Laid Off? Then Lay Out Your Plans

It’s common for people during a recession to end up feeling hopeless and fearful of the uncertain future. In a situation like this, all you really need to do is to begin this simple process of evaluation and goal setting.

1. Were you fired because you were overpaid? If so, it might be because you’ve not been able to add value to the organization relative to what you were being paid. It may also mean you have reached an income scale that doesn’t make sense for an organization to keep you. You might need to start out on your own, if you dare.
2. What kinds of useful skills do you have? Make a list of the skills you have developed. Would anyone hire you to use your skills? Can you confidently say you have a valuable set of skills that the market will value? If not, you really have to start over by developing a new set of skills. NLP can help you develop those skills faster through the process of modeling.
3. How are your life skills relative to your work skills? If you have great work skills but have never developed your life skills, it’s even more imperative for you to make plans for this.

Now, start building your plan.

1. Create a vision for your future. What is your intended lifestyle? How do you want to live your life? Put yourself there.
2. What resources do you need? Resources such as your skills, the appropriate emotional state, the skills that prevent your weaknesses from overwhelming you, etc.
3. When are you going to develop or model those resources? You need to set a time frame for you to build those resources. Write these down and visualize yourself after these have been developed. How different will your behaviors be? How different your results?
4. Who are your role models? Of course if you are going to model these skills, assuming you already have the modeling technology at your fingertips, you need to know who you are going to learn from! You will need to be able to observe them and learn from them, engage them in conversations. They may have to be formal coaching relationships to be effective in many instances (i.e. get ready to pay your way to develop the skills). Or else, you could develop accelerated learning skills and read widely to developed the expertise.