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Episode 41: Are you in the 5 stages of grief in your career?

Welcome to The Career Clarity Show, where we help you find a lucrative, soulful, and joyful career path for you! 

Grief. It’s a complicated emotion.

It’s one we expect to feel over the loss of a loved one, when someone precious to us has died.

Grief is not an emotion we expect to feel about work. Anger, frustration, dread, boredom, indifference — sure.

But grief happens, too.

We absolutely feel loss, especially when faced with the “death” (it sounds dramatic, I know) of an opportunity. Or maybe the death of the idea of your future career path.

That experience can be unexpectedly devastating.

Those of us who are “academic thoroughbred racehorses” (read: overachievers) thought we’d get straight As, do every possible extracurricular activity, go to a top college, and be set for life. We overworked ourselves in our teens and twenties to set the foundation for the rest of our lives so we’d be in cruise control as adults. We had big plans to own the future, not worry about it.

So the moment the illusion of “perfect” plans comes crashing down — the impressive job feels empty, the sexy company hid serious skeletons in the closet, or the unexpected layoff from the dream role — we’re likely to experience acute pain.

Coming face-to-face with the realization that our best laid plans failed us can be crushing.

When we’re trying to make sense of the emotional tornado around us (“How can I be this upset over work? It’s just a job…”), we can slip into the 5 stages of grief without even realizing it.

And if you don’t know what the 5 stages of grief are, you can spend years of your career languishing in them.

In your freshman Intro to Psych class, they’d define the 5 stages of grief as denial, anger, bargaining, depression, and acceptance. The “5 stages” framework is part of a methodology that helps us process the full swirling mess of what we’re experiencing when we’ve had a loss.

You’re not going to waltz down the 5 Stages Yellow Brick Road, predictably moving from one coping emotion to the next. The 5 stages aren’t linear, and you may notice that you’ve experienced all, several, or just one of these as you’ve been wrestling with how you feel about your career. (And I bet you’ll recognize coworkers who fit squarely into each of these stages.)

 

Shock, Disbelief, and Denial

This is the moment you get caught completely off guard with something shitty happening at work: you get pulled off a project you loved and put on a project you hate. Your coworker (whose job you’ve been doing for the last year) gets promoted and you don’t. There’s a re-org, and you get assigned to a new team that sucks. Your beloved boss is fired, and it’s clear you’re next on the chopping block.

The disbelief could also be from being treated disrespectfully at work: someone stole your idea, badmouthed you, spread misinformation about your performance, or yelled at you in a meeting.

Shock tends to kick in because your nervous system has been completely surprised and has gone into “freeze” mode instead of fight or flight. It’s as if your usual coping mechanisms have been paralyzed, and all you can do is watch Ali from marketing publicly blame and berate you for a mistake that *she* made, your mouth agape.

Denial is what happens when your body kicks back into action, post-shock: it tries to use the defense mechanism of pretending something didn’t happen as a way to keep you psychologically safe from re-living the experience. Denial might do this by keeping you from telling anybody about your experience, refuting that it ever happened, or saying that it wasn’t a big thing (when it clearly was a BFD).

Denial can be temporarily helpful if you have no spare emotional bandwidth to process what happened (or if your work environment is unsafe), but it’s not a healthy place to hang out for long. Talk to people who you respect who have witnessed your experiences at work and ask them for their candid read of the situation. Their perspective can shake you out of shock or denial and help you bust out your more adaptive psychological coping tools.

Anger

Career grief shows up as anger when you’ve been noticing injustice at work, and you’re fed up with it.

Anger can be useful when it’s righteous indignation and prompts you to take action on your own behalf, like when you were passed over for a great project and immediately went to your boss with a bullet point-laden, 11 page slide deck of the ways you’d kick ass at it.

Sometimes anger can be maladaptive, too. We get angry when we feel personally victimized by a situation, but victim-based anger usually doesn’t help us get where we need to go. If you find yourself thinking, “This is so unfair” or “Why does this always happen to me?” or “My boss has never looked out for me,” you’re encroaching on unproductive anger territory.

Anger can be instrumental in getting us to change our situations and take action…but pay attention to whether your anger is spurring you to activate on your behalf, or to stew in your cubicle, plotting an elaborate revenge scheme that may or may not involve encasing a stapler in Jell-o.

