Unemployment: 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.