He
that lives in hope dances without music.
--George
Herbert
I invited you in
Chapter One to consider why you might hesitate or procrastinate when it comes to
picking up the phone and initiating the contacts that are the building blocks of
a successful job campaign. Fear of
rejection is one of the reasons. So
is immobilizing discouragement. This chapter deals with discouragement, or, to put it more accurately,
this chapter offers you insight and assistance for dealing with your own
discouragement--your flatness, dryness, diminution of
hope.
"Until you've sat at
home, as I did, waiting hours, then days, even weeks, for the phone call that
never comes, you'll never know how important it is for me to return a call,"
said a senior vice president for human resources, who invited me into his corner
office to discuss his personal experiences (three times) of job loss. I had thanked him for being so prompt in
getting back to me when I telephoned for an appointment. He said that during his job search he
decided to make the baggage of discouragement a positive force, pushing him
toward the phone and out the door for an endless series of interviews. Now back at work, he used the memory of
the pain of waiting for unanswered calls as a stimulus to leave no call
unreturned for long. "When you're
looking for work and someone doesn't return your call," he told me, "you go
lower than a whale's belly."
"You don't have
to have the patience of Job," said an international banker, "but--phew!--people
don't get back to you. And when
you're waiting every day is like a week, every week is like a month, every month
is like a year."
You've seen how
important spousal support is in dealing with discouragement. Empathy, not sympathy; positive
reinforcement, not solution giving, during the job search; that's what is needed
from spouse or close friend. A
subsequent chapter will look at the relevance of religion, a help for many in
dealing with discouragement. Faith
and friends are usually sufficient to pull a person through discouragement.
An indispensable dimension of that
"faith," however, is faith in self--quiet confidence (the word means "with
faith"), not arrogant self sufficiency.
Of course, you're
discouraged. You wouldn't be human if you didn't feel down when out of work.
Besides, chances are you've lived long enough to be able to relate to George
Kennan's remark that if someone "lives more than half a century, his familiar
world, the world of his youth, fails him like a horse dying under its
rider." Good image, but don't
forget the rider can get up and start moving again. You are a human being with options, far
better options than the one a not-so-helpful career consultant had in mind when
he thought about the opportunities "out there" and told an aging inquirer, "If
you are 56 and blown away, you might as well open up a candy store." You have a choice.
You can convince yourself that you're
looking into an empty future, or you can believe instead that an opportunity
awaits you just around a future corner and you will turn that corner soon.
The intensity of your
personal discouragement while unemployed will vary from person to person, and
normally it will be in direct proportion to the duration of the quest for
work. As his job search moved into
its second year, a 52-year-old sales executive in San Francisco said to me, "I'm
running out of ideas and contacts, I'm running out of money, I'm running out of
life." Several levels of discouragement may be
activated simultaneously; for some, it may settle in at the level of the
unconscious. When that happens,
professional help may be required, as a displaced sales executive discovered
with the realization that his job-loss had triggered off a host of unresolved
feelings of grief related to his wife's death 18 months earlier. He dealt with discouragement by learning
how to deal with grief.
Some job seekers find
themselves for the first time asking someone else for help. They find this distasteful.
Unaccustomed as they are to asking for
help, they are even less prepared for the refusal and rejection those requests
will draw. Not flat out rejections;
those will be rare. But letters
have a way of being set aside, resumes get lost, promised calls become promises
broken; and the "anything-I-can-do-to-help" messages become forced or muted, not
followed up by prompt delivery. This leaves the job seeker even more alone and much discouraged.
After the fact, some can joke about
it. One man told me he kept careful
count of the response ratio to the resumes he mailed out. It was 3-to-40, only
three responses "of any nature, even 'go to hell.' You got to the point where 'go to hell'
was nice to hear; I mean, you got a response. The guy knew you were alive. It
was wonderful! You got a rejection
letter. It made your
day!"
With considerably less
glee, an ousted computer executive, age 46, acknowledged that "there were very
few people I felt comfortable talking to or asking for help when I was separated
from the company. I had always been
independent and successful; that was my image and I felt I had to protect that
image. People I helped along the way--finding jobs, advancing their
careers--didn't seem to have time to pick up the phone and call. This was probably my biggest
disappointment in the entire experience."
Below these
surface-level disappointments, these flesh-wound experiences of discouragement,
lies a substratum of discouragement
in many that calls out for the durability of hope, a call that does not
ordinarily get an immediate and effective response. Hope is needed to provide the courage to
endure, to overcome the all-too human tendency to personalize what Yeats saw as
part of the human condition: "Under every dancer is a dead man in his
grave." I was astounded when one
young man I was attempting to help some years ago referred to himself as "a
walking grave-yard." No one would
have suspected this handsome, well-dressed young professional was carrying with
him that kind of baggage of low self-esteem. He should have been building up some
personal reserves of hope to draw upon when he was in his 50s. As Thornton Wilder saw so clearly, "We
strengthen our souls, when young, on hope; the strength we acquire enables
us...to endure despair."
