Toiling away at our daily grind, we dream of running away to Hawaii or the South Pacific where we can lie on the beach and do absolutely nothing.

Some of us are lucky enough to take a vacation there and temporarily cut ourselves off from the world of responsibilities and demands and worries. We breathe easier, sleep deeper, eat more heartily. It is truly paradise.

It's wonderful because we have a life waiting to be reclaimed when we step off the plane. Our job is waiting for us and we go back to work with renewed energy and zest from our long overdue break.

It is like the first few days of unemployment, that honeymoon period when we find ourselves with extra time on our hands and no reason to get up early or fight the rush hour traffic. But honeymoons are not designed to last forever and it is only when they are over, that reality and the hard work of building a marriage starts.

The obvious stressors of unemployment are widely recognized: financial strains, the drudgery and frequent humiliation of job search, the family disruption, the loss of self-confidence and self-esteem. While none of these can be lightly dismissed, we are going to concentrate for a moment on an area that is often overlooked. It can cause inner turmoil, pain, significantly increase the emotional fallout of layoff, and exacerbate the depression, anxiety, and negative self-view that so often follow.

To feel productive seems to be an inherent human need. We feel good about ourselves when we are contributing -- to our own independence, to our family, to our community. Many of the great discoveries, inventions, and explorations of history were made by individuals born to family wealth who had no need to ever lift a finger to ensure adequate self-support. Yet these individuals wanted to contribute to the world in some way and left their homes, worked through the night, and even died trying to be part of some enterprise.

Those who sat back on their laurels, and never found any venture to engage them, lead empty lives, drifting through their days without personal value or commitment. Today we see their empty faces in the society pages and read the tabloids to hear about their drug problems and their tawdry efforts to find excitement and meaning.

Those of us - most of us - who have no choice but to work, dream of having enough money to have a choice. Few of us really want to drift around the world without goals or ambition. We simply want to do something meaningful to us rather than the career we fell into which has long since lost its charm and excitement.

It is when that career, boring and humdrum though it may be, is suddenly taken away, that we realize how much of ourselves is invested in the role we have worn for so long. Our belief in our own value is tied up and interdependent with our productivity. We feel a vital part of our marital partnership, someone our children respect and follow, an important person in our community who has earned the right to voice an opinion or vote for a principle. We bear ourselves with a certain pride in that we are bonafide members of the working class and clearly differentiate ourselves from those who fail to contribute: the welfare class, the criminals, the idle rich, the various parasites who dot the fringes of our society.

When we lose our job, the lines start to blur. Our sense of personal importance starts slowly to fracture. We see the reflection of ourselves in the eyes of our friends and family start to change. While we concentrate on finding other work and jumping through the multiple hoops required by any job search campaign, we also withdraw more and more into ourselves, seeking to escape the new image of ourselves emerging in the minds of those around us.

As a vocational counselor, I heard a repeated litany of concerns from spouses and family: "Since this happened, she's totally changed . . . He's not the man I knew . . . I don't know who she is anymore . . . he won't talk to me about what's bothering him . . . I want my husband back. I don't care if he's working or not . . ."

Have you, or someone you love, fallen into this trap?

Address the problem now, before a situation not of your choice and for which you bear no blame, mushrooms into the too frequent personal devastation of the unemployed - broken marriages, family dispersion, substance abuse, shattered lives.

The discomfort and emotional pain of losing your job also provides an opportunity to cement bonds and build strength if you take action to address problems head on. Above all, communication must not lapse. In fact, it needs to be expanded and enriched. Reach out to family and friends, those who love you as you are, "warts and all" as the saying goes.

Express your fears and your worries. Let them know how uncomfortable you are and how disappointed you feel that you cannot contribute to the family in the way you always managed in the past. Seek out ways to be a productive, even if non-working, member of the team. Take on new chores and responsibilities around the house and with the kids. Pay extra attention to your spouse. You may not be able to afford presents or a night on the town, but you can give of your time and your appreciation, gifts more valuable than anything you could buy at a store.

Share the rigors and discouragement of your job hunting efforts. Those who love you want to share in your failures as well as your successes. Encourage them to share their own feelings and fears about your plight, and express their anxieties about the future. Not only do we tend not to express our deepest fears, we also tend not to consciously formulate and define them. They just sit at the back of our minds as a faceless, nagging worry. When we fail to bring them out into the open, where they can be clearly defined and therefore contained, we live in a constant state of unease. To comfort ourselves, we look for something or someone to blame: "Everything was fine until she lost her job . . . if he hadn't got laid off, I'd be registering for college this year . . ." It is an easy slide from such vague thoughts to full-fledged blame and you become the scapegoat on which all problems can be hung.

