CareerSherpas: Climbing the Mountain

Peter Fitzgerald is chronicling his process of navigating from losing his job to a new and brighter tomorrow. To read other posts from the series, see “Job Transition: A CareerSherpas’ Odyssey”.

Much as Day 2 saw a lot of the same activity as Day 1 (contacting leads, reconnecting with people and thanking everyone) there are some realities one has to deal with.

Day 2

Re-Planning Finances

If I can call it “Part 2″ of my plan, dealing with the realities of re-sizing my budget to fit within my newly-diminished means is my least favorite so far. Trying to decide what is essential and what needs to be cut isn’t easy, but I knew I needed to start quickly.

So, for the “easy” stuff first:

• Monthly parking – I’m not going to use it and I can use the money. (Thanks to the Marten Ramp in Minneapolis for being understanding and cheerful!)
• Credit cards – Okay, so I’m not “getting rid” of them, but making arrangements to limit payments and try to get on whatever programs are available is an immediate action that shouldn’t be put off.
• Mortgage – Well… I didn’t get hold of someone today, but I need them to know the situation sooner rather than later. Again in the “not getting rid of” bucket, but managing it is going to be essential.
• Utilities – There are great programs for help with utilities. If you need them, find them and use them now.

Much, much harder:

• Horseback riding lessons – My eldest child’s 7th birthday present… she’s had two including today.
• Pre-K – This is a tricky one at best. As you can imagine we’re heartbroken over having to make any cuts here, but I need to talk to the school and see what we can do. (Day 3 has me thinking that maybe we should keep something here. My wife and I have a strong bias for educating kids well, so this might be something we “splurge” on to keep.)
• Applying for unemployment – When you haven’t been out of work in a while, there’s a certain sting in having to apply for unemployment benefits. As someone who has talked people through layoffs before I cannot stress enough: Do not put this off. Many of the assistance programs either need you to have applied for unemployment benefits or become a lot easier to obtain if you’ve already applied.

Retrieving Belongings from the Office

One thing that I still needed to do was to recover the rest of my belongings from work. Aside from a slight confusion in the morning, I was invited to pick up the rest of my stuff in the morning. This was instead of “outside of work hours” as previously stated, and I have to thank the Labor Day weekend (more on that in a weekend post) and the HR Director for providing that option.

I had the kids in the car with me. They’re pretty clear on what is going on, but were excited to visit “Daddy’s work” since both of them have had positive experiences coming into the office. Aside from a tantrum over using the whiteboard in my old cube, their presence was very comforting.

It’s always awkward going back to a place you’ve been excluded from, particularly when people are straining to say something and don’t feel comfortable talking. There are a number of things that made the visit easier for me though, and part of it was the number of folks who made a point of stopping to shake my hand. Some of the stops were very emotional, and it was difficult not to feel for people who were feeling the strain.

What I was most impressed by, and incredibly thankful for, was the dignity I was allowed in the process. In many organizations the death march is surrounded by negative responses and chiding, but I am very grateful that this was not the case for me. As much as it was an emotional exit, being allowed that dignity made the situation much easier. I know I learned a number of lessons in humility and human decency in the process.

All in all, not an easy day but far better than it could have been.

Peter Fitzgerald is the founder of CareerSherpas.com and is currently working on his first book, looking for a new day job, connecting individuals with ideas and opportunities, and attempting to learn the bagpipes.

Peter Fitzgerald is chronicling his process of navigating from losing his job to a new and brighter tomorrow. To read other posts from the series, see “Job Transition: A CareerSherpas’ Odyssey”.

Day 1

A side-effect of having so many people interested in helping is being really, really busy. This is a good thing.

Day 1 included responding to emails and calls, making more calls and sending more emails to new leads and generally trying to keep my head above water. The time flew by and the activity kept my spirits up. By the time I ended my day (a little early due to a school open house) I had somewhere in the realms of two dozen contacts sent and around a dozen connections made with people I didn’t know two days before.

I got to talking with my brother in the evening who made the observation that I was as busy out of work as I had been with the high workloads I’d been under in the days before.

Lessons from Day 1:

• Keep up with communications: The prioritized list you were working from is still your friend, but you’ll likely be adding to it rapidly.
• All leads are good leads: No matter how strange a possibility may look, it’s work pursuing.

(Since I’m a little behind, Day 2 will be arriving shortly.)

Peter Fitzgerald is the founder of CareerSherpas.com and is currently working on his first book, looking for a new day job, connecting individuals with ideas and opportunities, and attempting to learn the bagpipes.

