“I knew that morning TV is not a role that people do forever. At the point that I took the job, I was lucky in the sense that we had been living as though this could happen at any point.”
Chan-Green joined Nadine Higgins on the latest episode of The Prosperity Project, the Herald’s personal finance podcast, to reflect on a year on from the end of Newshub, and how she adjusted to and bounced back from redundancy.
She says she and her husband made the decision live frugally to protect both their finances and her mental health.
“I didn’t want to be ever left in a position where I would have to do something that wasn’t going to be as fulfilling as the job that I had just accepted. I was driving a rattly old car that was falling to bits, and I kept saying to myself, ‘if AM goes past three years, I’m gonna buy myself a new car’. I still haven’t bought myself a new car.”
She says while many people have to go through redundancy alone, the public nature of the shutdown of Newshub in July last year had some upsides.
“I would be standing in the butter aisle and people would be coming up saying, ‘Hey, I’m really sorry about what’s happening to you’, and it was quite confronting, I think there was maybe tears in the butter aisle a few times, but I felt I was lucky. I had so much support, people would see me and kind of know what I was going through and were really empathetic” she says.
She feels fortunate to have had time to think about her next move, which includes work for Radio New Zealand and School Shorts – a podcast focused on helping parents support their children’s literacy.
The podcast’s content was motivated, in part, by the role literacy had in shaping her career trajectory.
“I was debilitatingly shy in school, and so reading and the love of language is really what got me into journalism”.
Chan-Green says that after two decades in her career, she found her identity had become interwoven with her job, and redundancy forced her to confront that.
“I feel like I was really wrapped up with what I was doing was who I was, and I really had to change that around and think, what is my identity, and what my values are. And then let that shape the work that I wanted to do.”
Listen to the full episode of The Prosperity Project for more from Melissa Chan-Green and Nadine Higgins on adjusting to life after redundancy.
The podcast is hosted by Nadine Higgins, an experienced broadcaster and a financial adviser at Enable Me.
You can follow the podcast at iHeartRadio, Apple Podcasts, Spotify, or wherever you get your podcasts. New episodes are released every Monday.