If you are newly unemployed, take steps now to ensure that such a direction is avoided. If you have been out of work for a considerable period of time, and may have already seen this pattern develop, take the time to stop it in its tracks. Redirect your energies into developing a positive team spirit in which all can have a voice and a contribution. It can turn the destructive nature of unemployment into a lightning rod of family cohesion, strength, and deepened affection.

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Identifying your skills and getting that job

When applying for a job, it is ideal that you identify your strengths and weaknesses and get prepared to address them. By knowing your advantage, the chances of getting the job that you want will surely get easier. But you should not get too confident since this is one of the common mistakes that plague job applicants. Appearing too confident or as somewhat of a know it all person will only get you labeled by your interviewer as unfit for the job.

Identifying your skills

First thing's first. You should identify your skills. This is your ticket to get that job and you should be able to articulate your abilities and expertise as best as you can. Many people have a hard time telling their skills and abilities as this may seem to be bragging. But you should not be shy or afraid to discuss your skills. In fact, it is important that you convey to your potential employer what your talents are. You should be able to sell your abilities to your employer. That is how you will get the job that you want. It is important that you don't appear arrogant or condescending but you should also avoid selling yourself short. If the interviewer asks you about your strengths or what separates you from the other applicants, you should be able to readily give a good answer. But before you even go to the interview part, your resume should highlight your skills and talents for your prospective employer to see.

Type of skills

There are two main types of skills, hard skills and soft skills. Hard skills are tangible in the sense that these are things that you do like: knowing how to operate different kinds of machinery, knowledge of a specialized computer program, ability to type fast, skills on using many types of tools, credentials regarding special crafts, etc. Soft skills are skills that are rather abstract in nature like personal qualities. This may include the folowing: being a good team player, having the ability to work on your own, being enthusiastic or organized and decisive.

The steps to follow

Making a list of your previous jobs and experience acquired

First thing to do is to make a list of all the companies that you had worked for and the things that you learned from these jobs. There will be a lot of things to list and you should be careful enough not to forget even the smallest things or activities that you were part of or organized. It is also a good idea to list the volunteer activities that you participated in.

Include a list of your hobbies

Although it might sound trivial at first, it is also very helpful to list all your hobbies. There are a lot of abilities that your prospective employer may get from your hobby list. This will also give an idea of your personality. For example, if you were part of the school's debating team, then your employer may deduce that you have good analytical skills. If you were a champion chess player, then your employer will have the impression that you are good at making critical decisions. Think of your daily routine and the things that you do and often take for granted. Are you an organized person who always keeps your things in proper order? Are you an extrovert that can easily make friends in a matter of minutes? These may seem ordinary to normal things to you, but your future boss might think otherwise.

Deciding what career you want

After listing all your skills and all the things that you do well, you may now decide what field or career you want to take a crack at. Select the skills contained from your list and partner it with the employment you are seeking. Always take time to consider if your skills are relevant to the job that you are aspiring for. Don't be bothered if you have to cut out some of the skills from your list. It is also important to include in the list your skills that the prospective employer will probably value.

Stand by what you write

You should be realistic about your skills and the level of expertise that you have with it. For example, if you indicate that you are a very organized person, then you should be able to show this to the interviewer by being able to organize your thoughts and effectively use the time that was given for your interview.

It is important to know your skills every time you are job hunting. Always put your best foot forward and good luck!

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For many years, you looked forward to that day when you would bid the world of work a fond farewell and ride off into the sunset of your golden years.

Initially, it felt wonderful not to have to go somewhere each morning. Days, weeks, months of leisure lay temptingly before you. At last there would be time to do everything you wanted. No stress, no strain, just pleasing yourself for a change.

You can't quite remember when everything started to change. Maybe it was when you realized that you couldn't really afford to do all the traveling you had planned. Maybe it was the third day of puttering around in the garage trying to ignore the boredom and emptiness you felt inside. Maybe it was when you looked around the mall in the middle of the afternoon and realized that you were one of the youngest people present. Maybe it was when you watched the evening news and suddenly felt like an alien in a strange world in which you no longer belonged.

Whatever happened, you wake up one morning and know that you have to rejoin the world for the sake of your sanity, your self-respect, and your deep need to be productive: to count, to matter, to have community and personal value. With a determination, and a strong sense of relief, you step out on the road to un-retirement.

