. Most of us only need one. Maybe you want two. Let’s just start with getting one. Even during this past year with COVID and everything, there are jobs. People are hiring. Not everyone is hiring, but you don't need everyone to be hiring. You only need the one job, maybe two if you really want to have two. But most of us, it’s just one.
So instead of arguing for why it’ll be hard to get a new job, we want to argue for why you can do it. As we talked about last week with the confirmation bias episode, arguing for why it’s hard will make it hard. Arguing for why you can do it will feel much better and give you the resilience you need to keep showing up and doing the work for as long as it takes for you to do it.
So those are the three stories that come up that are really painful, that make a layoff feel really fucking scary. And those are the reasons why those thoughts don’t actually make sense or simply aren’t helpful, even if they do make sense.
So if those thoughts aren’t going to help you handle your layoff and get your next job, what is going to help you? The answer is learning to think intentionally. In order to feel better and in order to show up effectively as you manage being laid off and look for a new job, you have to learn to think intentionally.
Let me be very clear. You don’t have to like being laid off or think it’s a super fun time. This isn’t about bright-siding, it’s not about positive thinking. It’s definitely not about lying to yourself. I’m not saying that what you’re facing is easy. I am saying that you can handle it and learning to think about it intentionally can help you do that.
As a coach, part of what I do is I believe in my clients’ capacity to do whatever it is that they need to do. So if they come to me saying I don’t know how to do it, what if I can’t do it, I’m all in on believing that there’s a solution and that they can do the solution.
And that belief helps me just keep asking them questions and helping them untangle the situation until they figure out what it is they would like to do and then we take it apart piece by piece to make it handleable for them to do it.
So no matter what situation you are in, I’m here believing that there’s a way for you to figure it out and that you have the capacity to do that. Beyond believing in your own capacity, or maybe in conjunction with it, it’s also about how you think about you. If we go back to the painful thought number one was making it mean something bad about you.
So instead of thinking being laid off means something bad about you, you can think about it differently. You can think it means nothing about you as an employee and now you have a chance to go do something new. You may even find like I did that your next job is an even better fit for you and your skills.
When I was laid off, I was devastated. But the next job I got paid $20,000 more a year and I liked it better and I had better relationships and I actually had even better work performance. So even though I was a high achiever at the job before, maybe I actually didn’t perform as well as I was able to and maybe I would never have done that in that job.
But being laid off and getting into the next job, I was able to see that as a stair step up to being able to perform better, to being able to believe I’m an even better employee than I was able to believe before and that turned out to be true for me.
Alright, let’s talk about the money piece. Instead of thinking you won’t have enough money, you can decide to think about how you can use the money and resources you have available to you now. Like we talk about all the time, worrying solves nothing. Instead, look at the worst-case scenario and just decide what you will do.
Whatever that worst-case scenario is your brain’s obsessed about, that you are afraid is going to happen because you’ve been laid off or if you’ve never been laid off and you’re just imagining being laid off, follow that through all the way. Catastrophize it all the way out and then decide right now what you will do and how you will handle that situation so that your brain can see you know how to solve that problem and you don’t have to continue to be s cared of it.
And then we get to thinking about getting our next job. Instead of thinking you won’t be able to get another job, or that there are not other jobs out there, you can think about how you can be the one person who gets a job no matter the odds, no matter the current situation.
When we focus on why it’s impossible, whatever the it is, whether it’s getting a job, getting a promotion, being the first womxn to be a VP in your company, whatever the thing is, when we think it’s impossible, when we focus on why it’s impossible, we make it impossible because of confirmation bias and because of how we act when we have that belief.
But when we focus on how to do things no matter what, we make the impossible possible. Before someone ran a four-minute mile, people thought it was biologically impossible. Then this dude named Roger Bannister ran a mile in four minutes. Now tons of people have run a mile in four minutes or less.
Job searches are the same way. Do not look to everyone else to see what’s possible. Be the Roger Bannister who shows everyone else what can be done. And this applies to everything, y’all. No matter what it is that you want, don’t look in your past to see if it’s possible. Don’t look around at the outside world to see if it’s possible. Decide if you want to try to create it and then go all in on it.
Because maybe you will be the very first person to do it, and if you’re not, you’re probably going to wind up somewhere amazing anyway by being willing to take all that action to try to create the thing that you want to be possible in the world.
Alright, so to review, layoffs are painful and scary because of the thoughts we think about them and those thoughts, the ones at the heart of the scariness and the painfulness are usually this means something bad about me, I’m going to run out of money, and I’m never going to get another job.
And I understand why the brain wants to circle on those thoughts but circling on those thoughts is not going to help you feel better. It’s not going to help you get your next job. And so instead, I want you to do a reframe and think about how even a layoff could be a chance for you to be an amazing employee for the next company and to think about how you’re going to manage your money, even in this situation, and how you’re going to make sure to take care of yourself no matter what, and how you’re going to get that next job no matter what the odds are because you can do it.
And if you believe you can do it, that makes it much easier to do, versus what we said before, which is if you believe you can’t, you don’t try as hard as you could. And then you won’t get one, and your brain will be like, “See, it was impossible.” Not because it was impossible but just because of the story.
Alright y’all, that’s my lesson for you today. Stories are super important so pay attention to the stories you’re telling yourself. Pay attention to how those stories feel. Pay attention to what results you’re creating in your life when you think about things in the way you’ve been thinking about them. And if you want to create something different, change the story.
And if you love what I teach and you want some help taking things a little bit deeper and figuring out how this all applies to your own life, I’ve got good news for you.
I’ve got space for a few new one-on-one coaching clients starting this month, so let’s hop on a call. I’ll give you some coaching right away to help you get going and if it seems like a good fit, I will share with you how we can work together. Just head on over to my website and click on the Work With Me button and get started there.
Also bonus, my coaching offering is totally virtual so as to better serve my global audience, and yes, I do work with people who are not native English speakers and we’ve had great success doing that.
There’s even a testimonial on my website with someone in that category so you can check that out on the testimonials page. Alright y’all, have a lovely week and I will talk to you next time. Bye.
Thank you for listening to Love Your Job Before You Leave It. We'll have another episode for you next week. And in the meantime, if you're feeling super fired up, head on over to korilinn.com for more guidance and resources.
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