Keeping your job, or stressing out waiting

I almost lost my job during the past few months. Luckily, it all ended up well and I now have a new job which looks to be even more interesting than my old one. But my old boss has lost confidence in me, and might even have fired me if he had been able to. Which is always bad -your old boss can be one of your most valuable allies in the future.
So I am going to write aboit some of the experiences I have had, and maybe you can get som help from it as well.
For starters, becoming passive-aggressive does not help. Being aggressive is even worse. That you are going to have to move, or are being fired, is a very bad experience. It is very emotionally riveting, and the amount of stress you are under may not be visible you may not be aware of it yourself. In my case, stress turns outward (it used to turn inward, and that landed me in hospital with what I firmly believed was a heart attack). To become angry does not solve anything; nor does it solve anything to break the rules, stay away from work without reason for instance, even if you feel you are just sitting in the office, waiting for a deciion to be made about you and your position. Far better to do something, in particular if it is visible outside your company. It pays to be prepared for that eventuality too, as I will come back to in a later post.
But as long as you have your job, keep the rules. And try to keep a good attitude. Being irritable and souring the atmosphere in the office does not help you keep your job. I wish I had done a better job at that, but most companies do not care enough about their employees to ask how they feel. If you discover signs that you are stressed and it is showing up in the way you behave, try to find help. Most companies have psychiatric help as part of the medical package. And even if you do not feel the problem is grave enough, it pays to use those resources while you have them.
Sitting and waiting for a decision about who is going to be fired is as bad as as being fired - worse in many ways. If you live in a country where people are fired only after union negotiations, you know that the negotiations can drag on. Which can be extremely stressful. Something similar happened in my case, actually, which left me sitting without knowing if I was going to be fired or able to keep my job for two months.
But even after the recieving organization had decided to take me in, there was a glitch. And I discovered that even in agile companies, the HR systems are the least agile part of yhe company. Sure, you have to be carefulnabout whom and how many you hire, since firing people without very good reasons is expensive and difficult. But sometimes the bureaucracy can border on the ridiculous, especially in big companies. Be prepared for that, and try to find out in advance how the routines work. They are hardly secret. Because you may not be able to get an answer you can understand from your HR people otherwise. They are rarely wonders of transparency, even after they have decided to keep you.
I will be back with more experiences later, in particular on how to write a CV and get help, but this was a start.