REDUNDANCY:Redundancy is not the end of the world; it can be the start of the life you've always wanted

HOWEVER CLEAR the signs are that it's coming, it's always a shock. I glanced over the four-line fax that gave me my marching orders, in the smug expectation that it would be a message from the Middle East television company I'd been working for over the last 16 years, telling me how pleased they were with what I was doing. That's what they'd said, just a couple of weeks earlier, after all.

Well, that's not what it was. "This is to inform you that from May 31st, your contract will not be renewed. You should contact the personnel department to arrange payment of your three months' pay in lieu of notice."

That was it. They had pushed me, and there I was, swimming in the water. As the message sank in, my first feelings were a mixture of anger and fear - anger that they'd presumably been planning to get rid of me right at the moment when they were praising me to the skies, and with fear because I didn't know what to do next. I hadn't any money and suddenly I didn't seem to have any way of getting any.

Except . . . thoughts raced through my head of stories I'd read in the papers about the football managers who count their redundancy payments in millions, or the bankers who spend their six-figure cheques on a chateau in the French countryside, shuffle their share options and pension plans, and then slip back within weeks into another well-paid sinecure.

Perhaps, I thought excitedly, a large helping of redundancy pay might be my passport to the rich and idle life I reckoned I deserved.

And then, with a little help from a friendly lawyer who told me I would spend 10 times as much in going to court as I could ever hope to squeeze out of the company, I woke up. A few people may make money out of redundancy - I know one accountant who says he has made three times as much from getting sacked a few times in the last 10 years as he's had in salaries over the same period - but for most of us, there's no pot of gold at the end of this particular rainbow. I could stop worrying over whether the new Porsche should have leather seats or not: I was going no further than my old Ford.

That's when I started going through the same cycle of emotions that people suffer with sickness or bereavement. Denial first - they couldn't really mean it, could they? Then there was anger, and the desperate wish to get my own back on someone, somehow.

The bargaining stage that follows is always tricky - if you're arguing with the people who sacked you, then it won't work, and if you're arguing with yourself, it will just hurry you to the fourth stage, depression, which is where you want to spend as little time as possible.

I went around that course several times over the next few days and weeks - in fact, it was probably two or three months before I reached the fifth and final stage, which is where you want to get to, and accepted that it really had happened and that I had to do something about it.

I remembered an advertisement I'd seen years ago, for some bank or other. At 18, it said, you bought your first suit; at 35, as a successful, thrusting young businessman, you bought your first bespoke suit; and in your fifties - having presumably saved all your life with the relevant bank - you burned the suit and started doing whatever it was you'd always dreamed of. And that, I thought, was my answer - burn the bloody suit! Leave behind the armies of unexcited and unfulfilled people crowding onto the train every morning, without enthusiasm and without interest, just because they've always done so, and start doing something you really want to do.

Well, it wasn't an answer in itself, of course there were all sorts of bridges to stumble over before I reached that. But that picture of burning the suit, that moment when I suddenly realised that there might be other things to do than the things I'd been doing all my life, was a big step on the way to finding one.

For a start, I had to put myself back together. However cocky you may be, and however you may tell yourself that there's nothing personal in being made redundant, it's still a pretty shattering blow to your self-esteem to be told that your employers can do very nicely without you, thanks all the same. Going to the gym was one way that I tried to take back control over my life - other people I've met have learned to play musical instruments or taught themselves foreign languages. Anything that makes you feel as if you're in charge again.

And, since I didn't have a great deal else to do with my time, I started working for the Samaritans. It didn't make me any money, but it was worthwhile, and challenging, and something that I enjoyed - and it was another way of making me feel that I was doing something with my days. But I never forgot that I'd burned the suit. I knew now that I was looking not just for a new job, but for a new life. The question was - what was it going to be?

I went to everyone I could think of for help - to counsellors and coaches, to outplacement agencies and recruitment companies. If I'd been able to find an old woman in a black pointed hat with a cauldron, a black cat and a broomstick, I would probably have gone and asked her too. Some were less use than others: the recruitment specialist who saw me gave me an hour or so of his time, told me flatteringly how clever I was - I liked that bit - and hinted enticingly that he could give me access to an Aladdin's cave of exactly the sorts of job that I should be looking for, which for some mysterious reason were never advertised publicly. In addition, he said, he would give me a psychometric test to find out what role I really was fitted for, and some useful advice about how to deal with interviews.

