Page 1 of 6
Welcome to the Get a 6-Figure Job You Love Podcast. This is episode 113: When you’re laid off or fired, what to do next day? Tuned.
Hey there, welcome to the Get a 6-Figure Job You Love Podcast. I’m your host, Natalie Fisher. I’m a certified career mindset coach who also happens to want to skip all the BS and get to what it really takes to create real results for you and your career. On this podcast, you will create real mindset shifts that will lead to big results and big changes in your career and your income. No fluff here. If you want to get a 6-figure job you love and create real concrete results in your industry and make a real impact, you’re in the right place. Are you ready? Let’s go.
Hello. So glad you’re here. So glad you keep coming back. And even if you haven’t been laid off or fired, this applies if you’ve been dumped, if you’ve broken up with someone, or if you decided to leave, it doesn’t matter. When something ends in your life and there’s a big change happening, this is going to be helpful. So listen anyway. Or if you know someone who’s been laid off, the reason I’m doing this episode is because there’s been a lot of layoffs lately and I feel like layoffs happen all the time. People get fired every day. And I’m actually wondering why I haven’t done one of these before because it’s a question I get a lot.
So the first thing people tend to want to do, depending on how you are, I find people either want to go into action right away, start applying like crazy action, action, action. That’s what I did when I was laid off. Or they want to seethe in their emotions around what happened. And it depends on how it happened. If you felt that you were wrong, if you felt this was really unfair, if you felt it shouldn’t have happened, if you have any of those thoughts, then your emotions are going to be really high. And probably you do have some of those thoughts and that’s normal if you were laid off or fired or dumped or whatever if it wasn’t your choice, you’re probably going to be feeling bad about it. And that’s okay. It’s normal. You should feel bad about it. You’re a human, right? If you didn’t feel bad about it, you might be a sociopath or something. So it’s normal that you would feel bad.
So the main thing I see is people are just, they don’t give themselves any time or space or grace to just process the emotions. And sometimes that’s really necessary. You might not be ready to jump into action yet. If you had an interview the next day, you might not be in the best head space to get that job because your emotions might be really high. Now, I could be wrong. Depends who you are. Depends how your personality is. You might be fine or you might be still seething about it. You might still have some unresolved emotional energy, it just depends on your situation.
But anyway, I want to give you permission on the day that you’re fired or let go, you can just be that day. You don’t have to rush into action. A day is not going to make a difference, okay? And it’s better that you clean up your mind, you clean up your emotions so that when you do go back out there, you are going to be in the best possible position and you’re going to have the best possible chance to capitalize on the best opportunities that could come your way. So you don’t have to jump into action right away. You really don’t. Give yourself a day, a couple days. It’s normal to have to process these emotions.
So the reason why people do that is because often the emotions are emotions of panic, like, Oh my God, what am I going to do? How am I going to pay bills?” They go right into scarcity. Actually, this is what I saw when I was laid off. So in 2014, which is what led me to actually start this business and actually start coaching, was when I was laid off because I saw this mass layoff and I saw how everybody responded and acted differently and I saw their results so clearly and how different they each were. So when that happens, when you’re laid off, the emotions are going to be running high. We can expect that to happen, right? And what I did right away was I was calm. I just had this calm sense of knowing.
Page 2 of 6
I remember I was sitting there in the room, everybody came in. We were told that it was just an all hands meeting, regular all hands meeting, nothing different about it, although there were some people that we did not recognize sitting in there. So we knew something was up, but we had no idea what. And the CEO came up, he announced he was closing the company down and then he was passing it over to this woman who was the head of the company who was helping with the layoffs and the transition and the whole thing. So he passed it off to her and then he left. She was trying to answer our questions, but of course she couldn’t answer all of our questions.
The CEO probably should have stayed around to answer those questions, but he was very uncomfortable so he left. We were all left there in the room and we were told, “Your severance packages are at the back. You can collect them on your way out. And this new company,” I don’t remember what they were called, “you’ll have their contact information. You can set up meeting with the career counselor there. You can go to a workshop to help you find your new job.”
