Job loss is ranked as one of life’s most stressful events. A layoff presents major coping challenges including: adjusting your finances, engaging in an effective job search, and managing the emotional and social impacts of your new situation. Knowing just where to start when faced with such significant challenges can be difficult. Successfully coping with a layoff requires actively addressing all three of these major concerns.

After a layoff, many people ignore their emotional and personal health to focus all their efforts on finances and the job search. They often assume that personal and emotional distress will resolve once the crisis is solved. This approach, however, may actually limit their success because excessive mental, emotional or social distress can impact problem-solving abilities negatively. On the other hand, maintaining a positive attitude, controlling your mood and staying socially connected will focus and enhance problem-solving efforts. Therefore, managing your well being after a layoff is critically important.

Manage Your Thoughts and Attitudes

The way we think about our problems affects how we experience them. As the English poet John Milton observed, “The mind is its own place, and in itself, can make heaven out of Hell, and hell out of Heaven.” The field of cognitive behavioral psychology has extended this observation by identifying specific types of thoughts, beliefs and attitudes that increase or decrease stress and problems. Coping with a negative life event such as a job loss involves two primary cognitive tasks: maintaining a positive, solution-focused attitude and avoiding self-defeating thinking patterns.

Maintain a Positive, Solution-Focused Attitude

The way you think about, understand and react to the challenges you face shapes your attitude. With most of life’s major stressors a positive, solution-focused attitude is crucial to successfully coping. Your attitude is positive if it is based on the belief that you can successfully cope with your situation. It is solution-focused if it approaches the situation in a systematic, problem-solving manner.

Managing a layoff requires action. SuccessHawk provides you with the knowledge and tools necessary to take a solution-focused approach to conducting your job search, dealing with unemployment and managing your well being. Your success will be enhanced if you approach this action with a positive attitude.

Creating and maintaining a positive attitude after a layoff doesn’t mean you aren’t distressed or concerned. Distress is normal after a layoff, especially in challenging times. Having a positive attitude means that despite the challenges and distress, you still believe you can survive and land a good job. In contrast to a negative attitude, which fosters feelings of helplessness and inactivity, a positive attitude keeps you feeling motivated and engaged.

The following tips will help you keep a positive attitude after a layoff.

1. Avoid negative people
   Staying positive when surrounded by negative people is extremely difficult. Keep your distance from people who want to complain but take no action.
2. Focus on things you can control
   While it is important to understand the larger economic issues that affect your situation, don’t get stuck on “big issues” that are beyond your control. Overemphasizing these factors can make you feel powerless and helpless. Stay focused on what you can do to adjust your own budget to meet your new economic reality and find another job.
3. Make a list of your strengths and resources
   After a layoff, you may start to doubt yourself and become overly focused on the obstacles you face. Balance these concerns by focusing on your strengths and resources. Remember to include not only your own perceptions but also the perceptions of trusted, knowledgeable others.
4. Look for a silver lining
   When confronted with a challenge, some people are open to seeing a benefit or positive lesson from the experience. Your layoff may actually be the opportunity for you to find a more gratifying or rewarding career! Even if this isn’t the case, coping with a layoff will teach you something…such as how resilient you are, how supportive your friends and family are, or what’s really important to you in life.
5. Pay attention to your thinking
   Even though we don’t always pay attention to it, our minds are constantly thinking about and evaluating our experiences. After a layoff, it is important to make sure that this inner dialogue is positive and empowering rather than negative and self-defeating. To help yourself stay focused on positive, empowering thoughts, read Avoiding Self-Defeating Thinking later in this article.
6. Avoid self-defeating thinking patterns
   Engaging in frequent thoughts and evaluations about unemployment is common among people facing the task of coping with a layoff. Many of these thoughts and evaluations are knee-jerk responses that pop into our minds without reasoning or deliberation. Consequently, they are frequently negative, distorted and unrealistic. Such negative thinking is self-defeating because it heightens the stressfulness of the situation and undermines your belief that you can successfully master your challenges.
   Automatic patterns of negative thinking can be thinking traps because they lock us into self-defeating ways of perceiving and acting. The key to breaking out of such negative thinking is to recognize it, challenge it, and change it into more helpful and constructive thoughts. To learn more about common thinking traps and practice a five-step strategy for changing them, go to Avoiding Self-Defeating Thinking later in this article.

Manage Your Mood

Few things in life have a greater emotional impact than learning that you have been laid off. Although it is normal to experience strong emotions after a layoff, these emotions can be distressing and debilitating. They can interfere with your ability to function effectively by impairing your judgment, disrupting your concentration, reducing your activity level, and complicating your relationships with others. Developing mood management skills can help you avoid these pitfalls and optimize your ability to meet the challenges of a layoff.

The following strategies for decreasing the intensity of your emotional reactions are proven and effective. They are particularly helpful during a job loss, a situation that normally and predictably causes high levels of emotional distress. Try the strategies you think may help you, but remember there is a broad range of human emotion, so no single mood management approach or technique will work for everyone. The key is to try several and keep using the ones that work.

Establish a Helpful Routine

Though you may need some time after a layoff to absorb the impact of the situation, it is important to quickly regroup and get active again. An important coping task after a layoff is to reestablish a new sense of routine and direction. The following suggestions can help you get moving in a positive direction.

Maintain Helpful Relationships

Strong social support is one of your best resources for helping manage any of life’s major stresses and rebounding from a layoff is no different. Maintaining effective social and professional support networks enhances your ability to cope with a layoff. The following suggestions can help you maintain these types of helpful relationships.

Deal with Rejection

Rejection is a common experience during a job search. Few people find a job on their first attempt, especially when there are few jobs and many people pursuing them. Not being chosen for a job can be discouraging. If not managed carefully, rejection can erode your confidence and positive attitude. The key to preventing rejection from derailing your job search is to learn from the experience and monitor the way you think about it.

Learn from the experience

Finding out why you were not selected for a job can be very helpful. Did you lack an important skill? Did you not perform well on the job interview? Were there issues with your cover letter or resume? Whenever possible, contact someone from the organization and try to learn why you were not selected. Constructive feedback can help you identify areas for growth and improvement.

Avoid self-defeating thinking

Thinking traps are patterns of thinking that are self-defeating and make stressful situations even more difficult to manage. However, by changing these thinking traps, we can help ourselves better manage stress. The following example illustrates how to overcome some of the impact of rejections by reframing self-defeating thoughts into more positive and realistic ones. Read Avoiding Self-Defeating Thinking to learn more.