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As a result of the whirring churn of the labour market since the good old days of a ‘job for life’, most Western cultures are vocationally barren. What do I mean by that phrase? My absolute belief is that each of us has a skill, an innate ability, a talent, a gift, and / or a competency, within us which we must exercise. We got to channel our individual abilities out! Fewer and fewer Western governments invest in effective systems that help their citizens exercise their inner capabilities. Therefore, as Jamie Oliver the famous chef talks about our schools providing “nutritionally barren” food, our education systems produce vocationally barren citizens devoid of career aspiration.

Homo Sapiens relies on work to experience self-worth. Our self image is dependent upon the ‘Invisible Transaction of Work’; which I have written about extensively elsewhere. We are referred to as Human Beings, and I really love the Being bit. It means that to be a being, we’ve got to doing. Beings do.

Whereas, philosophers such as Descartes would have it that ‘I think, therefore I am’, I would argue that the point of living is more along the lines of ‘I do, therefore I am’. The human body is designed to work. We are engines. We put calories in in the form of fuel and we burn them. We build societies, structures and systems.

The obesity epidemic of the 21st Century is purely a metaphor for the fact that we are not doing anymore! The Welfare State coined in the United Kingdom in the 20th Century was a laudable movement to prevent poverty. However, we have generations of citizens who have never worked. As a result we have generations of people who maybe never experienced positive self regard, self esteem, dignity and independence.

In the same way, job loss can generate a sense of low self worth because we feel we have lost our self image. Somehow our view of ourselves becomes tarnished. This is to be expected. But this does not mean it has to be accepted.

The Bereavement Curve is like a dark valley that we must pass through to come out of the other side. After years of delivering redundancy counselling I have learned that the antidote to this hardship is generating stories that describe our achievements. This is often where working with a Career Coach can be invaluable because the irony is that when we have just lost our job, the last task we feel equipped to deliver is talking about our successes!

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In the early 1970s Elizabeth Kubler-Ross translated the findings of her extensive research into bereavement into what became known as the ‘Bereavement Curve’. As is so often the case, this diagrammatic representation of her thesis left a powerful impression on one’s mind; in parallel with the old adage that ‘a picture paints a thousand words’. Kubler-Ross summed up that those losing loved ones appeared to pass through seven stages of grief: shock, anger, denial, stress (either in the form of anxiety, or for some full-blown depression), apathy, acceptance and action.

Having worked as a freelance consultant in the field of redundancy counselling and performance coaching for 12 years, I am well versed in bastardising the ‘Bereavement Curve’ into what has also become known as the Change Curve. The fact of the matter is that human beings, in the main, are change averse. Often our security depends upon stability and routine combining to build up a sense of dependability and faith in the structures we surround ourselves. Often we subscribe to conventions to instil within us a sense of rhythm and repetition. Call it a ‘life beat’.

Job loss hits us hard primarily due to this breach of our life’s rhythm. Conventions lapse and the anchors with which we secure our routines are lost. For some, momentarily, and depending on how well we are prepared for change, for protracted and painful periods. Paradoxically, the more we wed ourselves to convention, the harder the flail of redundancy hits us. Let’s put it this way, the more indelibly etched the habits, the greater the turmoil.

The traditional psychological contract between employee and employer has shifted through 1800 from pre 1970 where employees were loyal to employing firms for providing jobs for life. To post 1990 where ‘The War for Talent’ (by Ed Michaels, Helen Handfield-Jones, and Beth Axelrod, Harvard Business Press), seeing companies battling for flexible workforces and the freedom to deliver ‘just-in-time’ products and services, meant that more and more companies struggled to instil any sense of loyalty in their workforce. And why should employees develop any sense of loyalty when the average number of jobs in career had shot up from one or two jobs in a lifetime to as many as 18 career transitions from job to job.

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