I think the German poet
Hebbel saw something that is at work within most of us and expressed it well in
these lines: "The one I am sadly
salutes/ the one I could have been." A displaced healthcare executive after first thanking me "for putting me
in touch with my feelings by giving me the opportunity to complete the
questionnaire," echoed Hebbel in
articulating this advice for others: "Don't engage in recriminations,
back-biting, or 'if-only' exercises; don't look back."
The circumstances of
age, sex, occupation, and other personal "environmental" impacts on the
displaced executive's psyche, make this a complicated issue. The "sad salute," usually directed to
opportunities missed, is made by different people in different ways and goes out
in different directions. Although its meaning is unique to the discouraged
person, the experience is shared almost universally with others in the human
community by virtue of their being human. Even back in the eighteenth century poet Edward Young framed the question
in a poem called "Born Originals." If indeed we are all "born Originals," he asks, "how comes it to pass
that we die Copies?"
To be is to be
disappointed--eventually; to have somehow fallen short. But, "That which we are, we are," wrote
Tennyson in "Ulysses," and we simply have to accept this and get on with
life:
Tho' much is taken, much abides, and tho'
We are not now that
strength which in old days
Moved earth and heaven, that which we are, we are.
Those who experiences
job loss need immediate and repeated assurance that they have not been laid off
from life, despite the downward-pointing psychological signals their personal
sad salutes might be sending to themselves. Draw comfort from Mark Twain's
observation [cited by Joseph E. Persico in Edward R. Murrow: An
American Original (McGraw-Hill, 1988), p. 496]: "It is not likely that any
complete life has ever been lived which was not a failure in the secret judgment
of the person who lived it." Sayings like that may be useful for after-the-fact reflection, but offer
little consolation to someone still in the job-search tunnel with no sight of
the light at the other end. One
woman in my sample reported that at the end of a long interview with a job
counselor, when she had been out of work for four months, she said, "Let me ask you a question.
Am I ever going to get a job? And he just sat and he said, 'Well, I
don't really know.'" She held her
composure there, but shortly afterward when she sat down to join a friend in a
restaurant, she burst into tears.
Ousted from his company
presidency, a telecommunications executive went, as he put it, "into a funk,"
when he clicked on the E-Mail feature he had been accustomed to using on his
home computer and discovered that he was "Not Valid!"
Back in the 1960s, when
college students were supposed to be unreflective activists, Jim Beek, a student
at Loyola College in Baltimore, wrote a poem for the Winter, 1968 issue of Ignis, the campus literary quarterly, that can speak to the heart of the
problem the person searching for work brings to this book. It was titled "Catharsis" and opened
with the line, "I awoke in the silent fist of the night gagging on
loneliness." Then, several lines
later, Jim Beek writes:
And I opened my books for something to ease the
cramp
But they only grumbled at me for awaking them
at an odd hour.
And the fear that my existence wasn't doing
anyone any good
Was under my fifth rib.
So the poet prays "to a
god who would have nothing to do with a stained glass window," and gets this
reply:
Son--
This is the pain that lets you know you're alive.
Much of you is grown, and the rest is trying hard
to catch up.
You have raked many words from books, and now
you must put some back....
If you put up your guard and go through life
with a sandbagged soul,
You may fend off a blow, but you'll also stop a
kiss.
The fear that your
existence isn't "doing anyone any good" adds a lot of heavy freight to your
discouragement. If, as the
psychologists remind us, depression is inverted anger--i.e., anger turned in on
itself--discouragement might be thought of as an aching awareness of not being
needed. The pain is there, "under
your fifth rib," alright, but it can serve as a reminder that you are alive, and
a member of the human race, and able to contribute if you lift the weights from
your "sandbagged soul," become vulnerable again, and see what words, or works,
or ideas of your own are at hand, so you "can put some back" in the form of
meaningful employment resulting from a persistent job
search.
Persistence
There's the
word--persistence. Discouragement
erodes it, undercuts it, tries to smother it. Discouragement puts the fire out. The
really discouraged person stops looking. The persistent person never gives up.
Torrey Foster, founder of "Job Seekers,"
a church-based support group at St. Paul's Episcopal in Cleveland Heights, Ohio,
tells his clients, "You've got to be pushy." Lest they go too far, he tempers the
advice by explaining that he is speaking of "dipolmatic
persistence."
I sat in on a 7:30 AM
"Job Seekers" meeting on a snowy January Friday. ("We meet on Fridays to
encourage them not to shrink the search to a four-day workweek," explained
Torrey Foster.) Jim Piper had good news to share. "I was a victim of society," he said,
referring to the downsizing phenomenon, "but now I've been reclaimed." The call came at 10:30 on the morning of
Christmas Eve, he was happy to say. And to the others there who remained jobless during and after the
holidays, and who had to drive through snow to attend the meeting, he said:
"Keep on spinning your wheels and eventually you'll get some traction."
Persistence eventually pays off.
