Embracing Change After Job Loss Through the Sunflower Model

Welcome to the Happiness Squad Podcast. Your weekly dose of practical tips and inspiration to help you operate at your fullest potential, integrating the science of flourishing into how you live, work and lead. I'm your host, Ashish Kothari, the founder and CEO of Happiness Squad and author of the bestselling book Hardwired for Happiness. I will be your personal guide on your journey to explore the many facets of happiness, well being and flourishing, from personal growth to building more positive environments at work. In each episode, we will share powerful insight, tips and stories from our guests who are leading experts, company executives and flourishing solution providers that you can implement right away to make happiness your competitive edge. Whether you're looking to overcome life's challenges, to go from good to great, or to enhance your team's performance through flourishing, this podcast is the place for you to find more joy, health, love and meaning in everything you do. Join us every week as we rewire for Happiness together. Welcome, dear Happiness Squad listeners. As promised, today is the second episode in our series around how you can use the Sunflower model to truly either achieve any goal that you want or to overcook any obstacles or unplanned events that you might be navigating through that life has thrown your way. Over the course of the episodes, I will help you think about how you can use the Sunflower Model, the nine practices almost like petals of a flower, that you can use and dance around each of those kind of practices to help navigate. And I think we'll use a series of questions that come with that to do the work we need to do and to get the support to achieve the goals or navigate transitions. We're going to handle questions around what to do if you've lost a job or what to do if you are at a job and you want to get promoted quickly, quicker. We'll handle things around what to do if you are looking to break an addiction or you're trying to build a new healthier habit that can help you live longer and enjoy life in the later part of your years with the same vigor and vitality that you had in your younger years. We'll handle questions around how you can use these to find new love. Find a new relationship will also help think about how these practices can help you overcome a breakup or a divorce or an untimely death of a spouse. We can use these practices to help welcome new life into the world. Maybe you've become a new parent and we'll prepare you using these practices to navigate becoming empty nesters. You can use these practices if you're starting your career, finding your first job, you can also use these practices if you are thinking about retiring and exploring what to do next. So that's what's coming. We'll tackle every one of these different areas once a month. But let's start with today tackling the question of how can you use these practices if you have recently been laid off or made redundant over 2023? I was looking at this data. About 1.6 million people lost their jobs in the US in 2023. There's another 120,000 who have been affected just in 2024, in the first two months alone. And you know, this reduction and these adjustments in employment that companies are making, part of it out of the fear of what's coming, a softening economy, higher inflation, part of it around recognizing that they need new skill sets. These are only going to continue. And so, you know, there are a lot amongst us who are navigating this transition, unplanned transition, I should say, of the loss of a job and what to do next. Typically it finds takes about three to six months on average to find a job. Now it might take longer if you're senior in your career or versus kind of entry. It also depends a bit depending on, you know, the skillset that you bring. But on average it takes three to six months. And so this episode, I'll cover some practices that can help you shorten that time. But more importantly, what's more important is how can you make the most of this time that you have all of a sudden? Usually our works consume 40, 50 hours, if not more of our real productive capacity. And now that's a gift that you have over the next four to six months. And I want to help you both navigate this transition in a much better way. But more importantly, really use this transition, this gift that the universe has given you. Even though right now it might not feel like a gift, might actually feel like more like a curse or even questions of why this actually happened to you. But trust me, in the grand scheme of things, if you use this time the right way, you will be more thankful about this time in your life than maybe, maybe many other times before. So let's get going. By the way, these experiences are very personal to me. I myself experienced being laid off in 2002. I was at Deloitte, I was on a work visa. I was halfway through my business school degree, MBA that I was paying for myself. And I was told, hey, tech downturn, telecom is being decimated and you're not going to have a job. I faced the prospect of actually having to leave the country without finishing my MBA that I had invested my own 30, $40,000 into by that time. And it was a scary time. But trust me, I am so grateful