Speaker #0Tens of thousands of people were laid off from corporate America last week. If that includes you, or if it's a terrible fear that is keeping you up at night, this is your invitation to take a breath. So many people are going to tell you what to do next. The system will tell you to update your CV, panic apply, get back on that treadmill, get back out into the job hunt, fix it as quickly as possible. But what if that's not the answer? What if there is another way? Today I want to talk to you about what it actually looks like to take a regenerative approach to meaningful career transition and use this opportunity to pause and really consider what it is that you want from your work life and whether whether you chose it or not whether this can be an opportunity to build a meaningful business of your own. If your career looks great on paper but feels wrong in your bones, you're not alone. Welcome to From Corporate to Calling, your lifeline into meaningful work. I'm Alyssa Murphy, a regenerative business mentor and former startup CEO who walked away from corporate systems to create work that brings life. Each week I share stories, reflections and provocations to help you recognize the signs of burnout and make a career change with purpose. If work looks good but feels wrong, this is your invitation to get out of corporate and into your calling. Welcome to episode 55 of From Corporate Into Calling. I'm your host, Alyssa Murphy. How cool that we're at 55 episodes. I am really proud of that. And this week we... really had to address corporate layoffs because it's been really intense and there's an awful lot of people who woke up in the middle of the night to a text message telling them that their job had gone. And there's also a lot of people out there giving really well-meaning advice about what to do to fix that situation as quickly as possible. And today we're going to explore what it might look like to take a kind of radically different approach to meeting this moment. Let's start with the reality of what's happened. So Amazon announced, I think they've said 14,000 layoffs but it might be as much up to 30,000 layoffs. Many employees said that they found out by a 3 a.m. text message. The concept is kind of so incredulous that it's hard to articulate. A 3am text message telling them that they were no longer required in their job. And these people who heard just this last week are not alone. In October, over 170,000 jobs were cut across the US, including more than 17,000 in the tech sector in a single week. And by the end of this year, end of 2025, five. Analysts expect jobs cuts to surpass 900,000 and that would be the highest rate since 2020. Amazon says that those cuts are due to advances in AI and I'm sure that feels really great to the humans who have just been replaced. So maybe this is something to do with AI efficiencies or maybe it's about the nice little bounce in share price that they're probably going to get that tends to follow a mass redundancy announcement. Either way, this clearly isn't a one-off, it's a pattern. And it's only going to get worse because corporations like Amazon tend to lead the way and kind of open the door for other organisations to act in the same way. So now that companies can cite AI efficiency savings as a palatable cover for cutting human jobs, where does this end? Meanwhile, The job market is clearly brutal and if you spend any time at all on LinkedIn you're going to see a lot of advice about how to get back in the game, to tighten your position, double down on your LinkedIn connections, stay visible. That's not bad advice but I'm going to stick my neck out and say that it is shallow advice because it doesn't address the deeper truth that's going on here. And that truth is the corporate system that most of us were taught to depend on for safety was never, ever designed. to keep us safe. It was designed for profit and as soon as we as an employee do not serve that pursuit of profit we become expendable, sometimes overnight. So if you have just been laid off or if you are nervously preparing for that possibility I want to offer you something different today. I want to share with you six regenerative strategies for approaching what may come next in your career. And I know it hurts. I know it's deeply painful. This is not intended to fix that pain. This is not intended to kind of magically solve anything. I'm not trying to gaslight you if you're feeling devastated. But it may be that with some time and some reflection and some processing, you yourself begin to wonder whether getting back out there and getting in that hunt for another job that puts you in the exact same position that you were in before, part of that corporate machine, just as potentially expendable as you were before, is really what you want. Or whether you are being called to a different kind of relationship with work and the possibility to create work on your own terms. So here we go, here are six regenerative strategies that you can try as a radically different approach to handling a corporate layoff and discovering what comes next. Number one, this is so important, please remember that it is not your fault. We've begun to talk about this, but look, corporate greed will always win out. When a company puts profit before people, workers become expendable. And that illusion of security that so many of us associate with corporate disappears overnight. So this is not about your