The following strategies may help make your journey more satisfying, more successful, and more fun.

1. Assess your current needs.

Before running out to look for work, take stock of your needs, your comfort zone, and your long-range goals. Are you looking for just "something to do" or do you intend to continue or develop a new career? Review your financial requirements, your willingness to make a long-term commitment, your health, your abilities and limitations, your family situation. If you only want to work part-time, or temporarily, or if your primary concern is to avoid the stress of your former work, consider entry-level unskilled work. If you yearn to return to your prior career, consider offering to work for previous employers as an independent consultant. It will provide you with some considerable tax advantages while benefiting your employer who will no longer have to furnish benefits. Many retirees see a return to gainful employment as a "rounding out" of themselves. You may have worked in one industry for several years while harboring a secret dream of doing something completely different. Now may be the time, with your safety net of retirement income, to try something new, just based on personal interest and a strong desire to spend your energy on something that is personally gratifying.

2. Entry-level, stress-free work.

The pay levels for this work are typically quite low. The benefits are that you have the luxury of starting immediately with few interview hoops to jump and can walk away without a backward glance when you feel like it. Knowing that you don't have to put up with a screaming boss or sarcastic remarks empowers you and removes the stress of trying to please your superiors and meet their (often unrealistically high) expectations. Typical jobs are security guard, courier, sales associate. If you like working alone, with minimal supervision, night security or courier work is ideal. You work independently where the presence of someone watching and judging you can be minimized. If you enjoy interacting with people, try building or manufacturing security or retail sales work where an extra perk is the typical employee discount on a wide range of merchandise. If you prefer more skilled work, try contracting through a Temporary Agency. Again, if you don't like the assignment, you simply request a new one.

3. Consulting.

If you possess particular skills, expertise, and experience, you may be able to return to your prior employer as an independent contractor. Frequently companies undergo sudden spurts of productivity: a new sales campaign, implementation of a large new account, reorganization, a merger or acquisition. In such cases, your insider company knowledge, and your understanding of processes and procedures, is invaluable and a few months of such work may be exactly what you need financially while still promising periods of free time between assignments. While you typically receive no benefits, your income carries significant tax advantages as you qualify as self-employed.

4. Achieving a sense of wholeness.

For most of your work life, perhaps 40 or 50 years, you may have been primarily interested in maximizing your income to take care of your family, send your kids to college, and build at least a small nest egg for retirement. Now that you have some guaranteed income on a regular basis, you may choose to move into work which is not so financially rewarding but which fulfills an inner need and has some moral, ethical, or purely entertaining payoff. You may feel a need to give back to your community by working in social or non-profit agencies, in the library, in schools. Perhaps you have always secretly yearned to teach, or coach, or counsel. Perhaps you just want to have fun and sign up as a movie extra or apply to be in television commercials. Your interests and preferences determine your direction. Concentrate on what is personally meaningful for you: art, music, education, reading and literacy, athletics, food, crafts, building, gardening. Whatever your interest, there are probably entry-level positions locally available, although probably at a salary that is a fraction of that you have earned in the past. Despite the income, the spark it gives to your mood, your self-esteem, and your zest for life make it all worthwhile.

Unless you are in a desperate financial plight that requires you to devote yourself to unpleasant work that offers you the highest possible income, post-retirement work can be fun, fulfilling, and a productive addition to your mental outlook, health, and longevity.

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Unemployment is depressing: financial pressures stress you out, looking for work is humiliating, and your fragile self-confidence reels under the blows of indifference and rejection.

It becomes harder to get up in the morning, to take care of yourself, to be supportive and loving to those around you, to swing energetically into job search activities.

Here are 7 tips on beating those I-want-to-get-a-job-but-nobody-wants-me blues.