now for that to have ever happened. Because the next set of things that happened in my life would never have been possible. I would not have doubled down. I would not have found an opportunity with another great firm called Char Consulting, which then transitioned me into McKinsey. I would not have, you know, really at that moment, taken the opportunity to get healthier. So lots of great things then came out of it. It is possible for you too. But in that moment it feels really tough. It feels really scary. So let's start by thinking about how we use the nine Sunflower practices. Self, awareness, purpose, gratitude, mindfulness, mastering your emotions, fueling up with compassion, investing in your well being, community and intentional living. Let's think about how we use them. Frankly, there is no one prescribed order. You can go in any order that works for you. But I always say it's always helpful to start with self awareness. So let's start. If you've just received the news or even a couple of months ago, you're probably going through a whole range of different thoughts, emotions and body sensations. It's important to be able to step back and create a bit of distance between what you're thinking, what you're feeling, what you're afraid of. What are the emotions that are coming up for you so you can process them the right way. Let's take them one at a time. When we lose a job often there are lots of what are called anti learning or non resilient or protection mindsets that come up to play. You know, you might be wondering and saying to yourself, why did this happen to me? Victim mindset or how am I going to ever find another job? The whole economy seems to not doing so well. Everybody's being laid off. Scarcity. These are moments when we really also doubt ourselves. We all have a fear of not feeling enough. You can pick your poison. Not feeling smart enough, tall enough, young enough, old enough, thin enough, muscular enough, you name it. These moments our sense of worthiness really comes up and we have extreme self doubts because we were the ones that were let go. There were so many others that didn't lose their job. So be aware of these thoughts, be aware of these beliefs. We don't want to believe them, but they kind of drive a lot of our lives. They will come up. These are your quote unquote demons and your brain will want to keep playing them over and over. Write them down and most importantly, look for evidence that suggests these are not true. Second, be aware of the emotions that you're going through. The most common emotions that we navigate when we have lost a job. It's not just one emotion. You'll go through multiple emotions. Fear comes up. Fear, how I'm going to provide for my family. Fear, how am I going to pay for the house, the mortgage? Fear, will I ever get another job? What will people think of me? Sadness shows up. Yes, it is an incredibly sad time to go through and find out that you've been laid off and people didn't value what you were doing. Anger will show up. Why me? It is so unfair. Shame will show up. How am I going to connect with others and tell them that I've been laid off? What will they think of me? Anxiety will show up because you're worried about the future. And on and on and on. Many of these emotions are going to be present for you. Start by just naming them. We know when we name an emotion, we already start the process of taming it. So name the emotion and then we can work on really getting underneath it. Every emotion is different. You can also notice how one emotion, just like a thought, rises and falls. We love the positive emotions. We crave them. Joy, love, feeling, valued, satisfaction. And we don't like. We are averse to these other unpleasant emotions, but like them all, they all rise and fall. They're not going to be there for long, but for a moment, just notice them and write them down. Notice what you might feel in your body. By the way. Again, it might start with feeling like the world is ending. And you might feel heaviness, tiredness and need to sleep on other moments you might feel euphoria. Anger sometimes can create a lot of energy. Well, you might move like taking action and doing things or complaining. Just notice. And also notice the movements in your body that you can make that might create a more positive emotion, create more space for you. So step number one is always awareness. Just be really good at noticing. A journal can be a really powerful way for us to just write these down. Process the thoughts, process the emotions. Just start with there. This is usually also a really good time because we rarely do this to take a step back and really look at our life dashboard. It's a tool I offer in the Hardwired for Happiness book and it really says think about four domains in your life. Wealth, hard work, health, love, and meaning. Imagine you have dials from 0 to 100, you define what 100 is. For some, in the wealth dimension, it might be a million. For some, it might be 10. For some, it might be 100. For some, it might be 150,000. It doesn't matter. Choose your number and just take an inventory of where. Do you feel you are in your journey, in your aspiration? On the wealth dial? Do the same on health. How healthy do you feel physically, mentally, spiritually? Do the same on love, your quality