Keeping Your Head After Losing Your Job (5 page)

Bad moments and painful feelings may come and go. You can avoid being hijacked by them if you can realize that they are temporary, they will not destroy you, you don’t have to escalate them, you can observe them, and you can distract yourself with other activities rather than getting pulled away by what you are feeling.

EXERCISE: USING REWARDING ACTIVIES—YOUR REWARD MENU

Improving the moment is a big step in improving your life. Here’s how to work through achieving that:

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Make a list of rewarding activities that you might want to do.

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Add to this list every day, if you can.

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Notice when you are having a bad moment that you could do one of these rewarding activities.

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Spend some time improving the moment.

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Notice that moments come and go.

7: Accept the reality as it is given

Before you can move on to the next stage—before you can move from validating your feelings—you will have to accept the reality that is given. These are the cards that you have been dealt. In order to get to where you want to go, you have to start from where you are. The “given” right now is that you don’t have that job. It is a hard given for you, but we have to start somewhere. Accepting it as the given for now, means that you can give up—for now—protesting, blaming yourself, or waiting for things to change. Accepting it as the given for now means that you are going to turn it into a problem to solve, a place that is your starting point, a place that you will eventually leave behind.

There are a lot of things that we have learned to accept in life—traffic, unfairness, getting older, disappointments and losses. Accepting reality simply means that you recognize that it is what it is, without protesting or ruminating about it. For example, one client, Ted, found that his company was downsizing and he was laid off. He finally recognized that he had to live with what was given—however unfair and unpleasant it was. It was hard to accept, but there really wasn’t any better alternative. At least accepting it gave him a starting point: “Where do I go from here?”

Change begins with acceptance

Accepting reality doesn’t mean it is fair, it doesn’t mean it is good and it doesn’t mean that you are giving up. It simply means that you recognize you have a real thing to cope with and you need to take real action. In fact, accepting it as it is right now means that you are beginning to make progress on how to change it—and how to change your life.

When Ted was complaining about how unfair it was that he got fired, he only felt angry, sad, hopeless and helpless. Those feelings made sense. He’s human. But my thought for him was, ”Even if all these feelings make absolute sense, how long do you want to feel this way? How long do you want to be stuck at this point?” This doesn’t mean that he doesn’t have a right to his feelings. It only means that he has a right to make his life better. Even given what happened, he still has power to change the way he lives his life. You always have a choice—no matter what you are feeling right at this moment.

EXERCISE: ACCEPT AND MOVE ON

Change doesn’t mean that your feelings don’t matter. Change means that your feelings matter so much that you want to aim for something better. Use the list below to help you.

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Describe the reality that you are facing.

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What are the advantages of accepting it as a “given” for right now?

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Imagine that you stopped protesting how bad it was and started to plan how to make your life better. What would change?

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Complete this sentence: “It is what it is and now I can . . .”

8: Commit to making things better

There is no question that unemployment usually brings a lot of painful thoughts and feelings, and many people isolate themselves, criticize themselves and feel hopeless. Those are your feelings. You can look at coping with unemployment as a series of stages in moving forward. The first stage is the shock, disbelief and the pain of losing your job. Perhaps you could not believe that this was happening to you. The second stage might be all the painful feelings that you are having now—sadness, anxiety, hopelessness, anger. In this stage, you may be coping with the unhelpful behaviors we’ve already looked at: such as isolating yourself, remaining passive and inactive, staying in bed for long hours, sitting watching television endlessly, ruminating, drinking, over-eating, smoking, or complaining.

While you are in the second stage you can ask yourself if you want to stay there for more time—and you can recognize that you have the right and the freedom to do what you choose to do. But I am going to suggest you move on to a third stage: the stage of committing to change. In the third stage you recognize that you are unemployed and you are going to do everything you can to make your life better during this time between your last job and your next job. This is going to require a lot of work. It will be a challenge. It will mean doing things that you don’t want to do. You may be uncomfortable facing your fears, overcoming your shame, taking the initiative to reach out, trying new things, and perhaps acquiring new skills.