One of the Cleveland
Heights "job seekers," a metallurgist who moved into management only to move out
on a downsizing wave, "got tired of looking," so he started his own business:
Power To Go, an airport-based, traveler-oriented, battery-pack pickup service
for travelers uneasy about the batterylife in their portable computers. The portable battery package is ordered
by phone, paid for by credit card, and returned after the trip for recharging by
the company and deposit retrieval by the user.
The
metallurgist-turned-entrepreneur explained to members of his support group why
he started his own business: "It was better to do something than slowly
die." His business forecast was
modestly confident: "Lots of little
seeds get planted and 88 percent of them die; you hope for the other
twelve." Regrettably, this new
business-seedling also died, so now his hopes are reduced to the remaining
eleven possibilities.
Tom Peters, of
In
Search of Excellence fame, had
something encouraging to say to this kind of initiative in an interview with Psychology Today (March/April 1993). The questioner commented, "Your
ideas are remarkable in their compassion for failure." Peters replied: "Well, to not fail is to
die.... If you
are not pursuing some damn dream and then reinventing yourself regularly,
assiduously, you're going to fail. Period." He further
explained, "In the world of dull, boring management, the essence to me of
everything that one accomplishes in life, from the trivial to the grand, is
failure. You don't ride a bike the
first time. You don't play a violin
the first time. The essence of
experimental physics is to create experiments at which you fail; then along the
way you eventually achieve some knowledge of something. It's hard to articulate because, for me,
it's so damned obvious that the only thing worth pursuing is failure." Peters has much respect for "the role of
groundless courage" in an individual life.
One of the men in my
study, a 54 year-old manager of advertising and sales for a large tire company
left his job voluntarily because he chose, for family reasons, not to move to a
distant state. When I met him, it
was fifteen months and still no job. "I tried to devote three-to-four days a week to 'employment seeking,'" he
explained. "I went to support meetings, yet there were days and weeks that I
gave up on myself and gave in to depression. I did nothing directed to job
seeking. Pulling myself out of
those 'bad' days and weeks has been truly tough--for me and especially for my
wife. If nothing else, this has
been the greatest test of our marriage. So far, we're winning." Because he gave up on the search, he had not yet come up with a job.
His spouse was holding him and their
marriage together. The ground went
out from under his career and the will-power isn't there to summon up the
"groundless courage" to keep his job-campaign going.
I've been told that the
painter Francis Bacon (b. 1909) used the phrase "exhilarated despair" to
describe himself; he saw it as "a state where one's basic nature is totally
without hope, and yet the nervous system is made out of optimistic stuff."
I'm talking here about something that is
even better. I'm talking about the
importance of living in hope. In
the words of poet George Herbert, "He that lives in hope dances without
music." The job seeker has to keep
on dancing to music from within, after the "background music" you get from your
job stops. Another line from
Herbert suggests the unappealing alternative: "He begins to die, that quits his
desires." All of this is condensed
in the experience of one manager, age 51, whose severance pay was long gone and
had, after two years, no job prospects that looked promising. In describing this "most traumatic
experience" in his life, he wrote in a letter to me:
Unemployment has had a positive effect on my life
in that it has made me a much more sensitive and caring person. I have been humbled and that is
good. Last year for a time I was
driving an airport limousine to make twenty dollars a trip (every little bit
helps). On one occasion I picked up
one of my former peers who still works at my last company. That was humbling!
I keep telling myself that someday I
will find financial security and I will look back with gratitude for having had
the chance to become a better person. I remain hopeful, but my trust is only in my own effort.
I expect no help and want (and deserve)
no sympathy. My situation is the
result of the choices I personally made. I have no one to be angry at, including myself.
I am proud of my strength but I do fear
despair. If someday I did lose
hope, the result would be final.
Persistence can
activate the optimism that lies hidden in the inner person, somewhere in the
nervous system, ready to spring. By
exercising persistence, you can experience the "exhilaration" and reduce the
"despair." But you have to try it
to become convinced. You have to
believe that the other side of every "out" is "in," and that any exit is an
entrance in reverse. Every ouster
is the starting gate for a comeback.
You also have to remind yourself that you
are not alone. You are experiencing
just one dimension, admittedly painful, of the human condition. For the musical "Closer Than Ever,"
director and lyricist Richard Maltby, Jr. penned a telling lyric for a song
called "One of the Good Guys." It
is a musical portrait of the hard-working, faithful family man, troubled by
doubt, but hanging in there as one of the "good guys."
Just between good guys
It's not which road you take
Which life you pick to live in
Whichever choice you make
The longing is a given
And that's what brings the ache
That only the good guys know.
The "ache" is
there. Having it does not at all
disqualify you from association with "the good guys," nor marginalize your
membership in the human race. You
have to resist the temptation to give in to the pain and begin thinking of
yourself as a "yesterself." Authentic "yesterselves" are not still around; you are, and you are
capable of drawing on your past education and experience to carve out a new
career.