of relationships with your friends, family and others in the community. And finally, meaning. Does your life have meaning? Do you feel your days are filled with something that matters personally to you, that you're in the service of, you know, in the busyness of life? Very rarely do we get this opportunity to step back and do this assessment so we can start to more consciously chart the second half of our life, the next chapter of our life. You've been given that gift. Even, even when people do the assessments, sometimes we are afraid to make the changes. The busyness keeps us stuck in patterns. You've just been given the biggest gift. You actually have the time. So step back and give yourself to space to say, this is where I am, but what would an ideal life look like for me? As you think about your next job and the next stage, let that be an important invitation as you start to explore different opportunities out there. Recognize, dear friends, by the way, that any transition. This is based on the work done by Bruce Wheeler. No transition is linear. Life is not linear. Transitions are not linear. And recognize also become aware that you're going to go through multiple, three different types of kind of emotions and kind of stages that you're going to have to go through. He defines them as number one is saying goodbye, saying goodbye to the old life. Many of us find it really hard. The second is the messy middle. Think about that moment when the caterpillar goes into its chrysalis. It is messy, it's gooey, it's not clean. That's the middle. You're going to find a lot. There'll be lots of emotions as you navigate this phase. And then the third is new beginnings. Again, as I mentioned, they're not linear. You might find you go from messy middle to new beginnings, you get excited, and then you find a day that you're finding it really hard to say goodbye and are feeling resentment, anger, all of those anxiety from the job that you just left. So just know, become aware of that and normalize it. Because we often, often try to beat ourselves and say, hey, I thought I went through that why am I going back? So awareness is a really, really big element. And if you do the work, if you do your assessment on how life is going and where you want to go, you might notice that there are certain areas that all of a sudden you have so much time. Things that you deprioritized or very rarely got to. For me, often in between my jobs, they were in the health dimension. You know, I worked too late, had too much coffee, didn't work out enough. This is that opportunity to start to do some of those things, take one or two things and start to take action on them. It might be, hey, I want to start running again, or hey, I always told myself I didn't have time to meditate, I want to start meditating. So start with awareness. There's a lot of questions in my book that can help you take a full assessment of where you are and some tools that you can start to navigate through. One of the big ones is going to be removing mindsets that are no longer serving you from awareness. As I mentioned, there are lots of emotions that are present. That's the place to go next. Recognize that you are entering a period where you will have lots of these emotions. It's a transitions are emotional journeys. Many of these emotions of anger, fear, resentment, shame, guilt and loneliness are actually going to show up for you know them and know that there is a way to work through them that can be helpful and a way that can make the effects worse. All of us have our go tos. These emotions are unpleasant, we don't like to experience them, and we often default to one of two ways in which we can process them. And trust me, 80% of us, I am no different. Without conscious thought, go towards what are numbing strategies, especially when the emotions are too intense. What are numbing strategies? This is where we use alcohol, we use substances, we might use marijuana, we might smoke food, we might overeat. Those tubs of ice cream look really good. I've had my cups, fair share of cups. We might actually binge watch and use Netflix or some other ways to just drown ourselves. Overindulging in sleep, keeping things shut, not getting up. All of these are what I call numbing strategies. They numb the emotion, but they take a big toll on our body. We can consciously recognize that the effect these are having on us and choose strategies that are more nurturing strategies. What are those? Well, everybody's nurturing strategy is different. When I feel down, one of the most powerful strategies I can deploy is called a friend. I'm an extrovert I like talking and that allows me to break out of the funk. For some, it might be playing a music or dancing, going out for a walk, going for a run, pumping iron, going swimming, meditating that are both numbing and nurturing. See if you can start to use a nurturing strategy to to work through Your emotion can be really, really powerful and you'll find several of them in the book Hardwired for Happiness. We hope you're enjoying this episode. If you'd like to start building habits and integrating the Hardwired for Happiness practices into your life, come check out Rewire our program on the Happiness Squad website. Rewired contains 35 minute micro practices that can help you truly build