Today’s episode is for anyone who is feeling isolated during unemployment. I know I used to be and that’s why I’m recording this today. Maybe you’re the only one in your group of friends or your family without a job right now. I also remember being that person. Maybe no one around you really understands what it’s like to be in your position in this situation that you find yourself in today.
And maybe, just maybe, you’re starting to wonder if there is something wrong with you. The short answer to that, no, there is nothing wrong with you. Let me reassure you, you’re completely fine. This episode is here to give you tools, to give you perspective and encouragement to help you feel less lonely in your job search and help you have more control.
over the outcomes in the coming weeks and months ahead. Let’s do this.
I want to start by talking to you about the emotional reality of unemployment. Let’s start with the emotional side of things, right? Because before we can be strategic, before we can be rational and objective about your career progression, we have to acknowledge that every human experience like being unemployed is
covered in emotions and there is no way to detach ourselves from it. When you are not working and everyone else is, everyone else around you seems to be busy and seems to be doing well and having meetings and the work dramas even that they bring to you and have conversations about, you’re kind of jealous of that, you miss that. I remember missing it. They have new projects. You can really feel like you are in a different universe from everybody else.
You’re waking up with a different purpose, a different rhythm, with less structure than everybody else. And it can be isolating. I remember feeling, in fact, depressed during the times I was unemployed. And fewer people talk about these things with each other, right? So we don’t tend to share with others our feelings of vulnerability.
our feelings of detachment from the world and isolation. When we present ourselves during unemployment, it’s to, you know, pump ourselves up and tell people what we’re looking for. It’s very rare that we give ourselves permission to be human with others. And there’s a reason for that. You know, if you’re in competition, you’re talking to recruiters, you have to position yourself well for them. But now
Listening to this episode. I want to give you permission to feel human and be human with me here
And here’s what’s especially tricky about all of this, right? Our identities are so tied up with our careers. When you take that away, you know, the job that you have away, even if it’s temporarily, it can be very destabilizing for a lot of people. If you’ve even thought that you felt a bit invisible or you don’t know how to explain this to people, that you lost your job or you’ve been laid off or…
job was made redundant or you got fired, whatever it was. You know, lots of people have gone through that, but they don’t talk about it. My clients tell me that it’s a really difficult thing to tell others what happened to them. I have had a client that even had to workshop with me what she was going to tell her parents. And I’m talking about a grown ass woman here, but it’s more than just
feeling invisible. It’s the assumptions that come with unemployment, the subtle or not so subtle judgments that we feel others have about our careers, the advice that you get that you didn’t ask for from people that may not even know anything about your sector, your industry or what happened in the organization or happened within your team.
Or sometimes it’s that silence that just fills up the space when people are not saying anything, but you know what they’re thinking or you think you know what they’re thinking. And when you’re looking for your next opportunity, these things stop playing up in your head and it’s hard. I remember it being hard for me too.
And it’s okay to admit that it’s okay that it is hard. It doesn’t mean that you are not resilient. It doesn’t mean that you’re not being honest with others or with yourself. It doesn’t mean that you don’t have an amazing career up until now that you can move forward from now onwards. Okay. I think we need to detach the
career progression that you’ve had, your competences, your skills, your experience, your expertise, your leadership from the transition period that you find yourself into. We need to do that because it’s true, know, one thing is all of the experience that you’re bringing with you. The other is the ups and downs of everyone’s careers. You don’t see them, they don’t talk about it, but it happens to everybody.
Now, why I believe that your support network could be letting you down? So let’s talk about that. That’s kind of controversial that I talk about this all the time. I don’t see a lot of it written. You know how influenced that I am about Steven Pressfield who wrote Do the Work. I’ll put a link to that essay down below. But I find that sometimes ⁓ people
talk to us but they have not looked for a job in over a decade. They give us advice but they are not from your sector or your expertise. They are your friends and they love you. They are your family and they don’t want to see you change or move or be too risky but they sometimes say the wrong thing and it’s not their fault. I think everybody’s trying to do their best for you and providing you with
resume templates that don’t work with career advice that’s not up to date. It’s not that they’re trying to see you fail, it’s just that they’re trying to help you with out of date or misinformation. Sometimes they say nothing at all and that can really hurt. I know I’ve been hurt a lot by people that haven’t really expressed what they were feeling about things that I was telling them.
