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Un-Employee Engagement: We Need You

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This was a comment I wrote to Rajesh Setty. it was a  short note to people who were laid off. Although this is an employee engagement site I think engagement is so important regardless of our state of employment.

A short note to employees who have been laid off:

Be kind to yourself for life is not a problem to be solved but an experience to be lived. You may not like the layoff (who would?) but can you live the layoff?

I think we get so busy trying to fix things that we don’t stop and take time to realize where we are.

Acceptance is not passivity and it is certainly not panic. Acceptance is so much stronger than simplistic positive thinking.

When life throws me a lemon, I don’t make lemonade, I duck. After that I get back up and figure out what comes next.

Alan Watts once wrote: “If we make where we are going more important than where we are, there may be no point in going.”

I encourage you to be fully where you are while creating your next moves out of acceptance not anger, hatred, fear, anxiety, shame, guilt or one of the other glitchy emotions that can accompany a layoff.

Please take care and carry on caring.

We need you — even if it does not feel like that to you right now.

Love David

Photo Credit: Give me some sunshine by http://www.flickr.com/photos/aussiegall/2245665263/

Comments

  1. I love this note! I have a relative working at a community thrift store/food pantry/help center and the stories are heart-breaking. Professionals from all walks of life coming in to get help for the first time ever, their eyes swollen from crying. Some of them just burst into tears right there in the office… they need notes like this.

  3. This is beautiful and original. At the very moment that this “formal” thing is happening to so many with all the legal, impersonal drek hanging off it, you cut to the part that is hurting the most. Thanks, David. What a service.

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