Pretty in Pink

By FCS | August 9, 2017

One of the most demure tints in the world of color gets a bad name in the world of employment. While a pink slip of paper should signal femininity, a baby or a birthday party. Instead, getting the dreaded pink slip at work evokes fear, anxiety or anger. Being fired seems like an unnatural step in the employment process. It makes a job seem like it has a life cycle of its own. During the interview of your dream job, did you whisper, “Until death do us part?” Then how could your employer break the vow?

Receiving a pink slip, or as I like to call it being “involuntarily unemployed,” is very stressful. Financial and workplace stress appear on most Top 10 Stressor Lists. How you receive that pink slip plays into how you handle the news and how much stress you can encounter. Years ago, I was part of a whole department that was fired. Fifteen of us were invited to a meeting and were let go en masse. We could stay until the end of the month. Those of us who stayed (because we didn’t have new jobs to go to) walked around like zombies and those who remained maintained a look of shock. It was a tight group, probably unusually so, considering there were about 25-30 employees, but because we had great team rapport, it felt like a slow dying process. As difficult as it is to be fired by yourself, I would argue it is more humane.

What you do immediately after you are fired can add to or lessen your stress. If you stay in your workplace for some time after you are fired, that requires a certain type of adaptation. If you are walking out the door with your possessions on the same day, that’s something else. Either way, before you look for another job, take time to evaluate your job experience from start to finish. What could you have done differently? Would you take that type of job again – why or why not? Author Steve Tobak says getting fired can be a blessing in disguise, but it comes with a price. In “This Is How You Handle Getting Fired with Grace,” Tobak says, “It’s a hell of a lot easier to play the victim who got screwed than take a good hard look in the mirror and face the truth that maybe you had it coming. If you handle it right, you’ll land on your feet and be better off for the experience.”

For most of us, looking for a new job must start as soon as possible. In Jon Acuff’s “6 Ways to Handle Getting Fired Without Totally Freaking Out,” he advises aiming for next, not best. Acuff says if you’re trying to pay the bills, aim for a job to make that happen (a “job-job” as he calls it) and not your dream job. “A lot of the people I coach get stuck trying to go off on some vision quest when they lose their job,” says Acuff. “Forget that. Get your next job — the one you might only have for a year and then fire up the dream job machine once you’ve stabilized things a smidge.”

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