Made redundant…now what?

Being made redundant is pretty popular right now…for corporations.

For those made redundant, this may be quite a difficult time frought with uncertainty and fear.

This may also be a great time for you to get a better understanding of your personal brand attributes, and strengthen your brand.  I am going to base my recommendations on some fundamentals of Human Needs crafted by Maslow, and since extended by guys like Anthony Robbins, and a great deal of other Personal Development legends!

In short – there are 6 ‘needs’ for human beings (starting from the basic CERTAINTY to the advanced GROWTH); let’s look at the first 3!

1.  Certainty - your job may well have provided certainty.  The certainty of income, and the certainty of relatioshipss and routine.  Well now this is gone.  So what to do?  The best advice here is to create certainty in OTHER parts of your life (these may not address the certainty of income immediately – but we will get to that!)

• Establish routine early – get a gym membership, 
• arrange to meet with friends every Wednesday morning at 7:30 for breakfast,
• Start a blog – or just write on a regular basis.  This helps with creatvity, organising your thoughts, and if you blog, it will introduce you to a whole new group of people!
• Take a moment to be grateful for the things you DO have, and recognise that unless yo do something REALLY bad, they will always be certain (like your family, friends, your health, your experience).

2.  Importance – Many of us love our work because it makes us feel important!  Really, this is a pretty fickle motivation; but for a large amount of the population, this is often ALL that keeps them at work.  So, if you have lost that perceived ‘importance’ brought by your job, then replace it by;  

• Design and print your own business cards.  Create a fun title that sparks conversation like CEO (Chief Enjoyment Officer) or CLO (Chief Leisure Officer). Give these to everyone you know
• Start a project to change something in your local community – like painting the bus shelters or collecting rubbish or cleaning the beach.  This will bring large levels of self satisfaction, and will make you feel more important than you ever have felt!
• Get a room – these days, for about A$30-40 a month you can get a ‘virtual office’ at a swanky address.  This will look good on your business card, and can come in handy for meetings,
• Reinvent your ‘look’ – you may not be needing those drab blue suits again for a while, so study some fashion mags (or get professional help form people like The Australian Image Company) and reinvent your style?
• Run for local council – this may seem brave (or stupid) but instead of complaining about local issues; do something to fix them!

3.  Choice – One of the comforts of ‘working for the man’ is that it gives you a regular income, and ultimately provides money; which gives you freedom (to a degree!), variety and choice! For the first time, you may now realise that being employed full time did NOT actually give you very much variety and choice at all! Now is the best time to get more variety into your life, so take up some new challenges!

• Join a new club; like the local RSL or the local LIONS,
• Book yourself into a dance class, or photography school,
• Take time to reconnect with some of your childhood passions – like making models, or collecting Star Wars characters!
• Sell some of your household clutter and used artefacts on eBay,
• Learn to swim or play tennis…

In general, there is so much you can be doing right now if you have recently been made redundant.  Recognise that we have not mentioned anything about looking for work or doing up your resume!  This is all good advice, but unless you take this time to recognise you have needs, and address some of these needs, you will be back in a job in no time that satisfies very few of you needs; except at best certainty…which is not a good place to get stuck!

Take note of each of these experiences as you try them; they will form an important part of your personal brand, and these experiences will ultimately make you more valuable!

Over the next few days, we will explore the final 3 needs in this hierarchy; CONNECTION, CONTRIBUTION and GROWTH.

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Tags: career planning, Certainty, Health, personal branding, redundant, Tony Robbins
This entry was posted on Sunday, February 22nd, 2009 at 7:57 pm and is filed under Executives. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.