1. Create a schedule for your week: 5 hours per day (maximum) of looking for work, 2 hours per day (minimum) of relaxing, having fun with others, and appreciating yourself.
2. Act as if you are still working: get up at your usual time, shower, have your regular breakfast – it will maintain your sense of sense and provide the familiarity of routine and structure in a world in which you are feeling increasingly alienated.
3. Get out of the house. Employers don’t make house calls so circulate. Surfing the net for job leads may make you feel as if you are accomplishing something but is often only a means of escape. By all means, post your resume anywhere you can, but then hit the road.
4. Actively nurture your relationships. Avoid letting your misery and self-reproach poison your interactions with those who love you and want to help. Recognize that your loved ones may also be in distress and take the time to go somewhere and do something with family and friends.
5. List your abilities, skills, and positive personal characteristics on a piece of paper. Write down your past successes and triumphs, however small. Read the list daily to remind yourself of your value. Add to the list as you recall other positive qualities.
6. Remind yourself of the realities of the labor market – that most of us will change jobs dozens of times in our working life and many change actual careers several times. Being out of work does not mean that there is something wrong with you, just that it is now your turn to go through this upheaval. Next time it may be your spouse or friend – it is part of the human condition in 21st corporate America.
7. Be kind to yourself. Your self-confidence, self-esteem and self-regard have all been hit with a steel boot. Actively look at yourself with the eyes of a concerned friend and give yourself the support, sympathy, and goodwill that you would extend to anyone you love who had suffered the same fate.

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If we are unlucky enough to be at the wrong place at the wrong time, we experience a personal tsunami - a misfortune of devastating proportions that sweeps away our routine lifestyle and forever changes the world we know.

Yet despite the frequency of such events - the tidal waves of Asia, the hurricanes of the Gulf Coast, the loss of life in the Middle East, the wildfires and mudslides of California - most of us are only indirectly affected. We bleed for those who have lost everything, give what we can out of our pocketbooks and our hearts, but our world is essentially unchanged and we move along in our personal life journey relatively unscathed.

The vast majority of us will never undergo the wrenching jolt of a major disaster, natural or man-made. The sheer size of the human race insulates millions of us from the floods, the bombs, and the mayhem. For us, the life-changing events we experience never hit the front page. Personal, quiet disasters - divorce, death, bankruptcy, or unemployment - change our lives forever but remain unnoticed by all but our closest friends and family. We pick up the pieces and try to get it together without government or private succor and support.

It is the isolation of personal loss that is so emotional destructive. We struggle alone to try to make sense of what went wrong and how we can recover our equilibrium.

Others are sympathetic and wish us well but there is an abyss between those who have a job and those who cannot find one. The longer we are out of work, the more alienated we become. Even those who love us start to worry that there's something wrong with us. They start to suspect that we're not as motivated as we say we are. Everyone has plenty of glib advice: "Have you tried . . . ?" Of course we have -many times and always without success. We become more disheartened as we analyze everything we've done and realize we have tried every trick in the book and still cannot find anything suitable.

Some of us get stuck in depression, anger, or paralyzing anxiety. Our energy drains away and even the smallest action becomes more and more difficult. As frustration and financial pressures mount, we wallow in the unfairness of it all and reminisce about how perfect everything was when we had a job and a future and hope, wondering why all this had to happen.

As with hurricanes and tsunamis and terrorism, the victims are not responsible for the catastrophe they face. Life-changing events do just that - change our lives, sometimes forever. Change can be negative, fear-provoking, and desperately uncomfortable. But, if we look closer, we'll see it also has a positive face. Without change, our modern world wouldn't exist. We would be living the way our ancestors did. And while olden times may sound attractive in their pristine simplicity, such times were filled with disease, inequality and a raw brutality we could not stomach today. We need to embrace change and, despite the turmoil it brings, look for the silver lining hidden within the storm clouds.

Although you now remember your job with nostalgic affection, there were undoubtedly times that you wished you could quit. Even if you loved what you were doing, any single job position only taps into a small part of your potential. Being forced to make a change allows you to develop other domains of your personal character.

Try to analyze your interests and preferences and identify things you would like to do which have not been utilized by your prior jobs. Can you think of an industry or a particular job title that might allow you to move in a new direction? Think about, and complete some preliminary research on, jobs in new industries that you might be able to do. You may not have directly related experience but there are common themes that permeate every kind of work: the ability to communicate, to work as part of a team, to learn rapidly, to be aware of details, to organize and prioritize. If you pick an area of genuine personal interest, you enthusiasm will clearly and naturally emerge and that is something all employers seek.

The job hunting you have been doing may, without your realizing it, have become routine and uninspired. The experience of failure and the frustration of never receiving positive feedback may have led to your merely "going through the motions," already convinced, in your own mind, of the futility of your efforts.

Taking a new direction can open up your job search tunnel. Instead of beating your head against the wall and revisiting every technique and lead you've tried before, moving into a different environment may give you a new sense of purpose and appreciation of your own potential. That is when the positive effects of forced change can become a new source of pleasure and satisfaction.

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When we lose our jobs, no matter the reason, we lose a big part of our identity. Think of the last several times you met new people. After names are exchanged and polite comments made on whatever event you are attending, the question quickly arises: "What do you do?"

