If you’ve been a faithful listener of the podcast for some time, you’ll know that I do a special episode each year during Thanksgiving week. It started out as five unusual things to be thankful for that weren’t specific to me. Somewhere along the way, they became MY five things. The hope has always been that you will look at the circumstances of your life through a different lens after listening to my list. For many of us – myself included – 2023 has been difficult, so I want to take a different approach to this year’s list. As a former coach of mine likes to say, half of life is A*S*S, and it feels like more than half of my year has been like that. If you’re in the same boat, here’s hoping this years list will help you see the good side of what you may have gone through in 2023. Here are five unusual situations at work you can be thankful for because of the growth they bring about. 1.    Getting terminated. Whether for cause, because of a large-scale layoff, or some other reason, what I see over and over again is that clients who get terminated are in a far better place six to nine months after they are terminated. What they repeatedly tell me is that they knew it was time to leave, but they didn’t have the [fill in the blank with the emotion] to make the move themselves. So the Universe stepped in and took care of it for them. In the best situations, these people take the time to evaluate what they want moving forward, do the necessary mindset work on themselves, learn from any mistakes they may have made, and march courageously into the next phase of their life. You have the choice when something like this happens to you. You can play the victim, you can argue with reality, or you can ask yourself “now what?” I highly encourage the third approach.  2.    Recognizing that your attitude sucks. I’ve talked about one of my clients before – she came to me earlier this year because she had lost her work mojo. She knew she was phoning it in yet was resentful for others getting promoted instead of her. She is in SUCH a different place today. Ironically, she DID get riffed recently, but because of the mindset work we did together, she was able to handle that termination in a completely different way than if she was still stuck in sucky attitude mode. This client had a choice: she could keep blaming her boss, her coworkers, her employer…or she could look in the mirror and deal with what she saw. She chose to do the latter, and that has made all the difference. Remember…always, in any situation…the only person you have any control over is YOURSELF. That’s the work.  3.    Being dissatisfied with your career path. Perhaps the path you’ve been on has run its course, or perhaps it’s been the wrong career path for you from jump. Either way, there’s such beauty in recognizing that you want to make a career pivot or reinvention. When I do this work with clients, they learn so much about themselves. They often bring up a long-ignored career path because it [fill in the blank with the career path’s shortcomings] and realize their passion for that thing hasn’t diminished over the years. When I work with clients to connect the dots between what they have been doing and what they now want to do, they experience a tremendous surge of confidence and assurance that they can succeed in this new field. Other clients have absolutely no idea what direction they want to go in now, so we do the excavation work to uncover the artifacts of their life that will give us clues. Still other clients want to engage their altruism more…their life experiences have soured them on their current corporate treadmill and left them longing for more meaning in their professional lives. Whatever situation you find yourself in, if you are experiencing seeds of discontent, be willing to work with a career coach like myself to figure out what’s going on…and to work through what you want to do about it.  4.    Failing.We all know this intellectually: We learn more from our fa