Anxious, stressed or feeling out of control because you have lost your job and wondering how you will pay the bills?
These feelings are quite understandable and understanding why they exist is the first stage of regaining that control.
They are part of the brain’s way of dealing with a threatening new situation. Your feelings of stress, anxiety and being out of control are part of your fight or flight response in which your cortisol and adrenaline levels rise. This causes the conscious side of your brain to partially shut down making it more difficult to work to a logical solution. After the shock of the initial news has passed, the ongoing anxiety keeps these hormone levels elevated and it continues to make it more difficult to focus on the job-hunting tasks you know you should be doing.
Following the financial crash of 2008, I ran a very successful programme in which we trained over 2500 professionals on how to get back into work. We pointed out that feelings of loss, anxiety etc were natural, even to be expected. We explained the now widely known Kübler-Ross grief model which can be applied to any form of loss or major change. The model explains that in loss we pass through five main stages which are denial, anger, bargaining, depression and acceptance and we do not fully accept our new situation until we have been through these. This is why it is hard to put your heart into job hunting when you are in the early stages of this process.
Denial is typically the I don’t believe it/this can’t be happening stage when you first find out that you may lose your job. Then follows anger in which you want to find someone to blame/you want to sue your employer. The third stage is bargaining where you are offering anything to keep your job or questioning that if you had only done something else the outcome would be different. The fourth stage is depression and then finally acceptance where you can start to move on.
You often feel very alone having these feelings of anger, stress, anxiety, being out of control and depression. Knowing this is a normal reaction can help you feel less isolated and more in control.
The remainder of the course helped the attendees learn the skills we utilised as recruiters, so that when they were able to focus on job hunting, they were equipped to do so. The problem with my “recruiter” approach was that people moved through the stages at different speeds. The “just give it time advice” wasn’t helpful when you are under pressure to bring in a salary. As a hypnotherapist I can now help you move through these stages more quickly so you can focus on the job-hunting process.