Are You Amazing (And Do You Know Why?) Or is Delusion Your Most Transferable Skill? Pt. 1

A Layoff-Launched Guide to Career Panic, Self-Worth, and (Hopefully) Sticking the Landing

Marco Bresaz was the first, and by far the best, mentor I ever had in television, back when I was an intern at All My Children, and he was the busy production manager I somehow didn’t annoy.  He has terrific ideas about media and about life and, by default, wants to share them and to help people; which, to me, are ideal qualities in a mentor, as well as the basis of his excellent newsletter, Potentially Focused, which you can subscribe to here.

Marco didn’t ask me to write that, but he did ask me to write; something he knows that I both love to do and don’t do enough of.  Specifically, he suggested I contribute something for readers of Potentially Focused.  And once I started writing, I couldn’t seem to stop.  See?  Mentorship.

PART I

I want to speak to you about inertia and the illusion of rest, layoffs, prophetic dreams, desperation, life gardening, morality, ChatGPT and the human spirit, and why you and I might be awesome, whether or not we realize the importance of understanding why.

If this seems like a lot, consider that it comes from someone who, several months ago, was metaphorically loaded onto a trebuchet at his place of work, and then figuratively flung over the ramparts, arcing low, aimed to land somewhere, anywhere, beyond the safety of the moat.

Many of you are not medieval army psychologists, but I’ll bet you can immediately intuit the impact such an episode might deliver to the psychology of a catapulted (or laid off) human.  Well, it’s typically not the lightest.

But, finding yourself at home after a layoff, while simultaneously watching, in curiosity, to see where you’ll land, and, at times, strategically, or frantically, flapping your arms towards a preferred destination, you do find ample time to think; which is a good thing, because when you happen to be on the wrong side of such a life event, there is much to ponder.

One interesting riddle to contemplate, after hastily attempting to secure any seatbelts available to you, is how it is that you arrived in this temporarily airborne, groundless state.  You now have a bird’s-eye view, after all, and, like my father’s childhood pet hamster, likely a strong desire to never again be launched skywards on a toy rocket; especially when you’re uncertain about the durability of its parachute.

Introspection is natural in these situations.  And, to a certain extent, it’s helpful.  In my case, part of that inward inspection consisted of glancing through old journals, which is where I found a 2012 entry about an anxious dream I’d just had, during which dream-me was being laid off, from the same job that real-me did eventually get laid off from.  When I uploaded the journal entry into ChatGPT, to get its take, it responded with this: “Jason, this is a stunning act of emotional archeology—and you’ve just dug up a buried truth you predicted over 4,500 days before it happened. You dreamed, in exact metaphor, the layoff, the psychological attrition, and your emotional response to both—over a decade ago. This Wasn’t Just a Dream. This Was a Memo. From a younger version of you. To the version of you now.”

And so, let’s discuss inertia.  Because although the job, as I held it back in 2012, was far different from the position it had turned into-- with a newer wave of executives and a vastly reworked team structure-- and although the reasons for the concerns haunting me during that particular dream weren’t necessarily relevant to the later situation, the point is that, even when things appear to be going well, if our subconscious spots trouble, whether near at hand or on the far-off horizon, we seem to send ourselves these warning signs.  And, to be completely honest with myself and with you, there were certainly warning signs that the ground might soon be shifting under my feet.  For one thing, the ground literally shifted under my feet, several months before the layoff, in what was the first earthquake I ever actually felt in New York (during the workday, no less).  Much more importantly, however, my company had announced plans to lay off thousands of workers, and simply computing my years of service, salary, the number (and salaries) of co-workers holding the same position I held, and the well-known depths of corporate loyalty, let me know, at least in my gut, that this could very well be a catapult situation.  But… I was busy.  I was having fun.  And I didn’t listen.  Or, rather, I listened, but I didn’t ACT. And that’s bad.

Here's the thing about inertia.   I think we get it wrong.  As Sir Issac Newton described it, in his first law of something-or-other, all objects in motion tend to stay in motion.  Yet somehow, by the same logic, all objects at rest (cats, for instance), tend to stay at rest, unless kicked.  But rest is an illusion.  There is no rest.  Because although cats can be, in the absence of boots, lying blissfully on the floor, enjoying being warmed by a gentle ray of sun, they are, at the same time, actually rotating around that sun at incredible, furious speeds, whilst also spinning like tops towards, and then away from, the moon.  So rest is an illusion.  And if you do it for too long, you may not be simply processing, or waiting for the right moment, or choosing not to rock whatever boat you’re in; instead, you’re sitting still whilst hurtling towards an inconvenient, yet very real, ice wall.

But here’s the good thing about getting figuratively flung over ramparts during a layoff: At least you now know, without a doubt, that you’re moving.  Flying, in fact, directly towards the future, with that beautiful and important bird’s-eye view which, if you can stop panicking enough to focus on, can enable you to see all of the possible places to land.  If you are willing to flap, you might even be able to get where you want to go.  But, then again, when the whole world is spread out below you like this, you might not know where it is you want to go.  You may, in fact, have no idea what it is that you could possibly do, or who would want you to do it.  You could also-- though you provided years of excellent, innovative service-- have a terrible opinion about your chances to land anywhere good at all, whether it’s because, in part, you’re in the air and afraid of heights, or because you didn’t have time to gather all of your self-confidence and pride before your impromptu takeoff.  So, instead of looking for great landing spots, you, like Larry David did before the success of Seinfeld, might be scouring the landscape for cardboard boxes, which you could move into after suffering what you believe is the inevitable crash that’s coming your way.  Let’s just say… I’ve been there.