It's a pleasant starting point for conversation and usually gives rise to many questions or a lively discussion. It also allows us to measure and preliminarily judge each other. Until we really start to know someone as an individual, we tend to deal in broad generalizations and stereotypes. By learning what work a stranger performs, we start making assumptions about their values: education, social ranking, work ethic, and personal priorities. Meet someone and talk for a while and unconsciously you are assessing and categorizing, much based on occupational data. Meet a custodian, a plumber, a nurse, or an attorney. Notwithstanding your actual conversation, you have made character judgments that may have little basis in reality but which allows you to fit that person in a suitable niche in your mental organization.

When I can no longer say proudly "I'm a mechanic" or "I am a computer operator" my self-esteem plummets. Meet a stranger and admit that I am unemployed, perhaps have been for an extended period of time, and I watch my stature diminish in your eyes. I can talk about what I used to do but I feel somehow tainted and incomplete. I talk too much about why I have no job because I want you to realize that it's not my fault, that I really want to work, that there's nothing wrong with me.

The scourge of unemployment is what it does to our minds. We may have watched as our position moved overseas. We may have sensed that our department was running over budget. We may have known that the company was seeking to cut costs. But unless the entire company closed down, or relocated out of state, we believe in our hearts that we were selected for lay off, over someone else, for a reason. And, being human and vulnerable, we blame ourselves.

Who has ever been terminated, even from a job you don't particularly like, without ruminating over what you could have done differently which might have changed the final outcome. "I should have . . . worked Saturdays to do that extra project, been more willing to train the boss's idiot son, socialized more with the in-crowd." Whatever it is, you feel guilty. "If I had handled things differently, my family wouldn't be suffering the way they are." You feel not quite good enough, not up to par. Your negative mental tapes start replaying in your head and you start generalizing about yourself and your lack of worth. You remind yourself of all the negative things you've done in life and look at yourself as a failure "Why do I always blow it?"

STOP IT!

That's a lot easier to say than do, I know. But, it's worth a try. Start by listing all of your positive accomplishments (take your time over this, add items later as you think about them). Anything relating to work is going to be valuable to put in your resume but there is more to life than work so look at other areas too. If your children are not in jail or strung out on drugs, include "good parenting skills" in your list -- you must be doing something right. Include major activities: taking night classes while continuing to work, coaching little league, volunteering for a charity drive, running a household while working full time. When you run out of major areas, start concentrating on smaller items such as cleaning the house, taking your parents out for a special dinner, losing those 10 pounds which had been bothering you. KEEP ON LISTING until you have pages of positive personal accomplishments over your lifetime, from an A grade in kindergarten to painting the patio last week.

Now compare the list of your positives, all the things that make you what and who you are, the things that make you a valuable and unique human being, and the one item, no current job, that is your primary negative. There really is no comparison at all, is there? Move your mental focus from those old negative tapes by concentrating on all (and there are a lot) of your positives. Keep repeating and redirecting until habit kicks in and your mental outlook slowly changes.

Your self-esteem will improve, your self-confidence reassert itself, your belief in your own worth blossom. Now you are ready to tackle the demands of job search with higher energy and without that baggage you've been hauling around for too, too long.

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Our lives are tranquil and smooth so seldom, it seems. We have our ups-and-downs, our good days and bad days, our sunny moods and black moods. The less we swing in opposite directions, the happier we tend to be. The biology of our bodies craves balance and consistency -- changes in our thought patterns and emotions interrupt the regularity of our nerve pathways leading to chemical inbalance and internal disturbances.

Stress kills because stress is the critical determinant of how we think, how we feel, how we react: all activities which terribly upset that silent body chemistry. Events cause stress: the death or illness of a loved one, fear of terrorism, divorce, exposure to violence or a personal attack, financial setbacks, loss of a job.

We cannot remove the event: it happened. We cannot control the stress: our bodies have already reacted. We can only control our mind and use its enormous power to move ourselves back closer to normalcy and serenity.

Unemployment plays havoc with our emotional system. We rapidly cycle through anger at what has happened, grief at what we have lost, fear of what lies ahead, and recurrent shockwaves of shame, anxiety, and despair. We take a number of hits all at once: loss of occupational identity, economic pressure, family anxiety, and the humiliation of job search. How can one little mind fight all of that at once?

One step at a time.

