"Prime Minister Boris Johnson ordered England back into a national lockdown after the United Kingdom passed the milestone of one million COVID-19 cases and a second wave of infections threatened to overwhelm the health service." - Thomson Reuters, October 31, 2020.
Now, the world awaits Monday.
How badly will stock markets get hit?
What kneejerk reactions will happen in the conference rooms of the C-suite, triggering reductions-in-force?
And, will states in the United States bring back comprehensive shutdowns?
The holiday season, which begins today with Halloween, may or may not let in some light amid the growing darkness.
But what really matters is what you are going to do about how you make a living. Here are the 4 fundamentals I hammer when coaching men and women who are overwhelmed by a combination of uncertainty and too much awfulness happening around them.
- The burden is on you to bring in income. We are not all in this together. If you can't pay your bills, it's you who will be evicted. Your car will be towed away. And the memory of the trauma will be imprinted in your soul for years. Take control now. Help is not on the way. U.S. brand of capitalism is based on individualism.
- This is a crisis. The usual rules of the game have been suspended. You have to play holding onto your source of income or finding a new job or gig assignment by instinct. The wiring for that survival mechanism is somewhere in some part of your brain. That was how the caveman lived to hunt another day.
- Don't depend on any single source of income. Hedge. That's called developing "multiple sources of income." Here is an article I published on that for marketers and public relations representatives. But the tactics are applicable in myriad lines of work.
- Be prepared to make a shift from a career path to what Willis Towers Watson describes as a portfolio of broad and nonlinear experiences. Instead of pursuing a career as a corporate communications editor, you might spend the next six months teaching writing in a prison, then the next 10 months doing loss prevention for a big box. Actually, this isn't new. Those in volatile lines of work have already embraced nonlinear as the way they make a good living.
The takeaway on all this is an observation Richard Bolles made way back in the 1970s for his career guide "What Color Is Your Parachute?" That is this: The folks who get the job offer (or, currently, the gig assignment) are not necessarily the most qualified. They are the most skilled in how they search for work. So on the money Bolles' insight has been that the book is updated every year. Public libraries carry multiple copies.
Your must-do is to become the best at how you put yourself out there for landing, holding and moving on to better kinds of work.
The Future of Work is now. Ghostwriting on those issues and coaching for job search, transition, personal branding, re-entry after recovery and reputation restoration. Sliding scale fees. Complimentary consultation (janegenova374@gmail.com)
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