ONE

         A SELF TO SERVE 

           We set up all kinds of monsters in our heads; they
 don't exist outside, just in our heads. --James J. O'Connell

     "Losing a job after giving yourself so totally to one organization is like getting cancer," said a veteran of 20 years as director of personnel in a large publishing company.  With no notice, he was on the street, "truly frightened that I would never find another suitable job," he told me.  "You know perfectly well on one level it can happen and you try to prepare yourself, but the reality is so totally stunning it's like walking into a steel beam in the dark."  It took him eight months to find comparable employment in another industry in the same metropolitan area.  He credits "a marvelous outplacement counselor" with "saving" him.  That person "put the old starch back in me and restored my faith in myself.  Alternating between stroking my ego and kicking my butt, he instilled in me the belief that I would find another job and a good one, and he was right."  "My story is not gloom and doom, pity me. It is work hard, do good, keep the faith, and you'll prosper."  This is a 46-year-old manager speaking, onetime head of the International Corporate Finance Department of a major New York bank. He received three days' notice, a six-figure lump-sum severance payment, and then took 18 months to look for work.  The time was spent in self-renewal, getting himself ready for a new career.  "What, sell life insurance?" he claims to have asked himself; "you've got to be kidding!"  No, he says, he wasn't kidding himself or anyone else when, after serious reflection and extensive networking, he came to the conclusion that there was a future for him in "serious, high-tech financial services," the new environment in which he now enjoys both satisfaction and financial success selling insurance products of one of the industry's leading companies.

     You have a self to serve during the transition from one job to another.  You are your sole client, your chief concern.  Throughout the transition, you are the center of a process of personal self-assessment and self-renewal; you must be or become the object of your own self-esteem and self-respect.  You are the one who has to guard against self-pity, loss of self-confidence.  You are the agent of change.  If new employment is to be found, you have to take the initiative.  The process is fundamentally self-serving, and there is absolutely nothing to apologize for in acknowledging that it is.  Ultimately, the job-search is a test of character.  And character, as both history and literature attest, is proved in action.

     There will probably be a humorous side to the self-service dimension of life that necessarily opens up for you as you move into transition.  You will, in all probability, be scheduling yourself, purchasing for yourself, getting things repaired on your own, placing and taking your own calls, handling your own mail--in and out.  If you were "above that sort of thing" earlier on, or simply prevented, in the interest of efficiency, from taking care of the practical details you would otherwise have enjoyed attending to, you will find yourself bumping into reality checks that remind you of your membership in the human race and your citizenship in the real world.  For instance, an ousted company president who flew, he told me, "on the Concorde to Europe once a month, and in a company plane virtually at will anywhere in the country," expressed the slightly exaggerated realization that upon his separation, not just from his job but from his chauffeur-driven car as well, "I didn't even know how to get to the airport."  But to the airport he had to go, as his job campaign began.  "So I drove myself out there and saw a 'parking' sign, left the car there, and returned eight days later.  How was I supposed to know it was short-term parking?  It cost me 192 bucks!"

     As a 55-year-old vice president for marketing discovered for himself while in transition, "I am my own salvation; the end result will vary with my imagination and effort."  He also convinced himself "that I will feel good when I act."  In the process of looking for work, he came to believe "that I am certainly good enough to be my own boss," and, accordingly, set himself up in a business of his own. 

     You have to recognize that you are both the product and the sales force in your personal job campaign.  You are the "corpus" to be moved from here to there; you are the "corporation" that does the moving. Getting to know the product is, not surprisingly, an indispensable first step toward making this important sale--the re‑connection of yourself with meaningful employment.

     "Make at least one networking telephone call every day of your working life," says the banker who found a new career in insurance.  That's a reasonable call quota while you are fully occupied with gainful employment, but many more calls than that must be made everyday for anyone who is, as they say in show business, "between engagements."

     The self you serve during what you can expect to be long months, possibly years, of transition will be better served if you pause at the outset to analyze why you hesitate to make those calls.  "Fear of rejection" is the basic reason, according to one outplacement specialist.  "I will dial the phone, hand it to them, and then walk out" (of the office where he counsels clients), explained Dr. James J. O'Connell, a psychologist who is senior vice president of Drake Beam Morin, Inc., a major outplacement firm.  "We set up all kinds of monsters in our heads," he said; "they don't exist outside, just in our heads."  Clients say to him, "I'll do it, but..."  He tells them, "Get rid of the 'but' and just do it."

