How to cope after redundancy

Needless to say, my farcical fake-commuter didn’t fool them. A couple of days later, over a Sunday roast, Daddy told them he was going to be off work for a while. “Cool, I figured something was up,” said 15-year-old Amy. “My dad’s got no job. That’s really cool.” (And to think I had been unsuccessfully striving for coolness for years.) However, Joel, who is 13, sat rather stern-faced, staring into his potatoes, eyes narrowed in thought. After several awkward seconds of silence, he looked up at me and announced: “Don’t worry, Dad, you could be a pilot now” – as if losing your job was the best excuse ever to get a life. How was I to know he was right?

It can go one of two ways in that first week and I wasn’t sure which it would be. The sympathy, though welcome, was almost too claustrophobic at times. I know it’s shameful to admit, but you want people to feel sorry for you – you crave it at times – and then you realise you’ve wrapped yourself in all this fluffy sentiment as if it were an incapacitating comfort blanket, instead of getting out and doing something positive.

We’re lucky in that my wife has a brilliant job, but even watching her suited and waving goodbye immobilised me in introspection. If it is largely our jobs that help to define us, then what am I now? I was posing the wrong question, of course. It should have been: “What do I want to be now?”

One of my closest friends invited me to supper shortly after “The Event” and, over a commiseratory bottle of his finest claret, asked me whether being out-earned by my wife was, well, just a little emasculating. “Hasn’t it all made you feel like you’re a bit less of a person?” I answered no, but I meant yes.

Losing your job when you are so arrogantly certain of your cosy middle-class future is more than a shock to the system. It recalibrates you in ways I am only just beginning to understand.

Yet what started out as a ruinous exercise in self-flagellation, introspection and hopelessness has turned into 51 weeks of remarkable reinvention (OK, so I spent the first week feeling sorry for myself; give me a break). You reach a point in your life – middle age, normally – in which you panic that you’ve hit a brick wall, that perhaps you’re no longer being propelled by life lessons, that there must be new experiences to break the monotony.

The normally inadvisable route out of that slump is to buy a fast car, have marathon-induced heart attacks or run off with a secretary – not lose your job. But I needed the biggest shock of my life to realise that it is possible to re-lay the path to self-discovery. And, after 12 months, these are the 10 life lessons that have helped me to start again:

1 The joy of domesticity is utter rot. Discovering the mind-numbing, soul-destroying tedium of life at home is the first key step to getting your life back together. The inevitable boredom is a sure-fire way to indulging in devilish pursuits such as therapy, porn, staying in your dressing gown and, worst of all, social media.

2 Social media is depressing. Firstly there are the message boards, that seem to be populated by deeply unfulfilled, lonely, often racist stay-at-home parents with anger-management issues. Not me. Honest. Not the racist bit, anyway. Then, just as dispiritingly, there are the career-focused sites such as LinkedIn, that are essentially global goldfish-begging bowls on which you are expected to promote your CV. Constantly.

3 You won’t get invited to dinner parties, principally because “what on earth are we going to say to the poor chap?” However, once everyone knows what’s happened, it’s a useful tactic to ensure that you still give dinner parties. The wine brought by guests will be better than usual, you can happily serve pasta with pesto, and no one will ever ask you about your job. A first.

4 Your best friends will be the lawyer and school bursar. As for the “normal” lot, there will, of course, be some friends who without prompting will lay down their lives for you and who won’t mind being “used” for introductions, etc. And then there are the friends, a tiny minority, whose elusiveness is akin to crossing the road when they see a blind beggar playing bongo drums. Even then, don’t give up on them. Sudden loss leaves one far less willing to harbour grudges.

5 There are three golden rules to finding a new job or career. All are painful, all will leave you feeling less of a person, and all are essential. One: kiss as many frogs as you can. Eventually you’ll find your prince or princess. Two: sell, sell, sell. A larger-than-life millionaire bludgeoned me with this one – when you meet potential clients or network at events you’ve got to be the best salesman ever, the most alluring mannequin in the window. Adopt a pufferfish mentality and be 'bigger’ than you are. Three: everyone is making it up as they go along, so don’t think for a minute you’re the impostor. This is where confidence really comes from, the knowledge that when you walk into a room, you can be whoever you want to be. You don’t need to know everything, you just need to seem to know everything.

6 Don’t let bitterness, anger and rejection eat away at you. Bit tricky this one.

7 It’s easy to reinvent yourself. When Ben Affleck won the Bafta for best director last year for the film Argo, he said that he’d appeared in so many dud films that he thought his career was finished, but that the experience of standing behind the camera had provided him with salvation, a second act. It turns out my son was right – reinvention is easier than you realise. So, in the past few months, among other things, I’ve written speeches and blogs for FTSE-100 businessmen, finely crafted 23 minutes of a future Oscar-winning screenplay (well, one can live in hope), pitched hugely ambitious projects to CEOs, become part of three internet start-up teams, engaged in consultancy for companies that once rejected my job applications and created a new one-off newspaper. I am not learning to fly, however.

8 Travelling by train outside rush hour is monumentally upsetting. This is because you are off to interviews, pitches or meetings dressed in a nice suit and everyone else is either a bemused tourist, drunk, old or also unemployed.

9 Always say yes. To work that is below your pay grade (learn to accept the incredulous looks when you mention your true rates); to meeting people who won’t be able to help (they may know someone who can); to unpaid work; to questions about whether you have experience in areas you don’t (that’s what Google is for); to anyone, especially parents, who asks if you’re making a success of it. By displaying such positivity, you’ll find you veer off the plan you devised 12 months ago and end up in a place you hadn’t expected – and will be all the better for it.

10 It’ll be OK. “Why wouldn’t you be OK?” said my publisher friend last week. “I mean, it was obvious to me 12 months ago. I know who you are.” What he meant, of course, is that when something bruises your ego, it’s easy to forget your best bits. The one person who didn’t was my wife, who pretty much saved my life in those first 48 hours and continued to convince me it would all be OK, eventually.

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