I remember how awful they were and how demotivating they were and how they were just terrible, which is another reason why I was inspired to start my company because I was like, “I could help people so much better than this.” The woman was just very demotivating to people. But anyways, she thought she was being realistic. She thought she was being well meaning and nice, right? She thought she was preparing people for what to expect, but really she was just giving them her limiting beliefs.
So anyway, I observed everybody just react totally differently. So some people cried. Some people were angry. Some people were just wanting to say goodbye to everyone and connect with the other people in the room. Some people left right away in a panic and grabbed their severance and ran out. It was just really interesting to watch everybody’s different reactions. And I sat there calm. And I sat there and I was like, “You know what? We’re all going to be fine.” And I just knew that. And in that moment I was like, “Okay, so what’s next?” And I started to feel excited. I wasn’t scared. I was like, “Yeah, I’ve never had a problem getting a job before. I wonder what’s next. This will be fun. Okay, cool.”
I don’t know. Maybe I was getting a little… At the end we could tell that things were not the same. Things were slow. We were told to pause a lot of things. So there were some little signs, but we never knew that everybody was going to get laid off. We thought maybe some people would, but we never expected the whole company to close. That was a big shock. So the way that I coped was I did go into action the next day, but I wasn’t feeling all the emotions, like the negative emotions of anger or sadness or anything like that. I was like, “Yeah, it’s okay. We’re all going to stay connected.” They made a Facebook group and everyone’s stayed connected. We actually ended up all going to the bar that night or whoever wanted to join, ended up having a fun party. Some people were really, really upset though still.
So I was just never one of those people who was upset about it because I was like, “You know what? This is just how it’s meant to go. There’s lots of other opportunity out there,” right? And it was really interesting to watch the people who were super angry because they spent a lot of time, their brains spent a lot of time complaining about how the CEO should have stayed around, about how he should have answered questions, about how he should have warned us sooner about how he should have, should have, should have, should have, how he should have done all these things differently, right?
I remember thinking, “Yeah, he probably should have, but he didn’t, and now we’re here. So what are we going to do now?” That’s all I was focused on. I was like, “Yeah, all that is irrelevant information. Yeah, that’s all true, but so what?” And I noticed the people whose brains wanted to stay there for a really long time, that they were the ones who made the slowest progress. So their attention wasn’t on the future. It was on the past. They were very past focused. And by being past focused, you stop yourself from creating in the future because your brain only has so much bandwidth. So when you
Page 3 of 6
focused on the past and you seethe in the past and you complain about the past, you’ll be able to tell if you’re talking about it a lot, if you’re complaining about it a lot.
I see on LinkedIn a lot people write entire posts complaining about being ghosted, complaining about how they were laid off, about how it was really disrespectful, about how it was really unfair. I’m not arguing that any of that stuff sucks and is not human decency. It’s awful. It shouldn’t happen. I wish it didn’t happen either. I’m not arguing any of that. I’m saying that sucks, right? But that’s on the people who do it, right? That’s on the person who did it, right? It’s not about you. And in no way does it serve you to be there. In no way does it serve you to complain about it. In no way does it serve you to vent about it.
And there’s that misconception people think, “Oh, venting is helpful. It’s going to help me get it all out.” That’s just the belief you have. You’re like, “Yeah, if I vent, it helps me.” I mean maybe, but as long as you move on quickly, if you vent and you’re like, “Okay, that’s I,” it’s like you’re throwing it in the garbage okay. But then don’t sit there and look at your garbage. Just throw it out, put it on the garbage truck, it’s gone, right? Don’t sit there and dissect the garbage because that’s what a lot of people do. Because while they’re doing that, that’s comfortable, right? It’s comfortable, it’s familiar, it feels good. It’s like indulgent. So it’s like an indulgent thing to do.
