You have get the joke, and the joke is, nothing’s personal. From the I love yous to the unreturned phone calls when your last picture didn’t perform they will pick you up in a limo, but you might have to catch a cab home. It’s not personal, it’s just business.
Matthew McConnaughey, Greenlights
My LinkedIn feed is flooded with close friends, colleagues, and aquantisces sharing what is one of the hardest days of their career – they were laid off. The tech sector has been hit particularly hard and my company just informed thousands that they were impacted (including me).
I’ve seen over a dozen layoffs in my career (first time on this end of one) and they are never easy for anyone involved. When I was much younger, I was more arrogant and assumed immune to company layoffs. One colleague said to me years ago, “Dale, the worst lay off you’ve ever seen is what, 10%? You only have to be better than 1 out of 10 people you work with”.
Of course this is not the case, but when you are in your twenties, you think you have it all figured out. Since then, both he and I have been laid off through no direct fault of our own. Still, it’s easy to take it personally. You know the five stages of grief; denial, anger, bargaining, depression, acceptance? Well, they don’t happen one emotion at a time, transitioning you from denial to acceptance – they hit you like a ton of bricks in waves, moving between each so quickly you feel manic.
One of the thoughts that seem to dominate in the first few weeks is, “why? why me?”. This for me is part of the denial process. I recently read Greenlights by Matthew McConnaughey and I remembered the quote above. He has such a great way with words here; “they will pick you up in a limo, but you might have to catch a cab home”.
Next I hear a lot of the same idea regarding loyalty. “I guess loyalty doesn’t mean anything any more” one friend recently said to me after the round of layoffs at his company (interesting sidenote, he was not directly impacted by the layoffs). This idea is rooted in anger, the feeling of betrayal. But is loyalty the right word here? You’re exchanging value for value – your time and talent for their money. Loyalty is what you do when you help a friend move or pick them up in the middle of the night from a bad situation. Loyalty is staying with your spouse during the tough times. Loyalty is not a word we should use to describe a job or our relationship with a company, but it’s hard not to evoke the word when the feeling so closely matches loyalty’s counterpart – betrayal.
The point here for anyone going through being impacted by layoffs – you are not alone. What you are feeling is raw and real and you need to take time to process it all. Just don’t let it consume you. A colleague called me after I was impacted to tell me it took them 3 months to get over the anger of being laid off earlier in his career. He shared its ok to feel angry but holding on to it isn’t useful. I really appreciated his call and willingness to be open and vulnerable with me.
Every great inspiring story has adversity. We like to see the protagonist climb out of despair to triumph over the pain, but often only get to know the story by the end, when the victory has been won. The journey through the horror is told in the past tense but experienced in the present. Know that this is just a thing you are experiencing on the way to… actually, I don’t get to write the next part – you do. I look forward to hearing your story when you are ready to tell it, because losing your job might be “just business” but it’s also very personal.