If you’ve been reading the news or your LinkedIn feed, you’ve likely seen the layoffs happening across the tech industry. Maybe you yourself have been impacted. Whether this is your first layoff or you’ve been a part of one before, the experience can be quite disheartening.
You go from having a full work day to hours on hours of open time. You had a group of colleagues you worked with daily and suddenly you’re no longer interacting with those folks on a regular basis. There are moments when your new found freedom feels amazing - and others when it’s absolutely brutal.
So how do you support yourself through it?
Below are some ways in which I’ve been taking care of myself throughout my own layoff journey. Hope you find them helpful too!
In business, there is an exercise called Stop, Start, Continue. The purpose of the exercise is to enable teams to give feedback, clarify priorities, and create agreed upon next steps. By putting all of these ideas out in the open, it’s easier to get everyone on the same page about what action needs to be taken. It’s often used at the end of project sprints or the end of a quarter to help teams self-evaluate and improve upon processes for the next project or quarter ahead.
It can also be a helpful exercise for your own self-reflection.
We’re all experiencing grief right now. It might look and feel a bit different from what normally comes to mind when we think of “grief”, but ultimately that’s what it is.
We’re grieving the loss of life - both the actual loss of life of those who have died of COVID-19, as well as the sudden loss of our “normal” lives. It feels like overnight the world we knew changed and we’re mourning what we once took for granted like meeting friends for dinner, going to the gym, or even shaking hands with someone we just met. Many of us are grieving the loss of stable income and aren’t sure when we’ll be able to find jobs again.
We’re also grieving the loss of the futures we had in mind for ourselves - whether it’s postponing a wedding or graduation, changes to who is allowed in the delivery room when giving birth, the move we were supposed to make, or the new job we were supposed to start. We had plans and dreams that suddenly seemed to have vanished or have drastically changed on us.
Nothing feels certain - other than the fact that we’re experiencing grief.
As we deal with our own grief, it’s important to remember that in many ways this is a collective grief. Every single one of us is affected by this pandemic in our own way.
This is particularly important to remember when it comes to work.
How are you holding up, friend?
I hope you’ve been finding ways to have fun and appreciate the good things in life amidst all of this uncertainty. To help you feel inspired and hopefully discover some new things to keep you occupied in quarantine, I’ve pulled together a list of things I’ve been loving lately.
Each item on the list is something I’ve personally been using for inspiration, stress management, or just for fun.
Over the past week, several friends and clients have mentioned the difficulty they’re having adjusting to working from home. Maybe you’re feeling that way too?
As someone who has spent a few years working from home and on distributed teams, I thought it might be helpful to share my best do’s and don’ts of working from home to help make your adjustment easier.
Here’s what I’ve found to work well.
A few weeks ago I had the honor of being a panelist for an episode of the One Idea Away livecast + podcast, a community and podcast created by iPEC (the coaching program I attended). I'd never been part of a panel podcast episode before and it was a super cool experience!
It was so much fun connecting with a couple of other iPEC coaches and talking all about what happens when you realize that the thing you thought you wanted in life isn't in fact what you want. We share our own stories and experiences, as well as advice for helping you pivot and figure out what you actually want to be doing instead.
When we enter the working world for the first time, we show up with a lot of assumptions about (but little understanding of) how the corporate world works. Sometimes these expectations are met, but a lot of the time they aren’t – leaving us confused and wishing someone had told us what to really expect before we even started.
Well, as a former sales rep turned career coach, I’ve learned that there are several things no one tells you about the first 5 years of your career. After spending much of those years really confused (maybe how you’re feeling now) and constantly soul-searching, below are 4 things I wish someone had given me a heads up about when I was starting my career:
This past weekend I had some very special visitors: my dear friends Rachel and Kristen from Clarity on Fire! They'd never been to Boston before, so between client meetings I played tour guide, running them all around the city and showing them my favorite spots! We even went on a walking tour with a guide dressed up in Revolutionary era attire - feel free to quiz any one of us on our Boston knowledge as we're now experts!
In honor of their visit, I thought this week's blog post was the perfect time to share my interview on their brand new podcast, the Clarity on Fire Podcast!
Hey friends!
I'm a big advocate of my clients taking time to celebrate when they reach their goals (rather than just moving onto the next), so I thought I'd take my own advice today and celebrate reaching a goal of mine!
At the beginning of the year, I made a goal to be on at least 5 podcasts in 2018 (hence why it may seem like I've been on the podcast circuit as of late). As an avid listener and some one who enjoys connecting with new people, I absolutely LOVE recording podcast episodes! They're a fun way to have really interesting conversations with awesome people!
On our quest to find a fulfilling career, our younger selves can serve as amazing guides.
When we were young, the world was our oyster. We had likes and dislikes, and images of our adult selves that we came up with before the world told us how we "should" be.
We had this little internal compass that pointed us towards things that felt good to us on a soul-level - even though we didn't necessarily know the term "soul-level" at the time. We just did what felt natural, what felt right for us. We didn't worry about whether or not that would turn into an "acceptable" career path one day.
This week I'm very excited to share my conversation with Kelly Goldhorn of the Millennial Revolution Podcast!
Kelly and I met via Instagram and I loved her idea for the Millennial Revolution Podcast! Kelly was feeling burnt out at her 9-to-5 and wanted to start talking to people who had created a different, more autonomous way of living their lives and making money. So she set out to create a podcast interviewing millennials about their career stories and how they became their own bosses or followed their dreams.
For most of my life I was very focused on New Year's resolutions. Or at least I tried to be...
Around this time of year, I would think about all of the things I wanted to change about myself or be better at and I’d write a list.
Past items on my resolution lists include things like:
I’d write them down neatly in a journal, attempt to maintain them for a few days and then, within a week, I’d fall off track or completely forget about them.
We live in a culture that views careers as a straight line in forward motion. There is even a phrase for what you are “supposed” to do throughout your career: climb the corporate ladder.
Ah yes, the corporate ladder.
We are all so familiar with this phrase that we don’t give much thought to it. We just absorb it into our vocabulary and assume we’ll do what it describes: Start at the bottom. Look up. And keep climbing through positions until we get to the most senior level possible.
You know those times when you’re so set in one way of doing something that you’re almost blind to alternative ways of looking at it? And yet, the way you’re going about something just isn’t working for you?
In these cases, you’re so fixated on the way things are that it's as if you don’t have access to changing your perspective. The more you focus on the problem, the more it seems to stay and the less you're able to see alternatives. It often takes something or someone outside of yourself to access a new mindset or perspective that, when you look back at it, often seems pretty logical or even obvious. Sometimes it comes from a comment made by a friend. Sometimes it comes from reading a page in a book. Sometimes the Universe smacks you upside the head.
How did I not see it that way before?!
