The Ripple Effect of Fear

Unemployment carries a lot of emotional baggage for most of us and fear is a major component. We fear the financial fallout of no longer receiving regular wages. We fear the impact of our lack of productivity on relationships: our marriage, our family, our friends, and our social and community activities. We fear losing the respect of our children when we can no longer give them what they need. We fear approaching acquaintances for help in identifying potential positions. We fear the humiliation of the job hunt and the personal rejection we expect to encounter. And finally we fear the most basic concept we hold within: that we're just not good enough, that we can't cut the mustard, that we're an incurable loser.

The fear seeps into our bones and leaves us awake and restless in the middle of the night. It flashes behind our eyes to telegraph our desperation in interviews. It weighs heavily on our stooped shoulders as we walk into yet another agency and answer the same questions we have been asked for weeks. It hobbles our energy and extinguishes the enthusiasm we try so hard to project.

It becomes our constant, uninvited companion in everything we do. If not quickly contained, it wrests control of our lives.

To manage our fear, "Think positive" is a useless platitude when there is almost nothing positive going on in your current world. You have no job, no income, no prospects, and no real hope. But you still have the most powerful tool ever developed: the human mind. To stop the encroachment of fear, your mind must become your partner and your ally; it is your secret weapon against the fears and anxieties of an untenable situation.

Here are a variety of strategies for you to try:

Early financial planning.

After the initial shock of losing your job ebbs a little, your natural motivation and competitive drive kick in and you feel optimistic that something will open up in a very short time. You may have been out of the labor market for a long time and haven't realized that hiring protocols have changed significantly over the past few years. Except for entry-level jobs, it is unusual to obtain an offer on the first interview. Employers are wary of skeletons lurking in applicants' closets and take their time in checking you out. For the past four years, the average time out of work has drastically increased - it now typically takes six to twelve months to find a new position. That is a long time to go without regular income and how many of us have substantial savings to give us a real safety net?

As soon as you can, sit down with your spouse and your records and see what you can do to immediately cut expenses to the bone. Contact your creditors and see if you can defer payments by paying interest for a while. Restructure your social life and choice of entertainment to conserve every cent that you can. It won't entirely remove that nagging fear-of-losing-everything that will dog your footsteps until you're again gainfully employed, but having some sense of control over it will lower the worry to a dull roar rather than downright panic.

Share your fears.

Confess your fears to your spouse, your family, your friends, your pastor - whoever makes you feel comfortable enough to share your personal thoughts. If you have a supportive spouse and family, reveal your worry that your present circumstances will impact your relationships with each other and jointly plan how that can be avoided. So many couples withdraw when under stress. The partner without a job feels drained and lost as summoning the high energy required for a successful job search campaign becomes more and more difficult. The partner who is still working feels stressed out from the increased responsibility of being the only breadwinner. Because they do not realize how painful and disheartening are your frequent rejections, they start to think that you're not that interested in finding a position, that you're not looking hard enough. Share your feelings early and become part of a team effort or you may become part of the nasty statistic that shows a high percentage of laid off workers encounter marital strife, separation, and divorce.

Use your friends and acquaintances.

Asking for, and receiving, support from those around you doesn't have to mean exploitation. People who know you, like you, and care about you are happy to help when they can. Don't be embarrassed to ask for their assistance and do it clearly, concisely, and directly. Just "dropping hints" and getting frustrated when no help is forthcoming is self-defeating. Call in the chips from everyone you know and vow that you will return the favor for them when your positions are reversed.

Manage the toxic effects of job search.

Looking for work feels humiliating because you sense an inner air of superiority in the contacts you make. People who have a job possess a sense of identity and security that as an unemployed applicant you temporarily lack. Ask yourself how much of the attitude is coming from the other person and how much is your own projection. While you will undoubtedly run into the occasional boor, many more of your contacts - employers, interviewers, receptionists, human resource specialists, agency staff - empathize with your situation having been there in the past themselves and fully aware that there is a good chance that they'll be there again in the future.

Your misery and pain leads to the feeling that it is you, alone, against the world. Every face in the crowd is threatening and alien. Self-conscious about our non-productivity in a culture that deifies success, we assume that everyone else buys into our own self-critical, guilty, personally faulty image. If, for even a few moments, you can step out of that self-centric view, you may be able to change your self-judgment. Look at yourself with the objectivity of a little distance.

When you look at other applicants, what is your reaction? Do you despise and look down on them or identify with their desperation and want to help? Although often distracted, inattentive, or oblivious, most of us care about other people and are willing to help once we really notice what is going on.

Look at the outpouring of sympathy, support, and love that a kidnapped child or a natural disaster evoke. Are we that generous all the time? Of course not, we are all too involved in lives that demand our attention 24 hours a day. Only when a light explodes do we start to look around us and our better selves emerge.

