Mar 16, 2021
Jon Tesser
Do I have value? Do I have skills? Am I ever going to get a job again? Is am I worthy? Am I worthy? I mean, it gets down to this idea of shame and worthiness. It gets really deep, right? This idea that I'm not worthy because I don't have a job.
INTRO
In today’s episode, we are talking about the trauma of lay-offs. And this is a rich conversation. We are going to talk about how to fire someone with empathy, what it looks (and sounds like) when employers pile on the shame, and the emotional PTSD that can occur when you lose your job. We are talking male expectations, class differences, and how lay-offs can actually make us better, more empathetic people.
My guest is Jon Tesser. Jon is a husband, the father of two boys, and he doesn’t have much time for hobbies these days.
- Jon Tesser
I'm a dad with two kids home during the pandemic. I watch them all the time. So hobbies don't really come by. Most of the stuff that I do for mastery is just ways to relax. So I'll play like an online video game on my iPod and try and master that. But is that something that I care to talk too much about or that I think is interesting?
- Jon Tesser
Not necessarily. It's something that I do so that I can maintain a sense of sanity in a world where I'm constantly bombarded by people. Stimuli is the way that I put it. So, I mean, mastery for me is is is this it's this idea of human to human interaction and how can I how can I handle that? And what does it mean? And what is my place in the world? That's actually what I do for fun.
Jon is a student and translator of human interaction. His LinkedIn account has thousands of followers and his daily posts generate lots and lots of likes and comments.
- Liesel Mertes
You you share on LinkedIn, you share on Medium. How would you define the content that you share?
- Jon Tesser
Oh, it's a I have a great way of describing it, it's my crazy thoughts vomited onto a piece of paper essentially is what I say it is. I'm like, I'm thinking something and I have to write it down. And for some crazy reason, I also have to share it with the public, which includes my one hundred seven thousand followers on LinkedIn and on my blog.
- Jon Tesser
And depending on what the content is and how I describe what it is, is it's just my thoughts and subjective opinions about the world and how I feel within my place, within that world.
- Jon Tesser
So, for instance, I just put out a post that said, you know what, being in the spotlight in social media and interacting with people has made me paranoid because I believe that no matter that, that who's the next person who's going to trash me?
- Jon Tesser
Right. I literally just put a post out about that. And I said very candidly, I'm actually quite paranoid that if I talk to somebody, they're going to be the next one who's going to spew some hate. Right. And this is actually coloring the way that I chat with people and has put me on guard.
- Jon Tesser
It's content like that you don't see very often on on on social media where I'm putting it out there about how I feel. And you may or may not respond well to it, but I'm not putting a sheen of code over it. Right. It is. It's purely how I feel. And there's that's that's what I think people connect to.
Jon is also a career whisperer for early processionals, helping them grow in self-awareness and clarify next steps in their vocational journey. This capacity for insight and care is borne out of living through some really hard stuff. In the language that I use in my consulting, Jon has lived through disruptive life events.
- Jon Tesser
I think the biggest disruptive life event was getting laid off three times within a period of five years while having children daycare to pay for a mortgage to pay for. That was a real sort of critical moment where I needed to essentially redefine my identity.
- Jon Tesser
Life had been fairly easy up until that point. I'd done all the right things. I got my MBA, I bought a house, I got married, I had the right careers.
- Jon Tesser
I was making a lot of money and everything was very easy and very upper middle class. And I never really had major adversity in my life. When you get an MBA, you go to MBA school, you are trained to believe that your career is your life, that your identity is wrapped up in what you do and how much money you make and the things that you buy.
- Jon Tesser
And this was this was my my idea, right, Liesel? That that life was about, you know, career and finding meaning in work and treating that as what you're supposed to do in life and the disruptive major event where all of that could be taken away and it's literally a snap of fingers and say, nope, that's that's your livelihood taken away and not just your livelihood, but your identity and your self-esteem that really that forced me to become the person that I am today, which is someone who has sort of decided that careers and companies are temporary and are not something to get wrapped up in.