Insisting that "my
youth is not dead--yet," a 60-year-old marketing manager gave me his reaction to
the very discouraging "you're overqualified" response he had been receiving to
job inquiries. "It really means
you're too old, or your salary range is too high, or simply: 'we don't want
you.'" When you hear
"overqualified," he said, "accept the fact that it isn't worth your while to
pursue it, but don't give up, just point your pursuit in other directions.
Maybe you are too old for a particular
job. But look at it this way: If
you needed brain surgery, who would you rather have operate on you--an
overqualified surgeon, or someone less well qualified? Package the skills and experience that
make you 'overqualified,' and sell that package, at a bargain price, perhaps, to
someone who really needs it. Your
job now is to find that someone."
Searching for that
someone, even by telephone, is never going to be easy. The single-day experience of one man I
spoke to will not necessarily be typical. He made 35 phone calls one day and
did not get past the receptionists to one live voice; he deposited messages in
35 separate "voice mail" boxes. Needless to say that can be discouraging.
When your job campaign
brings you this close to the trees, the forest--the larger picture of life and
its cycles and your place within them--recedes from view. A series of defeats can clamp your
outlook into too tight a focus. You convince yourself that you've spent the
first half of your life just warming up, and now the second half is being spent
just wearing out. You should know that you are experiencing, unconsciously
perhaps, something that runs deeper than the rejection of an unanswered phone
call or a frustration in your attempt to get an interview. You are experiencing downside
discouragement. You are probably
experiencing it without examining the slope of the downside, its dimensions, its
natural contours, and the appropriateness of your position
there.
Don't Let the Arithmetic Get You Down
Chronologically, as you
go through life, your position on the up, top, or downside can be arithmetically
established by multiplying your age by two, and then asking yourself how many
people you know who are alive and active in careers at an age double your own.
People over forty cannot come up with many names or impressive numbers. So do the multiplication and then admit
it: you are on the downside. You
are closer to the end than the beginning.
Note, however, that the
chronology of your working life did not begin to run until two decades or more
after your birthdate. Multiply your
working-years-to-date by two, and look at that number. You will surely know many
productive persons who had satisfying years of activity in the space that fits
in the bracket between the total number of your years-at-work and the target
number you associate with your own expected retirement. Sure, you are on the downside, but there
is a block of productive worktime in front of you waiting to be filled, by
you.
Some discover with
regret that the old saying is really true: "In middle age, we become the person
we always were." Others see this
truth as pointing to a storehouse to be drawn from, a natural deposit to be
mined, an endowment to be tapped. How well do you know the person you always were?
Your search (in solitude, support group,
or interspousal communication) for that person can open up avenues to
re-employment and dampen down feelings of discouragement. Even if you think novelist Eugene Fitz
Maurice had you in mind when he described a character in The Hawkeland
Cache as "a man with little of life left before him, and nothing of value to
be left behind;" and that you are the Londoner he knew who "was a man of no
depth and a negative position in intellectual reserves," your conversations with
supportive counselors and friends will uncover genuine personal assets upon
which you can base your job search and build your future. Just go ahead and do
it!
In 1983, Dorothy Brier,
then assistant director of the social work department at Manhattan's Lenox Hill
Hospital, conducted a seminar there on "The Middle Years of Life." Her advice to participants: "Middle age
has to be self-defined. It is a
combination of your age, your psychological state, and how you feel about
things. But if the issues you face
are midlife issues (related to teenage children, aging parents, career
uncertainties, health problems, and conflicts between spouses) then you have
midlife problems--no matter what your age."
No matter what your age
(about which you can do nothing), there is a lot you can do about your
psychological state and how you feel about things. One thing you can certainly do is keep
hope alive in your mind and heart. As William Faulkner saw the choice, "Between grief and nothing, I'll take
grief." But you've got to work at
it; you've got to choose positively. This doesn't mean you will feel great all the time. Nor does it mean that
as you look back, there will be no regrets. But you should realize, as the famous
trial lawyer and professional sports entrepreneur Edward Bennett Williams
learned in his midlife years and always reminded others, "The two great culprits
in the theft of your personal time are regret and indecision." They are also barriers on the road you
need to traverse if you are going to get on with your
life.
Mention of Washington
lawyer Ed Williams, who was influential politically and also owned the
Washington Redskins and the Baltimore Orioles, opens up a line of reflection for
me that brings both athletes and politicians into view as I examine the way we
humans manage discouragement.
Washington Post
columnist Chuck Conconi wrote (October 17, 1983): "Washington is a town filled
with ghosts. Mostly, they are the
ghosts of offices past. You can see
them everywhere around town: at receptions and parties, at restaurants such as
the Monocle, Duke's, and Mel's, and especially on Capitol Hill. They are the senators, representatives,
and cabinet members who have the word 'former' in front of their titles. They are the senator who never goes back
home; they are the defeated candidate looking for one more
campaign."
