So you’ve been fired? Let it go.
For many of the newly fired, waking up on “morning one” can come with a paralyzing sense of free fall — the sudden and shuddersome realization that you may not be obligated to match socks or shave for many months.
A few milestones, career counselors say, can make the vast, grim void of unemployment more fathomable. Start with day one.
DAY 1: The first day
“Walk while you’re scared,” suggests Thank You For Firing Me author Kitty Martini, vocal proponent of post-layoff exercise. “Take a bike ride.”
Women for Hire CEO Tory Johnson agrees. “While the immediate instinct might be, ‘I’ve got to get my résumé in order’ day one is much more about letting your emotions run freely,” she says. “That might mean pulling out your voodoo doll and pretending it’s the person who fired you.”
DAY 7: The first week
“By the week mark, it’s really about getting your finances in order,” Johnson says. “Maybe you downgrade your cable service, or eliminate one of your phone lines. That’s what you do early on.” HBO or not, she warns, count on reduced finances for the foreseeable future. “People say, ‘I’ll just bartend, or I’ll just dog walk‚’ none of those things are easy to land.”
DAY 31: The first month
“By the one-month mark, you have to be in serious job-seeker mode,” Johnson stresses — résumé readied, dreams determined. Unless your vision is not yet clear. “Right at the point when you really reconnect back with what your passion is” that’s when you should start looking,” Martini says.
“If you really want to do a routine, spend a little time each day just visualizing where you want to be,” she says. “That’s kind of like job hunting, but bringing the job to you, using physics.”
She explains: “Something in the universe will shift when you start thinking about what you want.”