- Jon Tesser
That's a lot of where my content on LinkedIn was forged because of these. I don't want to call it PTSD, but in some ways it is. There is some traumatic stress disorder that comes from losing your livelihood so often in such a short period of time.
- Liesel Mertes
Can I can I ask you a little bit more about that? What what surprised you about the emotional journey in the path of getting off?
- Liesel Mertes
I think the shows like that, there's a lot of emotions that underpin, like the receiving of the news, all of the logistics. So I'd love to hear more about that.
- Jon Tesser
I think it's the shock that I could actually lose my job, that I was considered to not be valuable enough to stay at a company. I mean, you're talking to someone in me who's always been a star performer. It's always outperformed at every job I had. And then all of a sudden I'm being told by a company that you're not a star performer. In fact, you're not even useful here. You're not like this is this is the self-esteem hit, right?
- Jon Tesser
When you think of yourself as one way as the person who's needed. Right. As the person who's always succeeded because they're so smart and they're so ambitious and they're so hard working that they make things happen.
- Jon Tesser
And all of a sudden, when you are told that you don't matter, that you don't exist here, that the work you do isn't needed and that your livelihood is now taken away, you're not making money, you're forced to reassess. This idea is like, am I valuable?
Right. These are the you talk about the emotional process. What am I do I have value? Do I have skills? Am I ever going to get a job again? Is am I worthy? Am I worthy? I mean, it gets down to this idea of shame and worthiness. It gets really deep, right? This idea that I'm not worthy because I don't have a job. And we're told in America that if you don't have a job, you're a loser, you're you're a pariah.
- Jon Tesser
You're not you're not a good person. Right. And we we the unemployed in this country, they they they internalize this. And a lot of ways because our culture says that you are where you work. And so, again, a lot of great things came out of this, which for me was to reject the societal understanding that we are where we work. To me, that is literally no longer the case. I am not tied into my identity at work.
- Jon Tesser
Work is a place where I do something that I am quite capable of doing and I get paid money to do it. Otherwise I'm living my life. And if they take away like if I get if I get laid off right, then my identity is not wrapped up in my job. So it's not that big a deal. Right. I'm going to get laid off and that just means that I'm just not making money now. So all I need to do now that I've been laid off is go find a way to make money.
- Jon Tesser
It becomes much more of a practical thing when. You when you use you disorient yourself away from your identity, being your job and your title and the number of people who report to you and your place in the hierarchy to a job is a place I earn money, which is essentially my mantra right now, and something that I try and teach to the younger generation as well.
- Liesel Mertes
As you as you say that, you know, until the arc of that story I'm struck, that there was, as you noted, some of this loss of.
- Liesel Mertes
Identity, in some ways, the questioning of who am I? I'm struck that in many companies, especially Pre-COVID, we're spending more time with our co-workers of our waking hours than we are at home. What was it like? Did you feel like you had lost a significant community of people in getting laid off? Like was that part of some of the sense of loss?
- Jon Tesser
It's interesting you say that because ever since I started getting laid off so often, I would become friendly with people at work. But it was never I. Maybe there it's really interesting that you mention this. There might have been a guardedness for me to get too close to people because I didn't want to create that community because I knew that it was is temporary. Right. So I never really felt too much like I lost that sense of community because I put the guard off and didn't allow it to be created.
- Liesel Mertes
Yeah, I can I can think of a friend and colleague of mine, and I was listening to her speak recently and she had gotten laid off and hired back into a much larger company. And she said, you know, for me in the past, I've always been like the community builder. You know, I want to talk. I want to hear from people. And she said, I don't know if I'll ever be that way again. I'm just so happy to walk in and clock out.
- Liesel Mertes
And I'm just tired and I don't even know. It's not even a question of right or wrong. As much as I hear how that could happen for her. And I hear dynamics of that in your story,
- Jon Tesser
It's literally the same for me to me, even at my job. Now, I've created a bit of separation between myself and my coworkers, not on purpose just because for me, work is work. It's not a place where I meet people to be friends with and to get to know them outside of work. It's a place for me to work with them as colleagues to clock out and then live my life outside of that with my friends, family and others.
