A career break does not have to be a disaster

Qhe replacement of human labor by automated systems is being considered across all industries. Human labour is facing competition from Big Data and digitisation, write Erik Brynjolfson and Andrew McAfee in their book "The Second Machine Age". According to a new study by the London School of Economics (LSE), the revolutionaries 4.0, above all robots and algorithms of the latest provenance, are already taking over 51.1 percent of jobs in Germany. And not just those in manual and other manufacturing processes. Increasingly, jobs and professions that thought they were largely safe from revolutions in the IT sector are also being affected: Lawyers, engineers, doctors, designers, journalists. The fourth industrial revolution is becoming reality. Just as the invention of the steam engine and the mechanical loom changed the economic and professional world, Big Data and digitization will also radically reshape working life. Some time ago, Jim Clifton of the polling firm Gallup moved this development closer to the practical imagination. In his book "The Coming Jobs War", he drew attention to the fact that of the more than five billion people who will want to work over the next 15 years, three billion will want to work, but there will only be full-time jobs for 1.2 billion. His prediction: a global competition for the available jobs is to be expected.

The power of the universe
Do you know the fairy tale about the greatest power in the universe? It tells of the gods who had to decide where to hide the greatest power in the universe. They needed a good hiding place so that man would not find this power before he was ready. One of the gods suggested that they hide it on top of the highest mountain. But after some consideration, they realized that man would climb the highest mountains and find the greatest power in the universe before he was ready. Another god said, "Let us hide this power at the bottom of the sea." But again they realized that man would also explore that region and find the greatest power in the universe before he was ready. Finally, the wisest God said, "I know what to do. Let us hide the greatest power of the universe in man himself. He will never look for it there until he is mature enough to take the path within." And so the gods hid the greatest power in the universe within man himself.

It is no coincidence that Riet Grass tells this fairy tale. As a successful manager after a change of ownership of "his" company, he personally experienced the professional downturn for which, he advises, everyone should be mentally prepared today. The confrontation with and processing of this experience taught him: failure can be turned into an unexpected fortune, if the opportunity hidden in it is recognised, to find oneself and via this "detour" to an unexpected source of strength.

Listen to the inner voice
What led him to a fulfilling new professional task, he therefore also recommends to others: Take advantage of the unwanted release from immediate professional duties and listen deep within yourself: Are there perhaps quiet voices whispering of an unconscious or consciously suppressed desire for a professional reorientation again and again? Investigate them, decode their message. And in doing so, discover the power that grows out of this turning inwards and enables you to lay a new professional foundation that is oriented towards your own actual wishes.

This path has led Riet Grass to build up and successfully manage his own outplacement company out of professional failure as a personnel manager. He was a companion in numerous personal borderline situations. This experience has now led to the book "Das Glück des Scheiterns - Karriere- und Krisenmanagement im 21. Jahrhundert" (The Luck of Failure - Career and Crisis Management in the 21st Century), in which he interprets failure as a borderline situation, as a fork in the road. One way: To try as quickly as possible to erase and forget the stigma of this supposed professional failure by continuing on the familiar tracks of a new job. The other way: to get out of the professional coincidences that give direction to many careers at their beginning and thereby turn them over time into an often self-distant, externally guided, often also empty puppet game that consumes energies instead of developing them, in which others pull the strings.

Grass proves this with case studies: The shock of an unforeseen dismissal can trigger a maturing process that is actually able to tap into the strongest power of the universe hidden in people. This opens up future professional paths which, to put it bluntly, have a regenerative effect instead of a degenerative one in the sense of gradually becoming more and more self-remote in one's work and emptying oneself out until one finally burns out, tormented by professional fears. And: The values and goals that give strength, support and peace in life are only revealed by turning inwards. A verse by the poet Friedrich Rückert aptly shows what Grass is trying to point out: "In everyone there is an image of what he should become / As long as he is not that, his peace is not full.

Trapped in claims
Grass knows only too well that in this delicate moment of professional emptiness, a hellish carousel of questions is whisked together in the mind to form a package of worry, fear and shame that is perceived to be groundbreaking. And all the more hellish if the partner, instead of helping to carry the situation with empathy, understanding and circumspection, instead continues to heat it up with reproaches, demands and accusatory references to what the other person means. In defiance of this, Grass advises self-examination: am I wise only to mingle with the others again as quickly as possible and to rotate with the others on an upwardly increasingly narrow circular path, alienated around a center that is not the center of my universe at all? His examples reveal it is not advisable to shirk and avoid this question.

Occupation, the outplacer Grass, who has come into contact with all the human sensitivities swelling up from a dismissal, wants to draw attention to, has not only to do with earning the or as much money as possible for the living, the leisure and other needs. Especially also those of the family members according to the pattern of the Grimm's fairy tale "Von dem Fischer un syner Frau". The fisherman does not share his wife's desires, but bows to her demands despite growing anxiety. Which, as we know, leads to nothing good. Learning to fail Especially at the moment of a manifest professional crisis, the question of one's personal mission in life, from which one derives meaning in life and, as a consequence, strength and joy in life, should not be pushed aside under any circumstances. The oddball Danish philosopher Sören Kierkegaard hits the nail on the head of what Grass is trying to get at when he admonishes, "It's a matter of watching out in life when the cue comes for you." Especially in the bottomless pit of life of a layoff, it should come down to seeking with mindfulness the balance between the external demands and myself, my inner self. Then the inner can become free(er) of fixed patterns and onward solutions to problems can emerge and develop.

To be able to fail without failing oneself. To be able to experience failure in turning away from self-alienating external orientation by turning towards oneself as happiness, how this could succeed, Grass describes this path illustrated with calm radiating nature photographs of mountain tours in six chapters: Reflection; Vision; Presentation; Motivation; Realization; Conclusion...or Why Passion is the Key to Happiness. He compresses the guiding thought that moves him in the process into the question: what is the crisis trying to tell me? The willingness to engage with this question, to feel one's way forward in it, to face up to the answers found, this willingness is for Grass the source of the happiness that can grow out of failure.