habits for a happier, healthier life filled with more love and meaning. The program uses the science of habit formation and the power of community to support you in moving from knowing to doing to being. Now back to the episode. The next step to go from awareness and recognizing the emotions that are only going to help you is mindfulness. Now look, 80% of people today know mindfulness is good. Only 20% of those meditate. Most common excuse is I don't have the time. Well, you've been given the biggest gift of time. It is one of the most powerful habits that we can build that can help us live longer, that can help us think better, think faster, sleep better. It's also really powerful as an antidote to stress and really powerful to help us regulate our emotions. This is a wonderful time to start to practice meditation. You might find a local sangha, a meditation school. We have tons of meditations on the Rebire app that we've designed. There are several meditation scripts that you can find in my book. You can go to YouTube, you can get calm. There is no dearth of resources. What's important is we start again. If you're a beginner, you can use the book. It defines a very specific path. One of the ones that I find the simplest is actually a method that I picked up from potential Project Anatomy Sitting straight with our back straight, our eyes dim or closed, our chin facing up, lips a little bit wide open. B. Breath. Noticing our breath going in and out. We use breath as a way to bring mindful attention. Count C Our brain needs something to focus on. So with breath, let's give it the number of times we're breathing in and out. Starting from 1, going all the way to 10 and then starting from 10 counting down to 1 use. Let's start simply with that throughout the day in the beginning, middle and the end. Finding five to ten minutes to just sit down and focus on the breath. And the last part of the ABCD practice is d your brain will get distracted. Our minds wander. That is a core property of the brain. When you notice you're distracted, make that be a part of the meditation. Don't judge yourself for being distracted. Just bring the attention back to the breath and restart the count from one to 10. Mindfulness will help you learn to be with whatever emotion that you're struggling with. You won't need to numb it and you won't need to act it out. You can bring the attention. One of the one of my teachers teach Nathan, who I've long admired, says this beautifully. With mindfulness, you can bring the embrace of a mother or of a big brother to a child. The small child in you that is feeling hurt, angry, is in pain. You can bring that embrace through that embrace of your breath in the present moment. Bring that loving kindness, that attention to the part of you that's hurt and just that attention and being held is soothing. So try with mindfulness, which is one of the core practices. As I mentioned, when we are going through a transition, if you've lost your job, you have lots of time. One of the areas most people withdraw from when we are extremely busy, which many of us are every day, is in the space of well being. So mastering your wellbeing can be a really, really powerful practice. Look, it takes somewhere between 14 days to 90 days to form a habit. Most recent consensus is 66 days. It's a beautiful period where you have the gift of time, where you can set your own schedule to build a set of morning and evening practices around wellbeing that will leave you nourished physically, mentally and spiritually. If you've never gone and done yoga, you could sign up for a yoga class. You can start running. You can consciously choose to eat better. You might not have had the time before to cook for yourself. Now you can maybe join a cooking class to start to learn a new type of cooking. It'll also keep you distracted mentally. See if you can get seven plus hours of sleep every day. Sleeping at the same time and waking up at the same time. Start to build a habit and get into a circadian rhythm that feels natural. Pick up something new, start to learn something, sign up for a course. It'll fill your days and it's a skill that you can develop. We can start to learn something new at any point in our life, all the way into our 60s and 70s. Often we don't Find the time. You have the time now. Maybe you want to take up a dance lesson, maybe you want to start learning piano, maybe you want to start learning how to paint. Invest the time that the universe has given you to pick up a new skill and then finally spiritually spend time in nature, start, pick up a game, see if there is flat football or another kind of local team, maybe a sport you played when you were young and you haven't played in a while. A great place to start to start introducing play. Spiritual reading is another great one. You know, maybe there's some books that you always said I will read, but you never had the time. What a wonderful opportunity to start to integrate that. Mastering your well being is one of the biggest, one of the four big drivers that allow us to be happier and help us flourish. This is the opportunity to start to build many of these rhythms and routines that will serve you well for when you do get a job. Because once they form habits, we start to do them unconsciously. So use the time, dear