One senator who did go
home--to Texas to write a book--was John Tower. He had resigned his seat and later lost,
by three votes in the Senate, a bitter confirmation battle to become President
George Bush's Secretary of Defense, which would have been the fulfillment of his
grandest ambition. Not
surprisingly, when the book appeared, The Washington Post sent a staff
writer to Dallas to interview Tower. Marjorie Williams spoke with him in his apartment in "the kind of
building to which wealthy widows and widowers remove themselves as their lives
contract." Her published article
(March 4, 1991) notes that the "triumphant experience of being nominated [to be
Secretary of Defense] proved merely to be the apex of his life's parabola.
From somewhere on the descending slope
he has issued 'Consequences,' a memoir looking back bitterly on his career and
its sudden, thorough end." Later in
the long article, Marjorie Williams writes of Tower's "strenuous poise, formed of
details: well-tailored British suits and formal cuff links and good posture and
deliberate gestures.... But all the care he takes seems a form of armor, a
grooming of the shell.... Inside the clothes, the man seems
depleted."
After his 1984
presidential defeat, Walter Mondale asked his party's unsuccessful 1972
standard-bearer, George McGovern, "When does it stop hurting?" to which McGovern
replied, "I'll let you know, Fritz."
Former Senator Tom
Eagleton is remembered for his involuntary departure from the vice-presidential
slot on McGovern's 1972 ticket in consequence of publicly acknowledging, "on
three occasions in my life I have voluntarily gone into hospitals as a result of
nervous exhaustion and fatigue." Once the press and the public learned that he had bouts of "depression"
and submitted to "electro-shock treatment," he was off the ticket. Twelve years later in announcing his
intention to retire from the Senate and return home in 1986, and not remain in
Washington, Eagleton said in an interview with The Washington Post (June
20, 1984), "Having made the decision I wanted to get out of politics, I decided
I didn't want to hang around the fringes. Occasionally I see a former senator in the corridors or maybe the steam
room and, well, it's a little sad."
Two glum but insightful Washington maxims
are: "What goes around comes around," and "Inside every winner is a future
loser."
Former Democratic
Senator from Minnesota, Eugene McCarthy, often quips, "Being a successful
politician is like being a successful football coach; you have to be smart
enough to win and dumb enough to think it's important." Of course he's not serious. It hurts to
be "out," so why not joke about it?
Less well known are the
political writers. They easily
accept inflated estimates of their importance as their bylines meet hundreds of
thousands of inquiring eyes searching for news and opinion. One of them recently wrote: "Our bylines
reveal nothing. Our anonymity is
complete as a bylined friend discovered after retirement a few years ago. 'I have found,' he said, 'that I am not
a has-been; I am a never was."
Sentiments like these
abound in the athletic domain where glory fades and people wear out early.
An insightful high school teacher,
Sylvester Conyers, himself a fine athlete and later a coach, sees it this way:
"Very good athletes lead a different sort of life than most other people. At a very young age you're well known,
you get a lot of publicity. It's
almost like being in the womb, in that everything is given to you. But once the career ends, a lot of
athletes have trouble adjusting to real life. They find out that nobody pampers
them." The adjustment is easy if
the athlete "never really had things out of proportion," says Conyers. "The adjustment is only tough when
athletics is the biggest things in your life, when you lived every day to be the
star, to play the game, rather than taking care of your education." Fine advice to the student athlete, but,
omitting the reference to education, it describes perfectly the typical life of
the pampered professional athlete and points to the difficult days ahead after
retirement.
Joe Gibbs ended his
playing days only to begin a successful coaching career that took him to the top
of the National Football League as head coach of the Washington Redskins for 12
years. He led the Redskins to three Super Bowl titles and an impressive string
of wins. When no one else except his wife wanted him to quit, at age 52, Joe
Gibbs abruptly resigned for an array of reasons that related to family, keeping
things in perspective, values, and a balanced life.
His decision prompted
Washington Post sports columnist Tom Boswell to write (March 6,
1993): "Millions of people face the
problem, not just Joe Gibbs. It is
so basic that William Butler Yeats just called his poem 'The Choice.'" And Boswell lifted the line that fits
the Gibbs situation as it applies to the rest of us: "The intellect of man is
forced to choose perfection of the life or of the work." As the sportswriter pointed out, "The
best poet of the 20th century knew that the idea of 'having it all' was nonsense
before anybody ever dreamed up such a fatuous phrase." Yeats saw The Choice as an insoluble
problem. "In luck or out the toil
has left its mark," wrote Yeats. Those who put family and friendships first were
left with "that old perplexity of an empty purse." Planning for a move like the one Joe
Gibbs took will entail some provisions for the purse. That was certainly no problem for
him. Although it will not necessarily "empty" a person's bank
account, a decision in favor of a balanced life will, in all probability, mean
less income but more life.
The Choice is always
difficult. Sometimes it is
compounded by accompanying guilt. You chose to move on, but now you feel adrift, out of control, and
guilty. If someone else chose to
move you on (or out, or down), it must have been because of something you did,
or didn't do, right? Maybe right,
maybe wrong. In either case you feel guilty and in virtually all cases the guilt
is without foundation.
