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.
Happy Summer friends!
Okay, maybe it's not technically summer yet, but Memorial Day Weekend always feels like the official kickoff to me. Parades, pools opening, warmer weather, frosé all day - you know, the signs that summer is coming!
In an effort to help you make this the best. summer. ever. for your personal and professional development, I've put together a list of the things that I'm LOVING right now!
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!
This week I'm trying something new. I had an idea for a blog post, but I knew my passion would come through more if I talked about it than wrote about it. So I recorded a little riff on the topic that you can listen to on your way to work or during a quick coffee break.
At the time that I recorded this, I wasn't sure what to call this sort of riff, but I've decided to call it #compassroses to line up with the questions and statements that I post on Instagram.
We've all experienced it: that dragging your feet, do-anything-but-this, one more scroll on Instagram feeling when you really need to get something done, but damn it you really don't want to.
I know this feeling intimately. I can think of many times in my corporate life where I'd do every other task I needed to do except for make the cold calls that I really didn't want to do, but had to do for my job. I do it now, when I think of any excuse to stay in bed and not go to the gym.
Since starting a business, I've had to get really familiar with my motivators and my own excuses.
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.
Happy Galentine's Day, ladies!
Given that this day is all about female friendship (and since I just wrote a blog post on making friends the other week), I thought I'd focus on a different female friendship in your life: the one you have with yourself.
Knowing I wanted to focus on self-love today, I'd been struggling to find a way to talk about it that felt different from my self-love blog post from last year. Then all of a sudden, a good friend emailed me a piece written by Tama Kieves for Oprah.com about how she talks to herself when fear creeps in. I opened the link and a lightbulb went off! This piece contained the exact message I needed to hear in that moment and it gave me inspiration for a fresh take on a self-love blog post.
Adulthood is filled with lots of things you never thought you'd have to do when you were dreaming up your post-college life, such as:
Just to name a few.
Interestingly, the topic of how difficult it can be to make new friends as an adult has been coming up a lot lately in my conversations with both friends and acquaintances alike. No idea why. Maybe to prompt me to write a blog post about it?