     "I was so ashamed," said a senior manager in a major advertising firm, who was fired without notice in 1991 from her

$250,000-a-year job as executive vice president and director of operations.  In those "terribly tough" first days of separation, she said, "I wanted to pull the covers up over my head each morning and not get out of bed; I was so ashamed."  Shame, the experts say, can be triggered by betrayal.  It also follows upon the revelation of something you prefer to keep hidden.  This lady felt betrayed when she lost her job, and she certainly didn't want the world to know that she had been fired.  Shame imparts a feeling of inadequacy and unworthiness tied together by a sense of helplessness.

     A 50-year-old foundation executive told me that "an element of shame" was attached to his summary ouster.  "I appreciate a little more the humiliation of the rape victim.  The whole damn world tells you how terribly you were treated, but something is different in all your normal relationships.  You may be good, loyal, smart, effective, even exceptional--but you have no power; you have lost a war that was never declared." 

     Shame can make it hard to pick up the phone.  So can pride. Neither condition is necessarily a vice or a virtue. Each comes naturally; each has to be contained.  The advertising executive certainly had nothing to be ashamed of, but shame was the emotion, compounded by anger, with which she had to deal.  The banker experienced neither guilt nor shame, just anger; and he directed the anger positively ("Don't harbor grudges; I was a marine--we didn't quit on ourselves or our families").

     Timidity is a vice often confused with humility; but true humility is courage.  Timidity makes it hard to pick up the phone.  Humility will keep you at the phone and on the trail of meaningful re-employment through a courageous, persistent, personal job campaign.  Severance, whether voluntary or involuntary, puts time on your hands.  It is up to you to use that time productively for self-renewal.

     Voluntary separation can leave a person unexpectedly off balance.  Involuntary separation inevitably shakes a person's self-confidence.  Some are initially stunned, immobilized physically and intellectually.  "He had to be told several times.  It didn't quite compute with him what had taken place," said a General Motors insider, describing a senior executive's reaction to news of his demotion as part of the outside directors' coup that restructured management within GM in 1992.  Even when it does "compute," especially when the computation results in a person being zeroed out, personal withdrawal into time-frozen immobility is not a promising strategy for successful re-employment.

     "Stunned" was the word used by a 55-year-old software CEO who was fired just a couple of months after his board gave him an 11-percent raise and a commendation for excellent year-end results in the face of a world-wide recession.  With the help of racquetball and long bike rides, he got himself "in gear" for the job campaign.

                      Doing versus Being

     There is in this country what I like to call the great American heresy:  what you do is what you are.  You conclude, therefore, when you find yourself "doing nothing," that you are nothing.  One man I met in the course of this study put it this way: "If you are what you do, when you don't, you aren't."

     Your employment has been terminated, yes; but you falsely and foolishly conclude that you've been terminated.  You forget that you are a human being, you think and act as if all you've ever been is a human doing.  That conclusion requires re-examination right at the beginning of a new job search. 

     When I made this doing-versus-being distinction in a conversation with a major banking executive whose job was lost as a result of a merger, he recalled advice heard thirty years earlier in a college classroom.  The professor said, "You should want to do, rather than simply be; but you shouldn't want a certain position in life just to have the position.  Take a position in order to do something good."  The banker went on to recall that it was in a big freshmen history lecture hall where he heard that advice, along with about 280 classmates (all male).  He  also recalled the professor saying, "Gentlemen, we want you to be individuals and non-conformists. But we don't want you to non-conform in matters of attire and grooming; we want you to conform in that way because those things are incidental and unrelated to the fundamental aspects of your humanity.  Where we want you to non-conform is in how you address problems, and how you think, and how you stretch your mind."  Acknowledging that he fell short of that ideal, the banker said, "I never forgot what he thought we ought to do, and I think about that a lot now as I'm working my way through this transition with no end in view."

     It is wise, of course, to tell just about everyone willing to listen that you are out of work and looking for a new opportunity.  Those close to you, who fit into the category of what some would call colleagues or associates, but whom I would label, simply to make the present point, "functional friends," should be asked to tell you what, in their view, are the ten things you do best.  You will probably be surprised to see listed some skills or strengths you had not noticed or had underestimated in yourself; they could, if cultivated, qualify you for productive activity in fields not within your immediate job-seeking range-finder.  By the way, be prepared to find that you have fewer "functional friends" than you thought you had.  A former bank chairman explained to me, "When you are riding the top of the wave, you have many friends and lots of acquaintances.  When you crash, you discover who your friends are and who your acquaintances were." 

     More important as you begin the reflective, self-renewal stage of your job search, will be responses you receive (only if you ask!) from another set of friends, those who know you and value you for who you are, as opposed to what you do.  Ask them to list your ten top qualities as a human being.  Both lists-- positive descriptions of your being and your doing--provide you with an agenda first for reflection, and then appropriate action.

