The first week after the call

The call came at 10:47am on a Tuesday. I remember the exact time because I was making a coffee and the milk steamer was loud and I had to ask my manager to repeat herself. Then I sat down on the kitchen floor for about twenty minutes, holding the phone, looking at the grouting between the tiles. The dog came over and pressed her head against my leg. I didn't move for a while.

If you're reading this in the first day or two after that call, I want to walk you through the next seven days. Slowly. Because almost every mistake men make in this situation, they make in week one, and most of them are the kind of mistake you can't easily unmake.

Don't sign anything yet

The redundancy offer will be in your inbox within hours of the call. Sometimes within minutes. There will often be a deadline attached. "Please return signed by close of business Friday." The deadline is almost always softer than it looks.

Do not sign the offer this week. Not Monday, not Friday, not at all in week one. The legal position in Australia is that you have time to consider a redundancy offer, and pressure to sign quickly is itself a yellow flag worth noting. Reasonable employers expect you to take the offer to a lawyer. Unreasonable ones will push you to sign without review, which tells you something useful about how they've calculated the package.

The cost of waiting two weeks before signing is essentially nothing. The cost of signing without review is potentially tens of thousands of dollars in entitlements, plus the chance that you've signed away rights you didn't realise you had (restraint clauses, non-disparagement, waiver of unfair dismissal). Wait.

Don't email everyone yet

The urge to tell people will be enormous. Old colleagues, your network, the recruiter who reached out three months ago that you politely brushed off. The brain wants to convert the news into action immediately, because action feels like control, and right now control is what you've lost.

Resist it for seven days.

Here's why. The narrative you tell about your redundancy in week one is the narrative that sticks. The shape of the story (whether it sounds like a setback, a strategic move, a mutual parting, a long time coming, a shock) sets in concrete the moment you start telling it. You don't have a clear narrative yet. You have shock and adrenaline. Anything you say to your network this week will be the version they remember, and you'll spend months trying to reframe it.

Wait until week two minimum. Three is better. By then you'll have read the offer, talked to a lawyer, talked to your partner, and you'll know whether the story is "I was made redundant in a restructure" or "I'm exploring my next move after fifteen years at the same company". Those two sentences land in completely different ways with the same network.

The conversation with your partner

Have it on day one or day two, properly. Not in passing. Not while you're cooking dinner. Sit down at the table, no phones, and say the words plainly.

"I lost my job today. The package is roughly X. We have roughly Y months of runway. I don't know what's next. I'm going to take seven days to do nothing before I make any decisions."

That's the speech. Don't dress it up. Don't pre-emptively reassure. Don't promise you'll have it sorted by Christmas. Your partner needs the real numbers and the real timeline. They will handle reality far better than they will handle a performance of confidence that they can see through.

Expect the conversation to go in waves. There will be a first response (often supportive, sometimes worried). Then a second response twelve hours later that's more emotional. Then a third response three days in that's more practical. All three are normal. Don't try to argue with the second wave. It's not about you.

If your partner has their own income, the financial picture is one conversation. If they don't, it's a different one, and the stakes feel higher to them than to you because they're holding the same risk with less information. Share the information. The spreadsheet. The redundancy letter. Don't ration the truth to spare them.

The conversation with the kids (if at all)

This depends entirely on age. My rough rules.

• Kids under ten. Don't tell them this week. Probably don't tell them at all unless something visible changes (a school move, a house move, holidays cancelled). They cannot do anything with the information except feel scared.
• Kids ten to fourteen. Light version, in week two or three. "I've finished up at my old job and I'm working out what's next. Things will be a bit quieter at home for a while." That's it. They don't need the financial detail.
• Kids fifteen and up. Honest version, in week two. They will notice anyway. They'll appreciate being treated as someone who can hold real information. Tell them the timeline you're working to. Tell them what stays the same (school, holidays, the dog) and what might change.

Do not tell the kids in week one. Your face is doing things this week that will frighten them. Wait until your face is your face again.

The body's response

This is the part nobody tells you about. The body responds to redundancy like it responds to any acute stress. Cortisol spikes. Sleep goes weird. Appetite either disappears or surges. The chest feels tight in the morning. You might notice a low-grade headache that doesn't quite go away. Some men report a kind of dissociation, where the world feels slightly behind glass for a few days.

All of this is normal. None of it requires medication in week one. What it requires is that you treat your body like you would treat it after a minor surgery. Walk every day, gently. Eat regular meals even when you don't feel hungry. Don't drink heavily, because alcohol on top of cortisol gives you the worst three days of sleep of your adult life. Get out in the sun. Don't watch the news. Don't doomscroll about layoffs. The brain's pattern-matching is already overactive without feeding it more material.

If you can, get a basic blood panel done in week one or two. Knowing your baseline now is useful, because in three months when you feel terrible you'll want to know whether it's stress, sleep, or something underlying.

Do nothing for five days

Here is the practice I'd recommend, and the one most men skip. From day three to day seven, do nothing.

• No job applications. Not even quietly browsing Seek.
• No CV updates. The CV will wait.
• No LinkedIn changes. Don't change your headline. Don't post anything. Don't even open the app if you can avoid it.
• No calls to recruiters. They will still be there in week two.
• No major financial decisions. Don't restructure the mortgage. Don't sell shares. Don't buy a course.
• No coaching engagements. Don't sign up for the career coach yet.

Walk. Read. Cook properly. Sleep when you're tired. Sit on the back step in the morning with a cup of tea and watch the light come up. Take the dog somewhere new. Go to the beach midweek when it's empty. Notice that the world keeps running without your work in it.

This sounds soft. It isn't. It's the most strategically valuable thing you can do this week, because every decision you make in week one with a cortisol-flooded brain is a decision you'll make worse than the same decision in week two with a clearer head.

A short imperative

SIT DOWN. Don't act this week. The instinct to do something will be loud. The reward for resisting it is a clearer week two, and a clearer week two is worth more than any action you could take in week one.

Closing

Sit. Breathe. Wait.