Everyone suffers severe losses at some point in his or her life. In my personal opinion, three of the absolute worst kinds of loss are: the death of a child; divorce (especially for men, who are very often blindsided by them); and losing your job due to a layoff. Each of these events leaves a particularly horrific impact upon one’s psyche. One such traumatic event is bad enough, but repeated instances of similar traumas leave scars that last a lifetime. I know what such trauma is like because of my repeated exposure to it – I have been through THREE layoffs in my life. In the current environment of extreme economic uncertainty, people need concrete, actionable advice about how to deal with job losses. So in this article, I will present some hard-won advice from my own experience to show you how to recover from losing your job.

Don’t Fall For the Pabulum

First, though, let’s get something out of the way. Losing your job due to a layoff is NOT like other kinds of job losses. If you are laid off, then in all probability, you likely DIDN’T deserve your fate. You were simply in the wrong industry, company, position, or location at exactly the wrong time. Much of this is out of your control.

If you got fired for doing something stupid, that was your fault and you could take your lumps. But if you lost your job as an actuary or insurance claims adjuster due to, say, a hedge fund operating within the heart of a company with a trillion-dollar balance sheet that made very bad bets on derivatives that brought down its parent, then what could you, personally, possibly have done differently? Your fate was not under your control. Few things hurt more than that feeling of powerlessness.

Unfortunately, “people management consultants” have come up with all sorts of ridiculous euphemisms to try to soften the blow of a layoff. They call it “downsizing”, “right-sizing”, “corporate reorganisation”, “restructuring”, or any of a dozen other wormtongue terms.

Every one of these terms is a disgrace and an abuse of language. Honesty demands that we call a layoff precisely what it is: the calculated and premeditated MURDER of a human soul.

A Dehumanising Experience

I can recall with near-complete clarity the exact sequence of events surrounding every one of my three layoffs. To this day, whenever I get an email or call from a superior asking me to discuss something without specifics or explanation, I break out in cold sweats. That fear never goes away, until and unless you establish income streams that allow you to serve no master.

Nothing prepares you for the moment that it actually happens. You typically walk into a room located far away from your desk – that’s by design. Your boss might be there, or he might not be. Facing you will usually be someone who does not know you or what you do, and does not care. Then you will receive the usual pabulum about how “adverse conditions” require a “change in direction” and therefore your role has been eliminated. You will receive some pro forma instructions about severance pay and benefits. And finally you will leave the building, usually under escort.

At no point will you be treated like a thinking, feeling, living human being whose hopes, dreams, aspirations, and future have been destroyed in an instant.

This is a horrible, dehumanising experience that leaves scars that never fade. You will never be the same again after you go through it.

Now, suppose you have just gone through this particular kind of shock. How do you deal with it?

How to Recover from Losing Your Job in Stages

The Kubler-Ross Model, also known as the Five Stages of Grief, describes your likely coping process well. Your very first impulse will be to deny that this is happening to you. A sense of utter unreality will surround you. Your brain will try to convince you that this is all just a bad dream, and that when you wake up, everything will be fine again.

But it won’t be. You will wake up and realise with sickening clarity that you actually went through that horrible experience – and there is no way back to your old life.

Your next emotion will be anger. You will be furious, in fact. And you will be justified in feeling like that. But you need to harness and focus that anger.

In the bargaining stage, you will feel the need to reach out to others around you to help cope with what happened. You NEED help – so get it, either in a personal or professional form.

Depression will follow within a few days to a week. This is the hardest and most dangerous stage. Follow the steps below and you will get through it quickly.

Eventually, you will reach acceptance. This article will show you how to get to that stage as fast as possible. The longer you spend in the lower stages, the worse you will feel and the harder it will be to recover.

Now let’s put into place an actionable plan designed to get you back on your feet.

1. Make NO Excuses

Because of my background in Rhon Mizrachi Krav Maga, which teaches what many might (inaccurately) call “militarised MMA for self-defence” I am an avid fan of mixed martial arts. I especially appreciate cerebral, technical, footwork-based fluid fighters who use range, speed, and timing as weapons. (Some prime examples from muay thai can be found here and here.)

One of my favourite fighters is former UFC bantamweight champion Dominick “The Dominator” Cruz. He has suffered an entire division’s worth of injuries and setbacks during his storied career. His greatest loss came in late 2016 at UFC 207 when he lost his bantamweight title to Cody “No Chin Love” Garbrandt.

Try to imagine being in his shoes. He had lost to a younger, tougher, faster opponent on the biggest stage in the world. Each fighter had trash-talked the other in the lead-up to the fight, and Cruz had to eat his words at the end of his opponent’s gloves. Now, look at his post-fight interview:

That is how you handle a loss. You face the world, accept what has happened, and offer NO EXCUSES WHATSOEVER. That is how to recover from losing your job.

This is hard to hear and even harder to put into practice. But here’s how you do it.

When you become redundant, go home and escape into another world for a day or two. Play video games. Go hunting or fishing or hiking. Engage in full-contact martial arts. Hang out with friends and family and have a few drinks.

Then, when the sense of unreality has faded somewhat, stand in front of a mirror and tell yourself that you no longer have a job and you need to move forward. This will short-circuit the process immediately and get you to a much healthier place, past the anger and the depression.

2. Take Time Off to Heal

Let’s stick with martial arts for the nonce. In combat sports, concussions are rightly treated with extreme urgency. These are highly traumatic injuries that rank equal to broken bones in terms of severity.

How do you treat a concussion? In practical terms, YOU DO NOT TRAIN for 6-8 weeks. You rest, watch TV, let your brain heal, and allow the CTE to subside. You then gently resume training after that period.

Similarly, you need to take some time off after you go through a layoff. Take a holiday, go for a driving trip, learn a language, start a website, pick up a new hobby or skill. Take 4-6 weeks, if you can afford it, to recover from losing your job.

