A job
search does not mean that you are starting all
over again. You are simply
changing. To live is to
change. You do, however, have a blank page in front
of
you that requires immediate attention. Consider
yourself
an author. The strategic
plan is your story outline; get
it down on paper.
--Words from this chapter's final paragraph
Winston Churchill's
comment about Americans in general applies often to displaced managers searching
for re-employment: "You can always get them to do the right thing, after they've
exhausted all the other possibilities." Time wasted in pursuit of "all the other possibilities" will be shortened
significantly by simply having a strategy for your job campaign. Strategies for individuals or
organizations presuppose a sense of purpose, a statement of mission, a
goal. Another prerequisite to
strategic planning is strategic thinking; "Think before you plan" is as
important a guiding principle as "Look before you leap."
Strategic thinking
begins with the question, "What sets me (or "us," or this specific organization)
apart? The answer to that question
is a statement of your comparative advantage. You are wise to build on your
differences--those advantages you have over others--which serve both to set you
apart and enhance the strengths you may have in common with
others.
It all begins with you
and ultimately depends on you. Although you will need the help of others, you can, if necessary,
"Outplace Yorself," to use the title of Charles Logue's book, subtitled: Secrets of an Executive Outplacement Counselor (Bob Adams,
1993).
There are many good
books that can assist you in the step-by-step detail of building your
strategy. Several that I would
recommend are: Knock 'Em Dead: The Ultimate Job Seeker's Handbook, by
Martin Yate (Bob Adams, 1994); In Transition, by Mary Lindley Burton and Richard A. Wedemeyer
(Harper Business, 1991); Parting Company: How to Survive the Loss of a Job
and Find Another Successfully, by William J. Morin and James C. Cabrera
(Harcourt Brace Jovanovich, 1991); and What Color Is Your
Parachute?, the best-seller by Richard Nelson Bolles (Ten Speed Press) with
a new edition appearing virtually every year since 1970. A note in the 1993 edition indicates
that more than 4.4 million copies of this "practical manual for job hunters and
career-changers" have been sold over the past two decades.
These books are loaded
with good advice, drills, and diagrams. They will work best for you if you work through them in the company of
others--in reading-and-discussion groups of two or three, or in weekly support
groups that can be found almost anywhere in America today. If you read them in isolation (normally
not a good environment for you, except during your reflective, self-assessment
stage), you are likely to become bored, confused, and perhaps discouraged; you
will be tempted to skip some strategic steps and go on to prove Churchill right
again. You should read at least one
of these or other practical, how-to-do-it manuals before you write out your own
personal goals statement, followed by your own step-by-step strategy--your
personal business plan for getting back in business again.
As I indicated at the
opening of this book, my intention is to put a compass, not a roadmap, in your
hands. The books I've just listed
are more like roadmaps; they lay out the practical do's and don'ts of
resume-writing, networking, telephoning, interviewing, and negotiating. And they are written by experts whose
advice is worth heeding, and whose assessments of the relative worth for you of
alternate job-seeking strategies will be helpful.
What I want to do in
this chapter is relay to you strategies recommended by men and women who have
been there before you, the participants in my study. I will also let you know what books they
found helpful during their own transitions. And I will be dotting the landscape
of this chapter with some suggestions of my own, derived from my own reflections
on what I've learned in the course of this study. From here on, you have to think and act
strategically.
Step One--the first
thing you have to do--is a personal, written statement of who you are. Step Two is a description of what you
want to do. If both of these are to
be sure-footed steps, they must be taken with care and they will surely take
time.
Reflection on
who-you-are will be difficult for those who have succumbed to what I labeled
back in Chapter One as the great American heresy: what you do is what you
are. And you will recall the
unfortunate conclusion, drawn from that proposition by many who lose their jobs,
is that "doing nothing" means that you are nothing (and the whole world
now knows it!). Step One requires
that you reduce to writing a simple statement of who you are without reference
to what you do, have done, or may do. Here you will have the opportunity to do what several I mentioned earlier
in this book did, namely, identify a closely held personal value and use that
value as a searchlight and criterion for selecting your next job. If you find it difficult, at first
attempt, to reduce to a sentence or two a statement of who you really are
without reference to what you do or have done, try writing a more extensive
"work biography," consciously including descriptions of what you have done.
But when you have that before you, cull
out of it the values that are really yours, the principles that are yours
wherever you may be, the wisdom you have gained that now can serve as a window
on your inner self.
"What are you trying to
prove, and to whom?" is the question transitioning executives hear from Donald
Perkins, former chairman of Jewel Food and now a senior adviser in the Chicago
office of Jannotta, Bray. He does
this to encourage a client to cut through the brush and move on to the who-am-I?
and what-do-I-want-to-do? questions.
Words applied by John
Naisbitt and Patricia Abdurene to organizations are even more applicable to
individuals: only a person "with a real mission or sense of purpose that comes
out of an intuitive or spiritual dimension will capture people's hearts. And you must have people's hearts to
inspire the hard work required to realize a vision" (Re-Inventing the
Corporation, Warner, 1985, p.22). So probe your deeper dimensions, here in Step One, to mine from within
yourself the elements of your Step Two mission statement. If it emerges from
within, it can shore up your own heart for the hard work of realizing your
vision, and "capture" the interest, and possibly the heart, of someone who could
hire you according to your plan. This important point is given a very practical extension by the
observation of an ousted division manager who obtained a vice presidency in the
chemical industry: "People fail to find work because they try to 'sell' their
experiences and accomplishments without translating these personal assets into
the 'value added' the prospective employer would gain by hiring them." The work of identifying your assets and
translating them into "value added" language is part of your Step One
activity.
The second step is also
time-consuming. It amounts to the
composition of a personal mission- or goals-statement--"Here is what I want to
do." It is wise to take time at
this juncture to come to terms with the question of whether you really prefer to
work for yourself or for someone else, and if you are not going to be your own
boss, whether you prefer a large or small organization. This kind of reflection led one of my
participants to conclude that he wanted "to build smaller fires and have more
balance in my life."
Ends, Means, and Resumes
There is nothing wrong
with keeping a mission statement general, broad enough to cover many
possibilities within the area defined by your general goal. Specification can be supplied by a
supplemental statement of particulars, known, of course, to yourself, but not
necessarily shared immediately with readers of your resume.
