I was horrified the first time I got fired, but I got over that feeling quickly. Half an hour after I left the building I felt differently. I realized that I was wasting my energy being angry at the idiot boss who fired me. How could I be angry at him? He was only being himself. I had noted his brainless remarks and his hostility toward me on my second or third day of work.
It was my mistake to think that my fearful boss wouldn't eventually bring the hammer down. He had made it clear early in our relationship that I was not his favorite employee.
Why did I stick around waiting for my hostile boss to send me packing? I realized that I had been under a kind of spell, the way most working people are. I figured that I had a job and I'd play it out. Back then, I had never walked off a job. Later, I learned that walking out of an unsuitable job is an act of strength, not weakness!
Too many working people live in fear of getting fired. They clamp their lips together rather than speak their truth even when what they have to say would help their employer. Nearly everyone has experienced the feeling of being afraid of their boss. When you stop and think about it, isn't it ridiculous that one person should be afraid of another? Your boss is not the police, unless you actually work for a police department.
Your boss is not a judge. He or she cannot send you to jail. Yet we tend to step carefully around our manager in order to avoid displeasing him or her. That's medieval, and we are living in modern times! We don't have to walk on eggshells around anybody.
As I got older I noticed that the people who were the most confident and had the most freedom of movement and speech were the people who cared less than I cared, and less than most people cared, about what their bosses thought of them. These confident people took the view, "It's my boss's company, not mine; the manager gets to make his own decisions. I get to make my own decisions, and it's my decision to bring myself and my personality to work. If my boss doesn't like it, he can fire me."
Now I have come around to the view that everybody should get fired at least once. Getting fired is a kind of inoculation against fear. Your boss can only do one thing: He or she can let you go. That's it. Getting fired is the capital punishment of the working world, and it isn't even that bad. It's one unpleasant conversation that puts an end to the stream of unpleasant conversations you've been having anyway if you have a difficult relationship with your boss.
In many cases you can get paid through the state after getting fired, while you're looking for a new job. If your company didn't have a good reason for firing you and/or didn't document that reason well, you can apply for and receive unemployment compensation. You can get busy the day after getting fired, looking for a new job. At least that is forward motion. It's better than going to work at the place with the awful boss and tiptoeing around him or her -- or waiting for the ax to drop!
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When you get laid off, it could be bad luck or the flick of somebody's pen at a corporate office many time zones away. Getting laid off is different from getting fired. When you are terminated because somebody doesn't like your brand of jazz, it's empowering even if it doesn't feel that way at the moment. You realize that you stood up for something -- a point of view or the right to disagree with your manager -- and it worked, because you had an effect on the energy in the room.
Now you have to find a new job, but that's how our muscles grow!
Until you get fired, you may think that it's easy to stay on a toxic manager's good side. It isn't that easy. It can twist you up in knots trying to stay on your boss's good side. I did it for way too long. Then I got fired a couple of times and I was inoculated. I realized that it's better to find my voice and my backbone than to hide in the corners trying to save a job that didn't deserve me in the first place.
Nobody goes to work with the plan, "I'm going to get fired today!" but the more you feel your feet under you and the more confidently you share your views, the more likely that is to happen.
The good news is that getting fired is not a big deal. When you start your next job hunt, you'll say, "I left Acme Explosives to explore other interesting things, like the work you're doing here at Angry Chocolates." Getting fired is nothing you have to apologize for. It is a form of quitting, but it's the kind of quitting where your manager speaks one millisecond before you do.
I think everybody should get fired at least once during their career. After they get fired it will hit them that they don't need to cower in fear of their boss or anyone else. Your boss can tell you to hit the bricks, and that's fine. You can likewise take off from your job whenever your body signals you that it's time to go. You will only get stronger with every transition. It's a new day in the working world. Your mission is not to please everyone around you. Not everyone will get you -- but only the people who get you, deserve you!