     If you are disappointed not to find qualities that you assumed would be listed, or if you note the absence of qualities that should be there, make your own "to do" list, identifying workable objectives within reasonable limits for the assimilation of qualities that should be part of the self you serve.  Again, within reason and respecting the limits, only you can provide your self with these enhancements to your personal being.  If you think you need help from an adviser, counselor, or even therapist, ask for it.  You are your own project now; getting another job is the goal, but not the entire goal.  You can't afford to forget that you are, now and always, a unique human being, not an interchangeable and suddenly dispensable human doing.

     Most of the job-seekers who will speak to you in these pages were jolted into a self-assessment frame of mind by involuntary separation; they were fired from their jobs.  Most, but not all. Barry Sullivan, chairman of the First Chicago Corporation, was thrown into a self-reflective mode by a hurricane. It struck his beach-home community on New York's Long Island in August 1991 while he was vacationing there. He left Chase Manhattan for the First National Bank of Chicago eleven years before.  Secure in his job, he fully intended to remain in the chairmanship at least awhile longer, because he had four years to go until retirement.  Five days without electricity, due to hurricane damage, meant long hours for walking hand-in-hand on the beach with his wife.  Processing memories of years past, assessing the present, and wondering what their future memories might be, they "kind of said, that's it."  So he returned to Chicago and told the Board, "Let's get on with succession." 

     What he really wanted to do was get into community service.  He didn't have to worry about personal finances.  So when his former mentor at Chase, David Rockefeller, had lunch with him on his first day back in New York and made a suggestion, Barry Sullivan, at age 61, was ready for a challenge. Sullivan was thinking community service, not public service.  But Rockefeller is persuasive; he had breakfasted that very morning with the mayor of New York City and the mayor needed help.  Mr. Sullivan became Deputy Mayor for Finance and Development in the City of New York, a job that gave him "the sweep of the most complicated city in the world," he told me with obvious enthusiasm eight months into his new public sector responsibilities. He loved the new job. It enabled him to make both a contribution and a difference.  He didn't miss the bank.  And it all began with long, reflective, self-assessing walks on the beach. 

     Whether you are on the job or out of work, you can't afford, as I mentioned earlier, to forget that you are a unique human being, not an interchangeable and dispensable human doing.  Of course, if you are out of work, you want to do something productive and satisfying again.  But first assess yourself as a human being as you examine your opportunities to do something in the workplace. Incidentally, the example of Barry Sullivan's move into executive-level government service might serve to remind you to widen your view of future possibilities to include public service or something else you've never done before.

     The self you serve is, at the very opening of the job campaign, not likely to be very demanding.  Typically, it will be a wounded self in need of help, not a sidelined self voluntarily withdrawn from the fray.  Quite probably, fear and fatigue are there to aggravate the blow to self-confidence, to magnify the wounded pride.  In this condition, it is hard for the ousted executive to rebound.  A healthcare CEO, fired from his $200,000-a-year responsibility by an unhappy board, told me he turned immediately to "the old triangle: daily Mass, pumping iron, and working the phones."  Why so fast?  Why no time off before the search?  "If you don't connect reasonably fast, you get that black-band around your arm and then you diminish."  He said, "you diminish," although he meant to say your chances of re-connecting diminish.

     "In between jobs, quiet desperation is the operative mood initially," an automotive industry executive told me. "There is a denial akin to the feelings surrounding the death of a loved one, except you feel you have died a little, and a lot.  The realization of the enormity of the occurrence has a numbing effect that translates into taking no overt action that could result in rejection."  As an ousted president of a large manufacturing company described the initial feeling, "I came home that night feeling like someone had torn my insides out."  A bank chairman described his reaction to involuntary separation: "It's like a terminal illness.  Someone you meet on the street asks, 'How are you?' You're not going to say, 'I'm dying,' but that's exactly how you feel."

     Many find it difficult to pick up the phone right away because they believe that they, not their jobs, have been terminated.  Not only is the wound personal, but, if their actions are to be believed, it would appear to be fatal.  "It's as though you have been killed, but you still walk the earth," said an executive vice president exiled from a healthcare corporation. But he came back to life with the realization that, "Since nothing worse can happen to you, it is easy to speak and write plainly and without reservation."  So he wrote for an entire week, the first week after severance.  It got him through what he calls, the "shock trauma period."

