Monster in Pink

Once a woman's favourite and the fantasy of every man – ‘Pink Slip’ today has turned to be the most dreaded word on the block for men & women alike.

I returned to work after a great two week holiday, to an office engulfed in fear and colleagues waiting for a slow but painful death. I don't know if any of the fears are legit as the management maintain a stoic face on matters like this yet every few days injects the 'anything could happen' phrase when they talk about the future.

So a rather bubbly office full of laughter & frolic has now turned into a shrink's chamber where people discuss their dwindling bank balances, home loans repayments and higher financial anxiety with a new born on the way.

My colleague who just made a down payment on a flat checks her email a million times a day dreading to find a ‘pink slip’ slowing slipped into her inbox.

So, you can just imagine what morale is like around my office: one minute we were the cutting edge media of the world; now the Gestapo has arrived. No one is hiring and everyone is firing, I hear everyone say. There is fear, there is sadness, there is anger and most importantly there is helplessness.

I first heard about pink slips when someone I know was caught in its web when it hit the United States way back in the end of 90s. He escaped the first five rounds of pink slips but was caught in the sixth one. He was devastated and his family heartbroken. He had recently married and bought a new house and the bills were mounting. But he soon found a better job and pulled himself up again. The pink slip did set his immigration back a little but he says life only got better. The worst part, he says, was the fear and uncertainty that gripped him during the first five rounds. He was relieved when he was given the boot because that meant he could stop worrying and do something about it.

So does the pink slip monster have the power to drag everyone into the black hole of misery or is there an escape? Can we choose not to be a part of dreaded funeral? Not because we are elusive and will escape the pink slips, but perhaps because we refuse to be trapped and we refuse to anguish over something that we may not be able to do anything about. Worrying didn’t help the millions that were laid off lately all over the world in the name of recession. What can make a difference, however, is to use this downturn to upturn your life- reinvent yourself, let your creative juices flow and let a new you be born.

Years ago, Keith had told me when he quit his high paying job in the merchant navy to settle for an unpredictable business opportunity in pharma that he 'needed time to smell the rose'. Keith was a marine, didn’t know anything about meds yet he plunged into it head first. Many thought he was foolish and would not survive but he did. Today I hear he is doing fantastic. His business is growing so is his family. He lives happily with his wife and two young daughters in a beautiful suburban Chicago home with his own rose beds finding plenty of time to enjoy them.

So with the recession shutting one door, somewhere I'm sure another one would open. Sometimes we get so cozy in our jobs we simply settle and though we may be growing vertically, our horizontal expansion stops. We limit ourselves and stop exploring new waters because we are afraid of losing the comfort our job brings.

But, the real growth begins when you don’t have a cushion to fall back on. You venture, you get hurt, you learn and you grow. It builds your character, it builds your perseverance and gives you the self confidence that no pink slip can take from you.

My friend once told me that her first business venture made her around 100,000 and the next one made her lose 100,000. But what she learned from both the experiences was worth a million bucks and the adrenalin rush invaluable. Yet somewhere down the line she stopped experimenting and settled for a job that paid her enough to live well. She knows she may never be able to give up the security her job brought but somewhere secretly hoped the pink slip could do the trick. Because, she says, she stopped really enjoying her life when she began doing what everyone expected her to do.

So to my friends who are scared to death of the pink slip monster, here is a little magic trick from our good friend Harry Potter: when the ‘bogart’ turns into your worst fear, imagine it in its funniest avatar and laugh about it- that will destroy him.

So take your pink slip monster, dress it up in a skimpy lacy pink negligee with puffy pink lips and a big pink bow on one ear. Imagine it standing in shocking pink stilettos on top of a huge flight of stairs. Then slowly go behind it and give a little shove. It will trip and roll into… oblivion. And you can have the last laugh!