The thing that really is going to get you where you’re going next is shifting your brain completely onto what’s going to serve you next. And what is going to serve you next is going to be rebuilding up your confidence, taking stock of all the value that you’ve brought, reminding yourself that that layoff had nothing to do with you personally. Connecting with the people that have been laid off to try to help them out and capitalize on their networks and generally be the person who’s going to be helping them so that they can help you. Like, somebody started a Facebook group for all of us to connect in and I found that helpful. There was a lot of complaining in there too, but I found it really helpful because people were asking questions about the tax benefits or how the tax works on the severance. And it was just facts. “I just want to know this, can someone answer this?” Those things were helpful, versus the complaining, right?
We as humans spend way too much time complaining. the time we spend complaining is the time we don’t spend moving on, right? And that’s why there’s also the processing the emotion piece. Because yes, the emotions are going to feel bad and that’s a normal part of being human. We’re not here to just feel great all the time. So processing emotion is different than complaining or venting, okay? Processing emotion, and I’ll share with you what that is, an emotion is just an electrical charge through your body. It’s just an energetic feeling that you get comes from a thought. And to process that you just need to feel it.
I didn’t understand what this meant for a really long time, but most people are trying to push it away, avoid it, drink alcohol so they don’t feel it, eat food so they don’t feel it. But really it’s not a big deal. You can feel it sometimes by crying. I like to dance it out. So I like to put on a great song and just dance around the room. Sometimes that makes me cry too. And then it subsides, it passes, it goes away. So that’s processing the emotion. That’s healthy, that’s productive, that’s good, versus complaining and spinning on a loop about how unfair things were, how screwed you are because of how unfair things were. Catastrophizing, going into the worst case scenario of what could potentially happen now because of this. So that’s unhealthy.
So processing emotion and complaining, venting, catastrophizing are not helpful. Processing emotion is. And then the processing emotion is what you need to do to move forward, right? So on the first day you’re laid off or fired, you’re probably not going to be in the best space to go right out there and take action. So probably processing emotion would be a good move for that day or for as long as you need to, right? It will go away. I promise you it will go away. And that’s something else helpful that I tell myself is,
Page 4 of 6
“This is just temporary. This is okay. This is being human. I’m just going to process this emotion and it’s going to go away,” right? And joyful emotions are coming. They always come back. So that’s what you want to do is. Process the emotion and then you can move forward.
And what ends up happening when you do that is you are so much clearer, right? You’re like, “Okay, I’m clear.” So then when you want to do next is you want to decide what you want next. You want to decide very intentionally, “What salary do I want to make? What job do I want to do? Maybe this is an opportunity to change industries or change careers. Maybe I get to now do what I always wanted to do. I have more experience now.” You want to document the experience that you’ve gained ever since. You work there and now you’re laid off so you’ve got lots more experience than you had before. So you want to take stock of that, and that’s what I call building your confidence back up after this happens, right?
And then you want to start to feel those positive emotions of excitement. You want to think your way into feeling a different emotion after you’ve processed it. And you’ll know if you’re ready for this if it starts to feel like the natural next step, right? So you get to feel excitement. Like if you think the thoughts that make you feel these things, you get to feel these feelings too. And this is normal. A lot of people do feel excitement, curiosity, like, “Oh, I wonder what’s next for me. I wonder what could happen. I wonder where I could be in three years now because this happened. Imagine if this really could be the best thing that ever happened to me.”
Now it’s hard to get there especially in the beginning when it’s just happened right? Like when my first boyfriend broke up with me or whatever, if you had tried to tell me at that point that, “This is actually the best thing that’s ever happened to you,” I wouldn’t have believed you. I would’ve argued and I just would’ve been like, “Whatever. Screw you. I just want to be sad about this This sucks. Leave me alone,” right? I wasn’t done processing the emotion and I also wasn’t very emotionally mature or open to that stuff. I wasn’t very open to anything at that point, right? I was just like, “Ugh, this sucks. This is the worst thing ever. Leave me alone,” right? So you’re going to go through that time maybe. And if you don’t, that’s great, like I didn’t. When I was laid off, I was like, “I’m going to be fine. Everyone’s going to be fine. Everyone in this room is really smart. They got hired here.”