     "How you handle this shock period may be important," he told me.  "It will help you rise above the situation or display whatever character flaws you may have.  For me, it was a good time, that week."  What did he write?  "Personal hand-written notes to Board members, both business and personal letters and communications to the new CEO [who let him go, but who had, upon arrival, given him the assurance, "I hope you'll retire here"], light-hearted printed messages to the department heads; all of it very much appreciated, well received.  Everyone who mattered learned about this situation from me.  That, I think, was part of the need to restore some dignity and control to a professional and personal life."

     This obviously sensitive and reflective person acknowledged that he and his wife wanted to avoid people, but did not.  "We took the offensive and dealt with friends head on.  We managed to keep a cheerful and positive outlook and projected it without exception.  Every single critical comment from friends and associates about 'the stupid bastard who let you go,' was turned around immediately.  We had stock statements: 'He's really a decent guy; he just needs to work with his own people, people who balance off his own strengths and weaknesses; he wants to build his own team.'"

     You serve yourself poorly if you fail to distinguish between yourself and your job, and, after the separation, act as if you've been terminated (a "mercy killing," was the way a Westinghouse vice president described his separation after 29 years with the company), instead of acknowledging candidly to yourself and others that your employment, and just your employment, was terminated.  You also serve yourself poorly if you expect the sting to wear off fast.  "The hurt will only disappear (wrong word--only lose a lot of its power) over time,"  a corporation president, fired at age 45, explained in writing to me following successful legal action to gain severance compensation.  Hurt feelings are no justification for inactivity.       "The 'mourning' ends as it began, with the realization--not so profound--that life goes on and you need to be a vital part of it. At that time, a 'new' you emerges and the process of rejuvenation begins."  For this former auto executive, the process took him, at age 55, into the oil business. 

    Just about everyone will tell you they hate to ask anyone for money, even for charitable gifts to very good causes.  They just can't bring themselves to ask for money.  What they are saying, in most cases, is that they cannot bring themselves to risk personal rejection.  They take a negative reply as a direct rejection of themselves, not a turndown of their request.  Similarly, the displaced or dislocated executive will shy away from the phone for fear of rejection. 

     The self you (and only you) can serve is indeed quite ill-served by procrastination, by deferral of the calls, by substitution of written (although the written will also be necessary) communications for direct voice-to-voice or face-to-face contacts.  Your wounded self will suggest the need to "smell the roses" for awhile, the need to rest and recuperate.  And that may indeed be not only necessary, but wise before the serious search gets underway.  Your responsible self, your "steering" self, so to speak, can permit you some downtime, but you should accept it as a slow-paced preamble to the demanding regimen of the upcoming job campaign.  This reflection from a 40-year old female healthcare executive who went through a tough separation is good advice for anyone in similar circumstances: "Don't be too hard on yourself or set too many demands; expect to be tired and depressed and not feel like doing much.  Remember that this--like anything--will be resolved one way or another, sooner or later."  For her it was resolved, and happily, but only after an eight month search.

     The account of "The Loneliness of the Layoff Survivor" in The New York Times, January 3, 1993, is instructive.  For those who survive the cut, writes reporter Glenn Rifkin, there is "fear and uncertainty, heightened by the constant threat that more layoffs will be coming, perhaps with less lucrative severance packages."  To compound the problem, "those who remain must take on increased workloads, often adding 20 hours or more to their workweeks."  Peter DiToro went through that tension at Prime Computer only to face an eventual cut himself.  Here is how the newspaper story recounts his experience  "'They cut a group of 55 down to 15 in one morning,' he said.  They just called us into a room in groups of eight or nine and handed us the severance package.  My manager was tough, and people were afraid to work for her, but that morning she cried.'

     "While the others went out for a tearful group lunch, Mr. DiToro got on the phone.  'I had three interviews lined up by the time they got back from lunch,' he said.  Forty-eight hours later, he had a job..."  This is not typical.  But it is, quite obviously, possible,  The moral of the story (and the reason for including it here) is simply this: pick up the phone.

     Bruce Springsteen sings about being on the "downbound train."  The self you serve, knowing perhaps what it's like to have been sidetracked, if not "railroaded," may need some immediate rest and relaxation. But withdrawal into self--to self-imposed isolation to dwell on the past--means running the risk of  missing the rebound train.  In some cases, and yours may well be one of them (it's your call), a short vacation could be just the right thing immediately after severance.  A corporate vice president in California, who lost his job at age 50 and had a severance arrangement giving him full salary for six months and half salary for the following six, offers this advice: "Get lots of exercise and start looking for a job right away, although if you can afford it, take a trip with your spouse--two weeks--and don't talk about it [job loss or job prospects] on the trip."

