Despair and its after-effects

I once coached a young man from Pennsylvania for a short period of time. This was about a year and a half ago. He had been in Information Technology and had been earning a salary over $75K. When I coached him, he had already been out of work for over a year.

We re-wrote his resume and worked on his interviewing skills; but he had the notion that he had been betrayed by his former employer, who had laid him off when things got tough for skilled IT professionals, and he felt that because of his knowledge and schooling he deserved to be given a new position; and this attitude permeated everything he did.

Our coaching sessions only last a month, at which time he felt he’d learned everything he needed to and could go it alone. We spent four hours together in some very intense sessions. He was feeling very contractive and didn’t want to spend any additional money on coaching. His attitude was: I learned what I needed to, now I can make use of it. (To me, this was not coaching, it was teaching, and I believe that a coach may do some teaching as part of the relationship, but he or she actually does more than that; my philosophy is if a coach were just a teacher, it would be OK to just teach a basketball team how to play the game.)

There was also, as there almost always is, a sense of macho in what this young man was feeling – namely, This is something I need to do myself.

The other day I heard that he was still unemployed, approximately two and a half years after being laid off, and it bothered me. It bothered me and it made me sad because I had coached him; because it was an unfortunate thing for a bright young man to be without a job; and because I believed that he had a problem that was greater than he was willing to acknowledge or seek help for, and that was the root of his problem. I have had a few clients like him, and I could almost predict with some certainty that they would not find a job quickly or easily.

Now it’s perfectly true that it’s a difficult job market out there, and that most job openings are competitive. Some areas of the country are worse than others, and the city in Pennsylvania that this young man lived in was not in the greatest shape economically. The IT marketplace is not the free-for-all it once was, when if you had a skill, a job would practically find you because a company needed that skill so badly.

But I believe his problem was two-fold. First, he had an attitude that communicated itself to potential employers and that attitude had hardened into a fixed world-view that was almost openly hostile. And second, he had begun, because what he was doing didn’t work, to slide into despair. Despair, to me, is that area where you think, “What’s the use? I won’t even try. It’s not worth it in terms of the hurt and rejection. It’s also not worth it because there’s nothing out there.” This was occurring even as he decided to stop my coaching services.

I mention all this because I believe that there are many people out there who have let themselves believe that it isn’t worth trying, that the hurt and rejection are just too much to bear, and they in turn have begun ever so slowly to sink into a attitude that is tinged with despair and could possibly develop into full-fledged despair. And once that happens, I believe it’s very difficult to come back to a place in which you have a positive outlook.

As a coach, when I work with clients looking for a job, part of my responsibility, I believe, is to help keep the person I’m coaching in a positive frame of mind. It’s not just to teach them what to do. In an interview, you have to know what to do and how to communicate, and your underlying attitude is usually more important than you may know. I, personally, can’t keep someone in a positive frame of mind, of course, but it’s my job to show them what this looks like and to help them develop ways to maintain it as a general attitude.

• One way to revive a positive outlook is to get positive feedback. That’s elementary, of course, but it does work. When a client begins to get interviews, even if they don’t always result in job offers, it’s positive for them and they reflect it.
• But even if you don’t get interviews, there are other ways to get positive feedback from the world, and your task is to discover them (or work with your coach to discover them).
• Unhooking your ego from your job or profession is one way to start.
• Building a support group that extends beyond your family is another.
• Doing something that provides such feedback, such as volunteering, can provide it.
• Taking pleasure and sustenance in using your own personal skills in your personal life is still another way to do this.
• It goes without saying that exercising regularly will improve your outlook when you’re up against a dry period in a job search.
• Sometimes taking a second job can help, even if it’s being a waiter or waitress or something that involves physical effort.

The important thing is to learn to be forward-looking, optimistic and extremely positive. One characteristic of the people who get offered jobs, based on my observations, is that they’re “likeable” and “positive.”

In addition to having the skills, you want to be around them. The sour puss, the person who is a “downer”, the one who is “negative”, often doesn’t get chosen. And it can’t be artificial or forced; it has to be real and natural.

So if you take anything away with you, from this blog, please don’t give in to despair, don’t even get started down that road. And keep your attitude as positive as possible. Keep this as a reminder: It’s not only good for your job search; it’s good for your life.