Recently several of my close friends have lost their jobs or are in the painful process of redundancy consultation with their employers, so my posting on Positive Psychology News Daily this month focuses on what positive psychology can tell us about human reactions to imposed (negative) change.
I had to include the good old Change Curve model (it explains the emotional roller coaster we experience as a result of change we didn’t expect or didn’t want) which you may already be familiar with.
There are various practical steps that we can take to increase our ability to manage negative change more effectively; I’ve suggested three activities here. I’m sure you can think of many others – please share them with us in your comments. To paraphrase Darwin, it isn’t the strongest of the species that survives, nor the most
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February 4th, 2009 at 1:48 pm
Sorry to hear about your friends losing their jobs. I was made redundant back in the late 80s after that particular property bubble burst. I threw a party to celebrate my redundancy then went on holiday for 3 months – and came back refreshed and ready for the next chapter in my life. Which was not to say that I wasn’t traumatised by losing my job at first – it’s just that changing the way I reacted to it helped me cope and gave me a different energy to adapt to my circumstances after that.
BTW, congrats on the new blog!
February 5th, 2009 at 12:25 am
Thanks for your comments Yang May. I’ve also had the redundancy experience; new opportunities appeared and I was able to do things I would never have had the chance to do otherwise. Perhaps some of it is about being in the right place at the right time?
Bridget