1. Assess.

Assess your situation objectively so you can set your priorities in order. If you are eligible, register for unemployment immediately while identifying everything in your life you can live without for the immediate future: entertainment, treats, brand foods, non-generic household staples, driving for pleasure, gourmet cooking, and eating out. Check your credit cards and major loans (house, car) and see if there are arrangements you can make to just pay the interest until you're back to work. Early contacts and planning may reduce your immediate financial burdens which will, in return, reduce your level of anxiety and fear.

Resolve not to ruminate about the unfairness of your layoff and identify some activities which will allow you to keep that negative brooding at bay when it quietly sneaks up on you.

2. Ask.

Asking for support starts with bringing your family on board so they know how you're feeling and how they can help. Even a totally self-absorbed teenager may be willing to pull their part when the family's survival is at stake. Explain how you are going to organize your job search and how you will need to count on them when you're feeling rejected and worthless. Identify a time when you will all meet together, once a week, so you can fill them in on what has been happening and get ideas from them which might make your next efforts more successful.

This will help you move beyond the grief of your job loss and the increased solidity and support will allay your sense of worthlessness and failure.

3. Appreciate.

Use your job search activity to bolster your self-esteem. Your confidence is already in jeopardy and your sense of self-value under constant attack. As you take the physical steps to find new work, take the time to nurture your emotional needs. Read your resume not just as a document outlining your experience but as a conduit to your character. Think back to your prior work and education. Give yourself a mental boost for the successes you have enjoyed, no matter how small. Pat yourself on the back for the efforts you expended and your value as an employee. If there were failures, as is usual for most of us, remind yourself of what you learned and how you became a bigger, better person for the experience. Reread any awards, special recognitions, or recommendations you ever received and internalize such paper symbols as evidence of your value, your worth, your ability to contribute to the world.

When you take to the street and visit employers, agencies, or obtain interviews, don't just focus on the outcome. It is so easy to interview, not receive an offer, and bear down on yourself as a no-good failure. The right offer will eventually come if you persist. What is important now is to appreciate what you have actually done. Give yourself credit for the actions you personally took to get that interview: resume submission, telephone calls, agency referral --whatever steps were needed. The job might not have been a good fit, that's why it wasn't offered, but you did all the right things to get the opportunity that a personal interview affords. Revel in the fact that you are taking the right steps in the right direction and that just a little more time and similar effort will lead to success.

Use your mind as a source of constant self-support and self-appreciation and it will counteract the stress you're now feeling. Use it frequently, and use it positively, as the one source of help and affection that will never desert you.

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One of the most emotionally crippling aspects of unemployment is the sense of powerlessness it engenders. Job layoff triggers financial pressures, emotional distress, family turmoil, and dashed career hopes. It is forced on us by unrelenting fate, an emotionally disengaged employer, and economic currents that have little to do with us personally. We feel that we have no control over our situation, our lives, our future.

As we work through the anger, resentment, depression, and fear which is the common lot of the jobless, we can take some steps to regain our balance, reclaim a positive focus, and reassert personal control.

1. Daily Routine.

We no longer have the structure of work to mold our days and give meaning to our leisure time. In a very short period of time, we start to drift. Our days are so much the same that we no longer remember what day of the week it is. The line between work and relaxation blurs. We don't work hard enough at our job search so we feel guilty which spoils our play time. Nothing has to be done immediately so we put it all off until tomorrow. Take back control by designing, and maintaining, your own schedule. Get up at the same time each morning, shower and get dressed as if you are going to work. Map out your job hunting activities and stick to the plan. Build in relaxation periods and stick to those too. Having a regular routine, and a defined purpose (finding work) helps you to continue to think of yourself as a worker and a valuable, productive individual, both critical in avoiding the descent into social oblivion prolonged unemployment so often brings.

2. Physical Shape.

We eat when we are anxious. We eat when we are depressed. We eat when we are upset. Couple these psychological urges to eat with the fact that we no longer appear before coworkers' eyes each day, have nothing to dress up for, and have seriously impaired self-respect, and our weight balloons out of control. Fight back by returning to a regimen of regular, healthful eating. So much of our lives is out of our control right now that it is a relief to find one area where we are in sole command. Cherish that opportunity by eating sparingly, reducing the amount of time spent in the kitchen, finding non-edible outlets for stress relief. At the same time, start a limited but regular exercise routine. It may not be something you enjoy but at last you have the time to do it and all that huffing and puffing is a wonderful way to temporarily banish your worries.

