If you got here without having read Part 1 and Part 2, here’s the condensed summary:

Losing a job is stressful. Driven by the need to move on quickly, there’s little acknowledgement of the mental anguish that inevitably accompanies such an event. The reality is that shame, guilt and trauma come along for the ride. How we identify ourselves with our work impacts our self-esteem, so losing a job can raise doubts about our abilities. The process of losing a job can trigger the same fear response from our brain as if we were under a life-threatening attack. Raising your self-awareness through mindfulness and being kind to yourself can help.

At some point, it’s time to move on.

Closure is a basic human desire. There is a whole body of research on the psychology behind closure and why some people need it more than others. Even to the employees that thrive best in ambiguity, a sudden job loss is different. If your path to closure is to accept the ambiguity surrounding the layoff, tread carefully to avoid spinning into self-deprecation. If your path to closure is through cultural or social beliefs — “This is God’s way and I’m OK with it” — that might help if the belief is genuine. However, most people are not comfortable with the ambiguity of a job loss, especially ones that are sudden and unexpected. Seeking closure through reasoning is a natural process of healing. Whatever path to closure you choose, the goal is simple:

“To sleep peacefully at night.”

Who wouldn’t want to?

Here’s a framework for rationalizing a job loss based on my experience that might help with closure.

Reason 1: Poor performance

If you’ve really been performing poorly, hopefully it’s a discussion you’ve had with your managers and peers well in advance. With little exception, “poor performance” is really a proxy for “poor fit.” As much as the leadership bibles seem to call for it, in practice, very few leaders spend time trying to determine the best fit for their employees. It’s easier to clean house under the “performance” umbrella. So why feel bad? If nothing, it’s a call to be more aggressive in chasing the right fit for yourself. This wasn’t meant to be. Sometimes, managers will use this reason to wage a personal vendetta. It wasn’t you anyway.

Reason 2: Poor fit

This can be interesting. If you’ve never had meaningful discussions on your role, citing “poor fit” is tricky — it reflects badly on the organization for not being proactive with matching employees to their best role. If you’ve been uncomfortable in the role for some time, perhaps it wasn’t a good fit after all. Your true calling is somewhere else. If you were a highly skilled employee, the organization hasn’t been able to nurture and grow their personnel properly. Would you want to stay in such an organization? It wasn’t you anyway.

Reason 3: Cost

I love this reason. It’s probably the most common one you’ll hear. “We over hired and now we’re over budget”, “It’s just a business decision”, “This acquisition didn’t work out as intended”, “This project is no longer profitable”, “This project isn’t aligned with the company goals anymore”, and so many others. Cost cutting, when done right, can be a necessary business tool. However, doing it right is to create a culture of personnel rotation, to aggressively match people to their ideal roles, and to exercise patience and good judgement in hiring. When you do all this and still need to cut costs, it’s easier to justify. Either way, as an employee, you’re trapped in mismanagement or the victim of a necessary tool in an otherwise well-run organization. It wasn’t you anyway.

Living in constant uncertainty and fear is a threat to our survival. Our brains have evolved remarkably to reason through cognitive dissonance. Much like the fox in Aesop’s fable who reasoned the grapes must have been sour anyway, my hope is that the framework above provides you with the tools to work through a layoff.1

It wasn’t you anyway.

Rabbit Holes

On the psychology of closure:

On cognitive dissonance — I would recommend listening to the 2-part series on Cognitive Dissonance from Hidden Brain and forking off into the excellent references from there:

Footnotes

  1. This was Shankar Vedantam’s analogy on a brilliant episode of the Hidden Brain on cognitive dissonance. ↩