And often it’s not because they don’t care. It’s because they don’t know how to say it or express their feelings. Sometimes they don’t even know anything about what you’re saying and it’s hard for them to help you out. And many of my clients, because my clients are usually in their forties, fifties and sixties, not just clients that I see as private coaching clients or consultations, but I believe even people that buy my
Online courses are ⁓ more experienced career professionals. That’s my whole niche is that population, that demographic. And when I talk to clients, they say something that I think can be extrapolated to new listeners, right? What I hear is something along the line as none of my friends have been unemployed. None of my friends have been in this situation.
or my partner wants to help but keeps pushing me to take the first job that comes along. My family thinks I should be over it by now. Why am I still upset about this? And the truth is that unless someone’s been through a similar experience recently, especially as a middle manager to senior level, which again, I think is my niche,
in a very competitive market. I think it’s quite interesting that things have changed so much that if you have discussed career transition with somebody that was looking for a job in 2022, 2023, things were good for them. Don’t even compare yourself to their situation. The job market was really, really positive towards candidates and…
Employers were just struggling to get people, so they were hiring left, right and center. They were offering better salary packages. 2024 undid all of that. 2025 hasn’t been a good year either. that’s those are ups and downs in supply and demand is they’re common in every market, but especially in recruitment, we’re really feeling it at the moment. So even if the experience is rather recent, if they were
going through a transition in a good year for job candidates, they probably don’t get how mentally and emotionally demanding it is to be looking for work when there aren’t as many jobs advertised and where there is way more volatility in the job market than in the past. And that gap in understanding can feel incredibly isolating for you.
But here’s the thing, you don’t have to rely only on the people that you already know for support. And that brings us to here, us talking on the podcast. If you’re watching on YouTube, you can even talk to me, look at me. I’m talking directly to you. And that’s what I want to do in this next part of our conversation.
So I’m assuming that if you’re listening today, you are in the middle of a career shift or you’re ready to make one or you’re just sort of curious because you’re career ambitious and you want to learn as much as you can about these types of situations so that when you find yourself in that situation, you know how to do and how to progress. So this might be the right time for you to give yourself a proper reset.
⁓ This podcast episode is coming out in the final week of June. It’s the final week of our promotion for Reset Your Career. And I just wanted to one more time remind you that I have a short course called Reset Your Career. It’s designed to help you as soon as you want to make a change. It could be done over a weekend if you have a whole weekend to dedicate to it.
It could be done over the course of a week, know, six master classes plus a bunch of resources that are really helpful to get your ideas in order, get your LinkedIn ready, get your resume ready and your Kovalet already. Like it’s all there for you how to apply for jobs. So if I were you, I would purchase it now still in the month of June because I am offering a bonus.
for everybody that buys Reset during the month of June and it’s a 30 minute conversation with me. So you don’t need to do anything, all you need to do is go buy, the course is yours, it’s yours for life, you will keep it in your computer, you can access it anytime and I will get in touch with you so that we can book a 30 minute conversation once you’ve reviewed your LinkedIn profile using the course and reviewed your resume using the course templates and ideas.
We will get together and finalize them, review them and answer any questions that you may have. It will be lovely to get to know you a little bit better and have that one-on-one bespoke conversation. I’m assuming it will be helpful for you and I’d love to see you soon. So there will be a link to research your career in the show notes. It’s also easy to find on my website under the services tab and go there.
invest in it, invest in yourself and research your career. Okay.
Now let’s talk about rebuilding your support system. Okay. What does that mean? Right? I don’t want you to go and change all of your friends and family, but what do you do when that current network isn’t enough to help you look for a job, support your career transitions, career change, career advancement? You need to build a new one.
You need to add more people to your repertoire, to your boardroom. Consider yourself a business and you need to have a boardroom of people supporting, mentoring, coaching you. So I want you to carefully, intentionally, in a way that makes sense to where you want to go next, to find those individuals. They don’t need to be necessarily connected with you on a personal level. It could be me here on the podcast. So, know, Renata’s…
The job hunting podcast is a member of my board. will be watching that podcast or listening to that podcast every week, learning from her. She’s like a mentor to me, right? It could be somebody you follow on LinkedIn. It could be somebody that you always liked to talk to, but weren’t very close to. And then you send them a message or an email and say, look, I would really like your advice as I move my careers towards this area.