I admit that this is not practical advice for everyone. If you are financially incapable of taking that much time out of the workforce, then you need to get moving, fast. And if you are a foreigner on a work visa facing deportation or loss of status, then your situation is very urgent. In both cases, your problems are bigger than a lack of work stability, as bad as that is. I will address these issues later. For now, address your most pressing issues and take what rest you can, when you can.

3. The Power of Forgiveness

This is perhaps the most important step of the process as you recover from losing your job. You must forgive those who put you through your own very personal Hell.

This sounds insane to anyone who just lost his job due to a layoff. If you are angry and in pain, forgiveness will be the last thing on your mind. But you MUST forgive those who put you here. You cannot move on if you don’t.

So, when you are ready, when the pain has subsided and the rage has quieted, find a calm and quiet place. Think of those who did this to you. And tell yourself, out loud: “[X], I forgive you for what you did to me”.

You must mean this with absolute sincerity. If you do not, you are wasting your time.

Forgive in sincerity, and your life will get better in a very big hurry. You will no longer be consumed by futile thoughts of revenge or foolish desires for payback. At this point, you will largely have healed and can move on with your life.

You may need professional help to get to this point. If so – seek it and use it. There is nothing wrong with asking a therapist for advice in times of grief and trauma.

4. Observe, Orient, Decide, Act

The OODA Loop is a conceptual framework created by one of the greatest military thinkers, strategists, tacticians, and pilots in all of human history. His name was LTC John Boyd, and his biography is well worth reading. This man changed the Art of War forever with his ideas. One of them involved learning how to think faster and process information more efficiently than the enemy.

The same lesson applies in life. You have just lost your job and you need to recover from losing it. You have already observed this fact. Now orient toward the factors that contributed toward the loss. Were you in a bad industry? Was your company the wrong one? Did you spend too much time getting comfortable in your own role? Were you too passive, waiting for others to recognise your talents instead of aggressively going out and getting what you wanted?

You must be resolutely and unsparingly honest with yourself. Once you have healed a bit, sit down in a quiet room with a sheet of paper. Lay it out in landscape orientation and draw four columns on it: Industry, Company, Role, Self. Your objective is to write down exactly what went wrong in each of these areas.

Let’s say you spent most of your career in an industry known for supercyclical hiring, within a company notorious for bad systems and high turnover, in a cost centre, and got yourself pigeonholed into a highly focused technical role vulnerable to automation. (Yes, I am describing myself here.) Write down a few bullet points about how each of these factors contributed to your job loss.

By the end, you should have a collection of about 10-15 bullet points outlining what went wrong. Now decide how to address each of them. Then ACT.

5. Action Breeds Excellence

In the previous step, you acknowledged what went wrong and how. You pinpointed specific things that contributed to your current situation. Now you must decide what to do about them.

More than once have I heard the advice, “a goal without a plan is just a wish”. I like to pair this with the phrase, “if wishes were horses, all beggars would ride”. Wishful thinking will not do anything for you. Concrete decisions backed up by uncompromising action will.

So here’s what you do. For each of the columns in your sheet above, jot down one to three actions that you can take to fix the general trend of those issues. Then, next to those points, write down an estimate of how long you need to perform each action, and roughly how much you think each action will cost.

You may need to pursue more education. Or you may have to switch functions, industries, careers, and even locations. Perhaps you will have to get yourself a part-time job to make ends meet while you figure out your next steps as you recover from losing your job.

Whatever your next steps are, WRITE THEM DOWN with clear, measurable, cost-conscious goals next to them.

Finally…

6. Take the Long View

In the short term – which is to say, for the next 4-12 weeks – you will be terrified. I understand entirely. What you are going through IS terrifying. But you must also constantly evaluate what you have gone through and try to put it into a bigger picture. You must think longer-term, about the next 5-10 years of your life.

Let’s say that you lost your job and are now pressed for funds. If you did Step 4 correctly, then you know where you are weak. Now start thinking about how to avoid this fate ever again. That means building up your savings so that you have 6-12 months’ worth of after-tax disposable income available in cold hard cash. That way, the next time your best-laid plans aft gang agley, you will be far better prepared.

Or let’s say that you are a foreigner working in the USA or Europe and you face deportation or expulsion if you don’t find a job immediately. Your long-term problem therefore has nothing to do with your job and everything to do with your lack of geographical stability. THAT is the problem that you must address. If that is you – get in touch, because I’ve spent considerable time and effort figuring out exactly how to fix that particular problem over the past few years. Let’s see what we can do to fix your problem.

Ultimately, understand that in the long run you have in fact been given a great GIFT. You have been shown the truth about yourself, your industry, and your choices. For whatever reason, you were offered a chance to reinvent yourself. Do not squander this, for you now have a window to learn from your past mistakes and come back stronger and better than before.

Conclusion: Drive Your Own Transformation

You recover from losing your job by acknowledging what happened, evaluating your part in your downfall, deciding on a course of action, and then acting upon it. Now, change of this kind is not comfortable and often not fun. But you still need to make those changes even so. If you do not, you will end right back in the same industry or role or function, exposed to the same vagaries and dangers. And you will then be taught another brutal lesson sooner rather than later.

Don’t put yourself in that position. Always strive to be objective about what has happened to you. Take the opportunities that you are given to change yourself, improve your skills, and broaden your networks. These things will be critical to your future success.

Above all, don’t expect anyone to hand you anything just for being who you are. If you truly want to change and improve – stop sitting there and thinking about it. You’re wasting valuable time. Go out there and do it. Take risks. Try and fail and try again. Push yourself to do things that you didn’t think you could.

Ultimately, you are the master of your fate, and nothing and no one can take that from you.