Many discouraged
job-seekers have their backpacks loaded with guilt. Guilt, conscious or unconscious, can
deepen the discouragement and push it toward despair. Listen to the wise distinction made by a
client to a counselor (not the other way around); the counselor is a friend of
mine who recalled for me his client's words: "'I made a mistake," is the
admission of normal guilt; 'I am a mistake,' is the expression of neurotic
guilt, even despair." It was a
personal struggle that produced this insight for a person who had been on a
downward spiral that just about convinced him that he, not his action, was the
mistake. Although unable to
identify it, the president of a printing company said, "I struggled greatly with
the 'failure' that must have been the reason for my termination." The struggle, he told me, was to
maintain "self confidence and pride."
Even if you did make
some mistakes that triggered your separation, that doesn't say you are a
mistake. You are the answer to
someone's problem and you will earn money and find fulfillment in solving that
problem. You have to believe not
only in yourself, but in the emerging fact that you will find another job
eventually, and a very good one at that. You simply cannot permit yourself to fit the description of "despair"
sketched out for me by the wife of an ousted trade association president. She was in the unusual position of doing
personnel work for a federal agency and "feeling guilty" that she was
interviewing candidates for employment but was unable to do anything for her
husband. The problem was compounded
because she felt she couldn't talk about her work to her unemployed spouse
"because of the anger and pain they would cause him." "It was especially painful for me," she
told me, "to recruit at two job fairs where I was interviewing candidates for a
variety of positions all day. Many
of them were unemployed and I saw (and identified with) their various stages of
unemployment: denial ('I'll find something at the same salary or greater very
soon'), panic ('I've been out of work for three months') and despair (virtually
catatonic with a look that said, 'I don't know why I even tried to apply for the
job, it is the same old story--no one wants someone as worthless as I.') I was quite depressed after each of
these events." But she was careful
not to communicate that depression to her husband, he was feeling bad
enough.
Here is an excerpt from
a letter Donald Nunes sent to his daughter on the occasion of her graduation
from college; it was later published in full as an article in The Washington
Post (April 27, 1993). He provided her with fatherly advice to carry away
from home and into her first job. One of his nine points deals with failure.
Of this I am absolutely positive: Over the course of
your long life you are going to fail. Many times.
Miserably. Horribly. There is no avoiding
failure.
If you don't fail, it's absolute, pure, blind luck.
And that's very dangerous. Because, while failure
enables you to grow, success just makes you cocky.
Arrogant. You learn nothing
from success.
Obviously, failure teaches
you what not to do again.
But that's not the most important thing about
failing.
When you fail and you calm yourself down and make
yourself examine the reasons for your failure and
then
fix the problem or write it off as a cross you'll have
to bear, you grow personally. You gain a sense of
trust in your ability to handle the most difficult
situations. You learn that
you survive failure.
From those experiences comes self confidence.
You only get that when you fail and pick yourself
up
from calamities and have at it again.
People sense it when others
have that kind of deep,
solid self-confidence. It's
the one thing that sets
people apart. It makes them
leaders. Forget how
much
you know. If you have
experienced failure and grown
from it, it shows. That
inner strength is what I look
for when I'm hiring senior managers. Do they refuse to
fold under pressure? There's
always pressure. Are
they not afraid to fail? They're going to fail a lot
and have to keep going. Do
they know what they can do
and what they can't? If they
do, they'll make more
right than wrong decisions.
Never, ever, be afraid of
failure. Nobody wants
it,
of course. But, in the end,
it can be your friend. It
helps you develop a sense of what you can do and
what
you can't do. Success never
teaches you that.
(Emphasis in the original.)
If you take this
perspective on failure, even if you do not view your separation to be a personal
failure, you will have the right disposition for managing the normal
discouragement associated with job loss. You just have to pick yourself up, wounded perhaps, but wiser for the
experience, and "have at it again."
The Choice Is Yours
How, then, do you deal
with discouragement in that in-between time, during those days and weeks of
waiting and uncertainty, during that ambiguous span of time with no end-point in
view? A female corporate attorney
told me, "You have a choice--negativity or a positive attitude. Since a negative attitude adds neither
value nor quality to your life, choose to be positive!" How does a 59-year-old former vice
president of manufacturing, who has been out of work for two years, deal with
discouragement? "I spend full-time at my job search. I get up at 6:00 every morning and start
at 7:00, and work until 5:00 or 6:00 in the evening." This is consistent with the prescription
offered by William Morin, the outplacement specialist, when I asked him about
his advice to clients on dealing with discouragement: "You have to bring
yourself to the realization--and this may be for the first time in your
life--that you are in business now for yourself." And the business, of course, is finding
a job.