     A high-level transportation executive chose, at age 45, to leave his job with the top firm in his sector of the industry because of personality differences with the chairman.  Although his transition was brief and his job search successful, he has this advice to offer, drawn from reflection on his career up to that point:

     "In my personal life, I experienced mixed emotions over the stupidity of my workaholic habits, my literal marriage to a company, my perfectionism, and the question of what life might be if I had worked only five days weekly and under fifty hours a week.  But I still had not learned.  I did not stay out (of the field) long enough to reflect, ponder, and smell the roses.  Instead, I decided to do better in terms of business achievement. In retrospect, I probably was misguided in my focus albeit I was doing the only thing that I could do to reach my goals for my family.  I should have taken six months off, made a retreat, and just unwound with my family.  I did not.  I was self-driven to go even faster.  Before charging forward to conquer new worlds, I would suggest to anyone that staying out a little longer to make more considered decisions would be beneficial."

     Two year later, at age 47, he was again in transition, and again voluntarily.  His higher paying, higher responsibility job in the same industry was just not the right fit. He quickly found a comparable level of responsibility with higher pay, still in the same industry, only to exit voluntarily three years later to take a CEO position in transportation-marketing that he has now held for fifteen years.         

     When asked to translate his own experience into advice for someone who anticipates loss of executive employment soon, he replied: "Begin discreet inquiries concerning possibilities elsewhere; think through objectively  your strengths, weaknesses, and potential value to another employer, and reassess your career path.  If you are in a stagnant or recessive industry, consider changing to another, and, time permitting, do what's necessary to make yourself marketable in the anticipated new industry through attending seminars, reading extensively, studying, taking crash courses, and developing new contacts." 

     That is a good, but only partial outline of is what you have to do to be genuinely helpful to the self you serve. 

                      Stages of Reaction

     In a restaurant in a Chicago suburb, an ousted soft-drink company president, age 52, listed for me, two years after the fact, the "life cycle" of his personal job-loss experience.  He moved, he said, from disbelief, to anger, to self-doubt, to emotional paralysis, to forgiveness (of himself "for being human"), to a final stage he labels simply, "getting on with it."  Books that helped him get off the ground in his job campaign had titles indicative of his need: "Man's Search for Meaning," "The Road Less Traveled," "Wounded Healer."  (In Chapter Nine, you will find listed some of the books and authors that participants in this study credit, from personal experience, with the power to assist in various stages of the job campaign.)

     The need to "forgive" oneself "for being human" is worth noting.  If that need is present and unrecognized or unattended, the job-search will not go well.  You'll be walking with a "limp" that others will surely notice. Refusal to forgive self or others is self-maiming.  Most job-seekers realize that if they are ever to "get on" with their lives, they need to forgive others in the former workplace who may have "done them in" or "taken them out."  Most who leave unwillingly have, for understandable reasons, great difficulty in forgiving anyone who had anything to do with the separation.  But they usually recognize the need to work at it, avoid talking about it--in the sense of "bad-mouthing" former superiors or associates--and thus reduce, if not altogether eliminate, the limp.  But they may not recognize the need to forgive themselves.  The soft-drink executive explained to me that he was a successful athlete in high school and college days.  He knew then what it was to lose, of course, but in those days he almost always knew as well that the loss was not his fault.  He pointed out that in business no CEO can always "play well."  Every manager is human and all humans make mistakes.  If you are not prepared to forgive yourself while still acknowledging ownership of your personal failures, you have a problem that needs attention very early in the job campaign. 

     The Career Initiatives Center (CIC), a low-budget, modestly quartered, non-profit, charitably-financed organization in Cleveland, provides displaced managers and professionals with "career transition services" including an eight-session "Self Marketing Class."  The first sheet put into the hands on new arrivals is headed, "Coping With Job Loss."  It enumerates the "stages of job-loss crisis," as outlined by Robert B. Garber in The Psychology of Termination and Outplacement:

(1) shock or relief, (2) denial/disbelief. (3) self-isolation, (4) anger, (5) bargaining , (6) guilt and remorse, (7) panic--degree depends on severance situation, (8) depression,

(9) understanding and resignation to the situation, (10) acceptance of reality, (11) building a positive outlook, (12) opportunity, growth, and new direction.  Just reading this list should be enough to convince you that you are not unique in your reaction, wherever you happen to be at the moment in the range of stages and emotions associated with the "job-loss crisis."

     Successive handouts to clients of CIC sketch, in effect,  the remaining topics to be covered in the Self Marketing Class:

(1) self assessment, (2) correspondence, (3) resumes,

(4) networking, (5) reference books, (6) telemarketing,

(7) job interviewing, (8) factors to consider before accepting a job offer, and (9)--(happy day!) salary negotiation.