The key to an open, positive outlook is to realize that our humanity is always there, we're just not paying attention to it. If you can expand that vision of a caring, supportive humanity to those who seem to view you with indifference, your world completely changes. Instead of a drab, lonely desert, you see the waves of surrounding support, all caring about you, wanting the best for you, rooting for you: a great, positive team in your corner.

Yes, you will still experience rejection but your new outlook can put that into perspective. It is not a personal rejection but a mathematical determinant: if the number of applicants exceeds the number of openings, everyone, even those fully qualified and highly regarded, cannot be hired. Acceptance of that reality, in a non-personalized view, can help keep you going until you find the perfect fit - you get the job offer and other highly skilled applicants don't.

Battling personal inadequacy.

There are, luckily, very few times in our lives when we feel we are being judged by our peers. Unfortunately, looking for a job is one of those times. Every resume submission and application completion makes us feel that our personal worth is being assessed. That feeling intensifies in an interview where we sit eyeball to eyeball with our judges. We feel vulnerable and objectified as interviewers scrutinize our skills and experience.

To validate our sense of personal competence, we need to be seen as valuable and worthwhile. That is why we feel so good about ourselves when we are offered a position that we wouldn't allow our dog to take, like night liquor store clerk in a high crime neighborhood or cleaning crew in a slaughterhouse (yes, people do those jobs). The important thing is that we are wanted, that what we have to offer has value to someone. It is also why we get so down on ourselves when we are not offered a position: the more we want the job, the more crushing is the sense of defeat when we don't get it.

Everyone experiences rejection at some point during their lives, sometimes only occasionally, sometimes often, whether it is finding a job, applying for a promotion, asking for a date, proposing to someone they love, or trying out for a team. Failure is part of our lives because we are naturally competitive and everyone can't place first in the race to the wire.

It is our mental generalizations that cause such natural rejection to become crushing. If something is not that important to us, we shrug it off with a sour grapes response: I didn't want to be in that stupid club anyway. When we are emotionally committed to a goal, failure becomes devastating. While being turned down for a job will never carry the emotional jolt of having a marriage proposal rebuffed, the destructiveness of job search is that rejection becomes a recurrent pattern. One failure to make the cut is manageable; ten failures, one after the other, start to impact our ability to cope; a hundred failures overwhelm us.

We start to identify ourselves as losers. We mentally twist our failures into a pattern and start to believe that we are the problem: we're just can't make the grade. We fail to look at the situation objectively: that each job application, like a dice roll or the pull of a slot machine handle, is a totally independent event with odds that don't change with multiple repetitions.

The fact that I was not offered one particular position says nothing except another applicant was a better fit. It is not a judgment about me as a whole person, not even as a worker or potential employee. For one of a thousand reasons, the chemistry wasn't right. Watch how your mind doesn't really accept that as it sinks into self-blame and self-doubt, repeating all the negative tapes you have ever developed, seeking to make you see yourself as a perennial loser.

Use that same powerful mind to consciously focus on your positive attributes. Think, or better yet write down, all your successes, great and small. Mentally explore your life, looking for all the times you were a winner -everything from a good grade in a difficult subject to the successful raising of a child, scoring a goal, marrying your spouse. Re-assuring yourself of your value, frequently and at length, will help turn your mind into a source of support rather than an internal enemy who repeatedly cuts you down.

Rejection is always difficult but its pain can be made more fleeting when we refuse to allow one, or a hundred, rejections to define ourselves as reject-material.

Virginia Bola operated a rehabilitation company for 20 years, developing innovative job search techniques for disabled workers, while serving as a Vocational Expert in Administrative, Civil and Workers' Compensation Courts. Author of an interactive and supportive workbook, The Wolf at the Door: An Unemployment Survival Manual, and a monthly ezine, The Worker's Edge, she can be reached at http://www.unemploymentblues.com

---

Kick-In-The-Pants Job Search

Believe it: three obstacles will hold you back from your ideal job -- your r?sum?, you, and your job-search methods. There's no hidden formula; there's no bribery needed; there's no one standing in... Read More

Always Have a Current Resume

What is the biggest mistake people make with resumes?People write their resumes as a chronological summary of everything they've done in their professional lives. Employers only care about one thing: what you can... Read More

Fuzzy Headed Job Goals Lead to a Fuzzy Headed Life!

May I clarify in this article what I believe to be "fuzzy headed" life and job decisions. I believe both are entwined: life and job."Fuzzy Headedness" is a result of not HAVING and... Read More

12 Steps to Targeting Success in Your Career or Job Search

Is your job search sagging? Are you still looking for that ideal next job? Or are you about to begin looking for new work and are not sure of the best way to... Read More

Petite Modeling: is There a Career for You?