I know that it is hard for you being unemployed, but I am going to ask you to meet a challenge, beginning right now. Here is the challenge: “Are you willing to do things that are hard to do?” I am not asking you to simply relax and wait until you find a job. I am asking you to take on a new job. This job involves taking care of yourself. It means that you are going to have to do things, such as identifying what you are thinking, challenging your own negativity, changing the activities that you do, confronting your fears and anxieties, setting goals every day, every week and every month. It means that you are going to have to do things that you might find unpleasant to do.

Will you accept the challenge?

Here is the challenge: “Are you willing to do some things that you don’t want to do in order to make your life better?” In fact, I am going to suggest that unless you are doing things every day that might be a little hard or a little challenging, then you are not doing enough to take care of yourself. Do what is hard now so that it will be easier in the future.

Throughout this book I want you to realize that ultimately coping with losing your job is about two things: how you can feel better and how you can feel empowered. Losing your job does not mean that you have lost yourself. You are still the man or woman you were before. But this may be a hard time to cope and a lot of this will be up to you. I am going to ask you to consider taking on the new job of coping with unemployment by thinking and acting in ways that could be helpful for the rest of your life.

Think about this time between jobs as your “basic training” in the fight for your life. Think about it as an opportunity to develop the ability to change the way you think, focus on values that can empower your work and your relationships, and develop the ability to do what you don’t want to do, but that you know will be important for you to do. This time of losing your job may be the end of one experience but the beginning of a new way to live life.

EXERCISE: PREPARE TO MAKE CHANGES

Committing to change does not mean that your feelings are unimportant. It means that they are important enough that you are willing to do something about them. Answer the following questions:

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Are you stuck in feeling down, isolated, passive and feeling trapped?

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Would you be willing to do some new things to make a change?

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Would you be willing to be uncomfortable, set aside the past for now, and try to make a better life today?

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Are you willing to be flexible and creative in living a better life?

3

TAKE ACTION

You will remember from the second chapter that your feelings change depending on what you are doing. If you are isolating yourself in your house or apartment, lying around on the sofa, eating junk food, watching television and dwelling on your negative thoughts, then you are almost guaranteed to feel worse. Ken, who had been out of work a few years before I interviewed him, told me that the absolutely worst time of the day was when he got up in the morning: “I had nothing to do. I had all this time on my hands. I had nowhere to go.” Having nothing to do, nowhere to go, and feeling helpless about doing anything productive guaranteed that each day was a day in hell. Ken isolated himself because he felt ashamed of being unemployed. He just sat around, watching television and dwelling on the negative, until he felt “free” to leave his apartment at five in the afternoon; he believed others would not assume he was unemployed since people who worked would be out and about after five. He was a prisoner of his inactivity, his forced self-isolation and his shame.

One way of looking at depression is that your sad and painful feelings depend on how you respond to them. You can respond to negativity with more negativity or you can respond in more adaptive ways. You actually have a choice. You can either make things better or you can make things worse.

For example, let’s say that you feel sad. You respond to this by thinking, “No matter what I do, it won’t get better.” You then isolate yourself, do nothing but sit around by yourself, and engage in activities that are not rewarding—such as watching television and dwelling on the negative. You avoid facing the situation and close down. You feel worse, and then you just start the same pattern of isolation, passivity and avoidance, as a way of dealing with your new—and probably more intense—sad and painful feelings. The ironic thing is that you are maintaining your worst feelings because you think that doing anything new will make you feel even worse, so you trap yourself.

Let’s contrast this with a different strategy to deal with your sad feelings. This involves GETTING OUT, LIVING YOUR LIFE, and DOING SOMETHING. So let’s take this new approach to your sad feelings. Rather than isolating yourself, you GET OUT. Rather than shutting down living, you LIVE YOUR LIFE. And, rather than remaining passive and doing nothing, you DO SOMETHING. Keep in mind that if you feel sad and you avoid facing the situation and remain passive, you are likely to feel worse and worse. As explained earlier, when you are unemployed you are at great risk of depression, worry, anxiety, hopelessness, anger and feelings of helplessness. Your tendency might be to avoid facing the situation and isolate yourself.

First we have to find out what could be rewarding to do. In the previous chapter you kept track of your activities for every hour of the week and this is an important step before you can move on to the exercises in this chapter.