I worked in HR there so I have a really good idea of how they got hired and what they had to do to get hired and how they were really talented and brilliant and passed through this process that we had. So I was like, “I’m really not worried about any of them. They all have what it took to get hired again.” But the reason why some of them took a year or more was because of their mindset. Their mindset was just really bad. They were focused on the wrong things, right? And when I say bad, it didn’t serve them. They were focused on venting, complaining, being in scarcity, being afraid, being fearful, being needy. It’s going to take them way longer if they’re like that. And that’s what I saw. It was so clear, right?
So what the people did that were really successful were they just started taking stock of their accomplishments, everything they’d gained. Quickly updated their resume, started making connections with people that they knew, connected with the group regularly, had a bunch of stuff they did. I call it inspired action. It’s like when you’re feeling good, when you’re feeling confident, when you’re feeling excited, curious, you’re going to have different things that you want to do, right? You’re going to think differently. You’re going to think who to reach out to. You’re going to think what to apply for. You’re going to think where to go online. You’re going to have what’s called inspired action, but that only comes when you’re feeling positive about the future, when you have a positive belief about the future.
If you have a really negative sad-sacky belief about the future and you’ve been catastrophizing a lot, then you might know what to do, but the way that you take the action isn’t going to be as effective. And especially when you show up for the interview, it won’t be as effective. So once you’ve done all that, once you’ve processed and gone through that stuff and you’re ready to take action, you will be in a much better space to do it.
Page 5 of 6
So what’s going to be needed for you to be successful at this is you’re just going to need to have a clean awareness of what I’ve talked about here. So know that you’re human, it’s okay, you’re going to have feel emotions and that’s fine. You want to process the emotions and feel them. And then you’ll be ready to move on when you know you’re ready to move on, right? You’ll be moving on from a better space and you’ll get yourself ready to go. And you can even get into that excited, curious energy for like, “Oh my goodness, I get to do whatever I want now. I have so much more experience than I had before. The fact that I was laid off has nothing to do with my value. That was all on them.” And I mean, in my case, I was like, “All these other people got laid off too.” I didn’t really have a thought about it being my value, but some people do. Some people are like, “Well, if I had been better at my job, I would’ve stayed,” especially if not everybody got laid off, right?
But there’s definitely an easy way to turn this around if you’re open and receptive to it, right? If you want to stay in the sad-sacky energy and the complaining and the venting, then you will stay there, right? If you’re like, “Eh, I just don’t care. I just want to stay here,” then you will, right? But there’s an easy way to turn it around if you’re open to it, right?
Inside my program, the first thing that we do is we go through that intentional self confidence module where we build up your confidence. Again, it’s a proven process to create intentional self confidence on demand. And you go through that and you will feel completely differently afterwards. Completely differently. And it’s just by making you think about stuff you haven’t thought about before in a way you haven’t thought about it before and seeing your value in a way that you didn’t see it before, right?
So what you’ll need to do is you’ll need to have an awareness around what your mind is doing. Is it going to the sad-sacky energy? Is it complaining? Is it venting? Is it spinning in thoughts like, “This is unfair. It shouldn’t have happened. I was wronged. I’m a victim,” like kind of the victim mentality? I mean, it won’t show up like that. You won’t tell yourself you’re a victim, but you’ll be in like sad-sacky, “Ugh, this is so unfair. They should have done it better. Blah, blah, blah, blah, blah,” right? And like I said in the beginning, that might all be true. I’m sure your complaints are valid complaints, but it’s not going to serve you at all. It’s not relevant at all, because ultimately you’re responsible for moving forward. And you get to be excited about that. Why not?
So you’re going to need a keen awareness of that. You’re going to need to understand how to process an emotion. You’re going to need to be willing to do that. And then you’re going to need to take inspired action. The results that you’re going to create are a much better experience, which also means that you’re going to create a much better result. I heard a quote that says, “The person who enjoys walking will walk a lot farther than the person who just enjoys the destination.”