This is an ends-and-means
situation. The "particulars" can be
so tightly linked to your goal that they are not just means (stepping stones) to
an end (the goal), but ends in themselves. Or the "particulars"--e.g., your desire to live in the Middle Atlantic
States, work in sales management, and be employed in the telecommunications
industry--can be immediate objectives to be achieved on your way to the ultimate
goal--e.g., top management in a Fortune-500 company. After careful assessment of your values,
interests, training, experience, temperament, vulnerabilities, needs, and
preferences, you state your goal. For example, your goal (or as those who use the terms interchangeably
would say, your "objective") might be "a senior-level management position."
Your mission in the world of work may be
to hold a senior financial-management position in a not-for-profit organization,
or be a chief operating officer in a financial services corporation. You may want to put your strong
suit--e.g., human resource management--to work in transportation, perhaps, or in
higher education; and you may want to say so explicitly. You can sharpen the description of your
general goal--senior-level management--and specify it on your resume. You can,
if you wish, specify skill, sector, industry, and geography as part of your
goal. Or, you can have just a general goal statement on your resume, and modify
or add, as needed (word processors make this easy!), with information that will
address the specific expectations of a potential employer. It comes down to a question of when
(and, since letters and resumes must necessarily appear in print) where you want
to highlight your comparative advantage, that which sets you apart--apart, in
the present example, from those who are also seeking senior-level management
positions.
One of the authors I
mentioned earlier in this chapter, Martin Yates, offers readers of Knock 'Em
Dead an excellent suggestion for an add-on sheet to the normal resume. He calls it the "Executive
Briefing." On a single sheet of
paper you list on the left side the company's stated requirements for the job to
be filled. On the right side, you
list your experience in a point-by-point match-up of your skills with the
potential employer's specific needs. Yates recommends that you attach an Executive Briefing whenever you send
out your resume. That, by the way,
will force you to research carefully the firm and the vacancy before you
apply.
Perhaps the Executive
Briefing device could have prevented the following mistake. Here is an example of one man's
"objective" as stated in a "Personal Marketing Plan" reduced to a single sheet
for review by potential employers--"Objective: An advertising agency account
management position in which I can apply my OTC [over-the counter] drug
advertising and marketing expertise." He then lists his "skills and experience" in advertising ("copy strategy
development; TV, print, radio production; media planning, buying; copy and
consumer research; people management/motivation"); and in marketing ("marketing
plan development; new product development; trade and consumer promotion;
advertising copy evaluation; presentation to senior
management").
Next, he lists in
"bullet" style four "Key Accomplishments" in both advertising and marketing,
and names the advertising agencies he has worked for and the accounts he
handled. Reaction from his support
group to all this was negative. "Don't you realize that no ad agency anywhere is hiring anyone your age
these days to do what you propose to do here?" was the candid question raised by
a good friend (thus fulfilling the old adage that "the best mirror is an old
friend.") This close friend
happened to have had years of senior-level ad agency experience in human
resource management.
This is not to say a
"Personal Marketing Plan" succinctly stated is not a good idea; this particular
plan was simply was not the right idea for this job-seeker. The example also illustrates the
understandable tendency we all have to define our potential in terms of our past
achievements. This can be a
strategic error, even for one who wants to remain in the familiar territory of
past employment success. This
tendency can blind a person to other possibilities where skills and experience
from the past can fit nicely into new opportunities in previously unexplored
fields.
Job-seekers typically
labor over the preparation of their resumes and many are never comfortable with
the result. Should it be
chronological, date specific, narrative format, more than one page,
achievement-focused, or what? I
favor the idea of an "overlay" sheet--a crisp, descriptive summary of who you
are and what you've done--that could easily serve to introduce you if you were
giving a speech. Attach it as a cover page to your formal resume, which can be
formatted in whatever style and length you select as best for introducing
yourself to a potential employer. The how-to-do-it books will give you many examples of model resumes, from
one-page career highlights to a full curriculum vitae.
Here is an example of a
succinct "cover-page" statement that worked well for one of the participants in
my study:
NAME
ADDRESS
PHONE
I am looking for a company, or division of a
company, that is not happy with its current revenue or profit growth, or is
simply in trouble. I seek a CEO,
COO, or Senior V.P. position. Areas
in which I have demonstrated special strength are: profit improvement, sales,
marketing, product development, brand identification, manufacturing improvement,
and cost reduction. I have a
consistent record of improving operating results and bringing
companies to a position of national market leadership. I am a strong leader and motivator of
people. My experience includes
acquisitions, new ventures (both high and low tech), divestitures and closures.
International assignments are welcomed. I headed the international company at Ameritech.
My most recent position was as COO at Maxwell
Macmillan where in a period of fifteen months we were able to bring an
unprofitable, troubled business to a point where it was an attractive
acquisition. The business was sold
at a profit.
If you need additional information, please
call--[outplacement office and home
numbers].
This brief summary accompanied a full four-page
resume. The writer eventually moved
into the presidency of a small company.
It will not surprise
you to learn that an accountant was one of the more effective strategic thinkers
and planners among the executives I
interviewed. After a top-level,
commendation-studded executive career for 25 years with the Internal Revenue
Service, this man left government to become a banker in the private sector.
His timing for the exit from the IRS was
fine, but not for subsequent entry into the presidency of a Savings and Loan
operation. He soon found himself
unemployed, without pension or benefits, as the Resolution Trust Corporation
shut down his banking operation.
His first step after
the separation: time off to think. He stimulated his thinking process by reading
What Color Is Your
Parachute? "All of my 32 years
in the workforce had been in the area of accounting, finance, taxes, and
management. I had done quite a bit
of volunteer work for charitable and not-for-profit organizations and found the
experience most rewarding. So,
after giving it a lot of thought, I set out to find a job from my heart and not
my head. I decided to focus on the
not-for-profit sector." It took him
three months to find one--executive director of a church-related publishing
operation with 125 employees and an annual budget of over $8
million.
Fitness of Mind and Body
From the outset,
looking for work was a full-time job for this man. Since, by his estimate, 15 percent of
the jobs were filled by respondents to advertisements (experts would drop that
figure by two-thirds for senior managers), he spent 15 percent of his eight-hour
search-day responding to the ads. He belonged to five networking groups and made it a point "to be on
someone's calendar each day of the week--to get in front of somebody and to walk
away with four or five names." He
became friendly with a research librarian, "a walking encyclopedia," who helped
him get background information on prospective employers. Every Friday afternoon took him to a
place in his suburban Chicago community where updated job listings from the
schools were posted. The remainder of each Friday afternoon was spent filling
out his calendar to make up a full schedule for his next 40-hour week.