     "Coping With Job Loss" means recovering from the shock of employment termination.  "Self Assessment" means the hard work of figuring out who you are, what you want to do, what you do best, what you hope to be or become, and where you fit best in the world of work.  This is the service you must render to yourself.  Others can help, but only you can write the ticket even if it's going to be punched by someone else.

     It is important that this be done in a focused way, not necessarily with pin-point precision, but with sufficiently clear direction to set course for your job search.  Returning for a moment to the compass analogy (and I would hope this book will be something of a compass in your hands), listen to one of my respondents, speaking of his personal job campaign:  "A point in every direction is the same as no point at all; focus on a goal-oriented job search."

     All the topics listed above will be touched upon later in this book.  The next three chapters--dealing with spousal support, management of discouragement, and your own reflection in the literary mirror--together with a subsequent chapter on the relevance of religion, are offered to provide you with an interpretative framework.  They will be useful for purposes of self-understanding in the early stages of your job campaign; or, if you have successfully negotiated your transition, they can help you locate the self that may have been hard to find when you were down, but will be with you always--how-, who-, and wherever you are, and whatever you do. 

     In a poem titled "The Time It Takes To See," Samuel Hazo explains: "Years/ afterward we find the words/ for what we had no words for/ then, which means the past/ is simply what we make (re-make)/ of it, which means we're always/ in arrears."  And then he observes: "We sort our memories/ like players who arrange the cards/ they're dealt into a kind of order."  You play the hand you've been dealt, you tell yourself, but don't forget to sort out what it all means and arrange your cards "into a kind of order."

     One of the participants in my study, who now runs her own executive search firm, came to see that her involuntary separation from another search firm was, in fact, "initiated by a realization of a values conflict that I had been unwilling to admit."  She wanted "out," but didn't know why.  After her release, she realized that the values conflict occasioned both her discontent and her termination.  She therefore focused on identifying and understanding her deepest-held values during the downtime created by her separation.  This gave her, she says, not only insight but "more psychic energy, because I wasn't so disappointed or angry with myself as I previously had been."  When a 39-year-old construction executive in my study found himself "on the bricks," he came to realize "what a great relief it has been to leave a job that constantly pushed me to compromise my values.  Now, through study, self-assessment, exercise, and just trying to organize my life, I'm rediscovering

important values and some neglected areas of my life."

     In a certain sense, your values are yourself.  You are what you value.  And it takes honest reflection to identify your deepest values.  It is important to spend time in that quest at the very outset of your job search.  And it may be helpful to recall that a value is a quality attached to a person, idea, or thing, so that it is prized and cherished.  It therefore has worth.  Association with, or possession of, that which you value is worth your while, your time, your thought, your money.  In the principles that organize your life, you can find the values that define you and that disclose your ultimate concerns.  Simple logic suggests the wisdom of knowing your values (and thus yourself) before you set out to select the job that will be a major part of the context within which you and your values will be spending a lot of time together.  If the job context does not provide a very high antecedent probability of congruence between your values and your work, let the opportunity pass.  "Don't let yourself be picked by a job," advise outplacement experts William J. Morin and James C. Cabrera in Parting Company (Harcourt Brace Jovanovich, 1991), an excellent book to be read before or during the transition.  "Discover what's important to you," they recommend, "and then find a job that fills those requirements."       It takes both courage and a capacity for risk-taking to do what a 47-year-old manager of R&D for a major brewing company did in the interest of "keeping an even keel," while riding the initial "cycles of depression and confidence." "I had a job offer within one week of severance," he told me; "I rejected it and then went ten months before finding employment."  After the fact, he could say it was worth the wait.  As the months of idleness added up, he wasn't so sure.

     One senior executive, who had perhaps the most attractive "golden parachute" I saw in the course of my interviews, told me that his anger, his sense of pride, and his determination "to show them they were wrong" in letting him go, put him on a rebound route that brought him very close to taking the wrong job.  An older, wiser friend cautioned: "You don't want to do that job, you just want to get that job."   Through the clearer vision of a trusted friend, the ousted executive saw the opportunity in sharper focus and decided to pass it up.  He never regretted the decision.