- Jon Tesser
So I absolutely identify with that idea that creating this community at work is is not worth it for me. And it's not something that I seek out because again, then you're tying more of your identity into your job. So there's there's a sense of defensiveness and protection that happens when you when you are in this situation so often where you just start to think that this is going to be temporary and there's no there's no real reason to build up these sort of more intimate bonds with the people that you're surrounded by.
- Liesel Mertes
I am. That sounds so understandable, and I can imagine a number of listeners are relating to that, I'd like to I'd like to just kind of like peer under the edges of that statement a little bit more, because on the one hand, I really like the emphasis of you're much more than your job clocking in and clocking out. I think there is something that, you know, I and others are trying to build right now in talking about things like empathy at work to say we want work actually to be a more human place where people could expect that they could have some level of support, a resonance that we're not just the jobs that we do.
- Liesel Mertes
How does a statement like that sit with you if you as you think about, you know, how you're kind of poised to engage with work right now, saying you get less?
- Jon Tesser
Yeah, where I come when you make a statement like that is this is not going to surprise you at all, it sounds to me a bit Pollyanna ish that we can create a workplace of empathy. To me, there's workplaces. Our God is going to sound so awful, but it does feel this way. They're their war zones and a lot of ways because the goal of the goal of the workplace isn't to excel. The goal of the workplace is to make sure that you wake up every day and you have a paycheck so that your kids don't go hungry or you have a roof over your head.
- Jon Tesser
When you think of it in that stripped down manner, it becomes like if you think about Maslow's hierarchy of needs, work can even fulfill safety. You don't feel safe in that way. And this could just be me and my PTSD speaking. But if you don't feel safe in an environment, then how are you going to use a job to self actualize? You have to be safe before you can come to before you can use mature human emotions such as wisdom, empathy and compassion.
- Jon Tesser
There's and it's almost impossible to feel safe knowing that your head is on the chopping block every day. The wrong move means you're gone. Right. And so then if you think that way, how are you going to be able to empathize, empathize with people and create a nurturing environment in a workplace that's literally like, I win, you lose and you get cut out and I get the promotion. How do you bring in mature human emotions when most workplaces operate in this fashion?
- Liesel Mertes
Right. Well, and, you know, it's never about judging someone else's experience, I hear how that perspective is really congruent with what you've experienced, you know, and that uncertainty and that feeling of being disposable and not being safe. And I agree with that. If there is not a sense of safety, it's it's difficult to bring more than just survival instincts to the workplace. And it's interesting for that, because that is something that oftentimes I hear people from less privileged communities at work talking about, like women in the workplace can feel that way because of marginalization or people from racialized communities, especially saying, you know, I'm not safe.
- Liesel Mertes
So, yeah, that's that's in line with what I think a number of people are articulating and definitely what I'm wanting to help do and help skill people up to say, from the top down, what does it mean to actually prioritize safety and care and not just have that be things on your website or a cheap catchphrases, but actually things that you embed in your policies and your procedures and your daily interactions?
- Jon Tesser
It's tough, right? Because at the end of the day, the employer and your boss can fire you. And that is a sector that's always sitting over your head. Right. And so, again, like it's it's a philosophical debate. But knowing that, is it really possible to bring those really those true emotions to a place where you are disposable at will? It's in your contract. It's called at will employment. Right. The employer can do whatever they want.
- Jon Tesser
And there are very few protections in the US for workers in the private sphere. You know, it's not like you have tenure at a university or that you're working in a government job where you have certain levels of safety. Or my wife, for instance, who works for the Board of Education and has a union, these people are protected. So you can bring in some of those work environments, more things like empathy. But when you're in the private sphere and it's it's all about, you know, am I being seen as somebody who's productive?
- Jon Tesser
And if I'm not being seen as somebody who's productive, I'm basically on the chopping block. It's really hard to get out of that survival mechanism.