A two-mile run was on
his schedule three days a week; both Mass and calisthenics were part of the
daily regimen. And for him, it
worked. "I've never had a more satisfying job and have never been happier," he
told me. As others have remarked,
the bright side of being pushed from the nest is finding that you still have
wings!
A vice president for
communications at a large food conglomerate lost his job at age 42 and had one
full year's severance pay. He spent
"much time," he told me, "analyzing likes, dislikes, past history, goals,
dreams." And then he began "to
explore again, at middle age, with the enthusiasm of a 20-year-old. I read heavily in many fields, saw every
old film I ever wanted to see, learned to play golf and rollerblade, indulged in
long talks with family and friends--the kind we always mean to have but never
get around to." But all of this, he
noted, "came on top of a 40-hour-week search for the right job," which took him
three years to find. Another
respondent, out of work at age 56, "treated each day as if I were gainfully
employed. I appeared at the
outplacement office before 9:00 each morning and did not leave until 5:00.
I made sure that each hour in between
contributed in a defined way to the job-search process." Within six months he had a new job with
more responsibility and higher pay.
An ex-IBMer, an
accountant by training but a systems manager for the corporation, did none of
the above and lost time and money as a result. Not only did he not do any serious
self-assessment, he neglected to check carefully before committing himself to a
franchising opportunity that took him to a distant state and cost him $35,000
before he cut his losses after about a year. He moved his family back to where they
had lived before, and then figured out what he wanted to do. His advice to any displaced executive
sitting down to map a job-seeking strategy: "Focus on your education and past
experience; they will always be part of you. You may want to separate yourself from
them altogether, but don't do that without first being convinced that they
aren't going to work for you in opening up new opportunities." He had never bothered to sit for his
CPA, having stepped right out of college into the corporation to begin a
successful career that lasted 22 years. He could have stayed with IBM, as he had planned, to age 55 ("I always
knew I wouldn't stay a second longer"), but at age 46 he "had grown tired of the
culture" and decided to take an attractive severance while that window was still
open. (At IBM they now call this
the ITO, the "individual transition option.") After the franchising misfire and the
return to his roots, it dawned on him that he really liked accounting and could
succeed in private practice. He
took a CPA exam-preparation course, passed the test on his first try, framed his
certificate, and went into business for himself. "Happiness is being your own boss," he
says contentedly.
Two weeks after having
lunch in New York with Kevin Dolan, an experienced human resources executive who
is singularly generous and
effective in helping others find work, and who was himself, at that time, eight
months unemployed, I received a letter from him saying that reflection on our conversation prompted him
to put on paper the "key lessons" he has learned while in transition. These come from his personal job-search
experience and also from running support groups for other job-seekers over the
past four years. He prefaced his
list with the general observation that "anyone who is unemployed must avoid the
debilitative feeling of hopelessness, powerlessness, loneliness, and little
control of one's life"--the common experience of job-seekers. He therefore "laid out a program to
minimize these negative feelings as much as possible." Here are his suggestions for "a solid
job campaign that will allow one to maintain one's dignity and a positive upbeat
attitude during the difficult transition of unemployment." What follows in Categories I, II, and
III is all Kevin Dolan.
Category I -- Personal Actions
Attitude--This is the most important aspect of a job
search. It is a time to grow, try
new things, meet stimulating and exciting people, and smell the roses. Recognizing it is a transition (it will
end) and that it is a unique opportunity to do things that one cannot normally
do while working can energize one to be excited about the job search and
challenge. A positive mental
attitude is the key to a successful job search.
Spiritual--This is the province of prayer, church,
ministers, soulmates, and inspirational meetings. All are needed to maintain the positive
attitude. The extra time one has
during a job search allows for some deep reflection on life and its
mysteries. I started most days with
20 minutes of spiritual reading and ended with 15 minutes of reflection at
night.
Physical Fitness--While working, most of us don't have time to
exercise properly. Now there are no
excuses. It is important to set
some goals here. Mine were to lose
between 15 and 20 pounds, and to walk 45 minutes a day at least six days a
week. I have done this and it gives
me a feeling of control and success (weight loss). It also keeps the mind in shape; nature
is wonderful in uplifting one's spirit.
Mental Fitness--This is a great opportunity to read all those
books you could never get to. My
goal was to read a new book every two weeks or two books a month on
average. I chose books that were
inspirational, motivational, businesslike, and religious. Some books that I have read include:
Covey's The Seven Habits of Highly Effective People; Tichy's Control
Your Own Destiny (Or Someone Else Will); Transitions by
Bridges; Seven Story Mountain by Merton; Lester Thurow's Head
to Head; some of the works of William James, Ralph Waldo Emerson, and
Thoreau; Sheehan's Personal Best, and numerous religious pocket
books. I have personally found that
when I was feeling low or depressed, a nature walk and an inspirational book
lifted my spirits tremendously.
[The "nature walk"
prescription recommended by Kevin Dolan and many others I met during the course
of this study, reminds me of lines from one of Countee Cullen's poems: "And I am
somewhere worlds away/ In God's rich autumn tinted lanes,/ Where heart at ease
from life's dismay,/ My soul's high song beats back the
rains."]
Financial Management--To assure peace of mind and avoid panic, I took
out an extended home equity line to provide sufficient
income
to ensure survival over a 12-month period of
unemployment. Additionally, a
zero-based budget (critical items only) allows me to see exactly what a given
month's shortfall is and how much I should be borrowing from home equity. This is my fiscal
conscience.
Family--Your relationship to both spouse and children is
key to maintaining your positive attitude. Regular family meetings are important.
You must always be honest and frank with
your family, but you have to try to remain positive, optimistic, and in control
offering reassurances about finances and job leads. Without communicating false expectations
about a job, you have to feel and act as if one is just around the corner.
You keep their spirits up by telling
them about the people you are meeting and the network you are
building.
Category II -- Outside Activities
Support Group--To keep your spirits up, you must have a support
group or two. More than three groups is counterproductive. Avoid becoming a support group "junkie,"
moving from group to group instead of developing your own wider network of
personal contacts. It is also
personally uplifting to do some pro-bono, charitable work.
Friends and Acquaintances--This is a time to lean on your friends for moral
support over lunch, coffee, golf, and meetings to develop network contacts.
Friends keep you sane and help you
realize that you haven't changed. Genuine friends will shine in this period.