     Similar advice comes out of the separation experience of a 55-year-old chairman and CEO of a large bank.  His advice to others who find themselves out on the street: "Stop--slow down--don't jump too soon into a position that you think you want. Wait.  Patience is very important."  He had experienced pressure from an unexpected quarter--his eleven-year-old daughter.  He and his wife had a "split-level family," two young adult sons and the 11-year-old daughter.  It was his custom to drop her off at school on his way to the office.  When he stopped working in January, he continued to do this--dressed, however, in casual clothes and turning back to home after the drop off, instead of continuing on downtown.  He and the family were economically secure as the result of a generous financial severance package.  He planned to work again, but was in no great hurry. In the car, on the way to school, the child would ask questions like, "Where are you going today?"  "Don't you have any work to do today?"  This, he said, "began to 'bug' me, although I realized she was totally unaware that her questions were putting pressure on me."  On the last day of school, before getting out of the car, she turned to her father and said, "When I go back to school in September, you'll have a job, won't you?"  This did it; he decided to take an available job.  He was back at work when September rolled around, but not sure he had waited long enough for the right opportunity to present itself.  And he later discovered that schoolyard teasing--"Your dad lost his job; your dad got fired!"--was behind the innocent questions.  Other children had heard their parents, some of them bank directors, discussing the dismissal in dinner-table talk at home.

     I mentioned patience to an executive whose involuntary departure from the presidency of a major corporation became the subject matter of a Business Week cover story.  He was angry, anxious to relocate fast, and wanted to run something big and complex--perhaps a university, he confided to me.  I explained that academic management is quite different from business, and that persuasion and patience have to be part of the academic CEO's tool-kit.  "Patience," he acknowledged, "is not my strong suit."  But he pressed me to nominate him for two vacant university presidencies and would have grabbed either, had the offer been made.  And that, of course, would have been a mistake for him and for the institution. 

     The job he lost--chief operating officer--was one he didn't really want, he told me.  He took it because his son had complained, "Dad, we move so often, and this one is right down the street."  When he was a rising young star on an executive search firm's preferred list for high-visibility Number Two jobs, he had not yet learned what he readily passes along by way of advice to persons on similar launching pads today: "Don't go, if you can't get the top job."  He eventually got the top job--twice--in high technology firms and lives with a certain resentment against executive recruiters: "As soon as you're off their top list, wham!  They disappear.  They drop you because you're 'shopworn.'"  

     Not in his case, but in another like it, the recruiter told me, "He never learned.  We placed him again and he made all the same mistakes all over again."

                     What Sets You Apart? 

     The self you serve can be hurt by hasty rebounds made in anger without reflective self-assessment and personal strategic planning.  Strategic planning begins with strategic thinking, and good strategic thinking for an executive-in-transition begins with the question: What sets me apart?  What (or where) is my comparative advantage?  First, however, you have to know who you are. When you were working, you probably resisted self-examination; most people do.  Perhaps you resisted it resolutely, concentrating on your work to avoid confronting yourself.  You may not yet realize that you've been doing that. Or, perhaps, introspection is not uncomfortable for you; you've done it and  you like it.  But, lately, you just haven't had the time.  Well, if you left your most recent job involuntarily and do not now clearly understand what went wrong, and, in particular, if you are not absolutely sure that the fault is not within your self, you may well fail in your next job simply because you by-passed this crucial stage of self-assessment.  This happens easily and all too often, especially as layoffs are routinely explained in terms of "the economy," "restructuring," "downsizing," "foreign competition," and other variables unrelated to one's personality, knowledge, attitude, and skills.  Your problem could be right there between your ears, and you don't know it.

     Whatever your record of reflection and self-awareness, you have to begin anew (or perhaps for the first time) to get to know yourself.  That will take time--quiet time, intervals of solitude.  It is important to remind yourself that solitude is not loneliness. Solitude is a chosen form of isolation; it is good for you.  It provides you with the necessary dimensions of space and time to figure things out, to work things through. Loneliness is never good; it is a kind of living death.  You will need friends--visible, tangible, audible human support--to help you fend off loneliness as you try to get to know yourself, and  plan a strategy to "market" yourself, and then stick to your plan, without losing heart, as you work through the implementation stage (which may prove to be long and painful) of a well-planned strategy.

     Of this, however, you can be sure:  if you know yourself, have a plan, and "stay the course" that your plan lays out, you will re-connect; your job campaign will succeed.

     In response to my inquiry about "bits of wisdom" that were picked up along the way and might be helpful to others in transition, a financial services manager in California put is briefly and simply: "Getting a new position is my responsibility, and working to that end calls for dedication, innovative thought and persistence.  Personal networking is extremely important. I'm preparing a larger 'nest-egg' in case it happens again.  Finally, I'd advise others: don't be bitter or vengeful."  That just about sums it up as a package of advice you can present to the self you serve, assuming, of course, that you know that self well--in depth and along all the fault lines. 