You deal with
discouragement by not giving up. You simply decide not to live your life "back there;" dredging up the
past can be a real depressant. You decide to take life one day at a time. You
ask yourself: what is most important in my life right now? And you know, as you look at your
potential, your family responsibilities, and the economic realities of your
existence, that the most important thing for you right now is getting a
job. And so you act. You "keep going back," said the man who
explained to me this strategy for dealing with discouragement. His expertise was corporate tax
management. He had his priorities
lined up correctly--God and family well ahead of work and income. But he knew that this particular crisis
point in his career pushed work and income to the forefront of his personal
agenda.
He knew his past
achievements. He knew there were corporations that could benefit from his
capabilities; he had researched them in Value Line and Hoover's
500. "Then, I'd call them up. That was hard. I'd look for
reasons to avoid it." Why? I
asked. "Who wants to be
rejected?" And he went on to
describe his "relief" when he called and heard the words, "He's not here right
now." He would be advised to call
back. "But, I'd put it off." And, he said, "there is a real
temptation to say, 'I always wanted to be a consultant; now is the
time.'"
He overcame that
temptation with his simple device for dealing with discouragement; he kept
"going back." Not "looking back"
with regret, but "going" or "coming" back with persistence to the points of
contact, one of which would eventually lead to employment. He lost job one on October 15; he began
working at job two on the following April 29. Discouragement could have turned the
in-between time into a swamp capable of swallowing him up; persistence turned a
painful experience into a successful job search.
Repeatedly, I heard
unemployed executives say what a 53-year-old ex-manager of research and
development told me when I asked him to offer advice to other managers who were
looking for work: "Be optimistic. Do what you have to do. Plan
for the future. Focus. Keep busy." This is a formula for dealing with
discouragement. A variation on that
theme was struck by a technical manager in the chemical industry who decided to
look upon his separation as a "graduation," an opportunity and a welcome change,
not a "problem to be solved."
"Keeping busy" will
mean different things to different people. Whatever it means, it functions as an antidote to discouragement.
"In addition to job-hunting," a female
manager told me, "I did lots of projects around the house, played golf, kept up
on my walking regimen, took up a hew hobby of painting floorcloths, did
needlepoint, got lots of sleep, started writing articles for professional
publications, investigated how to get a children's story I wrote published, read
a lot, did all the sewing for a revamped room (curtains, cushions, pillows,
etc.), and spent more time talking to friends." She characterized the transition as
"stressful" but she came through it, by her report, as a stronger person in a
stronger marriage. Much more
sparing in detail, a male manager explained how he "kept busy" during a
nine-month transition by "catching up on projects around the house. I did things I wanted to do for
years. It felt good!" Others, however, warn that this sort of
catch-up work can distract you from the central task of looking for your next
job.
A marketing executive
in Atlanta found that "the transition was the greatest time of my life. It was extremely difficult, but it was
like a rebirth." How did he deal
with the difficulty? He devoted
full-time to building his network. "Most people simply want the pain to stop, but they do not seek an
effective remedy--the right job. I
spent my time using every conceivable technique to build my network of business
associates. It is surprising that
we don't build networks of business friends until we need
them."
There will be times
when the weight of discouragement will not fall easily from your shoulders (or,
more accurately, from your psyche). You may want to see a therapist for a reassuring check-up.
A male vice president for marketing and
communications found himself on the street at age 43 and had serious doubts
about himself and his future. He
noticed that he wasn't looking for help, so he decided that he might need
some. "I visited a therapist once
during the six-month transition period, to make sure I wasn't repressing
anything." He was told he
wasn't. "With that pressure
relieved, I was less uptight and anxious. I found it easier to be with others
and others found it easier to be with me." When I asked him what advice he would have for others in similar
circumstances, he said: "There is no way to recommend that people prepare for
termination by saving money; having a relationship with God; going through
therapy, as needed; having a loving and supportive spouse; or learning what it's
like being terminated previously,
but that's what it takes!"
An outplacement
professional said to me, "When someone sits in here and cries, I say, 'That's
good; go ahead and cry. But when
you sit down across from a prospective employer, cut that out. Nobody buys weakness.
If we can't steel you or get you to
steel yourself, then go to a therapist and get some help.'" But the need for that kind of help to
overcome discouragement is, in his experience, "rare." Get it if you need it, but only if you
need it. You are much more likely
to be like the character in the cable-television comedy series "Sessions," who
is losing both hair and sleep, and laments: "I'm older and slower, and every day
something new gives me gas." Get
some exercise, watch your diet, go to bed at a reasonable time, and get cranking
on your job search every day. Be
like the painter Philip Guston, who told novelist Gail Godwin that he deals with
artistic dry-spells by going "to my studio every day, because one day I may go
and the angel will be there. What
if I don't go and the angel came?" What if you cave in to discouragement just
when the object of your job-search was coming into view?
