WITH LAY-OFFS LOOMING YOU MIGHT BE ASKING YOURSELF…
WHAT NOW?
It seems we can't really find steady ground right now doesn't it? The thing is, change is constant, and right now, that means many are facing layoffs.
If you have ever been fired, you know the feeling of a bruised ego. Or maybe the anger of why you. Maybe the sadness of losing your daily interactions with great team members. Or maybe the fear of what’s going to happen now. You might recognize the inner coach telling you to stay calm and not to worry because a new job is waiting for you (somewhere), and all you have to do is find it. This is now, and things changed fast.
Just a few months ago, we were quiet-quitting. Before that was the great resignation and people could pick and choose where they wanted to work, and companies were struggling to find the talent they needed to fill positions. Now, we are faced with widespread layoffs.
Our relationship with work is broken. We have been trying to take back control over our own time and work-life experience to cultivate more work-life balance, but now we are finding an unstable work environment where we might give up on balance just to keep our jobs.
It's very easy to jump to the immediate, "how do I fix this?" question, the same question organizations ask when they can't keep their talent or decide to cut jobs to cut expenses.
It is symptomatic of a system that hasn't connected the dots between human performance and sustainable success. If our job is in danger, what's the first thing we do? Dump self-care and work harder, only to find ourselves right back where we started, worn out and underperforming, and with that, even more, concerned that we will be fired or so tired that we quit because we are burned out. This relationship with work performance isn't working for anyone.
What I learned from being fired wasn't that I needed to work harder; I needed to understand what value I brought to the table to match up with the next job in a way that made both myself and the company more successful. When we are under pressure, we do what others ask of us instead of accessing the best of our human skills, which is how we think and make decisions, which ultimately adds up to peak performance.
Too often, anxiety and fear set in, and we cannot see clearly. We get lost in the FUD (fear, uncertainty, and doubt) rather than taking a pause to cut through the noise in our mind that tells us all the dangerous things that might be ahead. Don't get me wrong, it's not comfortable or easy, but it is possible to escape the hamster wheel inside your mind that says you are in trouble. That’s the power of taking pause - which people did during the great resignation period - to ask what matters, what we care about, and aligning our work with who we are.
Whether it was a shock or expected, if you have been laid off, you have that same opportunity.
Reclaiming agency over your work-life quality:
I'm asking you to be kind and honest with yourself, and you can use my AAA tool to help reclaim agency faster.
A: acknowledge how you feel
You may be relieved, you may be scared, you may feel stressed, you may feel hurt, you may feel all of the above. Avoid getting stuck in the story of how you feel and what happened. Simply state, “I feel.... right now.” It's important to use “I feel ... right now” instead of “I am,” which is an identity instead of a feeling. Stick to feeling.
A: accept the circumstance for what it is
As much as you could spend days and weeks discussing with yourself and others how unfair it is, you are wasting valuable time and energy, and distracting yourself from taking action on what you want to do to find what you want to do next. Please note I didn't say, what you want to do about it, because you cannot change what has happened, you can only focus on where you are headed.
A: ask what you need so that you can ...
This part can be a bit more tricky because you need to focus on the problem you want to solve right now. I have a lot more context about AAA in my book, The Self-Care Mindset, and more examples on how to use the tool, but for now, think of it this way. What's the next problem you have to solve? Is it, “what do I need so I can revisit my resume?” Is it, “what do I need so I can feel confident that I'm a valuable contributor to a team?”
The way you ask this question must be directed towards what you are working to achieve, because how you ask questions becomes the answer your mind will look for. In this case, it’s the next opportunity where your amazing self can contribute to the collective success of the people you work with.
Short-term challenges versus long-term change:
Maybe what we’re seeing right now is the great re-alignment, where we start to align people, purpose, productivity, and performance from a place that’s more care-driven from the inside out. Where the inner culture reflects the outer culture and where we are not driven by quick reactions to fixing problems but rather take a step back before we respond so that we can make more meaningful and discerning decisions.
The question we all need to start asking is “how do we cultivate more work-life quality in the face of the constantly changing and challenging reality that we live in?” Instead of fixing what's not working right now, let's fix work so we can cultivate growth because people belong and work better together.
For organizations that means building a care-driven culture where money isn't driving people decisions, but rather people drive money decisions. Saving money is one way for the profits to look better, but for how long? When we focus on results rather than how we reach the results, we miss out on harnessing our human advantage. That’s how we spend money better, not by pushing people harder, but by asking them what they need to be high-performers during a time of crisis. Listening to their input is how we can rethink growth together.
Saving money to show profits is about solving the right problem, which means building long-term sustainable success through supporting people in being at their best and having the tools to be more agile together.
