Carolyn Birsky
How To Take Care Of Yourself Post-Layoff

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!

How To Take Care Of Yourself Post-Layoff
Carolyn Birsky
Start, Stop, Continue, + Support

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.

Start, Stop, Continue, + Support
Carolyn Birsky
How To Support Your Grieving Team

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 To Support Your Grieving Team
Carolyn Birsky
What I'm Loving Lately: Quarantine Edition

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.

What I'm Loving Lately: Quarantine Edition
Carolyn Birsky
The Do's And Don'ts Of Working From Home

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.

The Do's And Don'ts Of Working From Home

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Open Up: Mindset Shifts & "Ah Ha" Moments

Open Up: Mindset Shifts & "Ah Ha" Moments

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?!

September Is The New January

September Is The New January

Well, it's that time of year again, when we say so long to summer Fridays and trade in our bikinis and flip flops for toasty scarves and pumpkin spice lattes. We may get a few more warm days, but the weather is very noticeably changing. Have you seen how quickly it's getting dark in the evenings now?!

Beyond the obvious shift in weather, the changing of seasons brings a shift in energy as well.

Summer's energy is very carefree - all about doing things that bring us pleasure, whether that be travel, lying on the beach or impromptu outdoor dinner parties with friends. Fall's energy, however, is much more focused. Now that our summer plans have come to an end, our focus shifts to getting back to our normal lives and routines. That "back to school" vibe is in the air, and even if we're no longer in school ourselves, the energy is still around us.

For some of us, this transition can make us feel a bit sad - like we're saying goodbye to an old friend. However, I happen see it as an opportunity.