3. Personal Relations.

You don't really feel like socializing. You are so tense and on edge that you take it out on those closest to you: your family. Make the effort to compartmentalize your life between your career strains and that of your family and friends. If you allow the frustrations of the one to spill over into the other, you are poisoning your best source of needed support and heading towards the personal disaster -estrangement, divorce, violence - that too frequently accompanies extended unemployment and the wide-ranging destructiveness it spawns.

4. Job Search.

We have no control over when we receive a call for an interview or get that job offer we want so much. What we can control is where we spend our valuable energy. Submitting resumes for openings advertised in the classifieds or on line should be a very minor part of our job search. For every position listed, hundreds of resumes may be submitted. Do the math and it is revealed as similar to buying a lottery ticket - easy and fun to do but unlikely to change your future. Spend your time more wisely by networking with everyone you know (and everyone they know) and calling on employers in your industry to identify openings which have not yet been publicized. Your sense of control arises out of being proactive: putting yourself in the public eye, refusing to passively sit by the telephone awaiting the call which never comes. You may be exhausted at the end of the day, and frustrated if the negative reactions held no hint of possibility, but you do have the self-satisfaction of knowing that you have taken your fate into your own hands and will no longer be relegated to the ranks of those who simply "watch and wait."

5. Community Activities.

You may be relatively inactive in local events or deeply committed to your community. In either case, now is the time to intensify your level of activity. Since you can only productively job search for a limited number of hours per week, use the additional time to become connected. Volunteer for local charities, schools, union halls, hospitals, any communal events you can find. You control where you invest your time and efforts and being productive, even in a small way, can help repair your shattered self-esteem. Interacting with other volunteers is also a whole new opportunity for networking and may indirectly lead to that one golden opportunity you seek.

The world of unemployment, especially if prolonged, can be emotional debilitating. By reasserting control over some aspects of our lives, we can contain the damage inflicted on our psyche and face the future proudly, recognizing that job loss is a regrettable fact of life, not a personal failure.

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There is always a debate about whether daily affirmations work - the kind of uplifting statements you repeat to yourself in the mirror each morning.

I find a more effective way to improve your mood and self-esteem is to create your own positive scripts for regular re-reading and study. On those days when you're really down on yourself and think that you're a failure, immersing yourself in a book crammed with notes about your qualities and accomplishments can restore your balance, brighten your spirits, and re-energize you for the rigors of the job hunt.

Keep a notebook close by and jot down every little success you've ever had. List your personal characteristics, work and non-work successes, little things you've done that made you feel proud. Record what other people have said to you as compliments or in gratitude. Note any awards or trophies you've ever won.

Describe your accomplishments, big and small: completing a difficult class, learning how to bowl or play a decent round of golf, teaching your teenager how to drive a stick shift, losing that last 10 pounds. No one reaches adulthood without a long string of successes along the way but we tend to discount them because our emotions are engaged by our failures, the "ones who got away."

Keep adding to your book of positives as you think of more and more accomplishments (the list will grow, the more you think about it). On the days when you think your value to the world is zero, take out your book to remind yourself of your own worth. The world is a better place due to all of our collective efforts so give yourself an emotional pat on the back.

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Let's put it all into perspective: the U.S. has an unemployment rate hovering at just above the 5% level (although much higher in ethnic populations). Iraq has an unemployment rate in the 75% range.

How on earth do they live?

We are all aware of the difficulties of being out of work -the financial pressures, the emotional trauma, the ruin of so many marriages and families, and the overall cost to society. The effects of unemployment on personal dreams of success wreak havoc with the self-esteem and self-confidence of those without work. In a society that glorifies money, power, and celebrity above all else, the have-nots carry the taint of failure and view themselves as losers. They can no longer compete with their peers, keep up with the Joneses, or live the lifestyle to which they have aspired for so long.

But if 3 out of 4 of your neighbors, family, and friends are jobless, the equation changes. You may live in poverty, unsure of when the next meal will materialize, but just about everyone else is in the same boat. Begging, bartering, and haggling over the exchange of meager basics becomes the standard lifestyle. Aspirations of success are tossed aside for the more immediate goal of survival. It is the few individuals who actually have work and a regular income who are the aliens in the crowd.

In an economy devastated by war, magnified by an ongoing insurgency, what does the much-touted western world's democracy mean: the freedom to starve?

