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.
As we approach the holidays and the year comes to a close, it's natural to start looking ahead to 2019.
Our focus shifts to New Year's Resolutions and what comes next for us in our lives and careers. I mean, just walk into any stationary store and you’re bombarded with 2019 planners - it’s hard not to think about it.
While it's important to be forward thinking and get serious about your goals, I encourage you not to let 2018 go so quickly.
If you're anything like me, you hold a lot of thoughts in your head. You're constantly thinking about the future, wondering how you're going to get where you want to go, wondering what things will look like a year or 5 years from now, etc.
With all those thoughts bouncing around, it's easy to get caught up there in our minds, mulling things over, over-analyzing, and staying stuck. When things feel disorganized, it can lead us to avoid taking action and just continue putting one foot in front of the other.
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.
