If you’ve just typed “lost my job what now” into a search bar at 2am, I reckon you’re not really asking about CVs.

You’re asking something bigger. Who am I now? Where am I going? What was all that for?

I’ve been there. In 2008 I lost my job in China, and it turned out to be the moment my life actually started. So this isn’t a list of ten tips for what to do after losing your job. It’s a story, and a different way of looking at what just happened to you.

Lost my job, what now? The question underneath the question

Most advice about life after job loss goes straight to the practical stuff. Update the LinkedIn profile, call your network, tighten the budget.

But here’s what I noticed, both in my own life and in the years since, sitting with people in workshops and coaching sessions. The practical stuff isn’t what keeps you awake. What keeps you awake is the feeling that the floor has gone. That the person you were last week, the one with the title and the meetings and the inbox, kinda disappeared overnight.

And if you’re honest, you’re not totally sure who’s left.

My 2008 story: when the Suit came off

I’ve told my story before, but this part matters most if you’ve just lost your job.

I arrived in South China in 2006. I was 27, working for a freight-forwarding company, and I was what you’d call a high achiever. Shipping and logistics, sales targets, long hours. My whole focus was on what I call the Suit: the external stuff. Title, results, money, how I looked to the people around me.

Two years later I was one of the best sales performers in the region. There was even talk of me going back to Europe one day to take on a European role, maybe even reporting to the CEO of a shipping company with 5,000 employees. Nothing was signed, kinda just an unspoken plan, but I’d already started building my future around it.

Then, suddenly, I was fired.

The firing itself isn’t really the point, though. What matters is what had been building for years before it.

How achievement got tied to who I was

I did everything to hit my targets and please my boss. Everyone was happy about it, except me.

That’s the strange part. On paper it was working. I felt good about the success, sort of, for a little while. Then something would gnaw at me. A loneliness that didn’t make sense to me. A low, heavy feeling I couldn’t name. Stress, long hours, and whenever it got too much I’d go looking for something external to feel good again. A bit more pleasure, a bit more external validation.

Looking back, I’d been living by other people’s expectations since I was young. Being successful was how I knew I was okay. The job title wasn’t just what I did. Bit by bit, it had become who I was.

And somewhere in all that doing, the inner me, the part I call the Monk, just went silent. Not gone. Just ignored for so long that I stopped hearing it.

Around that time, through some one-on-one coaching, I’d started to realise I was living a life that wasn’t true to myself. I could feel it. I just had no idea what to do about it.

Then life made the decision for me.

What it actually felt like

When I was fired, it felt like jumping out of an airplane without a parachute.

There was a huge sense of relief, honestly. Nobody was telling me what to do anymore. But right behind the relief came fear I’d never faced. The steady pay check, gone. Health insurance, gone. The apartment the company paid for, the business travel account, the company dinners. All of it.

For days it was hard to think straight.

I was afraid I couldn’t support myself. I was living in a foreign country in the middle of a financial downturn. And I was afraid of losing my girlfriend, because suddenly I wasn’t “successful” anymore. That one stung. It showed me how much of my sense of worth had been riding on the job.

I sat with it for weeks, going round in circles about what I was going to do with my life. I was stuck. My partner suggested we move to Europe, which had always been her dream, and I seriously considered it because I wanted to make her happy. But something in me knew that wasn’t my path.

The one thing I knew for sure: I didn’t want to go back to shipping.

The Gap: what job loss really exposes

Here’s what I eventually understood, and it’s the heart of everything I teach now.

There’s a gap between who you are on the inside and how you’ve been living on the outside. I call it the Gap. The Suit is your outer self: your job, your title, your achievements, your bank balance, how you see yourself in the mirror of other people’s eyes. The Monk is your inner self: your values, your purpose, your intuition, the part of you that was there before any job.

When the Suit and the Monk are far apart, the Gap fills up with stuff. Fear. Frustration. That restlessness you can’t explain on a Sunday night. The need for the next promotion just to feel okay for a few months.

A job can cover the Gap for years. You’re busy, you’re winning, the calendar is full. You don’t have to look.

Then the job goes, and there’s nothing covering it anymore.

That’s why losing a job can feel so much bigger than losing an income. It’s not only the role that went. It’s the thing you’d been using to tell yourself you were worth something. And when that goes, all the old feelings sitting in the Gap come up at once. Shame when a friend asks “so what are you up to now?” Checking your phone for an email that doesn’t come. Replaying meetings at 3am. Feeling oddly empty on a perfectly nice Saturday.

None of that means you’re broken. I reckon it means your Monk is finally getting a word in.

There may not be another job like the last one

There might not be another job exactly like the one you lost. Industries shift and roles disappear. If your whole plan is to get back to where you were, as fast as possible, you might be chasing something that doesn’t exist anymore.

And even if it does exist, getting it back won’t close the Gap. You’d just be putting the Suit back on over the same emptiness.

So I think the bigger question isn’t “what job do I get next?”

It’s “where am I actually going in life?”

What to do after losing your job: what changed for me

After those weeks of being stuck, something shifted. One day, I realised I wanted to work with people.

My first thought was HR, but I had no certificates. Then I thought about becoming a counsellor, but studying for three years wasn’t realistic. I needed to earn money, I was in a foreign country, and the financial downturn was hitting hard.

That was the real conflict. My Monk knew what it wanted. My Suit was shouting about money and security.

What made the difference was listening to my Monk first and letting the Suit follow. I gave up the corporate package and took a job as a business development manager at a training company. I had no experience in personal development. It was scary. But for the first time in years, I knew I was doing the right thing for me.

Within a couple of years my life looked completely different. Not because I’d found a better title, but because I’d stopped asking the title to tell me who I was.

That’s what I mean when I say worth comes from being, not doing. Your job is something you do. It was never who you are.

Career change after redundancy: start inside, then build outward

If you’re thinking about a career change after redundancy, this is the bit I’d want you to hear.

My new direction didn’t come from a job board. It came from finally listening to my inner voice, the part of me I’d ignored for years, and noticing that what it wanted was to work with people.

These days, when someone sits across from me after a redundancy, the questions I bring are pretty simple. When do you feel most like yourself? What did you enjoy before you were trying to impress anyone? What would you do if nobody was watching?

They sound soft. I reckon they’re the most practical questions there are.

The Suit still matters. Money, skills and a good CV are real. The Suited Monk is about having both: a successful outer life built around a clear inner one. It’s a new philosophy for living and leading life, where the Monk sets the direction and the Suit does the work.

Job loss just happens to be the moment the Gap gets hard to ignore.

Life after job loss can be the start

I wouldn’t wish that 2008 feeling on anyone. The free-fall, the fear, the weeks of going nowhere.

But I wouldn’t trade what came out of it either. It was the moment my inner Monk opened its eyes.

If you’re in the middle of it right now, I won’t tell you it’s a gift. That’s your call to make, later. What I will say is that the question you’re sitting with, where am I going in life, is a good question. Maybe the best one you’ve asked in years.

If you’d like a starting point, there’s a short questionnaire on my site that gives you a sense of how wide your Gap is right now. What’s your Alignment score? And if you want to go deeper afterwards, that’s what my coaching is for.

The job may be gone, but the person underneath it is still here, and I reckon they’re worth getting to know.

Raf Adams

Executive coach and creator of The Suited Monk, a new philosophy for living and leading. I help people close the Gap between who they are and how they live, through life and career transitions. Work with me.