PEtite modeling is a tough industry to break into. Especially since most modeling agencies won't represent models unless they're 5 feet and 9 inches tall or taller. Have you had people tell you're... Read More

Recovering From a Career Crisis

If you have ever experienced any of the following, you have had a career crisis:? Losing your job? Being fired? Burning out? Not wanting to do your job for one more dayA career... Read More

Hot Business Trends for 2004? And Beyond: Maybe One Will Turn Into a Creative Business Idea for You

I always look forward to the December issue of Entrepreneur magazine. That's the issue that features the publisher's annual pick of hot businesses, markets, and trends for smart entrepreneurs ? or those... Read More

Job Layoff: Confronting Why Me?

Perhaps you saw it coming. The fall in company stock prices. The news articles about company troubles. Maybe it was just rumors on the production floor, or a creeping suspicion that orders had... Read More

Successful Job Search: 10 Steps To Quickly Acquire Your Dream Job And Put More Money In Your Pocket

Do you want to continue your costly, time-consuming and exhausting struggle in a frustrating job search using weak, ineffective tools that are getting you nowhere? The job market today is fiercely competitive with... Read More

Tips for Getting Your Movie Career Launched

Hollywood helps those who help themselves! In you want to get your movie career fast tracked then here are three common sense tips to help you on your way.1. Borrow the Boy Scout's... Read More

Cover Letter Sample -- For the Corporate Flight Attendant

Writing a cover letter to send with your r?sum? can be both confusing and frustrating. What exactly should you say? Are you saying too much? Are you only speaking about your needs vs.... Read More

Helping Mid-Life Employees Find Meaning

People work to live, but most also live to work. A study on the meaning of work conducted back in 1987 revealed a strong attachment to work as a way of life. The... Read More

Showing Appreciation to Workplace Un-Sung Heroes

Millions of Un-Sung Heroes are born every minute! They are found everywhere-on street corners, in our homes, offices, and communities-wherever there are people in need of rescue. These special people, whose positive actions... Read More

Five Powerful Tips for Interns

Interning is about more than earning money during summer break. It's a wonderful way to gain work experience and lay the foundation for your future career. But to get the most out of... Read More

The Case For Internships

America may be the Land of Opportunity, but this is also the land of the Big Trade-Off. Sure, you can have that nice house, but you're going to have to become a mortgage... Read More

Get Out of Your Comfort Zone in the Job Search

Most everyone these days knows what a comfort zone is. My definition is the place, environment and tasks that we have learned to do and feel comfortable with--a comfort zone.Lots of people feel... Read More

The Perfect Resume

The perfect resume presents hiring managers with a four-fold vision of who you are and what you bring to the table: The perfect resume offers Logical Proofs: Facts Quantifiable... Read More

You Are Lucky in Your Career!

You Are Lucky in Being Satisfied in Your CareerJust for fun let's you and I, reader, consider that you are satisifed with your current career.It's good to find out why. You have a... Read More

How to Deal With Workplace Inflexibility

You've been a model employee: responsible, industrious, creative and productive. You've gone the extra mile time and again, with a smile.Now you have a family.Quite reasonably, you expect that when you ask for... Read More

The Telecommuting Tightrope

For many of us, telecommuting seems like the ideal situation. You wake up, shuffle over to your home office, work at your own pace. You take a break when it suits you, you... Read More

Career Change - Creating Wealth & Happiness

Whether you have a business idea or not, here's what I want you to do?I want you to take a pen and paper and go and sit somewhere quiet in your home where... Read More

Are Your Intentions Clear in Your Job Search?

1. Do you REALLY know what you want?2. Do you know yourself well? What your interests, talents, and transferable skills are?3. Are you articulate? Can you explain what you want and do it... Read More

How Can Qualifications Help Your Proof Reading Career?

For those who are looking for a career as a proofreader, it is important to have the right qualifications. It is important to remember that this is a proper job. It is not... Read More

Becoming A Police Officer Just Became Easier

As many law enforcement candidates can vouch for, taking the police entrance exam can be a stressful and highly competitive experience. I decided to research some preparation web sites and purchased several E-books... Read More

The Top Ten Strategies of A Great Interview

You've just received a call to interview with your dream company. Do you know how to prepare for the interview so that you'll feel confident, have a good experience and set yourself apart... Read More

Unlimit Your Life!

Do you have a tendency to think in absolutes?Is everything good or bad, black or white?This type of thinking can severely limit your options. Or worse, prevent you from getting an accurate picture... Read More

Networking Mistakes and How You Can Avoid Them

'Fear of rejection' is the major reason why individuals looking for a career change hesitate to use networking as the most powerful weapon in their job search armoury. This is even the case... Read More

Job Interviews: Succeeding with Panel Interviews

These days, job interviews often consist of a panel of three-to-six interviewers.A "team approach" to finding the best candidate can be beneficial for the employer. Each member brings a different set of skills,... Read More

Become A Personal Trainer

Every human body is different and a personal trainer will know exactly how to not just get a human body into proper shape but also shape the body into the desired form. A... Read More