friends, to build those habits. Now, we've talked a lot around awareness. We've talked a lot about emotions, mindfulness and well being. Let's talk about purpose. Because unless you no longer need to work anymore financially, in fact, I will say, even if you don't need to work anymore financially, most of us want to do something meaningful. Meaning is one of the biggest drivers around flourishing. We've known about that. And this is such a great opportunity to find a job or a career that actually is meaningful for you in addition to giving you a paycheck. If you already did the assessment and awareness around the life dashboard, you probably have a good feel for how much do you really need in terms of salary compensation from the next job. You know, I'm so surprised there's so many people who haven't done this assessment. They might be in their 30s and 40s and they might already have enough in the bank that they don't need to work anymore. Or they can choose to take a different job that might pay less, but might give them more flexibility to be with a loved one, to take care of an aged parent or frankly just take care of themselves, be with their kids more, more to be able to find time to do something more in the service area. But since we don't actually assess that, we don't know it. So I think it's really important to do that assessment and start to set some guardrails. Now, in my book I highlight one of the most powerful models that I found to find more meaning in life and to infuse it at work is the ikigai model. For those who are not familiar, it's a Venn diagram. It, it got popular. It's a concept that is really, really old. Originates in the high end era in Japan. It really got popular with the Blue Zones, work done by Dan Buettner. So ikigai imagined a career or a job that allows you to have all four of these things. So it's intersecting circles. What you love, what you're good at, what the world needs and is willing to pay for. If you're able to find your ikigai, if you're able to live into your ikigai, if you're able to integrate these into your next job, your job is not going to feel like a job. It's going to feel like life. You might choose never to retire from it. So how do we do that? I think the most powerful way in which we can start to do that is to resist the temptation, that fear, that mind of ours that wants us to just get the next job. You know, if I was in finance, let me take another finance job. I was a telecom guy. I'm going to look for other telecom companies that are looking. Resist the urge to just jump into the next thing that feels like this thing. Instead, step back and examine your last three years, five years, 10 years, however long it's been. What aspects of the job did you like? What aspects of the job did you not like? What aspects of the company culture did you like? What aspects didn't you like? What aspects of the pace of work did you like? What didn't you like? What aspects of how you interacted and collaborated with others that you liked versus what you didn't like. Step back and really examine all of that. Mind that rich experience that you had that we never. Step back and look. Go at the balcony and look at you in the dance floor. Through all of your jobs, find those nuggets of what you really love. What elements of the job you felt wouldn't flow that you really love. Find those moments, find the strengths that really differentiated you, that are really unique, that are your skills. Now you can ask people, you can do assessments like the Gallup strength finder or a VR character strength. It's really important to connect back to those strengths because once we look at what we love and what we are good at, we can start to generate a range of options. Now you can use a tool called mind mapping that I picked up from Dave Evans and Bill Burnett from the work they designed. They're two amazing design. Two amazing designers. They run a course called Design youn. I think I have the book right here. It's called Designing youg Life. It's this concept called mind mapping, which is from design thinking that they put around defining your life. I think it's a really powerful concept. You'll find them in my book as well. But it's really important from those two elements to start to generate a range of options, not just the linear immediate next. And give yourself the opportunity to get curious about how you too could design and find your next job or your next career that has some of those elements that you might have been missing in your prior job. Community. The petal of community. The practice of community can be a really big one. Actually it's one of the most essential ones when it comes to finding a job because of an interesting statistic that you might or might not be aware of. 70 to 80% of all hires are hired through referrals for jobs that are not even posted. It's called the hidden job market. So it's really important to be able to reconnect with that community, your friends. If you have a network that you invested in, this is when it will really come in handy. But even if you haven't, it doesn't matter. Start now. Talk to your friends, talk to your colleagues. Find others in the community. Connect with them, share with them. You know, if you did your mind mapping and you came up with a range of options, find