If someone tells you - as they often do - that being made redundant is the best thing that ever happened to them, they are not exactly lying, but they aren't telling you the whole truth either. The first reactions when it happened to me about five years ago were anger, disbelief, panic and fear, often all at the same time.

It was only a little later that I realised what an opportunity it might prove to be. I had been stuck for several years in a job which paid the bills all right, but which had long since ceased to enthuse me, and being eased out of it gave me the impetus I needed to go out and find something more rewarding.

I started writing as a freelance, and gradually began to work on books. "Burning the Suit" was the fourth book I have written and since then I have written two more: that's how I see the rest of my life now. Writing books has become my main way of making a living, although I also write newspaper and magazine articles and take on copywriting assignments for internal business communications. Sometimes it pays me more than I used to earn, sometimes it pays me a bit less - but it is infinitely more rewarding and exciting than anything I ever did before.

My most important piece of advice is quite hard to follow in the first panic-stricken days that follow being made redundant. It is to spend time working out exactly what it is that you want to do. Perhaps you really do want to find another job as similar as possible to the one that got away - there's nothing wrong with that, but it should be a positive decision, not just a determination to grab hold of any passing log because you think it will help you stay afloat.

Another important thing is to sit down and write yourself a list of the things you've done. The three A's - Assignment, Action and Achievement - are what potential employers will want to hear about, and putting them down on paper will not only give you a good start in any interviews that come up, it will help repair your battered confidence as well. What jobs have you been given to do, how have you carried them out, and what did you learn and achieve in doing them?

The most obvious examples I came across were people who took the opportunity to start doing something they had dreamed of for years. In my case, it was writing books; for other people it was running their own business.

Several people found new ways to achieve lifelong ambitions, like the woman who had always been told as a girl that "Little boys become doctors, little girls become nurses": she had abandoned all thoughts of working in healthcare and spent twenty-five years as an accountant. At 52, she was too old to retrain as a doctor, but she turned herself into a hypnotherapist.

Other people looked at the skills they had picked up, and found new ways to use them - like the nurse who used her years of comforting people in the extremes of grief and loss to turn herself into one of very few female funeral directors in the UK, or the television journalist who used his experience of speaking in public to help him forge a new career as an actor.

Without the initial shock of being retrenched, none of these people would have achieved these goals, and their lives would have been less fulfilling because of it.