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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