MUSICAL TRANSITION
We will return to Jon’s interview in just a moment. But first, I want to take a moment to recognize our sponsor: Handle with Care Consulting. Employee engagement matters. And especially in the midst of COVID, disruptive life events and compassion fatigue are taking their toll. We can help you create a culture of not only safety but care. Through keynotes, coaching, and certificate programs, let’s build empathy at work, together.
MUSICAL TRANSITION
- Liesel Mertes
I talk with employers about even to the point of when you let someone go, there is a more or less empathetic way of engaging in that process. Does that statement, as you reflect on being let go three different times? Do you think this company did it better? This one was worse.
- Jon Tesser
Like, ah, there there was definitely there is definitely better and worse. Well, we wish them well.
- Jon Tesser
Two of them were absolute nightmares. One and one of them I actually talked about on LinkedIn. And it was probably the most terrifying post I ever put out. And it was one of the most awful experiences one could go through. The person who laid me off from one of the companies told me specifically to my face that I was the wrong person for the job and that when they asked everybody around my company whether I was worth keeping on board or added any value, no one stood up for me.
- Jon Tesser
And he told me this as I was getting laid off to my face. And it was first of
- Liesel Mertes
Talk about the shame and judgment.
- Jon Tesser
Yeah. So he's bringing the she's bringing the shame and judgment to the forefront and saying you should be ashamed and judged and you are you are useless and you are worthless and you don't belong here. And I'm going to make sure you know that and I'm going to make sure that you leave here. You're done. Yeah. And it was and all for no reason.
- Jon Tesser
And that was handled absolutely terribly. The first time I got laid off was very similar. The person sat me down and said, you haven't been performing here. You're you're gone, essentially. And I was shocked by that. But, yeah, those situations were absolutely horrible. Third time was at a larger company and it was handled fairly well. This is a company that lays people all the time and it's in media entertainment.
- Jon Tesser
They had a clear process in mind. They made it. It was very I didn't feel alone. I think that day there, like 30 percent of the workforce was laid off. So I felt like I was part of a people who were getting laid off. The the the severance package was extremely generous. And so I wasn't too upset by it. I kind of saw it coming. Right. Like, when you're getting laid off so often, you're always see it coming. But this one, I actually kind of saw it coming.
- Jon Tesser
So it wasn't it wasn't so it was bad, but it was it was actually the third one was the moment where I was like I literally said to myself, I am done working because any job I'm going to get is just a ticking time bomb for when they're going to. Right. And yet it was at that moment where I was really pursuing my own business and doing getting my own independent consulting so that if I lost something, it was going to be on me, it wasn't going to be on a company.
- Jon Tesser
And so I went through that process after the third layoffs.
- Liesel Mertes
Yeah, I hear that one you you you've used the phrase a few times, but just some of that PTSD of thinking. Yeah, what's the impending sense of danger that is now feels implicit in what I do? I, I imagine, you know, it's hard it's hard for anyone to be laid off. There are still like prevailing social narratives about what a man needs to be a man with a family, a man as a breadwinner.
- Liesel Mertes
Did you feel like you're suddenly thrown on like reckoning with those narratives internally in ways that felt hard or even from external people? Did you have people in your community who kind of amped up the pressure with some of those narratives?
- Jon Tesser
Yeah, I mean, it's a good question, those those prevailing narratives of the man as the breadwinner, the man who earns the money, the man takes care of the house, are still ingrained in me, even though as much as I want to deny them, they're still there.
- Jon Tesser
It's still my responsibility to have a job that makes enough money so that everybody can eat. Right. And so I've always put that pressure on myself. Now that you mention it, it's more explicit that it exists. And so when you lose the job, you lose that role and you lose the value that you think you have in society. I think it's a very accurate statement to say that men are expected to be, quote unquote, breadwinners. And when they are not breadwinners, what is their value?
- Jon Tesser
This is a huge societal problem in the US, particularly among lower class and lower middle class men who are finding themselves out of work more and more. But it's still prevalent with folks like myself.