I’ve spent a lot of time over the past few years writing about transitions, career planning, reaching for success, and talking people through all of the above to help them reach a positive outcome. Today I’ve been offered a different challenge: Proving I can do the same for myself (again.)

Yesterday I was let go from my day job.

Rather than hiding this fact away and talking around it, I’d like to help whomever I can by making myself a case in point. So I give you the CareerSherpa approach to rebounding strong.

Day Zero

Let’s start with first reactions. On meeting with my late manager and human resources to hear the news, my immediate reaction was simply to hold very still. I doubt this is ever the kind of news one is fully prepared for, but I took in the information given fairly readily. Sure my hands were shaking trying to read the document I was given, but I’m pretty sure everything I heard made sense in context.

Sharing the news was not fun and, as you’d expect, more than a little emotional. As I talked with my wife, I realized that I had a choice in how I wanted to react and what I wanted to do.

Knowing that you can act and that you have decisions that you can make is a very liberating feeling. Immediately you can start to think about what the possibilities actually mean. For me, this meant I could start to formulate a plan.

My wife later commented that I was treating the situation like it was a project to run. In many ways I’m wired to plot out a course once I have an idea of the starting point and the destination. This has proven to be useful in a lot of areas and no less so today. So my first tasks were laid out fairly quickly:

• Step 1: Regroup and regain composure. Being an emotional wreck right out of the gate isn’t going to help, you need to take the space to recover and calm yourself. I had the advantage of suspecting that something was up some way in advance and had prepared a bit, but it is essential to collect yourself and prepare mentally to look at your options.
• Step 2: Eat lunch. It was lunchtime, so I found somewhere with Wi-Fi access to eat something. In general though, finding something to eat and drink is a good idea. Even if you’ve managed to recover a dead calm immediately, you have burnt through a lot of energy in your stress response. In any case, you will need more fuel to power up your brain cells and be able to think clearly.
• Step 3: Broadcast your availability to your network. Social media is your friend here. LinkedIn is the most obvious for professional networking, but you have to think through what your message is going to be there. Facebook offers a different kind of group, but it’s worth sharing the news there as well.
• Step 4: Create a contact list. Where social media offers an instant blast, you also need to follow up and target your message to certain people. It doesn’t matter who they are, if you know them it is good to have them on the list.
• Step 5: Prioritize your contact list. Start with any contacts whose job it is to find jobs and people to fill them – recruiters, contracting companies, people who have teams of people like you.
• Step 6: Contact your top five. Take the first five contacts on your prioritized list (or ten if you’re feeling energetic) and contact them. Use the mode of contact that they will appreciate most, but realize that leaving a message and giving them a chance to respond later may work best. If they like to communicate via email, use email. If they like to talk, call them. Keep each communication short and to the point.
• Step 7: Check your email. It’s likely that, if you’ve been a good co-worker, friend, or polite acquaintance at your last job, somebody will have noticed. If they’ve noticed, they might also have suggestions or contacts that they’re already offering to you.
• Step 8: Take everybody up on any offer given! Everyone who makes an offer of help thinks that what they’re suggesting is a good option. You won’t know if any offer is or isn’t good until you check it out and follow through.
• Step 9: Thank everyone who contacts you. Sounds silly? Not at all. These are people trying to help who have shown an interest in you. (Hint: Remember these people. They’re your real references and they’re the strongest connections you have in your network. It also never hurts to be nice to people.)

How far did I get on Day Zero? Honestly I hopped around a bit, but I managed to accomplish a lot of these steps and I’m feeling pretty good about what I accomplished.

I’d also like to take the opportunity to publicly thank everyone who contacted me to wish me well, offer help, or just to chat. Very few things take the sting out of a loss like a community pulling for you.

Peter Fitzgerald is the founder of CareerSherpas.com and is currently working on his first book, looking for a new day job, connecting individuals with ideas and opportunities, and attempting to learn the bagpipes.

When you know you’re doing the right things, staying on the right path and delivering really great work. Somehow it doesn’t seem to register with the people who make determinations about your effectiveness. Continuous (and usually stressful) pressure to do more, better or be more responsive can follow.

Left unchecked, this can mark you as a “bad” or “ineffective” employee and even gnaw at your self-esteem. After a while your explanations fall on deaf ears and leave you feeling frustrated and unappreciated. This can expand into a vicious circle where your behavior deteriorates and the perception becomes a self-fulfilling prophecy. After all, who would be motivated to perform with that kind of crushing negativity?

