This article is not meant to retrain your brain like Clooney’s almost-heartless character in Up in the Air. Quite the opposite. This could, in fact, be the start of something exciting and new. This is a call to self-defibrillate – to retrain your heart.

• You hated that job, they did you a favor.

Getting fired or as I like to call it -not quitting fast enough- can be a blessing in a remarkable disguise. 

There’s a reason you got fired. 

You wanted to quit. 

You’ve wanted to quit for a while but you just couldn’t bring yourself to do it. 

It may have been financial obligations or the overwhelming sense of missed opportunities. Maybe you were in denial about your unhappiness or maybe it was just the idea of being a freaking failure.

Whatever the reason, others could tell. It was affecting your work and your demeanor. Now someone else has solved the problem so you don’t have to suffer through it anymore. You’ve just been liberated from a crappy job you hated. 

So, smile. You owe it to yourself! Now, let’s create a plan and work it!

An opportunity for introspection.

You were probably let go (the exception being wrongful termination) for poor performance. Does this mean you’re a failure? No. 

Does it mean you are lazy? Mostly likely not. I don’t believe in laziness. I believe in malaise and a lack of inspiration.

Are you a bad person? No way. You were in the wrong job. In Shadan Delaveaux’s Fortune commentary entitled “Here’s why even the best employees get fired”, he surmises that sometimes your skillset is simply not what your company needs at a certain point in time. It is not a reflection of you. It is simply a matter of being in the wrong place at the wrong time.

So, the good news is that it really is an opportunity to take your first step toward doing something you really, really want to do.   

So, what do you really, really want?

In Eckhart Tolle’s inspirational book,  A New Earth, he claims that the process of making thinking the servant of awareness is key to determining your life’s purpose. This process, and the amount of time it takes, varies from person to person. But the first step is to take your daydreams out of your head and start acting on your desires.

Step 1: What did you spend all of those hours researching? 

What is your recurring life fantasy? The one you’ve been dreaming about on your lunch break for the past five years. Write it down. Many researchers believe that the act of writing a dream down helps to take it from the abstract to the concrete.

Step 2: How can you take the first steps toward pursuing it?

After you write it down, make a list of steps to pursue. Maybe the first step is to reach out to someone in the field in which you want to be. I have a friend who reached out to everyone she knew in the field. One person, from those dozens, walked her resume into a senior vice-president’s office and a month later, she was hired. 

Step 3: Don’t give up! 

Tolle encourages us, once we recognize what we really want, to recognize that the most important thing has already happened: the separation of thinking and awareness. What you do and who you are are separate things. Once we begin living in alignment with our primary purpose, the things we are put on Earth to do will become more and more evident with time. Don’t ever, ever, ever give up!