The Morning After: 7 Tips to Help You Recover from a Career Setback

When you have a career setback, the morning after is always tough.

Imagine if you were one of the presidential candidates right now. Today would be very, very tough.

All that work over the last 18 months or more, now gone. All of your hopes and dreams, crashing down around you. The team you led, the people who believed in you, all stunned.

And suddenly you are unsure of your next move.

Perhaps, even, you have no place to go career-wise.

All you really want to do is to crawl into bed and pull the covers over your head.

But that’s not realistic. Or what it seems a presidential candidate should do.

Switching gears and getting personal here: Does any of this sound even remotely familiar to you?

If you’ve ever lost your job, you know what I’m talking about.

The Morning After.

Whether it’s a layoff or you’ve been fired for whatever reason, it’s one of the toughest situations to find yourself in.

Suddenly you’ve got no place to go. Your identity has been stripped from your hands. The work, colleagues, friends – your career – gone.

And there’s nothing you can do. No going back.

That part of your career is over.

All you want to do is hide. Binge watch TV. Eat.

Yet that’s not productive, nor sustainable, for any length of time.

Bottom line: Suffering a career setback, whether you’re a presidential candidate or one of millions of workers who’ve been through it, sucks.

The good news is, you – we – can all recover.

Here are 7 Tips to help you recover from a career setback:

1. Take one day to have a pity party. Invite your friends or go it alone, but you only have one day to wallow.  After that, time to move on.
2. Make a list of your strengths and use those to begin strategizing your next career move.
3. Similarly, be honest and understand your weaknesses in order to improve at your next job.
4. Realize that this is just a setback; it’s not the end of your career.
5. Consider the setback an opportunity. Maybe you weren’t 100% happy at your job anyway, or maybe even in your industry. This could be the chance you were looking for to reinvent yourself in a new career.
6. Take advantage of this new-found free time to learn something new, discover a hobby, or reconnect with friends. Network like crazy while you can; you never know what might happen.
7. Above all, stay positive and have hope.  While “hope is not a strategy”, it’s necessary to keep moving forward.

Taking these tips to heart won’t make the hurt go away but they will help you move forward.

And don’t forget to be thankful that your career setback was not displayed in front of millions around the world.