Networking--This, of course, is a key element in your
job-search strategy, although it is often over used, even abused. It is important to learn how to network
and not be intrusive or overbearing in the process. Divide your network contacts into two
groups: (a) Job Source Leads--persons who can connect you with decision
makers, or are themselves decision makers; and (b) Stimulating
People--real friends, soulmates, clergy, psychologists, anyone who can make
you feel good and lift your spirits. I set goals of 10-15 new network calls a week, usually resulting in a
half dozen future meetings; the rest (those with whom meetings were not
arranged) received a letter and my resume. One or two of my weekly appointments are with friends or "inspirational"
contacts as a means of keeping the spirits up. I know that outplacement firms often
recommend that 15-20 networking calls be made each day, but I would be wary of
overload and burnout. Be sure, after each appointment, to send a follow-up
letter of thanks.
Category III -- Overall Tips
Active Lifestyle--This is essential to a stimulating job
search. Sitting at home waiting for
the phone to ring is debilitating; you should get out of the house every day,
preferably to an office or to a desk with a phone. Friends can be very helpful
here--providing space, keeping you active, goal-oriented, and motivated. This is the way to avoid feelings of
loneliness and helplessness. All
you need is access (for just a half day, two or three days a week) to a desk,
phone, and fax.
Pacing and Balance--Like any new job or endeavor, your transition
activity requires that you learn to pace yourself and balance your time evenly
across the spectrum. This is not
easy; it is also a matter of your unique, individual choice. I found that I would normally go to my
office in New York [space provided by former employer] three or four days a week
and spend a day or two at home in New Jersey making appointments for the other
days. Having an answering machine
at home, of course, helps a lot.
Balance is so
important! You can burn out during
a job search faster than you can under conditions of full-time employment.
That is why the spiritual motivation and
personal reflection are needed to maintain your sense of wonder and appreciation
of life even in this difficult time of transition.
Kevin Dolan and others
will suggest that, if you are a golfer, you should make time for the game during
your job campaign. This is not just to weave new networking contacts, but to
maintain a proper balance in your life. I was amused by a comment about golf that novelist David Noonan puts on
the lips of his character Jim Mooney in Memoirs of a Caddy (Simon &
Schuster), and I'm grateful to New York Times book critic, Christopher
Lehmann-Haupt for highlighting it in his review: "One of the appeals of golf is
that you can do all the things you would normally do in a bar while engaging in
an actual sport--you can eat, drink, talk and smoke cigarettes." While in transition, you should use the
game, if you enjoy it, for needed recreation but also as a context for
reflection on yourself. Consider the game of golf as a metaphor for the course
of you own career; it can be a lens for the examination of your life. Golfers are by definition
achievement-oriented; it is instructive to observe how they deal with success
and failure on the course. As a
regular caddy at a country club about an hour's drive from New York City, Jim
Mooney, the novel's 17-year old narrator, has become something of a judge of
character viewed through the framework of a player's conduct on the course.
Here is how he sizes up one Sean
Butterworth: "Sean was a good golfer with a bad temper that kept him from being
a great golfer. Great golfers
expect to make bad shots now and then and when they do they learn from them and
then let them go. Not Sean. He hated bad shots and when he made one
he got mad at himself and the world and cursed and threw clubs and talked to
himself and got all worked up and then, very often, followed the first bad shot
with another just as bad or even worse. The energized calm that golf required, the relaxed tension of it, eluded
him. He wanted to kill the
ball."
You can learn a lot
about yourself from your approach to the game of golf. Some job-seekers learn that it is better
to leave the clubs in the bag and just go for a long walk!
Personal Finances
Dolan and others warn
that you must be careful about personal finances. In addition to looking for work, you
have to talk to creditors, reduce expenses and be realistic. Know with precision what your fixed and
variable expenses have been over the past year or so. Be realistic as you look at the year
ahead. For instance, if the winter
months are approaching, you know that higher fuel bills are coming. Don't use last October's gas bill to
estimate your monthly outlay; use December. This is some of the practical advice for
the jobless Mary A. Malgoire, a financial planner, gave in an interview with The Washington Post (October 21, 1990). "And if you use oil, take the
number of gallons from last year, but use this year's prices." The next step is to total up your liquid
or near-liquid assets, including severance pay, and divide that total by your
monthly expenses. There you have
the number of months you can manage without new income. If it is not too late, negotiate with
your employer for generous severance, outplacement services, help with the
health insurance premiums that you will otherwise have to pay yourself, and
technical assistance on how to handle the tax implications of what you do with
your pension plan.
Be sure to talk to
creditors and prepare yourself for pleasant surprises. The wife of an out-of-work manager told
me she will shop at Sears as long as she lives "because they were so human and
helpful in carrying us, without penalty, over a very difficult year." Your creditors are interested in you and
your money; they will only alienate you and lose the money if you and they are
unable to "work something out."
"Professionalize" the Search
You will have noticed
already that conflicting, not necessarily contradictory advice will come your
way. What works for some might not
work for others. What some
recommend as an essential early step might be recommended as a later move by
others. You have to decide what's
best for you after consideration of what has worked for those who have travelled
this road before you. However you
choose to sequence the process, be sure to "professionalize" it. That's the advice of
a veteran executive search consultant
who spoke to me of the advice he gives to the typical displaced male manager:
"When you lather up tomorrow morning, look at yourself. You can't let yourself say, 'I'm not
important anymore.' So
professionalize the search process for yourself. Take it as a challenge.
Get your employer to provide you with
space, secretary, and fax. Whatever
you do, don't do it at home!" One
of the participants in my study, a very senior partner in a national accounting
firm, reported that he "maintained professionalism" after forced retirement, and
this was key to his successful transition.
The sad fact of the
matter is that the interval between jobs is lengthening for many managers.
Patience, as well as professionalism
must be maintained, and adjustment to the search strategy must be made by
longer-term job seekers. An article
in the business section of The New York Times (July 18, 1993) speaks of
"the after-18-months strategy." Craig E. Schneier, a management consultant, is quoted: "A year is almost
some sort of grace period; a prospective employer is willing to attribute that
to a tough economy. But 18 months
is when it starts to get dicey. You
need some strategies to crawl out of the hole that time puts you in." One of the recommended strategies is to
do something other than looking for work. This is not to suggest that you give up the search, but continue it in
harness with other productive, although uncompensated, work--volunteering your
services to a charitable organization, for example, and using your professional
skills in that volunteer activity. "If all you've done is stand in the unemployment line," says Mr.