Bargaining and Guilt

The bargaining stage is the most devastating part of the career grief cycle because it’s where you start to play all these unhelpful logic games on yourself, arguing things like:

  • “If I can only get a $8,000 raise at the next review, I’ll be happy.”
  • “I could have done a better job on that last report, so I deserve this to have happened to me, and maybe when I make a report more perfect, I’ll get the accolades I deserve.”
  • “If I can just survive here another 2 years here, I’ll get my pension/have that deal close/make partner and then I can leave.”
  • “Being reamed out in front of my colleagues must be all my fault because I did a bad job. I’ll do a better job next time so that won’t happen again.”

This mode of thinking is logical (just like all the stages of grief) but also pushes your happiness out beyond the foreseeable time horizon and has you trade away your agency and pray to the Corporate Fairy Godmother to bibbidy-bobbity-boop a better career situation on you.

Bargaining is a mistake: it makes you think you can solve past pains by making a deal about what fresh hell you’ll tolerate in the future. You do this because you feel guilty or even responsible for what’s happened to you, and negotiating is your penance. (You might be better off with three Hail Marys and two Our Fathers.)

When you’re bargain trading what you want now for what you think you can get later, look out. To most companies, you are a unit of human capital that’s pretty much interchangeable with anybody else — and easily replaceable. When you’re already in a bad situation but willing to negotiate, you usually end up losing even more.

Depression

Feeling deep sadness about your job sucks. There’s no way around that. But letting yourself acknowledge and feel the depth of your emotions about your job is a great way to clear those feelings out.

(An ugly cry in the bathroom between meetings to try to “keep it all together” does not count. Nor does becoming Moaning Myrtle every night after you get home…)

Pay attention to if you’re feeling the sadness within the container of work.

“I’m incredibly disappointed that this company I admired doesn’t share my values” is a totally different flavor than a never-ending fountain of misery about who you are and your lot in life like “I’ll never be happy in any job. Anywhere. Ever.”

This kind of catastrophized thinking (taking your specific circumstances and generalizing them out to all possible work scenarios) isn’t productive or healthy. It’s also usually symptomatic of a fixed mindset and a streak of perfectionistic thinking.

If you’re noticing that your thoughts tend to stay in the “no light at the end of the tunnel” space, enlisting the help of a therapist can be incredibly powerful. (Your employer might seem like a ruthless faceless entity, but lots of companies offer Employee Assistance Programs that could help you process your feelings, too.)

Acceptance and Hope

Acceptance gets a bad reputation because it sounds like you’re choosing to settle for your current reality. But in the context of career grief, acceptance is the return to hopefulness because you’re no longer denying the truth of your situation.

Instead of “It is what it is” (which could be denial-based or depression-based thinking), it’s shifting your mindset into “I see what it is, and I see what I can and can’t do about it.” There’s a lot of power in this mindset evolution.

Your dream of how this job could be great has died, but now that you’ve accepted its demise, you’re free to pursue a new path that fits you better. You can learn from your last work situation and use it to inform your next job.

Acceptance is not always easy or fun to get to but totally possible.

Good grief, the 5 stages are a heavy topic. But it’s a normal experience you might not have had a name for before.

Now that you’re in the know…which of these stages of career grief have you seen your coworkers fall into (or get stuck in)? Have you ever experienced one of the stages? What’s the hardest part of dealing with career grief?

Want to learn more about our strategic framework for successful career change? Download The Roadmap to Career Fulfillment ebook right here!

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About the Author Lisa Lewis

Lisa is a career change coach helping individuals feeling stuck to find work that fits. She helps people clarify who they are, what they want most, and what a great job for them looks like so they can make their transition as easily as possible. Lisa completed coaching training in Jenny Blake’s Pivot Method, Danielle LaPorte’s Fire Starter Sessions, Kate Swoboda's Courageous Living Coaching Certification, and the World Coaches Institute. In addition to that, she apprenticed with the top career coaches in the country so she can do the best possible work with — and for — you. She's helped more than 500 individuals move into more fulfilling, yummy careers and would be honored to get to serve you next!

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