     "Never lose your sense of humor, or sense of purpose; keep on going," advises a 50-year-old broadcast communications executive, who, in the face of unemployment, described himself as "an emotionally stable person" who "knew exactly what I had to do."  In response to a question about how  his time was spent between jobs, he replied:  "The job search is a full-time job, with overtime.  Even during times of recreation and leisure activity, one still needs to remind oneself that the search is an on-going one, and that opportunities need to be seized at the moment.  The great football coach Vince Lombardi used to say:  'Luck happens when preparation meets opportunity.'"

     As I indicated, I'll list for you later on the books that others found to be helpful in focusing their respective job searches.  Among those recommended readings will be What Color is Your Parachute? by Richard Bolles.  His words, responding to the what-do-I-have-to-do-now question and addressed repeatedly in different parts of his book to job-seekers of all types, never change: "Know your skills.  Know what you want to do.  Talk to people who have done it.  Find out how they did it.  Do the homework, on yourself and the companies, thoroughly.  Seek out the person who actually has the power to hire; use contacts to get in to see him or her.  Show them how you can help them with their problems."  That's preparation.  Luck inevitably follows.

     Jannotta, Bray & Associates, a well-known outplacement firm, provides its clients with a "Job Search Skills Workbook."  On the outside cover, a user finds these words: "A Message From Your Future Employer: 'I'm not here to give you a job.  I'm here to solve problems.  Show me how you can help me, and I'll be interested.'"  Once that cover is opened, a process  of self-assessment and opportunities research begins that prepares the job-seeker to present him- or herself to a future employer as an attractive solution to the potential employer's present problem.      It can be helpful to job-seekers who tend immediately to look for a solution beyond the borders of self, and who hope upon outwardly-focused hope that someone somewhere will present them with a job, to see if there is a lesson to be learned from this story that the writer Isaac Asimov was fond of telling.  A young would-be composer approached Mozart and sought advice on how to compose a symphony.  Mozart responded that a symphony was a complex and demanding musical form and that it would be better to start with something simpler.  The young man protested, "But Herr Mozart, you wrote symphonies when you were younger than I am now."  And Mozart replied, "I never asked how."  I've heard the same story, by the way, attributed to Beethoven.  No matter where and with whom the story originated, the point is one that should be assimilated by the self you are there to serve.

     You will and should ask a lot of people a lot of questions about how to prepare and proceed with your job search.  But the self you serve will be quite badly served if you expect others to do it for you, or if you presume that you are capable of handling all the complexities all at once.  Get the help you need for the task of measuring up to your responsibility of finding yourself another job.  If you asked David Maguire, president of the outplacement firm Jannotta, Bray & Associates, how to proceed, he would tell you to ponder the difference between activity and passivity.  You are being passive if you simply float your resume and let "them" know you are available.  Maguire would press you to get out there, face-to-face, with potential employers and stimulate demand for what you have to offer.  However, he would have you first be prepared to say with confidence: "This is what I'm good at; this is what I really enjoy."  And finally he would encourage you to be able to say, at least to yourself, "And this is the pay I'd be comfortable with."  His point is that although you may have good reason to accept in a new position lower pay than you had in your last, "you don't want to be embarrassed, even though you are keeping that information to yourself."

     I want to leave you here, at chapter's end, with one of the worst stories I heard in the course of this study, not to make you feel good by learning of someone much worse off than you, but to make the point that the self you serve can indeed by an isolated self who simply has to rebound from within--in this case the needed job vanished at the moment this executive was most needed by the ones he loved.

     A top manager I talked to, a CEO who reported only to the chairman, received high praise and the largest salary hike he had ever received only three weeks before the following exchange took place.  The CEO, just as he was leaving home one morning, received bad medical news from his wife--she had been diagnosed the day before as having breast cancer.  He had an important meeting that morning with the chairman and top staff; distressed as he was, he had to go to work.  The chairman, noticing that something was wrong, inquired about the problem written into the furrows on this troubled husband's brow.  "I got some bad news this morning; Pat has cancer."   Incredibly, the chairman's response was, "Well, maybe you ought to get all your bad news on the same day; you're fired."  

     Through networking and a series of consulting engagements on the way to permanent employment, he recovered from that setback; so did his wife recover from hers.  Concern for his wife helped keep concern for himself in perspective.  He put his attention exclusively on her for three months, and then began looking for his next job. I met them both two years later.  "She and I were best of friends when we got married," he said, "we're better friends today."  His employment contract called for a severance of 100 per cent of salary for nine months; it was cut to 90 per cent for six.  "I decided not to sue and just made up my mind not to look back.  A good friend suggested, 'It's time to be repotted;' I took his advice and got moving.  I'm happier now than I've ever been."  The self-service route worked very well for him.  It can work just as well for you.