I was reading a short article called “The Three Most Often Asked Questions by Employees Who Have Been Fired”, in it the writer talks about these three questions.
1. Can the employer dismiss me if I was an effective hard working employee?
2. Do I have any legal rights to get my old job back again.
3. If I resigned or quit my job, can I still get severance pay from my employer?
I find it interesting the questions that people ask. If you are an effective employee and you get downsized why would you want to stay with someone who doesn’t want you, why would you want to try and go back. I thought this only happened with dating.
The only question out of the three that has some benefit is the general question of severance. If your fired you usually get severance pay, if you quit in most cases you don’t. Now move on.
Here is my take.
You’ve just been fired, downsized, re-sized, let go, dismissed (did I miss any?). Now what?
Time To Celebrate.
Celebrate? I must be mad. You have just lost your source of income, the bills are going to pile up and people are depending on you. How can I even suggest such a thing?
As I have said before, we are not here to live mediocre lives, we are here to be great, to realize our best selves. And everything that happens, is for the good, if we can learn from it.
You have just been given the gift of learning, growth, and better success. Many people will go through life in a dead end job, and never do a thing about it. You have been given a great opportunity. Rejoice in it.
As I said you want to celebrate because you are going to lean, grow and succeed, so what are the questions that will take you there.
Stage One – A time for reflection.
Were you an effective hard working employee? Be honest with yourself, self deception will accomplish nothing.
If your answer to this is yes then you are ready to go on to the next step.
If your performance was less than stellar, then your employer might have already been giving you messages along the way, if you missed the messages this was probably the last straw. Fortunately for you your employer just saved you from spending the rest of your working years being an unproductive burden.
If you were not performing at your best it is important to answer these questions.
What could you have done to improve your performance?
What value could you have added?
What skills were you lacking?
Were you a team player?
Were you accepting of constructive criticism?
Did you take pride in your work?
Did you even like your job?
Knowing what was lacking will help you to move ahead in the future.
Stage Two – Figure out what you want to do now.
At this point you want to figure out what you will do next. You might already know exactly what you want to do next, if you don’t you can either read a book like What Color Is Your Parachute, which is a popular book for discovering what are some good career choices for you, or you can hire a Career Coach to help aid you with self discovery.
Optimally you want to find a career that connects to your passion and joy. If you hate typing, don’t get a job in data entry. If you are massively creative, don’t get a monotonous repetitive job.
Write out a list of the things that you are good to great at, the things that you really enjoy doing, what your hobbies are, what you liked to do as a kid. Ask friends and family to help also, they can tell you what you are good at.
Stage Three – Submit your resume or create your own business.
Once you know what you want to do, start spreading the word, tell your contacts, send out your resume, get interviewed. Take action and believe in yourself. Most low to middle class jobs are filled with people that don’t believe in themselves. You have skills, you have talent, go add value to the workforce and get fair value for it.
If starting your own business is the next step for you, start building it. Speak to people who have built their own business, read books or hire a Business Start-up Coach. I will let you in on a little secret, the two biggest keys to success in business are “Sticking and Learning”, don’t give up and learn from your mistakes. Most people give up just before success happens, start it, stick to it, learn from setbacks. Keep repeating the process until you have succeeded (usually 3-5 years).
The line goes “Five years from now, I’ll be laughing over what happened”
Because you know that by following this process you will be in a much better place 5 years down the road. You will have learned so much about yourself, and grown your success, and it will be because 5 years ago your employer did you a favor, he canned you.
If you will laugh over it then, I say ‘Celebrate Now‘
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