performance. It's about a broken system. So yes, take time to feel awful about what has happened, feel time to feel angry about it, time to really process what has happened, but don't internalize this as a personal failure. It's a failure of the corporate system. Number two, resist the reflex to rush right back in. It's totally natural to crave relief and a kind of balm when you're feeling that sting of rejection. And no matter how much you understand that it's not possible, you're probably going to be feeling that to some degree, and you're going to want to fix that feeling. And so what people do is they tend to move really, really quickly to action without a lot of conscious thought about their next moves. And they just kind of plug the gap and they tell themselves that any job is better than no job and look as always i put the caveat that if that is genuinely your financial reality, then that's absolutely fine. If you need to do what you need to do to put food on the table, good, do that. But for many people, that's not quite where they are. They are in a position where there is some kind of redundancy payout or they have savings that they can draw on and they can give themselves time to rest and reflect. And that reflection is so important because otherwise there is just a really high chance that you're going to end up back in the same situation. Because if nothing about the system has changed, why would it be any different in the future? And I hear this so many times, I really cannot express how much it frustrates me and saddens me that people either of their own volition step out of a role that isn't working for them or they're let go or there are you know structural changes and they find themselves a replacement job and they go into that job full of hope and positivity and expectation and nine times out of ten possibly even more they are let down because at the end of the day they're still inside that corporate system and the rules of the corporate system still apply. So if you possibly can, take... Time to pause. Let the dust settle, feel what you need to feel, and then consciously make decisions about what you want to be part of next. Third strategy, treat your redundancy as seed funding. If you're not familiar with kind of startup language, seed funding will be the early stage initial funding that you get to get your company or your idea off of the ground. And I am inviting you to think of yourself like that startup, like that really early stage business. Even if you have never before thought of yourself as an entrepreneur just experiment with thinking in that way now. So if you have received some kind of payout with your layoff, if you have savings that you can draw from even a certain amount, think of that as your seed funding and think of using those funds to live off for a while so that you can start to develop your own idea, your own offering. So start thinking like a founder. If this is early stage capital, how can you use it to fund exploration, to fund development, to test out ideas, to get a sense of the market? And look, you don't have to actually make investments in something, you're probably just going to be funding yourself. But think about how long you've got. How long is that funding going to allow you to explore ideas? And all this some investments that you do feel that you want to make. Maybe it's a trip or a training course or some coaching or mentorship, something that is going to really allow you to harness the opportunity that you have in this moment, but do it in a really conscious and sensible way, just like you have received funding from investors, right? And you have to put together a sensible plan for how you're going to use that funding, what kind of timescale you're going to operate in. what the key milestones that you're going to hit, because that is going to help you relax into this and not just feel like you are burning through your financial resources. Strategy number four, forget your CV. Yes, I said it. Oh, I hate CVs. But look, stop reshaping yourself to fit someone else's job description. Okay, your CV can never capture the full breadth. and depth of who you are, what you're passionate about and the skills and experience that you can bring to bear. This is your chance to rediscover what you're actually good at and what you really care about the most. This is the moment when those half-forgotten dreams and ideas and schemes that have been stored away and put on the back burner over the years, you get to bring those to the fore and don't let yourself be confined by whether or not that makes sense on a digital piece of paper which is all a CV is. It's just a shorthand and it's a highly corporatized format that is all about ticking somebody else's boxes. What if this is your opportunity to start ticking some of your own boxes instead? Like what would that feel like? And that starts by just putting that CV to one side. Stop. obsessing about that and come back to who you are, what you love, your values and the kind of future that you want to be part of. Yes you can build work from those starting points. What would you do if all constraints were removed? Because in some ways they have been. I'm going to interrupt myself for a moment because if this conversation has you thinking about what comes next, not just finding another job but building work that is truly yours, I'd love to tell you about the Meaningful Business Incubator. It is a six-month