The National Mental
Health Association buys newspaper space on occasion to print the following
checklist along with a phone number (1-800-228-1114) and a simple suggestion:
"If this sounds like you, don't ignore it. Because your doctor can help." Here is the list:
>Feelings of sadness
or irritability
>Loss of interest or
pleasure in activities once enjoyed
>Changes in weight
or appetite
>Changes in sleeping
pattern
>Feeling guilty,
hopeless or worthless
>Inability to
concentrate, remember things or make decisions
>Fatigue or loss of
energy
>Restlessness or
decreased activity
>Complaints of
physical aches and pains for which no medical
explanation can be
found
>Thoughts of death
or suicide
"Sounds just like me on
one of my better days," quipped a normal, healthy job-seeker whose sense of
humor under stress suggested that he could afford to forget the 800-number.
Someone who should have called, and
didn't, was a banking executive under extreme pressure in 1990, who was
described by a friend as "so depressed, he just couldn't do anything." He simply "sat in his office alone at
night, smoking cigarette after cigarette in the dark."
Patrick Nuttgens,
writing in The Tablet of London (January 25, 1992) recalled the
"unusually profound" comments a friend of his would make on occasion. "I asked him one night if he had a good
definition of happiness. No, he
answered, he had not. But he had a
good definition of unhappiness. 'Unhappiness,' he said, 'is the refusal to
suffer.' He was the happiest friend
I ever made."
The comment is, indeed,
"profound." It will take a bit of
pondering to appreciate the connection between suffering and happiness, or,
coming at the issue from the other side, the link between unhappiness and
rejection of suffering. Viewers of
the play, and later the film, "Teahouse of the August Moon," received a hint of
the resolution of this riddle in the suggestion that pain makes one think,
thought makes one wise, and wisdom "makes life endurable." Many of the men and women I met in the
course of this study simply remarked, "This, too, will
pass."
Involuntary separation
from any job, but particularly from managerial responsibilities, forces you to
accept the fact that, as one outplacement specialist explained it to me, "You
only rent a job; you don't own it unless you own the company. So don't ever let yourself be caught
with your resume down." Your
separation puts you, he said, "in the same rowboat with many others in this
monsoon called executive severance." He likened the experience to "labor pains."
And those kind of pains may well be the
beginning of a working-world wisdom that can bring you an undefined, even
undefinable, but no less genuine happiness.
So there you have a
menu of metaphors to apply to your downside situation. You've been "evicted" from that job
you've been renting; you can find a better one. Or, if you don't like the risk of
renting, think about buying--i.e., owning your own firm. Monsoons and labor pains pass; so will
your unemployment--if you remain alert, flexible, and
active.
If you were to ask the
staff of the Career Initiatives Center in Cleveland how to cope after job loss,
they would pass along to you these ten steps originally outlined by Cary
Arden:
1.
Find selective places to talk honestly about your
feelings.
2. Knowledge is power, so gain knowledge
of the job-search process.
3. Learn about what you can
control--yourself.
4. Live each day fully.
Have an attitude of
gratitude.
5. Do something for someone else.
Volunteer time to
worthy
causes or
organizations.
6. Build your own support system.
Ask for help.
7. Exercise and practice good nutritional
habits. Keep
a
high energy
level.
8. Do something
creative.
9. Maintain hope.
Set realistic
goals.
10. Look for the larger
meaning in life's lessons.
Not infrequently, the
principle embodied in the fifth point on this list was articulated for me by
persons who successfully overcame discouragement. "I found that an interest in helping and
healing others worked to my own benefit. By helping others, I found a way to diffuse both anger and hurt.
Helping others healed my own wounds. It boosted my
morale and reinforced my ego; it also opened up sources for job leads and advice
that were useful to me." Another
person I interviewed for this study--a female corporate manager who eventually
began her own business, thus giving herself "a sense of purpose"--provided
pro-bono services to organizations and did some volunteer work "to offset the
isolation between assignments."
Point seven found
expression during a 49-year-old banker's transition in the form of competitive
long-distance running. "It kept me
in shape, released tension, and by winning my age-group races, I managed to keep
my pride in tact!"
One man in my sample,
an experienced project manager, offers this helpful insight. Job loss leaves you with "feelings of
confusion, anxiety, and depression." To offset these, you have to take immediate steps "to locate and make use
of a resource that will help you begin to plan your personal approach to
reemployment. There must be
a sense of order and progress in your life to balance out the feelings of
confusion, anxiety, and depression."
You can also cope with
the feeling of discouragement by lengthening your timetable, giving yourself
more slack, lightening up on the self-imposed tyranny of expectations you
yourself have raised and those deadlines you yourself have set. Beware of the tyranny of the promises
you make to yourself. This is not a polite way of saying "abandon hope." It is a practical reminder that you are
in a human predicament and you can deal with it only in human--i.e.,
non-mechanical--ways. The human way
is inevitably an imprecise way of more or less, of experimentation, success,
failure, second, third and fourth tries, and both pleasant and unpleasant
surprises. Avoiding unrealistic
expectations is both prevention and cure for normal discouragement. Be content with being human.
And add your personal Amen to William
Faulkner's line in his Nobel Prize acceptance speech: "I believe that man
["woman" would, of course, be specifically included today] will not merely
endure: he will prevail."