Schneier, "it's going to start to show." If, however, you've professionalized your search to the extent of making
time for unpaid community service that uses the same skills you are trying to
market, you can, after 18 or more months of unemployment, have something
positive to show when you present yourself for an interview. Otherwise, both you and your search show
all the signs of failure.
From the ashes of your
own discontent, confusion, anger, and injured pride, you now have to build your
reconnection strategy. You know
that Step One is self-assessment and Step Two is drawing up your mission
statement. All the steps that
follow need not fall in ordered sequence; circumstances will suggest different
steps at different times for different persons pursuing their individual job
campaigns.
Dick Wedemeyer,
co-author of In Transition, the book I recommended above, thinks it is a
good idea not only to view yourself as a "corporation," but to appoint for
yourself a "board of directors." I
would recommend this step as a good strategic move. I heard Wedemeyer discuss
this idea in a presentation he made to about 50 white-collar job-seekers
assembled in a mid-town Manhattan corporate auditorium, where they meet once a
month to listen to an expert and share ideas. Your board of five or six "directors"
does not have to meet. They are "there" for you, however, individually at the
end of a phone line at any time; or, if you really perfect this art, you can
convene them by conference call to get their reaction to whatever you propose
about yourself and your job plan. Boards do not manage; they oversee management and set policy.
You can benefit from the reaction of
firm but friendly overseers to you and any or all elements of your
strategy.
Inviting others to
react to you is a humbling, but necessary strategic step. One person who did this learned that
"I had a frown in my voice" when
speaking on the phone. The
suggested remedy: "Install a mirror near your phone and check often to make sure
you are smiling when you talk to anyone who doesn't know you well, but who might
help you find employment." Solitary
self-assessment cannot detect that sort of thing; frank reaction from a trusted
friend to you and to the way you "come across," can. This is what George Herbert must have
had in mind when he remarked, "The best mirror is an old friend."
Your board of directors
will be particularly helpful if you are at all inclined toward opening a
franchise or going into business for yourself, particularly in a recession.
Hesitancy about laying out such plans,
with all the numbers, is a sure sign that you haven't given the matter
sufficient thought. And that's what
boards are for: to make sure your plans are well thought out, that you are not
undercapitalized, that you have not underestimated the length of your sales
cycle, before you go into business for yourself.
Similarly, having one
of your board members as an editor (and spell-checker!) of anything you commit
to paper is a good idea. This is
more common-sense, standard operating procedure than basic strategy, but it is
insurance against the embarrassment (that's two r's and two s's) of misspelled
words, grammatical mistakes, and poor style. Elimination of the "uhm's," "ah's," "you
know's," "like's," "I mean's" and "stuff"
from your oral presentations will not happen unless
a friendly critic rings some kind of a bell for you upon hearing them. Grammatical errors, "just between you
and I," are the spoken equivalent of bad breath in a job
interview.
Within the comfort and
confines of a support group, you can "role play" the job interview. This is always beneficial, even moreso
when recorded on videotape so that you can function as your most severe
critic. But the criticism you need
should go beyond style into substance. For example, one job-seeker I tried to assist was good with words, but
not-so-good at keeping his partisan political prejudices, really ideological
biases, to himself. If you are an
ideologue, you should avoid, during a job interview, discussion of government
policies and their impact on the economy (even though you are convinced that
those policies cost you your job). The man I have in mind could not resist bad-mouthing current political
leadership and praising the defeated persons and party of the previous
administration. It had not occurred
to him that he ran the risk of alienating an interviewer whose political points
of view, not to mention biases, were not congruent with his own. Instead, I encouraged him to read the
business press and current business authors, like Emshoff and Handy, so that he
could build a mental file of topical points for intelligent conversation about
business and its environment. The objective is to impress, not alienate, the
interviewer. Sometimes you need a
friendly critic to keep you from forgetting that.
It is also good
strategy for the job-seeker (and good sense for anyone intent upon broadening
his or her ensemble of skills) to practice writing. Let your written sentences fall like
pebbles to the ground, someone once advised me. This means direct, concise, crisp, clear
writing. If you possess that skill,
it will serve you well on a daily basis in any managerial position. Letters,
memos, speeches, discussion papers, occasional articles and even books--these
are arrows in the executive's quiver, implements in the managerial
tool-kit. An executive with whom I
discussed this study told me that he looks for writing skills in persons he
hires and uses the following procedure to evaluate their potential for writing
well. At the conclusion of the
interview, he invites the candidate to sit down at a desk in an outer office to
"write a summary paragraph or two of the highlights of our conversation; I'd
like to be sure we have a clear mutual understanding of what we discussed and
I'll keep what you write as part of the record of our meeting." He does this for two good reasons.
First to find out whether or not the
job-applicant can, unassisted,
write well. Second, to see if the person thinks
clearly and really grasped the essentials of the conversation.
Readers of the novel,
The Man in the Gray Flannel Suit, will recall the interview the job-seeking protagonist
Tom Rath had at the United Broadcasting Corporation. He met with "a fat pale man sitting in a
high-backed upholstered chair behind a kidney-shaped desk with nothing on it but
a blotter and pen." The
interview concluded with the question, "Can you write?" The startled applicant was given a
typewriter, a cubicle and one hour to write his "autobiography." "Write anything you want, but at the end
of your last page, I'd like you to finish this sentence: 'The most significant
fact about me is...'"
So, although the idea
may not be altogether original with the executive who described for me his way
of screening candidates, I mention his unusual but not unfair practice by way of
encouraging job-seekers to hone their writing skills. You never know!
Among those you select for service on
your "board" or membership in your support group should be persons capable of
critiquing your writing.
Practicing your
communications skills fits right in with advice conveyed to job-seekers by a
short note in the Wall Street Journal's "Labor Letter" (May 11,
1993) under the heading: "Stay Active, personnel professionals advise
the unemployed." The newspaper
surveyed outplacement consultants, executive recruiters, and personnel managers
who suggest that "people out of work should do volunteer work, take classes,
learn a new language" and give some thought to "making speeches, lecturing at
schools and contributing to industry publications." If you include writing-for-publication
in your job-search strategy (understanding "publication" to include op-ed essays
or just letters-to-the-editor), you may find yourself with an impressive piece
of published writing to append to your resume or job-application. That can work to your comparative
advantage by clearly setting you apart from other
applicants.
