By
Kathryn Britton
Associate Certified Coach, Master of Applied Positive Psychology
In these days of financial insecurity many people feel on the verge of a big change for the worse. Programmers working for big IT companies saw 4th quarter profits fall precipitously because other big companies could not invest to upgrade systems because their profits were down because customers were not spending as much over the holidays. Belt tightening means that unexpected layoffs are always in the wings. You might not be part of the first layoff, but what about next time? Just in case a layoff does include you, what can you do now to be ready to handle it? How can you prepare for other negative impacts of the current economic downturn?
The threat of job loss is very real in the current economic downturn. Some people who lose their jobs come out better than others. Part is luck, but a large part is how they manage their emotions and thoughts, how much energy they have for facing the change, and what kind of resources and talents they’ve accumulated in good times to be able to weather bad times.
This article describes 4 steps for building greater resilience to face anxious times.
Step 1 involves intentionally calming down the part of your brain that mobilizes your body to deal with immediate threats. Negative emotions narrow focus to mobilize an immediate fight-or-flight response. Job loss, however, is not like pulling your family out of a burning building. It needs broadened thinking, not narrow focus. Step 1 includes recognizing the emotion, acknowledging its reason for existence, but then weakening its grip so that you can move on and think resourcefully about the future. There are numerous ways that people calm themselves. Prepare for negative events by finding and practicing the technique that works best for you.
Step 2 involves taking time to remember and re-experience pleasant times, things you are grateful for, and times you have been appreciated. Intentionally invoking pleasant emotions broadens your thinking and increases your ability to think resourcefully about what comes next. Prepare for negative events by collecting reminders of good times so that you can more easily relive them.
Step 3 involves reframing your thinking about the loss to put yourself in as confident a position as possible. There are specific ways to structure your thinking to help you maintain confidence in a tight spot.
Step 4 involves making an inventory of your resources, abilities, and useful connections. With Step 4, you take your thinking away from the loss and focus on it on what you have not lost. Prepare for negative events by starting your inventory before the loss and updating it periodically.
If the loss has not come, practice so that the steps are easy for you. If it has come, don’t feel alone. Join the people who used these steps to survive and then flourish.
Step 1: Calm Down at Will
Negative emotions such as fear or anger cause swift physiological changes to prepare us to fight, flee, or freeze. Negative emotions are more powerful than positive ones because quick responses to threats meant survival in early human history. Positive emotions could be put on hold.
However, the fight and flight responses are often not effective for the kinds of threats we face today. Think about the most recent threats you have faced. Perhaps your spouse failed to get a desired position. Perhaps your child brought home a bad report. Perhaps your manager gave you a bad review. Perhaps you overheard someone saying something negative about you. Perhaps you felt disappointed with your own performance during a presentation. Or perhaps you just lost your job. None of these requires instantaneous action. Running away or fighting back are unlikely be the responses that help the most.
Negative emotions can hinder your ability to deal with the subtle ongoing threats of modern life:
• They put you in a state of arousal that depletes your physical energy.
• They crowd out positive emotions and memories of assets.
• They narrow your thinking.
So the first step for dealing with a negative event is to calm down your physiological response to threat. Do this before trying to rethink the situation, before trying to strategize about possible actions, before saying anything that you might later regret.
Here are approaches that work:
• Name the emotion without judging it. Say to yourself “I am afraid of the future without my job,” or “I am angry that I have been let go …” and do not try to talk yourself out of it. Research shows that naming without judging has a quick calming effect on the amygdala, the part of the brain that controls the fight-or-flight response.
• Meditate, for example by breathing deeply and regularly and paying close attention to your breath as it goes in and out.
• Exercise. Physical exertion has a calming effect and helps your brain and body recover from stress. Research shows that taking your dog for a walk is more calming that walking by yourself. You might be interested John Ratey’s exploration of the impacts of exercise on the brain and body in his new book, Spark [http://www.johnratey.com/].
• Practice tai chi or yoga
People who regularly practice meditation, tai chi, or yoga are usually able to calm negative emotions more quickly, since they have built the skill with practice. But even if you haven’t been practicing, it is not too late to start when you lose your job and feel a sense of panic coming on. Name that emotion, watch it without trying to make it go away, breathe deeply, and seek a calm state that leaves space in your mind for new ways of thought.
Step 2: Experience Positive Emotions
After step 1, your brain is calm, and you have made space to experience positive emotions about the good things that remain in your life even when the job is gone. Research shows that experiencing positive emotions prepares you for creative problem-solving. Noted psychologist Barbara Fredrickson has formed the Broaden and Build Theory: positive emotions broaden your behavioral repertoire and build durable resources such as confidence, social connections, and good health. As she says, “The latest scientific evidence tells us that positivity doesn’t just reflect success and health, it can also produce success and health. … Beyond the present pleasant moment, your positivity has downstream consequences for the very trajectory of your life,” (Positivity, pp 18-19).
Experiencing positive emotions, such as joy, gratitude, serenity, interest, hope, pride, amusement, inspiration, awe, and love, makes you more open-minded and creative. These emotions broaden your scope of attention and the range of possibilities that you are willing to consider. In fact, Fredrickson has found that people who experience more positivity in their lives are more able to cope with adversity in an open-minded way.
Here are some ideas for intentionally increasing your positive emotions at any time, but especially when dealing with a major loss:
• Develop a ritual of ending the day by remembering 3 good things that happened during the day. Some people write them down in a journal to reread later. Other people share with their partners or children. See Jen Hausmann’s Three Good Things: A 7 Year-Old’s View of the Three Blessings (http://pos-psych.com/news/jen-hausmann/20070403191) for an example.
• When you say goodbye to someone, summarize the good things that came out of being together. When you finish a project, summarize what you learned and gained by being involved. If you like to journal, write them down so that you can reread and remember them later.
