Your employer announces a restructuring and the names are not out yet.
Take this situation apart. Each piece goes in one box: yours, or not yours. There is no third box, and almost nothing falls in one piece.
Yours
- How many evenings you spend running scenarios.The unease arrives by itself; that is the first movement and nobody is blamed for it. Whether you keep it going for three hours is the second movement, and that one is yours.
- Whether you update your CV in the meantime.An hour of work, available today, and it predicts nothing. Preparing is not the same as expecting the worst.
- Whether you keep working normally until you know.The simplest and most underrated choice on the list. Your work is still your work, even when the outcome is uncertain.
Not yours
- Whether your role is on the list.Already decided or not yet, either way without you. This is where your attention wants to go and where it pays the least.
- When the board provides clarity.Their timetable, their pace, their lawyers. Waiting is the only thing to be done here; how you wait is a different question.
- What gets passed around in the corridors.Noise from people who know as little as you do. What is yours: whether you treat that noise as information.
The reasoning. Fear is nearly always about the left column: the outcome, the timing, the list. That is precisely the column where no action is possible. Write out the right column and something concrete usually appears that you can do this afternoon. Not because it changes the outcome, but because it puts you back in the only territory where you are somebody who acts.
- We suffer more often in imagination than in reality.Seneca
Nearby situations
More on this topic: Fear and the future