Keeping your board of
directors in place, at least for awhile, after you return to work is a good
idea. Many reconnected managers
live in fear that separation is going to happen again. Dick Hanscom, Director of Operations of
the Career Initiatives Center in Cleveland, told me that one CIC client found a
job but waited six weeks before telling Dick of his good fortune. His reason?
Fear that he would lose the job or prove
not up to it. Dick's advice for
dealing with this fear is to find a "mentor" in your new employment setting and
also keep in touch with a support group--the board of directors
idea.
You may not need a
board of directors or consultants to advise you in the financial aspects of your
search, but the availability of that kind of advice has been helpful to
many. Refinancing your mortgage can
be facilitated by seeing knowledgeable friends before you talk to the
bankers. An important piece of the
financial question is your estimate of what you need and want by way of salary
and benefits from your next employer. Although no one linked his or her thinking in this regard to the reported
Japanese practice of often reducing compensation for older workers, some of the
job seekers I spoke to, whose most recent employment was very highly paid,
acknowledged a willingness to work for considerably less. They reasoned that top jobs for them
were more likely to open up in smaller firms and the pay levels would not be
what they had received in the recent past. But their homes were clear, their
children out of college, and only their pride, not their reasonable need, urged
them to seek top dollar. Once free
psychologically to work for less, they became enthusiastic about taking jobs
with fewer perks and lower salaries. A constant in the compensation calculus, however, is the need for
adequate, lifetime health insurance if the person is returning to a payroll, or
a sufficiently high income stream to afford full health coverage, for those
planning to free-lance or otherwise go it alone.
One of my respondents,
age 52, who lost his position as vice president and treasurer of a college,
advises those willing to listen not to cut themselves off from others in their
field, "no matter how secure your position seems to be." Keep debt down and, when you lose your
job, "be prepared to accept less in dollars so that you can establish a platform
for a serious job search." He
thinks that "too many outplacement advisers are telling people to wait for the
six-figure opportunity." You won't
get that advice from Bill Morin who says a good working principle for the
job-seeker is "take a job to get a job."
The "how-to-do-it"
books go into much detail about salary negotiations for your next job. I found considerable unease in the minds
and hearts of job-seekers as they anticipated having conversations on this point
with prospective employers. They
typically wanted the job more than they wanted the best possible salary for
doing that job, and they feared losing the job opportunity by naming an
excessive salary expectation. They
also were familiar with the conventional wisdom that the one who specifies a
number first, loses the salary negotiation. And, of course, no one wants to be
"taken" in salary negotiations.
My suggestion to an
anxious job-seeker in these circumstances would be simply to say to a
prospective employer at the opportune time, "Look, you know what the market is
these days and what this position would typically command; perhaps you feel you
are unable to meet that number right now. I know what that number is too, and maybe I'd be willing to work for you
for less. My house is clear; my
kids are out of college. My needs are not what they were five years ago. So lets try to settle on a number right
now and agree to look at it again in six months, when you'll have a better
measure of my 'value added,' as well as a better handle on your ability to
pay."
Another factor to be
considered when you size up the organization you might decide to join for the
next stage of your career, is the likelihood of change in the composition of the
Board of Directors or those in top management to whom you will be
reporting. The probability of
involuntary separation rises dramatically when a senior-level manager finds him-
or herself reporting to a new CEO or working with a reorganized board. You should be wary of walking into a
situation where personnel changes at the higher levels could mean derivative
turnover that could affect you. Although most of your strategic thinking and decisions center primarily
on you, your needs, and what you bring to a new employment situation, you cannot
afford not to survey your prospective employer for present fit and future
stability.
Many transitioning
executives speak of the need to watch personal expenses, trim vacation plans,
reduce entertainment outlays, and defer maintenance on automobiles and other
property. One, however, turned this
belt-tightening tendency into a do-it-yourself, confidence-building
strategy. "I continued my regular
work schedule and fitness routine," he told me. "My average workday was 10 hours.
I curtailed entertainment and did
cost-saving things like cooking and car repairs in order to build my confidence
and extend my ability to live well without income." Resourcefulness along these lines should
be part of any job-search strategy. You have to stay social; you can't drop out.
"Fishing with my sons"
was an element factored into his transition strategy by one man. "I'm glad I decided to do that," he told
me, "because we had never fished together before and we continue to do it now
that I'm back at work."
Read Your Way Back to Work
Books should be
factored into your job-search strategy. Some books will provide how-to-do-it help focused on the specifics of
preparing your resume, presenting yourself in interviews, negotiating salary,
and avoiding pitfalls along the way. Other books will broaden your outlook, deepen your self-understanding,
and sharpen your awareness of what is happening in the world of work. Let a good librarian, not just a job
counsellor, be your guide, and use the library to keep up with newspapers and
periodical literature, particularly the business and technical journals. If, by the way, you want the job
seeker's equivalent of one-stop-shopping for practical information, ask your
reference librarian for the 1131-page Job Hunter's Sourcebook: Where to Find Employment Leads and
Other Job Search Resources, edited by Michelle LeCompte (Detroit:
Gale Research, Inc., 1993). Bob
Adams, Inc. publishes a "Job Bank" series--e.g., The Carolina Job Bank, The Los Angeles Job Bank, and about 20 others that provide current and
comprehensive information for job-seekers in specific geographic areas.
As promised, I will
pass along to you now, information about some of the reading my interviewees
have found helpful. I will cluster
book titles, with brief comments on their contents, under headings that
correspond to the main themes of this book--the self you serve, spousal support,
dealing with discouragement, the relevance of religion, and the new corporate
culture.
THE SELF YOU
SERVE will be helped enormously by one or all of the three books mentioned
earlier in this chapter. What
Color Is Your Parachute? A Practical Manual for Job Hunters &
Career Changers, by Richard Nelson Bolles (Ten Speed Press) drills
home the point that you must come to grasp and fully appreciate: "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. Cut no
corners, take no shortcuts." This
book was mentioned more than any other by those I interviewed, and given high
marks for its practical utility.
Richard A. Wedemeyer
and Mary Lindley Burton drew on their experience with the Harvard Business
School Club of New York's Career Development Seminar to co-author In
Transition (Harper Business). Believe them when they say, "The biggest factor in the success or failure
of your job search is your state of mind." And read what they have to offer by way of practical advice so that you
can connect your steady-state, positively-oriented mind with an effective,
pre-tested search strategy.