All I had to do, he smiled - and here I noticed that his teeth were sharp and pointed, like a shark's - was to give him £4,000 (€5,085) and all these benefits would be mine. I would, he implied clearly, be mad to refuse - and, quite by chance, he had the papers here all ready for me to sign.

He had paved the way for his sales pitch with a few statistics designed to turn my blood to ice. "One in three people over 50 is out of work, and by the time you reach 55, that proportion has gone up to 50 per cent," I was told. And, with the repetition of phrases like "credit crunch", "inflation", "outsourcing" and "downsizing" across the financial pages, nobody expects the situation to get better any time soon.

But then, of course, the professionals have a vested interest in scaring you rigid. If you're well and truly terrified, you're more likely to shell out a large slice of whatever redundancy payment you have picked up on paying for their services. I'm gullible, but not that gullible, and my £4,000 - or rather, the £4,000 that I would have had to borrow from the bank - stayed in my pocket. But my new-found friend had given me something, all the same. His suggestion of psychometric tests, coupled with the probing of the counsellors and coaches, had taken me another big step forward. They'd faced me with the big question I had to ask myself.

At the same time, it's the simplest question you can think of, and one of the hardest - one which, if you are wise, will occupy much of your waking time in the weeks after you lose your job.

'What do you want?' Not 'What should you want?' or 'What do other people want you to want?' Not even 'What have you always thought that you wanted?' or 'What would be a good move?' Just 'What do you want?' - honestly, at this moment.

It's not a question you're ever supposed to ask about yourself - from our earliest years, we're taught not to be selfish, not to push ourselves forward. But until you've dredged down to the very bottom of your soul for an honest answer, you can't work out what direction to take.

As I say, it may take weeks to answer, and a lot of the time it can be quietly churning over in the back of your mind.

And that's when the fighting back really starts. The only limits are those set by your own imagination. How much money do you actually need, and how much of what you really want to do are you prepared to sacrifice to get it? Do you have ideas in your head for new services to offer, or of new ways to provide old ones? What skills have you picked up in the career you've had so far, and how else could you use them? Do you have dreams? Because if you do, this could be the time to make them come true.

In the last two or three years, I've heard from a nurse who decided to use her experience of dealing with people in the extremes of grief and fear to become a funeral agent - not a choice I'd make, but one that worked for her. I've spoken to a journalist who became an actor, and is now roughly half as rich as he was, and more than twice as happy; to a female accountant who had been told as a child that little girls never became doctors, and who chucked in accountancy in her 50s to learn to be a hypnotherapist; and to a business executive who was running his own furniture restoring business.

There are people who have ended up working for themselves, people who have switched careers entirely, people who have launched their own businesses, and people who have simply down-sized, changed their priorities, and slowed their lives down.

The one thing they all had in common was what they said about the redundancy that had seemed such a disaster when they first heard about it: "It was the best thing that could have happened to me!"

As for me, I decided that I wanted to write books, which is what I do now.

It's never going to make me rich, unless I come up with some crazy idea about a little boy going off to school to learn how to be a wizard - but it makes me happier now than I've ever been before. "You don't seem to realise what's happened to you - this is a disaster," said one friend, soon after my redundancy. Well, I should have more disasters like that one.

Of course, none of those ideas may be for you - you have to find your own answer to the "What do you want?" question.

Perhaps the answer will simply be that you want your old job back - in which case, at least you will have made a decision, rather than just trooping into work every day because you've never done anything else. I've spoken to people who've reached that conclusion as well.

But even when they've got something exactly like the job they left behind, they find that it's not the same after all, because they've changed.

Perhaps they're a bit tougher, a bit more realistic; perhaps they're less ready to see their work as the only thing in their life. Whatever it is, they are not the same people when they walk back into the office as they were when they walked out of it.

Redundancy is always a shock - but the real unexpected change only comes weeks or even months after you walk out of the door.

There are problems to deal with and hard choices to make, but for many people, the real surprise is not the loss of a job that you thought would last for ever, but the discovery of the new life that is waiting for them.

Andrew Taylor is author of a new book, Burning the suit: fighting back against the aftershock of redundancy; Wiley; £14.99 (€19)