1: Review your activity schedule

In Chapter Two I asked you to keep track of what you did every hour of the week to see how this was related to your feelings of pleasure and effectiveness (see page 25). If you are like a lot of people who are unemployed, you might notice that a lot of your time is wasted dwelling on the negative, engaged in passive activities (such as watching television or surfing the internet for useless information), or complaining to people about how bad you feel or how unfair things are. (Although things can be bad and unfair, complaining might simply make you feel worse about them.) Your passivity might also involve lying in bed until later in the day, half-asleep, half-awake, ruminating and dwelling on negative thoughts and images. This passivity might also manifest itself in your lack of response to people who reach out to you. Passivity maintains your negative feelings.

On the other hand, your activity schedule might also contain information about those things you do that bring you some pleasure and some effectiveness. For example, one client, Bill, found that he felt really good when he took his son to school. Not only did it feel pleasurable, but it also made him feel effective. He was doing something. He loved his son and being involved with him—now even more than before when Bill was working—and it was making him feel good for that hour. Bill also noticed that when he went out for a walk near to his home, he felt better putting on his iPod and listening to music. He also felt better when he got some chores done around the house, painting the outside, and feeling like he was making a difference. Doing something leads to feeling better.

EXERCISE: LOW- AND HIGH-PLEASURE
ACTIVITIES

List all the activities you associate with feeling down (low pleasure) and all the activities associated with feeling better (higher pleasure). The example below shows the sort of activities people list. (You can make a similar list for activities that are associated with feeling effective or not effective. For example, filling out a job application may not be as pleasurable as playing basketball or talking with your friends, but it might be associated with feeling more effective.)

Low pleasure	High pleasure
Sitting at home thinking about not working	Going for a bike ride in the park. Playing with my daughter. Talking with my best friend

Now, let’s think beyond your current situation and try to remember the kinds of activities that you used to enjoy in the past. Did you exercise, have hobbies, hang out with friends, spend time with family members, or do anything that might be relatively simple—activities you found gave you pleasure or a sense of effectiveness or “mastery”? For example, Bill remembered that he used to work out, enjoyed reading and listening to music, enjoyed talking with friends, playing catch with his son, and preparing dinner with his wife. We can call these the “Past Rewarding Activities.”

Now, to add to your possibilities of rewarding activities, think about things that you thought of doing but didn’t really follow up on. These could be possible “Future Rewarding Activities.” For Bill, this included practicing the guitar (he used to play when he was a kid, but put it down for the past 15 years), increasing his exercise (by jogging, rather than only walking), learning more about his heritage (he was Italian), learning how to cook some new cuisine, reading more about political affairs and getting in contact with people he knew from university. These were possible new activities.

EXERCISE: PAST AND POSSIBLE REWARDING ACTIVITIES

Now list your past rewarding activities and the possible new rewarding activities—see the example below.

Past rewarding activities	Possible rewarding activities
Taking a drawing class. Playing with my children	Seeing my friends. Listening to music. Going to the museum

You are concentrating on two things:

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List the activities that you have enjoyed in the past.

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List the activities that you might enjoy doing in the future.

Looking at what you have written:

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List the activities that make you feel worse.

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Keep track of what you do and how you feel when you are doing these things.

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Is there a pattern to what you are doing when you feel better and what you are doing when you feel worse?

2: Plan rewarding activities for yourself

Taking care of yourself during this difficult time means that you need to do some things for yourself. Lying around, waiting for a job offer is no way to take care of yourself. Now that you have a list of your current, past, and possible future activities, your challenge is to schedule some things for you to do. You can assign yourself positive activities for each hour, each day, and each week. Don’t wait until you wake up in the morning to decide what you are going to do. Have the next day planned in advance—the day before.

You can start with your list of past, present, and future pleasurable and effective activities. (Part of your list will be the job search activities, but that comes later in this chapter.) I tend to think that getting up at a set time, getting started with a good breakfast (a healthy breakfast), getting out and exercising (take a walk, go to the gym, get active) is a great way to start the day. But it’s up to you. There may be people to contact, things to learn, courses to take, relaxation exercises, food to prepare, kids to attend to, plans to make. The more active you are, the better you will feel.