Parting Company: How
to Survive the Loss of a Job and Find Another Successfully (Harcourt
Brace Jovanovich), written by William J. Morin and James C. Cabrera, the two top
executives of the outplacement firm of Drake Beam Morin, draws valuable
information from, as the authors say, DBM's "knowledge base," and puts it all in
one place, between the covers of this helpful book. The authors are "career continuation
consultants" who have found that despite the changing corporate climate, "one
thing has remained the same: the reaction of a person who loses a job." You may see yourself in the person they
describe. "Almost everyone
encounters shock, anger, and surprise, plus a psychological inability to deal
with these unpleasant emotions and a host of practical problems connected to
finding a new job or choosing a new direction." Their book addresses these practical
problems.
If you are not ready to
go immediately to the practical, try John W. Gardner's Self-Renewal: The
Individual and the Innovative Society (Harper), a short widsom-packed
paperback. This book first appeared
thirty years ago, so the author was clearly ahead of his time in saying, before
the word "downsizing" was coined, that "top management can put its finger on
almost any function within the organization and decree that henceforth that
function will be performed by an outside organization on contract." This book will help you understand an
important point: "In the ever-renewing society what matures is a system or
framework within which continuous innovation, renewal and rebirth can
occur." It will also help you
figure out how to become part of that system, and how to function within that
framework.
Many of my respondents
praised Stephen R. Covey's The Seven Habits of Highly Effective
People: Powerful Lessons in Personal Change (Simon &
Schuster). This is a book to be
read with felt-tip pen in hand (as,
for that matter, are all books that belong to you and not to a library or one of
your friends!), so that you can underline the basic argument. It is not by any means abstruse, just a
bit involved as it traces out for you a "character ethic," buttressed with seven
basic principles, around which you can organize your life.
SPOUSAL SUPPORT
will be more readily forthcoming and sustained during the job-search if Deborah
Tannen's You Just Don't Understand: Women and Men in Conversation
(Ballantine) is read and appreciated. The author is a professor of linguistics, whose work rests on solid
psychological grounds. I would
recommend that "His" and "Hers" copies (the book is inexpensive) be read
separately by each partner, taking care to underline for the other what each
thinks the other needs to know. In
effect, with the exchange of the underlined copies, each can say to the other,
"Here, this is what 'You Just Don't Understand' about me and the way I converse
with you."
One couple I worked
with during the course of this project highly recommend John Gray's Men Are
From Mars, Women Are From Venus: A Practical Guide for Improving Communication and Getting
What You Want in Your Relationships (HarperCollins). Forget about the subtitle and just
consider what you might learn from the text appearing under these several
headings: "How Men Unknowingly Start Arguments," "How Women Unknowingly Start
Arguments," "When He Needs Her Approval The Most," "How To Express Your
Differences Without Arguing," "Giving Support At Difficult Times." And there are many more.
The woman in the couple that brought
this book to my attention "had no idea" that all men, including her husband,
needed occasionally to "go to their caves," to withdraw. Nor did he realize that she, like other
women, is like a wave. "When she
feels loved," says Gray, "her self-esteem rises and falls in a wave motion.
When she is feeling really good, she
will reach a peak, but then suddenly her mood may change and her wave crashes
down. This crash is temporary. After she reaches bottom suddenly her
mood will shift and she will again feel good about herself. Automatically her wave begins to rise
back up."
DEALING WITH
DISCOURAGEMENT may require that you put yourself on The Road Less
Travelled, M. Scott Peck's book that is subtitled: A New Psychology of Love,
Traditional Values and Spiritual Growth (Simon & Schuster). Peck is a psychiatrist who acknowledges
that at an earlier stage in his life, "during the process of giving up my desire
to always win [at games] I was depressed. This is because the feeling associated with giving up something loved--or
at least something that is a part of ourselves and familiar--is depression.
Since mentally healthy human beings must
grow, and since giving up or loss of the old self is an integral part of the
process of mental and spiritual growth, depression is a normal and basically
healthy phenomenon. It becomes
abnormal or unhealthy only when something interferes with the giving-up process,
with the result that the depression is prolonged and cannot be resolved by the
completion of the process." A
number of my respondents found this book to be quite helpful.
Also helpful is Gilbert
Brim's Ambition: How We Manage Success and Failure Throughout Our Lives
(Basic Books). A theme that runs
throughout this book is the need we have to live in a way that keeps us at a
level of "just manageable difficulties," a phrase Brim borrows from the
psychologist Nicholas Hobbs. Failure to do that can generate a lot of discouragement.
A technique for keeping difficulties
manageable is what Brim calls, "scaling down the dream." I have often thought of this in terms of
facing up to the tyranny that can come upon us from the promises we make to
ourselves. Brim concludes a chapter
on "Changing Levels of Aspiration" with these words: "Some aspirations are of
little importance to us, and we can reduce them with ease. Others mean more to us, and we may never
get over our failure to fulfill them. Psychiatrists may say that giving up part of our lives should cause
mourning over the loss. This may
indeed happen during the transition, and may last longer than that in some
cases. But the more likely emotion
is joy at finally ridding ourselves of hopes that have turned heavy with
disappointment. In the end it is
relief, not grief, we feel as we relax into a state of lowered
ambition."
THE RELEVANCE OF
RELIGION came through in a variety of ways during this study, as the contents of
Chapter Six can attest. Religious
books, notably the Bible, were mentioned often, and within the Bible, the Psalms
and Book of Job were mentioned most frequently. The Bible is a source, as I noted in
Chapter Eight, for principles that, once internalized, can guide a life as well
as a job-search. With the spiritual
needs of job-seekers in mind, I edited 125 of the 150 Psalms for a book that
borrows its title from the 27th Psalm: Take Courage; Be Stouthearted:
Psalms
of Support and Encouragement (Sheed & Ward).
This is an area where
near-religious and explicitly religious "little books" are both treasured and
traded within support groups. The
respondent whose religious commitment I described as "Main Street traditional"
in Chapter Six, lives by Russell H. Conwell's tiny tract Acres of
Diamonds (Jove Books/Berkley Publishing Group). This executive freely distributes copies
to job-seeking friends so that they can get Conwell's motivational message to,
in effect, "bloom where you are planted." The story is based on an Arab tale about a man who sold his home and
property to search for a diamond mine, only to die a pauper never knowing that
the property he sold rested atop an "acre of diamonds."
