Just watched the second episode of a tv series called Aftershock Rising After Redundancy following 6 people who have been made redundant having worked all their lives. They meet with a career coach who takes them on a journey into themselves and into the great unknown. A few things really struck me and which I could personally relate to.

  • How vulnerable each person felt
  • How their self confidence and sense of self worth had taken a hit
  • How they struggled to come to terms with where they now found themselves-out of work, no longer earning money, feeling they were letting themselves and or others down.

Each person came from very different career paths-some were skilled, others unskilled and ranged in age from late twenties to mid sixties.

As they now had to look at ways of re-inventing themselves and possibly looking at totally different career paths, re-training, stepping outside the comfort zone etc, one thing really struck me.
The majority of the candidates wanted to get into a different career; a career they were really interested in and not just one where they earned a living.

Earning a living was the reason they stayed in their job till the were made redundant and now they had tough choices to make. Going outside the comfort zone can really test self confidence especially when self confidence is already low.

The main tasks the individuals were set were to find something

- they are passionate about

- something they are good at

-something that will bring value to others

One very interesting thing I found was that often where the person couldn’t really answer these questions for themselves, they were very good collectively as a group to work out what were the best career choices for each other. That is they saw the strengths in the other person that they couldn’t see in themselves or wouldn’t admit to and thus whole new career possibilities were opened up!

Sometimes impartial third party advice can open up a whole world of opportunities to us we never saw possible. For me it was moving from environmental scientist to stay at home mother and now to working on the internet part-time!

Who ever would have guessed-certainly not me!

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If someone tapped you on the shoulder, and handed you the EXACT system they used to make money, would you stop to listen or would you say "here we go again, another sales pitch". I don't blame you. I felt exactly the same way .There is no magic bullet to success but there are loads of shortcuts you can take when you are shown and taken by the hand until you succeed. Would this help?