So say the job search is you have to walk a certain amount of time or until you get to the job. If you don’t enjoy the walking, then you’re not going to walk that far. You’re not going to walk as far. And I mean you’ll get to the destination, but I mean this is why it takes people so long because they’re not enjoying that walk. They don’t enjoy walking. They don’t enjoy the job hunt. They’re not getting anything from it. They just think it’s a thing that they want to end soon, right? They’re not enjoying it. And when they’re not enjoying it, they’re not actually moving as fast on it. They’re actually moving slower because they don’t enjoy it, right?
So this is kind of to set you up to enjoy the experience. But also inside my program, we have a community in there and we meet weekly and we talk about this stuff. Every time you come to a call and you leave the call, you feel refreshed with new thinking, right? When you feel refreshed with new thinking, it’s like you’ve been recharged, right? So you’re recharged and then you get to go out there again and you have a fresh mind. You have fresh things to apply, you have a new sense of what it’s like now. It’s like you’ve taken a big giant step forward instead of little tiny steps forward, right? And that’s
Page 6 of 6
why people inside my community are landing interviews. They’re landing offers. They’re doing this all the time.
And it’s not a surprise. And it’s happening quickly because of the way that we’ve set up this community to enjoy the walk, right? They are making changes in other parts of their lives too, right? So not only do they change the way that they think about their career or their job search, but they change the way that they think about situations that otherwise they wouldn’t have enjoyed, right? So when an unexpected thing comes up and they’re like, they post in the community saying, “I was going to do this, but then I decided to think this. The vacation I took was so much better because of this tool that we work with inside the community.” So it changes everything. And when you change one thing in your life, you get to change everything else because you have that meta skill.
So you just get to enjoy the destination or you get to enjoy the journey to every destination that you’re working towards. And really our life is more of a journey than a destination. It’s like we work, work, work to get the job, then we’re like, “Yay, we got the job” and we celebrate for five minutes and then we’re on our next thing, right? It’s like it’s an achiever mindset that we mostly have. I have an achiever mindset too and I love achieving, but I’ve also learned to slow down and really love the process and see what can I get. How much can I actually get from this process? How much can I actually enjoy it? How much can I actually love it? The coincidence here is when you do that, you get to your results so much faster, because like I said, the person who enjoys walking is going to walk so much more than the person who just wants to get to the destination.
And so it sounds counterintuitive, but this is how it works. You don’t even know you’re doing it. You’ll just be at your destination one day and be like, “Oh, I’m here already. Cool. Oh, I didn’t realize it. Awesome,” right? And then it’ll be exciting because you’ll get to set your next goal and your next goal. It doesn’t have to take long at all. That’s on you how long it takes. It really is. I know people think it’s like, “Oh, I can’t control who hires me. I can’t control the economy. I can’t control what companies are hiring. I can’t control…” And it’s like there’s so much you can control. There’s so much you can control, you don’t need to control all those individual things because there’s a whole big world and there’s a whole big universe. You just need to control what’s going on in your mind, right? And that’s what we do. That’s what we work on.
So if you are ready to join us, we are having a call Tuesday, 2:00 PM. Link in the show notes to join. It’s www.nataliefisher.ca/start. You could be on the call with us next Tuesday. Or if you’re listening to this podcast on the day that it comes out, you could be on the call tomorrow with us and I will coach you directly. So I hope to see you in there. If you’ve just been laid off or if you know someone who’s been laid off, share this episode with them, it will really help them. And I can’t wait to see you in there. Otherwise, I’ll talk to you next week. Bye-bye.
If I were to sum it up, I would say the most common thing people come to me with is, “I’m going on interview after interview after interview and I’m not getting the offer. What am I doing wrong?” So I’ve put together a freebie where you can get this download completely free. It has the eight reasons that this is happening and I break down each reason very specifically and how to fix it. So to grab that download, the link is in the show notes. You can click on that link. You just have to enter your information. It’s called The Eight Reasons You’re Not Getting Hired, and I will help you figure that out. I will see you in the freebie. Okay, talk to you soon.