- Jon Tesser
Now, what makes it harder and I'm not saying I feel bad for myself, but what makes it harder for the sort of upper middle class, well educated folks like myself is that you're expected to be working right, that you're expected and you're surrounded by everybody in your community who is working and who does have a job and who is successful and is who is supporting their family.
- Jon Tesser
And when you're laid off and you're one of me, you don't feel like you fit into that community. So there's a lot of dynamics here. And you can probably have an entire conversation just about societal expectations around this. But, yeah, for sure it does. It does wear on you. Yeah,
- Liesel Mertes
What were what were some of the most helpful things, whether it was within your professional network or your personal network that people did to come alongside you in the aftermath of these layoffs?
- Jon Tesser
Oh, that's a great question. It was really the individual people. I have a very close friend from college who was really there for me the first time I got laid off. And I would just go over and hang out at her house with her baby at the time and just feel connected to people, really get out and be around people and talk and interact like a normal person. Obviously, this was not during the pandemic. So you could do things like that.
- Jon Tesser
Having those people who supported you through that and who were made sure that they were there and set up the time to listen to you and talk to those people. Well, I'll keep around for life. As I said in a post recently, when you go through stuff, you find out who your real friends are. And each time I was laid off, I definitely found out who my real friends are, the ones who are going to be there when the chips are down.
- Jon Tesser
It's one of the positive things about getting laid off is really knowing that you have to rely on people. You can't be doing it yourself and finding those people you can rely on and realize that they're there for you is very it's one of the triumphs of the human spirit. Honestly.
- Liesel Mertes
It sounds like there were those people who showed up. Were there any people that you would have expected to show up and be supportive? That faded into the background?
- Jon Tesser
It was always the bosses that were surprising. The people who I had reported to just were not there universally across all three jobs. People that I have reported into kind of shirked away from their responsibility to help out. And I think that gets back to this idea of empathy, empathetic layoffs. Right. I believe that it's your duty as a manager to make sure that if somebody is laid off, you do your damnedest to help them land back on their feet.
- Jon Tesser
That's the least that you can do to help them, because they're a human being, deserves dignity and deserve support. Those people who did not have my back during those situations, I hate to say it, but I haven't forgotten that. And it's not something that you raise because you expect a boss to be there for you to make sure that you're going to land on your feet. And in none of my situations where they there.
- Jon Tesser
So is there a sense of bitterness? No, I think there's more of a sense of a little bit of sadness around that truth that people who you would expect to be there for you aren't. But it's definitely was the case that I did expect some sort of help or put me in touch with their network, this that they just didn't want to do it.
- Liesel Mertes
Yeah, as you as you look back, you know, and not that it's the person who has not been supported their responsibility, but as you reflect on it, you did a couple of times what what would have really meant something to you from those bosses? Like what would you have hoped for?
- Jon Tesser
John, here's a group of people I'd like you to talk to, I'm going to make some introductions. I think that that would be really well fit for for talking to them, getting to know them. I know how good you are, John, and your job, your super valuable. And I think that by talking to these people, you'll show your value. Do you see what's done there? Do you see what happens there?
- Jon Tesser
That's what I did for my analysts when she was laid off and this post went viral. I don't show off much on LinkedIn, but this was kind of a show off post where I had a laid off analyst and I got her a job right away. And I introduced her to my network and I made sure that it happened and I made sure to introduce her as the best analyst that ever worked for me. Right.
- Jon Tesser
So I took the lessons that I learned from my bosses and said, I'm not going to do that. I'm going to support my employees, how they need to be supported. It comes back to the idea of an empathetic workplace. Right. So just being just knowing that they that your boss can say can vouch for what you do and repair your dignity would mean a lot.
- Jon Tesser
It's not a very big thing that you're asking for a little bit of recognition as a human who's worthy and somebody who needs a little bit of help.
