Stepping along the road: My personal journey after layoff.
The first step and the one before that.
As it turns out, the first step is the second hardest.
The door is slammed shut. You stand there in shock, alone and afraid to move. This is the time that is the hardest. There is a faintly sour smell lingering in the air, “your services are no longer needed. You have 10 minutes to clear out.” It is a time of danger and wonder and fear and curiosity. Anger and depression. And if you are lucky, friends who come alongside you.
The band-aid is ripped off. What will I do? Will I stay rooted in the spot? Crawl into a hole? Lash out in anger or sink into depression. Or, maybe in my panic, jump at the first thing I see whether it is good for me or not, and miss the better road that is almost right there.
I can’t see that road very clearly. I don’t know where it is going to go as it wends its way into an unknown future. This step before the first step is what is hardest. It is a struggle that takes place within myself – in my thoughts, which is where most of the epic battles happen.
In that turning, I discovered boon companions and wise counselors who have been on the road before or at least on their own road and can help me travel more fruitfully.
For the most part, social media was not one of those friends. Its mantra is that you must always build your brand. But never forget that you are the product it is selling to advertisers. Friends saw my status, expressed condolences, and moved on with their own brand experience lest the same thing befall them. The exception was my former manager who set his status to “retired.” He congratulated me, saying,
No one will remember the late-night phone calls, the extra meetings you took, the reports you wrote over the weekend; no one… except your family. You don’t get that time back.
The job never loved you. No matter the affirming values they voiced, the relationship you had with them was always a transaction: your time for their money. That was always the bargain.
It matters how you treat people, showing love and kindness. That is what colleagues will remember.
Receiving those thoughts without becoming cynical, that was the hard pre-work. And now, I could step onto the road.
Six dimensions and welcome interruptions
One of the good things I did in these first steps of the transition road was to take some retirement seminars and coaching sessions by LHH. Their resource library is rich without being overwhelming. Their models are sometimes a bit too simple but a coach like Alex was able to guide me through what made sense for my situation and gave me needed helpful encouragement.
The six dimensions of life model has been resonating with me in these early days. It is simple and sticky, something I ponder regularly to help me consider how to enter a new, more balanced, and valuable retirement, one that continues to give value to your life while expanding areas you have ignored while working for money.
It reinforces what I believe:
This life you have been given is lent to you for a time. It is yours to steward, to give out, to be a blessing to others as long as you can. Retirement is not an end; it is an opportunity to move on to something else.
The model says there are six dimensions of life to pay attention to: work (including volunteering and gig work), family, community, social, spiritual, personal. It is likely that during my working career, work got a large percentage of my attention and priority. Now, walking in this new road involves rebalancing that investment. What would you like to do more of, same, or less of? With the one rule that you cannot simply do more of everything! Doing more of one area means doing less of another. That is what keeps things in balance. And it will change over time.
The other posture I have embraced is a welcoming of creative interruptions. “I am really having to learn how to adjust to a new way of seeing and being. So, I give you – friend, family, God – the freedom to interrupt me. To draw my attention to beauty and opportunity along the way. I want always to be open to being changed.” I am realizing I need the help of others who love me, who have more life experience, who have seen further to help me get my bearings. It requires an attitude of humility and teachability and vulnerability which is, I expect, one of the secrets to making a successful transition on this road: the curiosity needed to learn.
Looking
I am only three months into this new road. I feel like I have been going through detox: a whole-soul reset from the toxic overload I have had after 50 years of imbibing the American myth that my primary identity is defined by my job, my career, and my LinkedIn profile. Where the first question you are asked is always, “What do you do?” It is asked so often and in so many ways, it gets lodged deep in your soul without you even noticing.
To answer, “I am retired” provokes all sorts of responses from looking away to jealousy to golf games to “so what are you doing now?” I want to shout, “I am not my job! My relevance is not in my career. That is not my brand.” But it is a big lie that is deep poison in my world that must leech out little by little.
Americans are not good at the deeper soul-level work going on in those six dimensions. But they are part of the necessary detox here at the beginning. It is reprogramming my thought life, my attitudes, my habits.
This is not an overnight process. There is no manager or teacher or coach who is going to be evaluating my work.
In fact, one of the amazing things I have learned is that in this retirement, I no longer have a manager who controls my time. I can schedule as I see fit to what is adding value to my family and community and not to some company’s bottom line. When to take a reflective walk or when to volunteer project management skills to a nonprofit is all under my control. I have freedom to bring focus to what the road is bringing my way. This is not something to take for granted!
But it is not a random walk. It takes intentional reflection to be sure I am walking the good path. To that end, I am employing one other tool on a regular basis: Journaling using the old practice of the Examen. The four steps are:
Replay the day: What happened and what did I hope would happen?
Rejoice over the obvious joys that came to me.
Repent from failures and from wandering away.
Reboot, intending to change tomorrow.
That’s where I am on this journey. I’ve been putting one foot in front of the other for three months. The poison is leeching away. My thoughts are changing but I’m not there yet. I still get the odd thoughts, the fear of the unknown and the yearning still to be labeled “relevant.” I am committed to walking the path, sometimes with friends and family and companions and sometimes alone, I am trying to put one foot in front of the other and trust God even though I don’t know what the path holds. Come what may.
That’s the journey yet to unfold.
Jim Trott