And I thought maybe you could give me some ideas if you think it’s a good idea. What do you think? Right. People love to give advice. They don’t really like to help when we asked for help, like help me get a job. But helping with advice, people are usually very keen to do that. Let’s start though with the easiest of all of those individuals in your network or a new network. Let’s start with yourself.
This might sound a bit philosophical, but you really need to become your own advocate first, right? And I spoke about Reset Your Career, the online course just before there’s a master class there about storytelling, because we actually hate talking about ourselves and we don’t advocate for ourselves. And you need to be a good advocate for yourself first, right? So that means treating yourself with compassion.
encouraging yourself, motivating yourself, being a ⁓ disciplinarian and creating that own self-accountability, the habit and routine of engaging with conversations with yourself about your career. It means not buying into the stigma that says being unemployed is something to be ashamed of because there’s nothing to be ashamed of. It would be really
unusual for somebody to have such a long career, 30, 40 years working and not have a single time when they’re unemployed. I mean, that’s impossible. And it means giving yourself the structure, the goals and the routines that help you stay focused and grounded. Right. So do that for yourself. We need to start there. Then we find your professional peers online.
You are not the only one going through this. are thousands of professionals that navigate job transitions at any one time. And while it might take some effort, you can connect with them. You can connect with them through Facebook groups, LinkedIn groups, job search webinars, free online meetups, commenting thoughtfully on someone else’s post and
then from that starting a private conversation with that person. I know that I have a client that just did that. I think I mentioned how she did it in a recent previous episode, which unfortunately I don’t remember the number. But if you are one of those listeners that binge on everything, you probably remember that I mentioned somebody who commented on someone else’s post and then that
person then connected with her and they met up for coffee a few weeks later. And I thought that there was such a great example of the power of LinkedIn and moving connections from followership to connections to in real life connections. So some of my strongest professional connections that I have started that way, ⁓ not in a networking event.
not through a mutual contact, but online. I have made now new friends on Instagram because I’m investing more on that platform, trying to understand it. I joined an Instagram group of people that want to grow their understanding of Instagram. We have a mentor, she organizes the events and we help each other. ⁓ I think those things
exist in every social platform. I’m very certain that there are lots of those groups on LinkedIn as well. And I want you to focus on quality, not quantity. So within this group of women on Instagram, there are 44 of us at this stage. And I have already identified some that I think are really amazing. And I’m quite impressed is one of them that has focused on
Instagram but her LinkedIn posts are amazing and have such great engagement. I’m actually learning from her also on LinkedIn. She doesn’t have nearly as many followers as I do but how she posts is probably way more natural and is resonating really well with her audience. She’s from a completely different area of expertise but I can learn from just observing how she’s doing it so I’m really sort of
aligning myself to her and sort of watching her more closely and giving her lots of ⁓ praise for the work she’s doing on LinkedIn because I don’t even think she knows how good she is. So I’m letting her know that what she’s doing is amazing. So again, it’s not about building a massive community. You need maybe two or three people to get you to get what you’re going through.
People you can message when you’ve had a bad interview or when you have a great lead that you can talk to them about that lead, about that opportunity. People who are also navigating uncertainty and can remind you that you’re not alone. That would be great if you have somebody else that can navigate job search with you. When I was running a group coaching program a few years ago, I had two senior finance managers in the group.
And at one point I felt that it would be a little bit awkward because they were in the same town as well. And I thought, are they going to compete for roles? And what happened was the opposite of that. They started sharing jobs that they felt that they weren’t uniquely qualified to apply for, but the other might be. So I would see in the Kajabi community page that they were sharing.
you know, how about you apply for this role? I’m not going to apply for this role. I don’t think it’s for me. They were both the job titles that they were applying for were the same, but their expertise was rather different as I found out over time. So sometimes your best supporters will be from your own industry, your area of expertise. Sometimes like this woman that I’m now friends with that I found on my Instagram new group.
she’s not from my industry at all and still I’m learning so much from her.
The important thing is for these individuals that you’re bringing in to be people who understand the emotional reality of your transition, right? And even if they’ve never worked in corporate, that they will be supportive of you. And if you haven’t met them and they’re just like me, just a podcast that you listen to, I want you to find more things like this in your life.
