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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