Jean-Pierre de
Caussade's Abandonment to Divine Providence (Doubleday Image Books) is a
Christian classic that speaks to the soul of the troubled believer who is
invited by this booklet to accept its basic proposition: "All will be well if we
abandon ourselves to God." This and
another short book, Daily Readings from the Cloud of Unknowing
(Templegate), are distributed like business cards to job-seekers by a senior
executive who has himself been through several involuntary
separations.
An ex-IBM executive
told me that he has personally given away about 200 copies of Fenelon's Let
Go (Whitaker) and Granger E. Westberg's Good Grief (Fortress), books
that he found helpful in managing the emotional and spiritual crisis his
unemployment produced.
He Leadeth Me
(Doubleday Image Books; now available from Georgetown University Press) is a
spiritual reflection, a "testament of faith," written by an American Jesuit
priest, Walter J. Ciszek, who was "convicted" of espionage in Russia in 1941
spent 23 years in Soviet prisons and the labor camps of Siberia. "Through the long years of isolation and
suffering," writes Fr. Ciszek, "God had led me to an understanding of life and
his love that only those who have experienced it can fathom. He had stripped away from me many of the
external consolations, physical and religious, that men rely on and had left me
with a core of seemingly simple truths to guide me. And yet what a profound difference they
made in my life, what strength they gave me, what courage to go
on!"
THE NEW CORPORATE
CONTRACT is a phrase I heard often as displaced managers mumbled about the
"contract with corporate America" being broken. I mentioned earlier, James R. Emshoff's
The New Rules of the Game: The Four Key Experiences Managers Must Have
to Thrive in the Non-Hierarchical 90s and Beyond (Harper Business), a book I
read after conversations with Emshoff and recommended to others as a source of
informed "talking points" for managers preparing for job interviews. Management "closer to the ground," which
also means "closer to the customer," is not trendy, but a genuine new trend that
has explanatory value at either end of the hiring-firing decision process.
In other words, this trend could serve
to explain your release as well as explaining your prospects for
re-employment.
A book that influenced
Emshoff and many others is Charles Handy's The Age of Unreason (Harvard
Business School Press). The writer is British, a fact that may provide helpful
perspective for his view of corporate America. He writes: "The new organization will
seek to bind its core executives to itself for as long as it thinks it needs
them. The new executives, however,
will be less ready to be tied, particularly if they have some sort of
qualification as a passport.... Companies...will be reluctant to guarantee
careers for life to everyone, even in the core. More contracts will be for fixed periods
of years; more appointments will be tied to particular roles or jobs with no
guarantee of further promotion. The
help-wanted pages of the papers already reflect this trend: the advertisements
offer a job more often than they promise a career."
A book with an
industry-specific starting point but written to broaden the thinking of
displaced executives who consider themselves wedded to that one industry, is Career Alternatives for Bankers (Magellan Press), co-authored by William
King, Dean Graber, and Rebecca Newton, and "sponsored by" the American Bankers
Association. The first 100 pages of
this book convey helpful advice to anyone, not just those with career
backgrounds in banking. The
applicability of banking skills to opportunities in other fields covers more
than half of this book and ranges from "banking outsourcers" through education,
government, real estate, insurance, self-employment and other
possibilities. Included to
stimulate the thinking of the more venturesome reader is a "Directory of
Outsourcers and Other Companies Selling Products and Services to
Banks."
I heard many
job-seekers refer to John Lucht's Rites of Passage at $100,000+
(Viceroy); its lengthy subtitle--"The Insider's Lifetime Guide to Executive
Job-Changing and Faster Career Progress"--provides a hint that is confirmed in
the first chapter. "As an
upwardly-mobile executive, there's a good chance that sometime during your
career you'll be involved with all the 'professions' that move executives
around. Therefore, it's worthwhile
to take this once-and-for-all-in-a-hurry opportunity to see how you should deal
with each to best serve your self interest, which often does not
match theirs." Although helpful to
the out-of-work executive, this book is more suitable for those who are fully
employed but anxious to move onward and upward, often with the assistance of
executive search consultants. Readers will get the promised "insider's" look at the different ways
recruiters work; they will also be introduced to a variety of search techniques
that can be implemented on their own. Displaced executives will find much to help them in this book.
In my view, most helpful of all for the
ousted executive attempting a rebound will be the hard-headed assessment of what
works and does not work in "Networking: Pursuing the People You Don't Know"
(Chapter Four).
Intended to help you
think ahead is Reengineering the Corporation by Michael Hammer and James
Champy (Harper Business). The central thesis of the book is "that American
corporations must undertake nothing less than a radical reinvention of how they
do their work." Read it so that you
can understand what is happening out there and thus be more likely to reconnect
with an organization that is not standing still.
Put Your Thoughts on Paper
You have heard it said often, no doubt, in this age of nutritional
awareness, "You are what you eat;" you are familiar with the good advice about
diet, cholesterol, and calories associated with that dictum. Consider, as you are laying out your
job-search strategy, that it is not too wide of the mark to suggest that "You
think what you read." So look
around for reading material that can keep you thinking, not just strategically
about your job campaign, but deeply about the meaning of life. The point of mentioning this here, of
course, is to acknowledge that there should be a place for scheduled reading
time in the structured day your search strategy imposes on you (and in all the
days that follow, once you are back at work but still in need of intellectual
broadening and mental nourishment).
Your strategic Step One
statement of who you are, composed after reflection and self-assessment, might
well take the form of a "Letter to Myself," for your eyes only, if you want to
keep it that way, or shared with others as you wish. You should read it once a month during a
job search, and this for two reasons: to see if your activities are consistent
with who you say you are; and to consider if more recent reading and reflection
may now prompt you to make revisions in this personal base-line
document.
Step Two of your
job-search strategy also requires that you reduce your thoughts to writing, in
this instance stating clearly what you want to do. This is the statement of your
mission. It is a more "public"
document, even though personal and brief. For you personally and privately, it can function as a foreword in your
search-strategy "playbook," the longer list of strategic steps you intend to
take. Your desk-calendar should now
become for you a planning tool, as quantifiable goals--contacts made, people
interviewed, books read, miles walked, journal entries made, days off--are
specified and written down.
A job search does not
mean that you are starting all over again. You are simply changing. To
live is to change. You do, however,
have a blank page in front of you that requires immediate attention. For every question running through your
mind, look for an answer from within. Consider yourself an author. The strategic plan is your story outline; get it down on paper.
Don't succumb to "writer's block." Start working on that story now with the
unshakable conviction that there is someone, somewhere, not just interested in
what you have to say, but ready and willing to "buy your book."