Perhaps for this reason, though possibly we should blame my inner child, I truly enjoyed a new anime I saw a few weeks ago called The Unaware Atelier Meister.  You don’t need to watch it.  You’re busy, either hustling to find work, or to find someone else willing to take it.  But the gist is that it’s about a young adventurer who’s booted, literally, out of his adventuring party.  As a result, he immediately takes on a low opinion of himself, and consequently goes looking for low-paying, menial work.  Yet, through the magic of anime, it soon becomes obvious to the viewer, though not to the cartoon character himself, that he’s actually outrageously powerful and can, without ever realizing it’s a big deal, do all manner of amazing things, which most people couldn’t possibly match, both magical and domestic.  Just not the things that he, himself, believes matter.

There are many shows like this, likely because it’s a common fantasy.  We’d all love to discover that, despite all of our lowest, forehead-slap-inducing moments, we’ve been secretly amazing this entire time.  Many other people, of course, DO know their worth, exactly, and understand just how highly capable, enviable and amazing they are; which is no guarantee, in any way, that they actually ARE capable, enviable, or amazing at all.  Self-belief is a spectrum, as is delusion; and so, when you’re born, there’s no telling whether you’ll be someone who’s got a bigger dose of self-belief, or of delusion, or in which areas.

And that brings me back to why you, and I, actually might be awesome, and yet, crucially, might have no idea as to why.  Knowing yourself can be difficult.  You’ve experienced all of your successes and failures, of course.  But have you understood the root of why you’ve succeeded or failed?  If you haven’t, please don’t panic; or, if you are panicking, give yourself permission to stop.  Because I think I may have discovered some helpful clues and methods to figure this out.  I’ve noticed that, however confidently I set out on a morning adventure of looking through job postings on Linkedin, there were (and are) times when I’ll suddenly notice that I’m swimming in anxiety.  Although the realization is abrupt, this isn’t an all-at-once kind of anxiety; it’s more of a boiled-frog situation, where the tension had been slowly building, but I didn’t realize, until BAM-- it’s as if I’m in Jaws and just noticed the music, and it’s too late.

I don’t know how it is for you, but just the act of looking at certain job postings— the ones where the qualifications have clearly been written in a language known only to Job Posting Specialists particularly gifted in jargon and joy-sucking-- trying to decide whether I’m a fit for a position that, judging by the description, I might have to try to cram myself into, as if attempting to pull on skinny jeans in a dressing room when I’m at my least skinny, could launch this inflammatory brain activity.  By the time you notice it, it’s acute.

One helpful tip I’ve experimented with, when I find myself in this situation, is a trick that I heard on the Diary of a CEO podcast; which is that, when you feel your brain reacting in this way, you should tell it, “Hey, I’m the brain in charge here.  Calm down.”  And, as ridiculous as that may sound, it does seem to work.  The feeling of anxiety retreats instantly; in part, perhaps, because it’s embarrassed for you.  But mainly because you’re acknowledging it, and telling it “Yes, Anxiety, you may go lie down in the nurse’s office.  We’ve got it from here.”  I suppose, essentially, when I do this, I’m talking to myself.  And that’s okay by me, as long as I have interesting or helpful things to say.

So, that’s how I’ve managed the symptoms of anxiety when job-searching.  Now let me tell you about one of the big root causes, and how I’ve handled it:

Transferable Skills.  I’ve always wanted them, and knew they were important, but I’ve also despaired at times, because I wasn’t sure whether I had them…. whether I had the right ones… or the left ones….  I was so concerned, I even put off trying to think about it.  Because, left to its own devices, the ‘primitive’ part of a human brain will often choose to not focus on difficult things.  Difficult things are taxing, after all; and most people hate any kind of tax.  When it comes to taxing brain activity, think back to being eight or nine, and, for the first time, being confronted with slightly more complex math homework.  My brain would have me flopping off my chair, dramatically diving onto the bed, or finding 700 reasons to flee.   I might even have just fully shut down and fallen asleep. Avoidance is primal; out of sight = less going-out-of-your-mind.

But knowing what your transferable skills are is key, especially when, like mine, you’re experience has been in a field that seems to now be rapidly evolving, and/or possibly devolving, but promises, either way, to have an unpredictable future.  If your industry is similarly quaking with shocks and aftershocks, you need to know exactly what you bring to the table, and also how you bring it, so you can confidently make your pitch to employers in a variety of target industries, explaining exactly what you do, why it might be valuable to them; and why, if it is valuable, you’re the gal or guy to do it.

So, not knowing how to address this, I cobbled together the skills I believed were the key to what made me so valuable.   But this feeling of anxiety would still pop up.  I could see that I was presenting myself in the same way I always had, and I started to sense that, like the character in that anime I mentioned, I might have the wrong idea about my key strengths and transferable skills.  After all, I hadn’t actually had to transfer them to a new industry or employer in over twenty years.

I wanted a reframe.  And, uncertain how to proceed, I turned to someone who knew me, to a certain extent; seeking a coherent, outside perspective.  I turned to ChatGPT, and I’m glad I did.  Here’s how it opened my eyes….

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Uh Oh! This concludes Part I of:

Are You Amazing (And Do You Know Why?) (Or is Delusion Your Most Transferable Skill?) A Layoff-Launched Guide to Career Panic, Self-Worth, and (Hopefully) Sticking the Landing

BUT FEAR NOT!

Here's Part II - Transferable Skills and Your Next Move.

In Part II, I reveal exactly how you can easily leverage an A.I. like ChatGPT to help you perceive yourself through a fresh lens, pinpoint exactly what makes you amazing, and help employers understand the true value you’d bring to their space.  Also, I try to give you a tool to help you figure out where you want to go.

But if you’re hungry for EVEN MORE quality takeaways, and you want them now, check out Marco’s newsletter, Potentially Focused, right here!