beatredundancyblues

Are you feeling lost and like you don’t know who you are anymore?

If so, this post is for you.

When you lose your job, you often feel like you’ve lost your identity and you’re no longer connected to yourself or understanding who you are. This is particularly true if your identity was tied to your job role or career as a whole, and you might feel bewildered and lost and like you just don’t know what to do. But I’m here to help you to uncover your true identity and be who you’re meant to be, not who you’re born into being, or what the job role made you believe you are.

Companies want to make you compliant with what they want and need you to do, and this means they need you to believe certain things about yourself, the company and your abilities. They need you to need them and the job, and they need you to tie your sense of self-worth to the things they give you or allow you to have in that job, otherwise you would become a free radical; an anomaly, and may become non-compliant.

But the truth is, you were born for a lot more that just being tied to a job or serving other company owners’ their own dream, by working hard for them to line their pockets.

We all know that many people who end up questioning the status quo, often end up having their job status revoked and then they end up somehow without their job at all – this could be disguised as redundancy or they could find a way to actually fire you.

However you lost your job, you need to know there is more for you in your life, that the best is yet to come, and you can use redundancy as an opportunity to discover who you truly are and who you’re meant to be.

There are multiple aspects of your life that can challenge the notion of your identity other than your job. These are:

• Your sexuality.
• How you express yourself sexually.
• The clothes you wear.
• How you communicate with others.
• Body language.
• Body state and physiology.
• Your abilities and skills.
• Your experience and knowledge.
• Any disabilities or special needs you may have.
• Your attachment style.
• Your love language.
• Your gender
• Your family.
• The people in your friends circle.
• The people you choose to hang around with.
• Your background.
• Your childhood.
• How others view you.
• How you view yourself.
• What you say to yourself.
• What others say to you.
• The amount of financial status you have.
• The possessions you own.
• The thoughts inside your head.
• Your circumstances.
• Your confidence or lack thereof.
• Your sense of self-worth and self-esteem, or lack thereof.
• Your spiritual connection to yourself.
• Your spiritual connection to others.
• Your spiritual connection to the world, planet, universe.
• Your relationship with yourself.
• Your relationships with others.
• Your relationship with life itself.
• Your hobbies and interests.
• Your body shape and size.
• Groups and / or communities you’re part of.
• Your ability to be your own person.
• How much you have agency over your own life and yourself.
• The news and media.
• Social media.
• How others perceive you.
• How you perceive yourself.
• Your attachment to others.
• What types of movies you like.
• What types of music you like.

All of these things can affect your identity and sense of self. This list is not exhaustive.

You will notice some of these are based on:

• How we feel.
• How we behave.
• What actions we take.
• Other people – Who we hang around with, who we are involved with. Our family, friends and society.
• Our likes and dislikes.
• Our childhood and backgrounds.
• Our hobbies and interests.
• Our connection to others and the world around us.
• Our understanding and awareness of our internal self.

The problem is, when we listen to the outer world, and others, more than we listen to ourselves, and what we really want, need, like and dislike, that’s when we get ourselves into trouble and head down paths that were never meant to be our forever path. They are detours, disconnects from ourselves, and they tear us away from our sense of self and therefore our sense of sense worth, putting someone else, or multiple people, in the driving seat of our lives and in command of our own life ship, when what we really want and need is to take that person or people our of our driving seat and put us firmly back into it, so we can take our car of life for the spin of our dreams, on the road to our own success and happiness.

So how do we go about this?

What you need to do firstly and foremostly, is to get to know yourself – yes, this may seem cliche, but it’s what you need to do in order to be you, and not what other people want you to be. This is where the magic happens, as you begin to spend more time with yourself and be by yourself and take yourself out to places that you enjoy, the more you can spend time getting to know your own needs and what you like and dislike, instead of what other people and society is driving you to believe you need, want and like. The more you can do this and listen to your own inner voice that is drowned out by others, the better you will begin to see your own value, your own worth, and what you most value in yourself and others. And you will be able to make decisions that are in your best interests not others.

Write in a journal, what makes you happy, what feels great and lights your life up and brings you joy and empowerment and write down what doesn’t, and then you have a blueprint for how to best live your life moving forward. If you’re finding this a difficult exercise to do, along with the self-reflection, and you’re still feeling devastated from losing your job and you feel you don’t have a sense of place in life anymore, I know where you’re coming from as I’ve been made redundant 3 times – I even wrote a book about it to help others called BREAK THROUGH THE BARRIERS OF REDUNDANCY TO GET BACK INTO WORK -AN A-Z ‘HOW TO’ GUIDE – check it out here https://amzn.to/4cBjdAQ it’s got a ton of practical advice in it.

But one thing I do know for sure, redundancy is a good and positive opportunity to do something you’ve never done before in your life. It pushes you to get out of your comfort zone and achieve things beyond your wildest dreams. How do I know this? Because when I was made redundant for the second time in my life in 2009, and I was able to cut through all the noise, the grief, pain, and loss that goes with losing a job you actually enjoyed and thought was pretty much made for you in your life – for life, and that you were all set in your life – you eventually begin to have clarity to see it wasn’t actually your forever job. In fact there was aspects of the job you didn’t like, you even hated, and you wished in those moments you could have been somewhere else entirely – yes, it was that bad. But just like we put people on pedestals in our lives, such as actors / actresses, singers / popstars, influencers / gurus, we often put our job on a pedestal, and then when we are hit with the reality of that job coming to a difficult and abrupt end through redundancy, we can gain more clarity and insights on what really wasn’t so good about it after all, and what was actually an absolute nightmare, but our mind had selectively cut that part out of our most important memories for recognising what’s good for us and what’s actually terrible for us.