people who are in those jobs. People are always willing to help. Ask them for their story. Don't ask them for their job. Ask them for what they love about their job. They will talk to you about it and your passion and your expertise and your experience in that area will start. So community is a really big deal. Look, you know, I spent for most of my life I was out on the road three days a week. I didn't have a chance to invest that much in my local community. I don't know about you, maybe that's true for you as well. Great opportunity to get involved. Maybe there are some organizations where you can volunteer your time. Maybe there are opportunities, local schools where you can mentor. You might be looking for a job, but might be a great opportunity for you to be mentoring others. You never know how. Some of these volunteer opportunities might be the doorway to your next job, the next practice that can be really helpful actually builds of community. I talked about volunteer is fueled up with compassion. So one as we volunteer, we can actually be serving others. Be compassionate towards the needs of our community and be able to invest our time to play our part in being part of the solution. It's also equally important to be compassionate to yourself. As I said, these are moments that you're going to doubt your self worth. These are moments that you're going to navigate and sometimes fall into numbing ways of navigating these difficult emotions that you're going through. Maybe you'll drink too much one day. Maybe you'll feel like just having a Netflix day. Maybe you'll have an outburst at a loved one, maybe because you were really feeling down and somebody started to give you advice. Be compassionate. Practice self compassion. It can be a really, really powerful practice that we can lean on. Dr. Kristin Neff's work on self compassion is quite powerful. You can find that in my book Hard Ride for Happiness, where I bring in the practice that I picked up from her around how to be compassionate to ourselves. But compassion can be a really big one. Last but not least, living intentionally. As much as sometimes we hate our jobs, we love the structure they provide us. As much as we complain about running too fast, being on a treadmill, that treadmill takes us from the day to the next day to the next day. When we lose our job, that structure goes away. Our friends might still have jobs and we have so much time on our hand in these moments. The practice of living intentionally can be really, really helpful. Setting our intention, setting up our structure around some of the eight practices that I covered so that you can bring that structure that your job offered every morning. You can also set an intention for how you want to meet the world today. There's a beautiful practices around the sunflower that I highlight in the book. You can maybe choose today to start with curiosity or, or kindness or mindfulness or compassion. Choose how you want to meet the day. Second, choose what you want to focus on. Sometimes when we are afraid, when we are feeling really scared about what is gonna happen, you might want to try and do 15 things at the same time. And there'll be days that you want to do none. Prioritize, step back, be intentional around how you want to spend your time. Hardwire those practices and the habits that you want to go do every day. Meditation, journaling, being in nature, spending time with friends. Just build that time into your calendar so that you can make the most of those three to six months, maybe longer, maybe shorter. The gift of time that the universe has given you so that at the end of it, and I know you will get to the end, my friends, because everybody, there's very few people who I find who are not able to find something once they've lost a job, you will find it. It might not look like what you want, it might not feel like what you want in the moment, but you will get there at the end. This time will never come back. Use this time to rewire yourself away from fear, scarcity, too much focus on self to love other service and if you build these habits in this time, you'll be thankful for it. Hope you found this helpful. Please share this podcast with others that you might know have lost their jobs and could benefit. It'll be my pleasure to connect with them on LinkedIn to be able to help answer any questions they might have. They can join our Rewire community. We meet once a month and we'll do our best to be able to support them through the transition, through the power of community, through the micro practices that can help them build these habits to be happier, healthier and have more love and meaning. Thank you for listening, have an amazing day and God bless you. That wraps up another episode of the Happiness Squad podcast. We hope you found the insights actionable to enhance your your journey towards happiness and fill your life with more joy, health, love and meaning. Please consider leaving us Review and share the podcast with anyone in your professional or personal life who you feel will benefit from some of these very insights. It's a really simple way to extend support and spread positivity. Take care and remember, happiness is a choice that's available to you moment to moment in the here and now. Take care and see you next week.