- Liesel Mertes
Well, and what you're saying has alignment with what I've experienced, as I have done as I've gone in and done communication coaching for downsizing with companies, which is that the people who are doing the reduction in force or the layoffs, that the whole event is its own workplace trauma for everyone involved.
- Liesel Mertes
And that doesn't mean that it affects people with the same degree of like force all the way through. But for the people who are doing it, I, I sense this like very prevailing sentiment. Oftentimes they just want to get past it like they hate they don't want to have to fire people. They don't want to have to have this and they just want to like put it, you know, in the rearview mirror and be thinking about the next thing, the next way they can reduce, you know, the next strategic goal and how that disconnect.
- Liesel Mertes
Yeah, it can really be painful both for those who are laid off and also for their coworkers who might be fearful for their own job loss or missing their coworkers. And when the posture of management and leadership is just like we just want to move on and pretend like this never happened, it really does widespread damage.
- Jon Tesser
Yeah. Yeah, I agree.
- Liesel Mertes
Did did anyone say or do anything that was immensely unhelpful that you would say like when somebody who's gotten laid off like this is just dumb?Don't do or say this.
- Jon Tesser
I mean, I think I walked you through an example earlier come to mind. No, it really is.
- Jon Tesser
It is this idea that you don't add fuel to the fire, that it's already a shameful enough activity, that you don't have to then say and you suck to there. You don't have to remind somebody of that. I think that this idea of empathy and understanding that somebody's going through a traumatic life, events such as this doesn't need to be piled on in any way.
- Jon Tesser
And it's not something that you'll ever forget. Right. Like these are indelible moments that are imprinted in my mind that I recall them so clearly because they are trauma events. And you don't want to add to that. You're probably not thinking of that as you're laying somebody off, that you're creating an indelible trauma moment. It's not like your thought process, but you are healing and you're handling of that is is is crucial and critical to this person being able to recover.
- Liesel Mertes
Hmm, yeah. Is there anything else, John, that you would like to say about? The disruption of getting laid off that I didn't get a chance to you, yeah,
- Jon Tesser
I mean, I do want to talk. You know, we've talked mostly about the negatives, and I don't want everybody here to, like, run away because it's such a negative conversation. But I think the positives out of this is the incredible adversity and the ability to deal with adversity.
- Jon Tesser
And resilience, and that leads to the cultivation of mature human traits, right? If I hadn't been laid off three times in five years and been treated so poorly, would I have had the wherewithal to treat my employees so well when she got laid off? Probably not. Right, I would not have thought of it that way, I would have been like, well, she's gone like whatever she's got to deal with it, right? It would have been very like like it's on her very unsympathetic and very non emotional intelligence derives.
- Jon Tesser
but I think because of this experience, I have a preternatural empathy to understand the experience of the jobless rate. And so the positive that's come out of it is this.
- Jon Tesser
I've created an entire community on LinkedIn around being supportive of people who are scared and anxious and insecure in their job situation. And I'm that person who offers them a bright, optimistic support mechanism. That's an incredible positive thing that's come out of it, that's come out of the adversity of this.
- Jon Tesser
You know what I'm saying? Where, like, I wouldn't have had that if I hadn't dealt with these traumatic events. And if you hear the way that I'm talking about it, I was forced to come to a reckoning on my identity and who I am as a person. And I've come out as a better person because of it.
- Jon Tesser
And I think a lot of people who've been laid off would agree with that statement that as you get over the hump, as you deal with the adversity and as you become more resilient, you become a better person because of it.
- Jon Tesser
And I would definitely agree with that statement. I like who I am now more than I was, more than I like who I was prior to getting laid off.
- Liesel Mertes
Yeah. Yeah, I appreciate that, and I think that that's true, it's not that it's not that hard things always lead to resiliency or an increased capacity, but they can be that invitation. If you go through the work to getting to that point, I, I recognize that there is an element of choosing and work to bring that spirit of positivity and not just trauma.
- Liesel Mertes
What are some of the things that were important for you to do or engage in in the aftermath of your third firing?