Part of your down mood—and your tendency to avoid facing the situation and be passive—is that you think that none of these activities will be helpful. These are your predictions and, like any other thought, they could prove to be true or false—or more or less accurate. You can list some activities that you are going to do today and then write in how much pleasure and how much of a feeling of effectiveness you think you will get. We call this “Pleasure Predicting,” and what you will find out is whether your expectations are overly negative. Try this exercise.

EXERCISE: PREDICTING PLEASURE AND EFFECTIVENESS

Assign some activities that you think might be associated with pleasure or effectiveness. Write down how much pleasure and effectiveness you expect to get for the activities you are going to do today, using the 0 to 10 scale. Then, after the activity, write out the actual pleasure and effectiveness. Here’s an example to help you.

Is there any pattern to your expectations? Are they overly negative, overly positive, accurate?

Fill out a different sheet for each day of the week, including weekends, showing the predicted pleasure and effectiveness. Try to note if your expectations are accurate or not.

More activity = more reward

Some people find they often predict certain activities will not yield any pleasure or effectiveness, so they don’t engage in them and don’t find out if they are wrong. You might find that exercise, spending time with friends or family, or learning new skills or other activities might be rewarding, so that you can assign these to yourself, again allowing yourself to build up a menu of rewarding and positive things to do. Sometimes an activity might help you to feel effective, such as contacting some former colleagues and exploring the possibility of new contacts for a new job. This kind of activity could or might not be pleasurable. It could be the kind of thing that you might do to feel more effective and to move yourself forward. Also, it may be that you may have to do an activity many times before the pleasure and effectiveness “kicks in.” At first, it may be harder to do, and perhaps even not very pleasant. But more activity tends to produce more reward and may help you to get out of those negative thoughts and painful feelings that you have when you respond to your sadness by avoidance and passivity.

EXERCISE: BUILD UP AN ACTIVITY MENU

Rather than avoiding taking part in activities because you worry that they will not be pleasurable, find activities to do and then discover how you feel about them once you have tried them.

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Start to assign some positive activities to yourself.

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List your predictions of how you will feel when you do these things.

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Carry out the experiment—by doing these activities—and then rate them for pleasure and effectiveness.

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Are you predicting that behavior won’t be that rewarding, but you find out that sometimes it’s more rewarding than you anticipated?

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What is the consequence of predicting that really rewarding behavior won’t work for you?

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If it’s not that rewarding when you do it, are you willing to continue to try to do these things until the “reward” kicks in? Perhaps it takes a while.

3: Challenge your negative thinking about taking action

You might find yourself thinking, “How can these activities help me get a job? How will exercise, or listening to music, or hanging out with friends, get me the job I need? My problem is that I don’t have a job and everything else is useless. Who are you kidding with this nonsense? I have a real problem; I don’t have a job.” Well, it may be true that exercise and doing fun things or seeing people you like might not get you a job, but it might get you out of your doldrums.

After all, you still have to live your life every day. You still have to fill those hours with something.

And, who knows, perhaps if you are in better shape—mentally and physically—you might do better in a job interview. If you are depressed and anxious, and you aren’t enjoying your life, it may make it more difficult for you to take part in the interview well. Your depression and helplessness may make it less likely that you will search as effectively for a new job. Your passivity and isolation may spill over to your job search and trap you even more.

Is there any downside in filling your day with some pleasurable, challenging and meaningful activities? Will anyone be worse off if you are feeling better?

You may also have other thoughts that lead you to negate or discount doing positive things to help yourself feel better. For example, you might have thoughts like “This used to feel better when I had a job.” For example, going for a nice long walk in the countryside or riding a bike might have been more fun when you weren’t feeling down. I would imagine that a lot of the things that you could do for pleasure and effectiveness are not as rewarding as they were when you felt better. Let’s assume this is true. So what?
You have to start somewhere
. Why not start from where you are and build from this point on? It’s like getting into shape. If you are out of shape, it’s more difficult to exercise. So what would you do? Would you wait until you were in shape and then begin to exercise?
Do the hard things now until they become easier
.