Therefore, I want you to challenge yourself right now, to write down what wasn’t good about the job you was in, and how bad those things really were. Be honest – what made you feel angry, irritated, stressed, anxious, worried, feeling like you weren’t enough or appreciated? And then you can start to paint a true picture of the bad aspects of the job that you are now free from and you can start to turn your time and attention towards finding another job, career, hobby or interest, that allows you to be your true authentic self and enables you to feel the opposite of those emotions. Nothing is perfect, but you can have better for yourself and you can use redundancy as an exciting adventure to find what you truly desire, want and need. This is a clean slate to find out what makes you excited, happy and elated, free of societal norms and expectations, and you can use this time as an opportunity to get to know yourself much better and improve your sense of self-worth, self-esteem, and self-identity.

It was that second time of being made redundant in 2009, that enabled me to understand that writing books that change lives from pain to gain was my true calling, not working in retail forever, or following a professional radio career which I had been doing hospital presenting and training for, for years, in order to help me to achieve that. If it wasn’t for redundancy, I would never have been an international bestselling author right now with my own book publishing company and I would not have joined bLU Talks and spoken at Oxford University last year and have co-authored bLU Talks volume 11 book with James Redfield (The Celestine Prophecy) and Ken Honda (Happy Money and Mindvalley).

We have to stop being who society wants us to be, who our job wants us to be, and who our co-workers want us to be and start living our life for us.

We have to look again, through that list of what shapes our identity, and start asking ourselves questions about why does that affect our identity and what’s my current thinking about that? Do my thoughts stem from me, or from what others want me to think, or need me to think, in order to satisfy their life agenda, their comfortability, and what they want and need? Now ask yourself, what do I want and need?

Here is that list again, remember to go through those questions with each thing on that list and write down your answers in a journal – along with your blueprint from earlier, to keep to refer back to, as it will help you immensely in your life moving forward.

Multiple aspects of your life that can challenge the notion of your identity other than your job, are:

• Your sexuality.
• How you express yourself sexually.
• The clothes you wear.
• How you communicate with others.
• Body language.
• Body state and physiology.
• Your abilities and skills.
• Your experience and knowledge.
• Any disabilities or special needs you may have.
• Your attachment style.
• Your love language.
• Your gender
• Your family.
• The people in your friends circle.
• The people you choose to hang around with.
• Your background.
• Your childhood.
• How others view you.
• How you view yourself.
• What you say to yourself.
• What others say to you.
• The amount of financial status you have.
• The possessions you own.
• The thoughts inside your head.
• Your circumstances.
• Your confidence or lack thereof.
• Your sense of self-worth and self-esteem, or lack thereof.
• Your spiritual connection to yourself.
• Your spiritual connection to others.
• Your spiritual connection to the world, planet, universe.
• Your relationship with yourself.
• Your relationships with others.
• Your relationship with life itself.
• Your hobbies and interests.
• Your body shape and size.
• Groups and / or communities you’re part of.
• Your ability to be your own person.
• How much you have agency over your own life and yourself.
• The news and media.
• Social media.
• How others perceive you.
• How you perceive yourself.
• Your attachment to others.
• What types of movies you like.
• What types of music you like.

With this in mind, I was recently interviewed by Jennifer Regular on her Awaken and Ascend podcast, about how to be who you’re meant to be, not what society wants you to be, or what you’re born into being. Because as a child we’re born into being who we are told we are, and how we should be, but what if we aren’t actually that thing we’re born and shaped into being, but our core identity is actually something else, maybe something and someone completely different to what we are told we are and meant to be.

Watch my interview to find out more by clicking on the video below or by clicking through this link https://youtu.be/R-ZV9hjef8s?si=-2Pm27Q7WVHNjAF9

Jennifer Regular, the host of Awaken And Ascend podcast, selects show guests who are transformational specialists that can help others step into a fuller expression of who they are, by sharing their insights, knowledge and wisdom from their own life experience. Her website is here https://lightingthepath.ca/

I feel so honoured to have been chosen as one of those transformational specialists who is living on purpose with helping asexuals, writing bestselling books, and always striving to fulfil my asexual life mission.

I hope you enjoyed watching the interview video above. I want to emphasise, the main themes of our interview are authenticity, identity, and what it takes to be your authentic self, see what I mean by watching this highlight clip from our interview here https://youtu.be/Kn_M3KAvL_g?si=tHOuuuufl9nMr5dc  or by watching the video below, underneath this text 👇

I hope you see redundancy as the wonderful opportunity it is, to reassess yourself, your life, your own identity and what you truly want and need moving forward to live your best life and be who you’re meant to be, not who you’ve been born and conditioned through your job and other aspects of your life, to be. Live for you, not what others need you to be. BE YOU! It’s the very best person to be.

Let me know what you think in the comments below and if you find this article useful, helpful, or insightful, in any way?

As always, stay positive.

Sandra xx