Can losing your job really be the best thing to happen to you? A tale of Hope.

THIS IS ALL ABOUT HOPE.

When you first lose your job you probably aren’t thinking it’s the best thing that’s happened. Far from it. I certainly wasn’t feeling like it was a great thing when I was made redundant, Or when I found myself out of work yet again a year later.

So why do I still believe this could be a good thing?

Well it’s a tale of hope. And it’s an exploration of the power of having hope. And it’s the story of how amazing human beings can be when faced with adversity.

The key words in the book title are Could Be. Losing your job Could Be a great thing, if you want it to be. If you start to rethink your situation. If you start to believe in yourself more than ever before. If you do the work, on yourself. If you want it to be all ok, you can make that happen. It’s a choice.

No-one is coming to save you. There is no-one you can moan at, complain to, blame. Your future is now fully in your control. And that can be terrifying. But if you give yourself a chance, it can be liberating. It can feel ok.

It’s not an overnight thing. It takes work. It takes belief.

But its possible.

When one door closes…

Before you can leap into all the greatness of opportunity and space this closing door is giving you, you do need to say goodbye properly. When a door closes you are going through a loss, through grief. Shock will come & go and manifest in all kinds of ways. I lost my hearing!

Acknowledge you are in shock. Give yourself some space to breathe & look after yourself. You need to be in tip top condition when you are ready to go and get out there with gusto.

It’s not a linear process. It’s not get made redundant, brush off CV, get new dream job. You are dealing with many emotions,many decisions, a lot of pressure and you are dealing with you.

You might not have had this much time to think about things before. You have filled your time with stuff, work, routines, stuff to make work happen. Busyness. And now you have space to think. You have to think, because your thoughts are guiding you to an answer, to help you solve this problem.

Worry will come & go. Your thoughts will drift from being OK to panic to OK to not OK.

But it is you in control of your thoughts.

You can work on the chatter inside your head. You can work on dialling down worry and dialling up hope.

Dialling up hope will bring you closer to an answer.

You can worry all day, have sleepness nights, cry, panic, feel despair.

Or you can work on dialling it down. Telling yourself it will be ok.

Dialling up hope will put you in a better position to think clearly, be focused, get that job you want.

It’s not easy. But it’s possible.

And if you do start to work on yourself, it’s an investment you’ve got for life. Once you start to understand that you have more control over what happens to you, how you respond and how you can deal with life stuff, it never goes away.

You can only keep getting stronger, and braver, and bolder.

Small, gentle steps of hope

But. Right now. Right now, when you are raw that you have just lost your job this might feel out of reach. So that’s why we start with hope. Hope is easy to have.

Start every day with hope that this will all be OK. Tell yourself ‘ today I’m going to be ok’ because you will be.

Open up to opportunity, and living out of your comfort zone.

Start to get curious, and brave.

Know what you want, tell people, ask for help.

8 GENTLE STEPS TO MOVING ON

It’s a shock. Embrace the shock. You don’t have to be instantly positive about it.
You can wallow for a little bit, give yourself a break. Looking after yourself is an important part of moving on.
Get a notebook and start writing for 10 minutes each day. Write everything that comes into your head. Everything. How you feel. Thoughts. Ideas. Scribble it out.
Create time to think about you, and what you want to happen next. Just 10 minutes a day is all you need. Place in your mind the question ‘what do I need right now, what do I want?’. Play with it.
Don’t jump into creating a CV straight away. Instead write down all the things you loved about your job, all the things you are good at. the best moments of your career so far.
Think about what your ideal tomorrow would look like. If everything came together and your perfect scenario happened tomorrow, what would it be.
Do 1 – 3 things to help you every day – no more than 3. Break that overwhelming list of 52 things to do before 4pm into 3 top priorities for the day. Do them and do them really well.
You have choices: You can Stick, Twist, Bust your career. These are all positive decisions when you own them. And the are not final. You can keep refining your career. You can keep doing the work and move towards the place you want to be. The point is you have choices.

THIS COULD BE AN OPPORTUNITY TO START SOMETHING NEW

And this is how Another Door was created. I write down what I was learning, processing, putting into practise. And I opened up to getting things wrong, rejection, failure and a few times things going right!

When you get made redundant you go through a few stages as you process what has happened.

Another Door is five chapters (five steps) Shock, Stuck, Slow Go, Unstuck and Thrive. I created this structure when I felt like I kept getting things in the wrong order. For example getting a business coach when I didn’t have a business (but this lead me to get a business coach when I did, and that was game changing! – so even your mistakes will be part of your success).

Everyone goes through these chapters at different pace, for different reasons. And each chapter can mean very different things for people. Shock can be expressed in many different ways, for example, worry, self-belief, anger even humour. Thrive is experienced in different ways, for example, happiness, fulfilment, safety or wealth and health.

Structure is important to moving on well. We have lost our routine that enabled us to do work. But we still need it. We need routine and structure to help us do the work to move on. That’s why I created Another Door & designed the programme to encourage structure.

If you give yourself some thinking time, even if its just 10 minutes a day over breakfast, you can start to ponder what you really want out of this situation.

Think about this question for a few minutes…

WHAT WOULD BE THE BEST THING THAT COULD HAPPEN FOR YOU RIGHT NOW?

What did you think of? ‘Winning lottery (is that really the best thing?), a change in career, an amazing opportunity abroad, a job closer to home, starting a new business.’

Why is it the best thing that could happen?
If your ideal scenario could happen tomorrow are you clear what that would be?
Why is that the best thing?

Ask yourself why and get a deeper understanding of things you want to change or keep in your life. The things that are important to you.

Lots of people will tell you losing their job was the best thing to happen to them. You can join that club too.

It all starts with a little bit of hope. And then asking yourself what you really want. And then being brave enough to believe it might actually happen.

Thank you for being curious and reading this.

You’ve already started to grow your hope into an idea.

eleanor