A culture in disarray yearns for "the man on horseback." The inequities and internal struggles of the Roman Republic gave birth to a long line of debauched, despotic Emperors. The mass poverty of Russian serfs opened the door to Lenin and his monstrous descendant, Stalin. The ruined economy of the Weimar Republic brought us the order and security, as well as the total evil, of Adolf Hitler. The hedonistic excesses and widespread corruption of Havana produced Fidel Castro. The war-ravaged landscape of Cambodia hatched the Khmer Rouge.

Consider the average Iraqi. Three years ago, there may have been a muzzled press and sinister whispers of secret executions and atrocities against minorities, but the electricity and water systems worked, there was order in the streets, there were uplifting parades or uniformed troops, a leader standing up to the might of the western world, and a deep pride in being a citizen of the arguably strongest Muslin country in the world.

Three years later, men stand in line for the few paltry jobs available with the security forces, well aware of the possibility of being blown to bits for the only sin of standing in that line.

President Bush is on a crusade (that was his word) to rid the world of terrorism and convert the entire planet to Western Democracy and his version of freedom (his favorite word).

America will save the world. And if there is nothing left when the saving is over, can we wring some sense of self-satisfaction from the fact that no despots are left standing on the windswept, barren plateau that remains?

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

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

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

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

Here are a variety of strategies for you to try:

Early financial planning.

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

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

Share your fears.

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

Use your friends and acquaintances.

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

Manage the toxic effects of job search.

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

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

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

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

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

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

Battling personal inadequacy.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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Baffled by the latest U.S. Labor stats about jobless claims? Two-sided confusion; cautious optimism and wolf-criers. No need to spin your wheels wondering. There’s a no-hassle solution to the unemployment news blues. You’ll have to run your search fundamentally different than your pals to find the next great career. Don’t do it solo.

Job searching alone is like hitchhiking a scary ride with an unknown stranger on a 180-mile long deserted, no-exit road with hopes you’ll make your destination. When you lack time or expertise to plan career moves carefully, sometimes the loss of ground is not apparent until years later. You can get trapped in a black hole and frustrated that your career is not advancing to full potential. Ever feel imprisoned in positions that lacked adequate reward, satisfaction, challenge or a future? There are many reasons for these job jails:

• You’ve become too specialized.
• You’ve become too generalized.
• You failed to look ahead and plan for the future.
• You held out too long hoping for the “right break.”
• You accepted jobs that never made use of your best talents.
• You remain too long in positions that offered no challenge or mobility.

Use these seven job search marketing hacks and you’ll get in front of decision makers faster. What’s a “hack?” A “hack” is a clever solution to an interesting problem, so says the experts at O’Reilly Media, Inc., a leading-edge book publisher that offers cool technology workarounds on everything from navigating Google and eBay to digital photography and gaming. Hacks are the “down and dirty” of getting a task done. Your mission here is to get a great job, high on adventure, low on headache.

Hack #1: Know the job market. Locate and identify geographic employment hot spots. Search out emerging industries. Grow up and ditch the pabulum of pursuing comfortable industries that are on their way to obsolescence.

Hack #2: Know your functional and industry options and employers’ needs in these areas. Pinpoint your top three positioning (career focus) alternatives to what you’re now doing. Find the chief five employers that serve that market segment.

Hack #3: Know your most marketable skills, competency, and relevant background. Create a personal branding; the things that make your “package” distinct. Blaze past your competition and neutralize the yawn factor in candidate- selection boredom by linking your portfolio of contribution to employer need.

Hack #4: Know how to win multiple, simultaneous interviews. Spot the core three strategies to gain exposure that penetrates both the advertised and unadvertised job markets. Isolate which one is used the least but rewards the most, in terms of results.

Hack#5: Know how to create effective resumes and letters that sell solutions. Build a campaign action plan that sends your tombstone resume to an early grave. Leverage your knowledge to solve employer problems through tailored special-ops marketing tactics that creates “you” stickiness in decision makers’ minds.

Hack#6: Know how to multiply your access to those who have the power to hire. Networking is out. Building strategic relationships is in. Be there…where. Informational meetings with those who have knowledge you need puts you in the driver’s seat when hiring patterns emerge.

Hack #7: Know how to give your inner critic a name and tell it to be quiet. Visualize the results you want, not the ones you fear. Trigger the right reactions in your targeted prospects by looking for ways you might be sabotaging yourself, then adapt, improvise, overcome.

A professionally-run job search gets you there faster. It gives you defined direction and leverage to compare, negotiate, and deal from strength. Try to imagine the alternative; hitchhiking to nowhere at the mercy of blind luck. Can you think of one rational reason why you’d want to take this trip alone?

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