There are ways out! Not that they’re easy or that they don’t require seemingly herculean struggles against your own self-doubt (and likely negative attitude.) From personal experience, finding a positive way out can be worth it, but it requires some forethought, lots of self-control and self-discipline, some luck and an eye to a longer arc to success.

The steps are easy to describe, but very hard to follow.

• Decide to be positive: If you’re caught up in the vicious cycle, you have to be the first change to break the cycle. Deciding to look for positive, constructive alternatives and to pursue them is not an easy step. It is crucial to be open to positive approaches to be able to see a way out when it presents itself.
• Get fresh eyes on the problem: If you can take a step back from the problem and look at it from a different angle for yourself that’s great! Sometimes taking a vacation or finding something else to focus on can give new insights into your situation. If that isn’t an option or you can’t break free of it, find someone you trust to be a sounding board and explain the situation as well as how you’ve approached it. Get the other person to repeat back to you what you’ve said. Both of you are likely to find current opportunities that you’ve missed so far that you can grab, and if not you will probably hear something that changes the way you think about the issues.
• Choose a goal: Pick a goal that gives you hope for a better tomorrow. When you’re in the vicious cycle it can be really hard not to give up or run away from the problem, but accepting either of those options won’t teach you how to solve the problem. The problem may not be you, but it is yours to solve. Find a new goal, refine an existing goal or remember a goal you had before you got sucked into the cycle. Hang onto that goal and look for opportunities.
• Take action: Pick one, two or three things that you can record the outcome of and make a plan with your manager or a co-worker to try them for a week and see what happens. The important thing with the choices you make is that you have to be consistent with them. You have to manage your own reactions and set up whatever situations or reminders will help you stick with them. At the end of the week, consider what effect your new actions had on you and share them with your manager or co-worker.
• Take a risk: Somewhere while you’re executing on your planned activities you’ll start to see opportunities that have some risk associated with them. Consider the risk and the reward to get a feel for how comfortable you are with the idea. Be honest and realistic with yourself about how well you can execute on the decision to take each risk, but be prepared to dive in and grab the opportunity that offers what you want.

Ultimately, these steps only work if you can take them one at a time. If you haven’t changed your attitude, you can’t get clear perspectives on the situation. If you can’t get clear and broader perspective, you can’t choose an attainable goal. Without a goal you can’t pick the right actions and without taking actions that you monitor you won’t see opportunities for what they are.

Grab the bull by the horns and hang in there! It’s not the easy road to confront your problems, but it’s the one that will lead you along the path to success and contentment. If you can face your own problems and solve them, you have a strong platform from which to follow and achieve your most ambitious goals.

Peter Fitzgerald is the founder of CareerSherpas.com and is currently working on his first book, conducting high-level business analysis, connecting individuals with ideas and opportunities, and attempting to learn the bagpipes.

 A recent Harvard Business Review article (via BNET) lends credit to the well worn concepts of how to make your position secure in an organization. While it’s hard to argue with their recommendations, many are thoughts that appear time and time again and which definitely hold true in any economy.

It’s important to remember that layoffs happen even in good economies, and many of the practices of making yourself appealing as an employee are important whether or not the storms are brewing or the waves crashing over your company. As Salary.com’s Ruth Morss lays out in her article “Guide to Surviving a Layoff”, there are many opportunities to shore up your position, whether the options make sense for you or not, investing the time to try to avoid the layoff list is well worth your time if you want to stay in your current job.Take Fortune’s “Ask Annie” as Anne Fisher lays out again in “8 ways to recession-proof your job”, your visibility, contributions, cost saving ideas, your network and maintaining a positive attitude (or as she puts it “no whining allowed”)all play a part in making your position more stable.

For a more visually cheery approach, you might want to try Forbes’ article “How to Recession-Proof Your Job” which shares much the same ideas, but with an “in pictures” twist for fun.

Whoever makes the most compelling case, or offers the ideas that fit your situation best, look realistically at where you are, what turn your company’s fortunes are taking and how you can best weather the storm. It may be that your position is already much more secure than you think, and if not, maybe it’s worth showing that you’re engaged, delivering and ready for the challenges ahead.

Got your own suggestions for protecting your job? Share them in the comments.

Peter Fitzgerald is the founder of CareerSherpas.com and is currently working on his first book, managing a team of project managers, and attempting to learn the bagpipes.