• Collect a scrapbook that shows ways that you have made a positive difference to others. Include notes, comments, and recommendations they’ve made for you. Capture oral praise either by writing it down or associating it with an image that you include in your scrapbook.
• Do something kind for someone else. In fact, just keeping a daily tally of the kind things that you already do can raise your positivity.
• Dream about your best possible future. Visualize it in detail. What would you be doing? Who would you do it with? How would you spend your time? What kinds of things would you achieve? What would a day be like? Visualization activates the same parts of your brain that are activated when you actually do those actions, so it’s a chance to rehearse for your next job while you increase positivity.
• Spend time learning about your strengths. Take the Values-in-Action signature strength test [http://authentichappiness.org], think about the ways your strengths manifest in your life, and find ways to use them more.
• Find places nearby where you can spend time with nature.
There are many more ideas in Barbara Fredrickson’s book, Positivity: Groundbreaking Research Reveals How to Embrace the Hidden Strength of Positive Emotions, Overcome Negativity, and Thrive.
Step 3: Reframe Your Thinking
After Steps 1 and 2, you are calm and your thinking is broadened by the experience of positive emotion. Now you are ready to examine the way you are thinking about the negative event. Are you thinking about it in a way that undermines your confidence? Could you think about it in a different way that still acknowledges the reality of the situation but puts you in a strong position for your next steps? The ABCDE technique below is one way to reshape your thinking.
A is for Adversity. Describe what happened? Just the facts.
I just lost my job.
B is for Belief. Describe your in-the-moment, uncensored, ticker-tape beliefs. The rawer the better. Beliefs often come in the following categories:
Loss of self-worth: They think I’m not worth much.
Violation of rights: How could they do this to me, after all the effort I’ve put into the company?
Negative comparison to others: I must be doing worse than the people they are keeping.
Future threat: Nobody else is going to want to hire me.
C is for Consequences. Identify the feelings and behaviors that arise directly from Beliefs. The above categories of beliefs have predictable consequences on the way you feel.
Loss of self-worth → Sadness and depression
Violation of rights → Anger
Negative comparison to others → Embarrassment
Future threat → Fear and anxiety
D is for Disputation. Find other interpretations that fit the facts but have different consequences.
My skills are more important for companies that are growing than ones that are cutting back.
My company would only do this because times are really hard.
Our company is cutting into the muscle now. They will really miss my skills.
Many very good people have been laid off from one job and found ones that they like better.
E is for Energy. Observe the state of your mental and emotional energy for working on next steps.
See The Resilience Factor by Karen Reivich and Andrew Shatté for more about these steps and for other techniques for building resilience to face adversity. The following short articles give examples of the ABCDE approach in action: Is Feeling Better as Easy as ABC? [ http://pos-psych.com/news/nicholas-hall/20070606273] and Taking Positive Psychology to Work: The Reframing Skill [http://pos-psych.com/news/kathryn-britton/20070607274]
Part 4: Take Inventory of Your Assets
Now that you’ve used Steps 1, 2, and 3 — calmed yourself, experienced positive emotions, and come up with a better way of thinking about the adversity — you can start working on what comes next. Get started by turning your attention away from what you have lost and toward what you can carry forward.
Here are some categories to help you take inventory of what you’ve accumulated that can help you with whatever comes next:
Strengths: What can you do especially well? What activities most absorb your attention and make you feel energetic and alive when you finish them? Here are a couple of short articles about exploring and using your strengths: Using Strengths when You Work [http://pos-psych.com/news/kathryn-britton/20070807363], Using Your Strengths in a Job Search [http://pos-psych.com/news/senia-maymin/20070712337“>http://pos-psych.com/news/senia-maymin/20070712337], and Sorting Your Life into Place: The Strengths Card Sort [http://pos-psych.com/news/margaret-greenberg/20080614798].
Relationships: Give thanks for your close family ties and friendships, and prepare to keep your work connections, even if you are about to leave a job. Using a social networking service such as LinkedIn is one way to create connections that survive even when either of you moves around. LinkedIn is like an automated roll-o-dex where you don’t have to maintain the information on the cards. While you have access to your internal company directory and buddy list, send invitations to people that you want to stay connected to. You may also want to ask people to write recommendations for you that can be posted on LinkedIn or a service like Naymz. Not everybody will respond, but if you ask now, you may get useful statements about your past accomplishments and working style that will raise your confidence and be useful to potential employers.
Personality: Spend some time increasing your self-awareness and learning about your preferences. How do you work best? Do you like to work alone, with a partner, or in large groups? Do you like detail work or abstract work or a combination of the two? Are you good at problem solving or creating things from scratch or encouraging other people or keeping projects running or any of the wide range of abilities needed to make things happen? There are numerous self-discovery instruments available on the Web or from your employer, including the Myers-Briggs Type Inventory for exploring preferences and instruments for measuring grit, optimism, gratitude, meaning in life, and other psychological factors at the Authentic Happiness site [http://authentic happiness.org]. The happier.org site [http://happier.org] has a series of assessments and related exercises.
Experiences: Have you dealt well with serious adversity in the past? If so, what were the skills and thought patterns that brought you through? Do you have experience grieving from losses and then being able to let them go? Do you have a rich store of positive memories that you can spend time reliving? What are your biggest accomplishments? Do you have the information collected to explain them to future employers?
People tend to downplay their personal resources and assets accumulated over years of work. Now is the time to focus on them. Talk them over with close friends since that will help you get the most out of them. Create reminders such as lists, photographs, or scrapbooks that you can draw on when you need to remember all you have going for you.
Repeat these 4 steps as necessary to put yourself in a position where you can reach out for whatever comes next, not from a state of defeat, but from a position of strength.