Marching Orders

Redundancy and Perspective

Whilst running a seminar a few days ago a worried looking woman came up to me in the break and told me about her husband John.

John went into work a few weeks ago as usual.  He sat at his desk and logged on to find an email from his boss who wanted to see him at 10.00 that morning.  John grabbed a coffee at 09.50 and went into his boss’s office at 10.00.  By 10.20 security escorted him back to his desk.  He put his personal belongings in a box, handed over his office keys and ID to the security chap who was standing vigilant and found himself out on the pavement by 10.35.

John was in shock, he didn’t see any warning signs that he was about to be made redundant.  He stood in the rain for a while in disbelief.  Eventually he went back to his car embarrassed, confused and dumbfounded.

He didn’t remember the journey home, he didn’t remember his wife’s face when he walked through the door earlier than usual, in fact he didn’t remember much for the next couple of days.  But his wife remembered some of it.

John’s brain went into avoidance mode.  He got dressed for work each morning and left the house as usual, where he went he couldn’t say.  When he came home he opened his laptop and remained ‘busy’ until bedtime.  He didn’t eat and slept badly.  He began to get headaches, stomach pains and this thinking was very ‘foggy’.  This is normal when we experience shock and bad news. 

John’s wife was worried sick, but eventually he started talking and as the words came his anger and bitterness welled up into a sea of fear and hopelessness.  Luckily for John, his wife was able to direct his anger into doing banal jobs around the house.  He pruned bushes in the garden, several times he mowed the lawn between showers, he sorted out home paper work and gradually he had the energy to think about his working future.

The day of the seminar John’s wife wanted to know what she could do to help him.  I told her she had already done so much by being incredibly supportive.  When bad news happens like this and it is delivered in such an appalling way, people need time out.  Doing the garden or things in the house gave him space to think whilst being productive, it helped clear his mind and at the same time, gave him a purpose.  The fact that he was now talking about it was a big step.  The next stage was to help him look at the experience in a different way.  When we shift our perspective we can be more proactive, so looking at the redundancy as an opportunity to develop and reinvent would see a change in attitude and confidence, which would put John in a much stronger position to find something new.

John’s wife left the seminar feeling much better, not because of the seminar itself, I would guess she didn’t hear a single word of content, but because of our chat in the break.  She changed my perspective too.  We help in the most unexpected ways, don’t we?