I’ve probably personally known more people fired around the world and especially in Ameria in the last two months than all the other years put together. This is what the Speaker Of The House Of Representatives in the US posted on the Speaker’s blog.
photo credit: kevindooley
And so I have a dilemma. Should these people have been fired? Is it good for people to get fired? Or would it be better for them to have not been fired?
I do know that being fired is a painful experience. It causes disruptions in life, creates stress due to the uncertainty of the future, and surfaces many dissatisfactions.
If you’ve been fired, you really need to go out there and get your life back.
The first thing is to ask yourself what your market value is. It’s all nice and dandy to point at the people who caused the fiancial debacle and say it’s their fault. It’s even more important to focus on what you can do instead. To increase market value, you really need to increase your expertise.
Developing expertise can help you eliminate future job loss in the future. It shows you have added value and a large proportion of people are willing to hire those with advanced skills even if they get fired.
So, I’d highly recommend:
- Manage your state. If you are in the “mourning” stage of your loss, give yourself a limit, then start looking forward.
- Select a skill to build. You need to know what is important in your marketplace. Chances are, these skills aren’t the technical skills. They usually are the life skills such as NLP (hint, hint), leadership, presentation skills and the like that you have to master and increase your personal branding. Sometimes, these skills (for instance, NLP) can help you to build a pathway toward your new business, but you will definitely need to learn how to establish yourself as an expert, and then to have the right credentials (such as being licensed) to teach those skills you have mastered yourself.
- Pick a series of books. Don’t just get one book or two, that would be like dabbling! Pick up a series of 20 or 30 of the top books in that area, so you can really get a depth of knowledge there. Oh, and in order to learn this, you may have to develop some speed/accelerated reading techniques to digest them fast and still understand and remember what you’ve read.
- Build your portfolio. Test yourself by proving that you are competent in those areas. You create your own key performance indicators, and find a way to prove it. Leadership can be proven through project you create and run, say, in a volunteer organization. Presentations can easily be proven through a Toastmasters meeting. Add this to your list of achievements, and you’ll find that you continue to build competence while upping your confidence.
Not sure what to learn? Then I’d suggest you pick up NLP skills because it will improve your modeling skills so you can adopt any new skills you choose!
Incidentally, if there were a skill you wish you had, what would you want to learn? Drop me a comment below.