personalized program where you can design, test and launch your own meaningful business or consultancy. This is for post- corporate professionals who are ready to turn all of their experience into meaningful work, the kind that sustains you, fulfills you and makes a real contribution. Inside that program, we bring structure to your ideas, steadiness to your fears and momentum to your next chapter. We'll be turning vision into action and calling into income. If that sounds like the kind of guidance that you need right now. I would love to tell you more about the program. Send me an email it's alisa alisa at regenerative worklife.com and we can talk about where you are in your career and whether the meaningful business incubator is the right next step for you. Strategy number five, redefine networking. Because all of the advice is going to talk about networking, but most people feel kind of nauseous when it comes to the idea of networking. And of course, connections matter. Perhaps they matter now more than ever, but it also matters that they're the right kind of connection. So stop, you know, chasing titles or trying to impress the same corporate circle and really think about consciously choosing who you are connecting with so that you are using the opportunity to expand your idea of what work can look like. So here's what I mean. Right now, let's take LinkedIn. Your feed is probably predominantly filled with a certain kind of person in a certain kind of role that sort of ripples out from the work that you have already done and that is what you see. In your feed, like repeated all the time, you're getting the same message of work looks like what you've already experienced and that's what's available and that's where you need to be, but you can't be there because they just laid you off. Like it's incredibly frustrating. So think about actively seeking out connections for people who are approaching work differently. Freelancers, founders, community builders, regenerative practitioners, people with job titles that you never even knew existed. anything that you see in a headline that just lights you up and you think wow someone can do that for a job i mean i think of a connection i can't remember exactly what her title is but essentially she um tracks water sources in um in land so she helps people to analyze um an area of land and track the water sources and she um posts amazing content about the different ways that you you can. look at how you know grasses and other vegetation grows and sort of contours in the land to be able to even just do a visual assessment. Anyway that's the kind of thing that just fascinates me when I'm like wow that is your job that's amazing. Look for those people whatever that kind of spark of aliveness is for you and connect with those people because it's going to broaden your horizons, it's going to expand your definition of what work can be it's going to give you deep inspiration and right now those are your people the final strategy number six be radically kind to yourself okay we have talked about this you are not just job hunting you are taking the opportunity to fundamentally reimagine your relationship with work and that is deep stuff it means deconditioning a lot of very deep-rooted beliefs. It means soothing and working with your nervous system on a daily basis and it requires an ongoing connection to your deeper why. You have to know for yourself why you are pursuing a different kind of work. You have to know what you are never willing to go back to you have to see the system for yourself articulate it in your own words and make that decision within you that you deserve something better. You deserve work that brings life to you and to the world around you. That is my definition of regenerative work. So don't expect yourself to sprint, to get back in the hustle and grind, get on the treadmill. This is slower work, it's deeper work, it's real work. So there we have our six strategies for taking a radically different approach to career change, particularly when that career change has been somewhat thrust upon you. Number one, remember it's not your fault. Two, resist that reflex to rush back into exactly the same kind of situation that you've just been pushed out of. Three, treat your redundancy as seed funding and start thinking of yourself as a founder. Four, forget about that CV. It is just a digital sheet of words that does not define you. Number five, redefine networking and seek out connections that stretch your definition of what work can be. And number six, be radically kind to yourself because this is a journey, not a sprint, but I promise you, because I do this work with people every day, it's an incredible, beautiful, and deeply. fulfilling journey. If you've just been laid off, I know it hurts. Take time to acknowledge that, feel what you need to feel, but maybe, just maybe, this is the first real opening for something regenerative and meaningful to grow. The end of a job is not the end of your story, it might just be the start of your calling. If this episode of From Corporate to Calling was helpful or inspiring, Follow the show so you don't miss an episode. And if you know someone who's questioning their career, send them this podcast. Lifelines are meant to be shared. Remember, you don't have to tolerate burnout or misalignment. You can redirect your skills into meaningful work that brings back life to you and to the world around you.
