A former client sent me a Holiday e-card with a note that she’d lost her job and with it, her family’s health insurance. In follow up emails she told me that she was part of a lay off last month, she’s been feeling sicker since she’s left work and feels lost. She wants to work with me again and thinks it would help as it did before.
But she won’t do anything that would cost money or wear her down even more physically. She’s too afraid to look for a job.
Because she’s been reading my posts for years, she suggested I write about her story.
By her own admission, she’s swimming in guilt about what her job loss is doing to her family. Especially since she’d been out of work for 3 years grappling with a debilitating pain condition. She wrote, “ I’m a burden on my husband and kids. I desperately want to find another job but I can’t bring myself to do anything about it. I’m afraid to fail.”
I get it. I know healthy people who feel this way when they lose a job. But for so many reasons, the ‘guilt’ from losing a job is a particularly heavy load to carry when compounded with debilitating illness.
It’s not always true that doing something is better than doing nothing. But how can do nothing help here? And just wanting isn’t enough even if it’s easy: “I want a job”. Setting intention is harder: “I’m going to try to make this happen“. Taking action is risky and brave: “I’m going to commit my resources, time, money and energy to do what I can to make this happen.”
You might ask yourself this: When I think about what I’m going to do with my resources, my energy and myself, am I making decisions with confidence and clarity or am I making decisions from a place of fear ?
How is that going for you?
Jason Reid says
I love this post Rosalind. Making decisions from fear is something many of us do – including myself. The whole fear of failure concept is also a familiar one to me. So many times our egos get in the way of what we really need. I know I should be making cold calls today to prospective customers, but if there’s an excuse I can use (like needing to do online research) it’s easy for me to avoid it.
If my health conditions starts to flare, I suddenly have more excuses to avoid confronting my fear of failure and rejection. What’s worse, being sick is a REALLY GOOD EXCUSE not to do what we fear.
Today I resolve to put my ego in the backseat and ignore it, as it’s getting in the way of my needs. We’ll see how that goes. 🙂
Rosalind says
Thanks for sharing that, Jason. So true, isn’t it.