There is a certain kind of brain fog, rage hangover, or mucky despair that settles into your psyche after you’ve lost your job.  You’re aware that you’re not in a balanced state of mind — the neutrality you practiced, and thought you’d mastered, to get through those last toxic workdays has collapsed.  You’re exhausted and can’t think straight.  Rumination keeps tugging you back into woulda-coulda-shoulda.  How do you get out of this gloom swirl?

Take a vacation.  Leave the area.

Permission Slips

The eerie loneliness that sets in that first day when you’re no longer tied to your role can morph into a sense of panic to do something!  This is especially present when it’s fed by emails, texts, or calls from your colleagues, expressing their shock and digging for answers about what happened. Allow me to give you permission for what you don’t have to do.

• You do not have to answer those calls.  You need to distance yourself psychologically.  This is much easier to do when you’re out of reach.

• You do not have to write explanatory messages to anyone, or perfect your post for LinkedIn to announce that you’re moving on.  If you decide to do this months later, it will still be read by your followers and you’ll be able to write a better, calmer message, I guarantee you.

• You do not have to begin your job search, or your marketing of yourself.  I administer a Job Readiness Assessment to the professionals I coach through their career transitions.  Even those six months out are not fully ready to jump back into the market.  Grieving and reshaping your identity takes time.

• You do not have to hide in your home, feeling stigmatized, surrounded by all the technology that reminds you of your ex-job.  You’re not as alone as it feels — everyone I interviewed for my book, Involuntary Exit, had either been fired or knew someone who had been let go.

• You do not have to jump immediately into the big arena of networking.  If you can’t stand idly by, start by information seeking — not asking for jobs — to help you figure out what you want and don’t want in your next role.  As business coach Bob Cooper says, “We are rarely given the chance, with such clarity and immediacy, to question how we have been spending our hours and how we will manage our lives from this point forward.”

This Is Not Lost Time

This is not unproductive, lost time.  This is found time for you to—forgive the pun—find yourself again.  You won’t know what you want next and why you want it if you’re simmering in a stew of self-recrimination or intense hatred or blame-fixing, all related to your ex-job.  Imagine you have just been transported to another part of the country where no one knows you, people are friendly, and you’re surrounded by forests of trees—those beautiful, nonjudgmental gateways to clarity.

Forest Bathing

The Japanese have promoted this form of mental meditation and de-cluttering since the 1980s.  Called shinrin-yoku, forest bathing is a government-backed public health program to reduce stress and promote wellness. 

I recently came back from a vacation that primarily consisted of hiking miles through the magical, mystical coastal Redwood forests with an unexpected result.  The urge to organize took hold of me.  It started with my digital files.  Not getting enough, I wrestled the apps on my phone into folders.

This wasn’t exactly meditative but it did raise my awareness that the need for order could only mean one thing: a cry to eliminate the mental clutter — the piles of assumptions that led to more assumptions rather than clarity.

Clarity can be peaceful. Like thousand-year-old trees defying assaults of nature and man — standing tall with their canopies in the clear sky. Still. Just still, in peace.

“Clarity-Bathing”

Clarity-bathing means asking questions that wash away assumptions. “Why am I doing this? Do I need this? Why couldn’t I move? Why do I think I can’t . . . ” (fill in the blank).

It’s not the to-do list or the what’s-wrong-with-me list. “Why didn’t they call me back? What do they expect me to do now? Why did they fire me?”

Those kinds of questions put the answers in someone else’s hands.

There’s a reason why people flock to the Redwood forests or take the pilgrimage along the El Camino Trail or move about their landscape of choice. The escape from mental clutter and emotional habits that live in your ergonomic chair in front of a screen is necessary.

Three days into a vacation, the sighs of release, like pressurized gas from a tire, help lift your eyes from the dirt trail in front of you to behold the forest through the trees—again, apologies for the pun.

Sustaining Clarity

Back home, my husband walked up to me as I was sitting in my favorite chair, reading. He told me to close my eyes and open my hand. He gave me a stone — the one I’d pressed into his palm on our last day in the coastal Redwoods, streaked with wild white lines like breaking waves. “Feel the ocean,” he said.  “You can feel it. You’re right back on the beach.” And I was.

Maybe next year, we’ll exchange leaves?  What sounds funny is serious stuff.  It’s the gift of clarity.