Sometimes the support is really not obvious at all. There was this client that was made redundant last year in 2024 and he was in a C level role and his partner worked in a completely different sector and could not understand why he wasn’t getting interviews straight away. Because when you are from a different sector, not even a sector, it’s like a completely different environment. Okay, let’s say she was from
healthcare, right? So a doctor on an allied health, I actually don’t remember. But she doesn’t have that experience of white collar work and corporate work where you have to apply for jobs in that way. It’s different for them. And his friends were all still working. So none of them were unemployed. And I remember having that discussion with him last year and I took those notes to do this episode and then I never did it. And
He was in one of those group coaching programs ⁓ that I run. And he said that the biggest value wasn’t the resume or the LinkedIn strategy. It was really the group coaching community that we had created. And I want to run that group again. It’s actually quite hard for me to motivate you to join a group. I think people tend to self-select themselves out of groups when they are
job searching because of the stigma of job searching and I don’t know why people feel like they need to do all of these by themselves. You I think it’s stoicism on steroids and it just doesn’t work for job seekers. You learn so much more when you’re working in a group. I know this because I’ve been running groups for five years now and they’ve all been so good. The feedback is always fantastic.
just hearing others share the same frustrations that he had felt him feel much better about the situation again. He’s now back in a leadership role and he still catches up with people in the group. ⁓ He messages me from time to time when he goes for a coffee with somebody just to say look I’ve just been to a coffee with such and such from the group and I love that you know I think that that
I think catching up for a coffee is hard in my group because I have people from all over the world ⁓ in those career coaching groups. But from time to time, if two or three of them are from the same town, I think it’s really, really awesome when they meet in real life. And even if they are not, I have one ⁓ group coaching client in Seattle that I know has been in touch with another client of mine who is in London.
There you go. Right. It’s so amazing to see that happen. And more importantly, you know, for them to be supporting each other. So that’s the message for you. You are not alone. And I think that if this episode resonated with you, there are so many other episodes that you can listen to on the job hunting podcast. And I wanted to let you know that we’ve just recently finalized. ⁓
updating the backbones of the job hunting podcast website. I think you will find that things are easier to find and that the searchability is better. We have re-categorized ⁓ the episodes and we’re actually working to do that even more fine tune categorization again.
So that means that if you’re seeking for something specifically, you can go to the categories and see a specific playlist for you. But also please use the search button at the top. If there is a guest that you liked and you know their name, or if there is a specific topic, ⁓ keyword that you want to type into that search box, you will find episodes talking about those specific issues. So I would recommend that you go check out the job hunting podcast.
website because it’s such a much easier way of searching for specific topics. And this episode is just a teaser of maybe some much more interesting work that I’ve done with guests or by myself in the past that you might want to go and have a look. The thing about the job hunting podcast is that now we have an archive of almost 300 episodes, right?
We’re growing a lot and that library is, it hasn’t really aged. Maybe there will be episodes, you know, that we talk about the pandemic or COVID, but I still think that there’s just so much early on in those first initial episodes that are just as good as the ones that we’re doing now. If you excuse for the terrible microphone and my lack of experience back then, I think that the content is really great. Many times I still recommend.
the first few episodes for clients because of the topics that I discussed back then that I haven’t spoken since. So I can see why some people write to me to say that they’ve been binging and they’ve watched everything. I think it’s amazing and I get so proud and excited about it. So I just wanted to remind you that it’s quite a big catalog and it’s all there for you. And also one more thing before we go, if you haven’t yet subscribed,
there is a newsletter that I send out every week. I think it’s great. Very few people unsubscribe from my newsletter. Like it’s crazy. I have a 44 to 50 % open rate on that newsletter and I have usually a zero unsubscribe every week. I think the reason why that happens is because even if you’re not looking for work, you just want to make sure
I’m coming to your inbox every week just in case. That’s how I think about it, because I know that all the thousands of people that are subscribed are not necessarily looking for work yet. But it’s just like, if I ever need Renata, she’s in my inbox. All I need to do is reply back or click on the links in the newsletter and go and check her services and courses or whatever. So it’s really impressive. And, you know, I’m so grateful.
that I’ve created this community of people that read it. Many of them reply back after they read the newsletter and give me feedback, give me ideas, compliment on whatever point they enjoyed. And the newsletter is also subscribed by many recruiters I’ve noticed. And I think that that’s also a good sign. ⁓ I keep in touch with recruiters a lot. You may have seen.
quite a few of them are guests on my podcast anyway so I think if you’re not subscribed you should be there will be a link to subscribe in the show notes all you need to do is go to my website it’s easy renatabernadi.com R E N A T A B E R N A R D E dot com thanks for listening take care of yourself and I will see you next time bye
