Eleanor's letter: Redundancy plot twist - it's not the end

Hi there

This week’s missive is about redundancy – a massive part of the midlife collision! In the very first NOON research that we did with Accenture (Meet the Queenagers: The Secrets of Midlife Women), we found that by 50, over half of us have been through at least 5 big life events: Divorce; bereavement; redundancy; caring for elderly parents; caring for a Gen Z with a mental health problem; our own health issues; some kind of financial, physical or other abuse; and menopause.

This was also backed up in our more recent Beyond the Break report around midlife divorce, with Mishcon de Reya and the private bank Julius Baer.

However, today I want to talk about redundancy.

Stories of redundancy

At the NOON London Circle last week (30 women, thanks for coming!) we heard several tales of women suddenly being ‘let go’, out of the blue. It is always horrid – thanks to you ladies for being brave and talking about it. (You would be amazed at how many senior women have been whacked but never talk about it, camouflaging it by announcing a new job or life stage without ever admitting that perhaps it wasn’t actually their call….)

I am a big believer that we have to lance the shame around redundancy: It really does happen to the best people. And while at the time it can feel like the worst thing in the world, in the long run it might just be the best (and yes, I KNOW if doesn’t feel like that when it happens).

Now, as many of you who have read my book will be aware, this is personal. I set up NOON after I was made redundant exactly 6 years ago this month. On International Women’s Day…ooh the irony.

Telling my redundancy tale

I was talking about it last week on a Pension Bee podcast and they have used the grittiest clip of me talking about being whacked and promoted it all over the internet. I confess that redundancy experience still makes me cringe a bit. Like the remnants of a scar – it’s numb now but golly it hurt at the time.

For me the redundancy came out of the blue. I thought I was popping up to see the new boss to talk about my plans for the next few months. But when I got to her office she was sitting with the head of HR and there was a box of tissues on the table between them. Yup. It was THAT meeting.

It was my work death day. (It’s a bit like the novel One Day where they keep going back to St Swithin’s Day over 25 years, which [spoiler alert] is actually the day the heroine dies.) You can listen to me tell the story on the podcast.

Well, that day is lurking for all of us.

So rather than believing that jobs love us back (they don’t; despite the rubbish that companies spin about their loyalty to employees) remember: The only people we are ever really irreplaceable to are our families. The graveyards are full of once essential CEOs, ministers, politicians, editors, doctors…

Too big to NOT fail…

At some point, if we are an employee, we become too big number on somebody else’s spreadsheet, and all the evenings, weekends or personal occasions we sacrificed to the job are forgotten. We are out.

It’s important to remember that when we are grinding as a cog in someone else’s machine.

My job had been the majority of my life

If we’ve been in a job or at a company for a while, it is normal for our identity to be wound up in it. I’d done 23 years at mine; I’d gone from being a young gun to hitting 50. When I lost my big job I felt like a part of me had died; that company gal was no more.

It was humiliating and public and I had no idea who I was or what I was going to do. That’s why I set up NOON – so no other woman whacked at 50 would feel as lost and lonely as I did then.

Now, 6 years on, I am SO glad it happened. I truly am happier and more fulfilled now than I have ever been, not least because I run my own ship and call the shots. On Wednesday the sun shone for the first time in weeks, so I spent the day on the Heath, swimming, soaking up some rays. The worker bee in me still feels guilty about ‘bunking off’ but I’m learning to do what works for me, not be on someone else’s schedule.

How to react in the aftermath of redundancy

Of course, we don’t go from employee to new life in a flash. The transition is everything. We know a bit here at NOON about redundancy and what to do it if it happens to you. So here are my tips.

First, mourn what is gone. Feel it all – I watched The Crown on repeat and drank too much wine and ate a LOT of ice cream. Please be kind to yourself. Then Pause. Please. Take a bit of time out. Tell everyone you don’t know what you are going to do next and that you are just being putty for a while, in transition.

Remember: Change is difficult. You are allowed to feel a bit battered and unsure.

And don’t rush to jump back into a job like the one you just had or the closest equivalent.

At the Circle last week, a woman who’d been whacked said: “I thought I should start applying for things, but actually I am beginning to think that the universe has been nudging me to make a change for a while and I have ignored it. So now it is forcing me too. I’m going to think about what is really important to me and what I want to do next.” Yes. Hooray!

Is this the sign you need?

Maybe the redundancy is the nudge you need, to do what you always wanted to do.

Yes, I know there are financial constraints: Many of us need to go on earning as we have expensive dependents, or mortgages or need more in our pension. Yet a big life change means adjusting our values and our needs.

For instance: Maybe you are lucky enough to own a house or flat. Could you downsize, get rid of your mortgage and not need to earn as much as you used to? Or have you always fancied living somewhere different? Have you yearned to go back to study? Do you have an itch to retrain and do something more meaningful? Or maybe you’ve got an idea for a business. Remember: Midlife is the time of BECOMING. Becoming the woman you always wanted to be. Now is the time. And if not now, then when?

Time to turn off your brain…

At our Circles in February we’ve been asking ourselves this question: What would you do if you weren’t afraid? Just ask and don’t let your brain shut down what your heart wants before it has a chance to utter it. (I did this at one time…and then I started listening.)

What we know at NOON is that during midlife much of what has been at the centre of our lives between ages 25 and now begins to fall away. In her brilliant analysis of the 100-year life, my friend Avivah Wittenberg Cox talks about Four Quarter Lives (check out her podcast): 0-25 is getting started, 25-50 the years of achievement (when we tick the boxes that our families and our culture have set for us such as jobs, houses, maybe kids, partners).

…and become who you want to be

The good news is that 50-75 is the time of Becoming – for me it is when we become Queenagers, when we finally ask ourselves what WE want (rather than doing what everyone else thinks we should…).

This time Q3 – or Queenagerhood – is a gift. It comes before Q4, 75-100: Harvest) and sometimes it takes something painful, like a big loss, to clear the space for our own becoming. For me that was redundancy, but for others it can be divorce, or bereavement or an empty nest (or everything together in what we call the midlife clusterfuxk).

But into that space something new can grow if we have the courage to let it…and nurture it.

The good news about loss

The best discovery of our first bit of NOON research was that the Queenagers who had been through the MOST at midlife, who had shed the most, ended up the happiest. They had created lives that were resonant and matched on the outside how they felt on the inside.

So yes, redundancy in midlife is horrid, humiliating, scary. But like those other transitions, it can also be a gift.