1. Don’t panic. Keep calm. Breathe deep. Take action.
My first reaction to such news was disbelief, an almost floating feeling of ‘no way, this only happens to other people’. And then more denial…: ‘so what, you can step out tomorrow to find a new job!’
Not this time, however. The message sinks in, and you remember headlines in the news on increasing unemployment figures, the ‘DDay’ Speech of the VCs on Sandhill Road after the Wall Street debacle… and then that small voice telling you this may be serious.
I read the advice of Marcus Aurelius: “The first step: Don’t be anxious. The second step: Concentrate on what you have to do”. And I decide to do just that.
In the next few months I will learn to “Blot out my imagination. Turn my desire to stone. Quench my appetites. Keep my mind centered on itself.”
“And you can also commit injustice by doing nothing.”
Marcus Aurelius would become one of my best allies.