- Jon Tesser
Yeah, it's a it's the best question you can ask. The coping mechanisms are to allow yourself to feel what you feel as one thing and then to also say to yourself, you know, how much of this unhealthy feeling can I deal with? So I'm going to get real. I'm going to get real vulnerable here for a second. I've been I'm not I don't have clinical depression, but I did have situational depression for obvious reasons. So each time I would get laid off, I'd be like, OK, you know what?
- Jon Tesser
I don't want to feel so anxious and sad and not able to deal with my situation. I'm going to go on antidepressants, right. To deal with the temporary situation I'm on here so that I can have a clear head for interviews and get a job. Right. It's these kinds of coping mechanisms that that you learn about and that help you get through through the situations. Right.
- Liesel Mertes
Well, thank you for sharing that, because, yeah, it's it is it's own trauma and to be able to take the steps to purposefully rebuild, sometimes feeling your feelings feels really crappy. What did you do when those moments of feeling, your feelings just felt overwhelming?
- Jon Tesser
I had drugs and I'm not talking about opiate or cocaine. I'm talking about antianxiety antidepressants. If things got to be too overwhelming, I dealt with it and I said, you know what? I'm not strong enough to deal with this. This is too traumatic. This has happened too much. I need to take things to help me physically deal with this because I life what life just dealt me too much and life wins, right? It's like you that is not a sign of weakness is actually a sign of strength to say I need something to help me.
- Jon Tesser
I'm going to I'm not going to be ashamed to do it, do it because I need it, because this is a situation way too much for my humans, for me as a human being to to deal with. So I'm going to take those things that can help and realize that it's temporary. Yeah.
- Liesel Mertes
I know that you are a man who also makes space for meditation and contemplation, was that part of some of that recent train journey as well at that time?
- Jon Tesser
Yeah, absolutely. You know, taking walks to clear your head, being outside, seeing people, like I mentioned, a very an intense meditation practice was also very important. I believe at those times that I was laid off, I would do one half hour in the morning and one half hour at night of of breath meditation to really, really center and just try and deal with the fact that the emotions and the thoughts are coming at you in ways that are hard to deal with.
- Liesel Mertes
Right. Well, John, thank you for sharing with listeners today and today's podcast. I know that you also share regularly on some of your channels of influence if people want to hear more from you, where the best places to find you.
- Jon Tesser
Sure. Search for me on LinkedIn. I'm under https://www.linkedin.com/in/jonathan-tesser- even though I call myself Jon here. And if you want to read a little bit more of the content, that's probably closer to the stuff that we talked about here on the podcast. I do have a blog as well. It's mahler101.medium.com Möller, and they are one to one medium dot com. And that's where I offer sort of more of my or deeper meditations on things and on life. Those are the two areas where you can really learn a lot about me if you're so inclined.
MUSICAL TRANSITION
Here are three key take-aways from my conversation with Jon
- Lay-offs are a life trauma for the men and women that are being let go.As an employer, consider how you can have these conversations with care, eliminating unnecessary shame on top of the transition. Do you have a clear plan? A severance package? As a boss, can you use your network to help someone find their next role? And, consider this a point 1b. There is an emotional toll to how you do layoffs. Jon is a man who wants to be empathetic, but he has found himself less and less willing to give of himself, in a deep way, to his working environment. Are your policies and practices towards lay-off contributing to this workplace disconnect? Because it will affect both those that leave as well as those that stay. And creativity and collaboration can suffer when people are more guarded and less connected at work. The cost of the trauma is high.
- Medications can help in the process of coping with loss.Jon tells how going on anti-depressants was an essential part of navigating his job loss. You can get more information and resources from your doctor.
- “When you go through stuff, you find out who your real friends are.”Jon found great comfort in relying on those around him. The friends that invited him over to play with their baby, the friends that were just available to talk. If you know someone who has been laid off, make that call, send that text or email. Your support matters.
- And finally, as a bonus take-away.Remember, you are not your work. You are who you are and work is what you do. This is deep wisdom for all of us.
OUTRO