Prelude to piece below about "despair"

Before you - if you're not employed - start generalizing about how lousy the economy is and how much the deck is stacked against you, and how impossible it will be to find a job comparable to the one you had, I want you to understand that I am currently coaching a woman, a single woman, who is eligible for Medicare who currently earns better than $6000 a month.

Here are a few salient facts in this "rotten" economy:

• She was laid off around the middle of the year.
• She began feeling "down" and "depressed", which was wasted emotion.
• In less than three months, she received not one, but two, comparable job offers.
• She took one of them.
• She is now looking at changing her job, once again, because a Household Name Company is very interested in her and it would mean a shorter commute.

The point here is not that we work miracles or that thinking positive will get you a job or that this stuff about the economy being bad is all poppycock. The point is, no matter how bad it may seem to you, it is still possible to get a new job in this terrible, rotten, downward-spiraling economy. Operative word here is "possible".

One other point. As with any of my clients, we built a "Killer Resume" for her that, which when posted out on Hot Jobs or Monster continues to pull in responses from Headhunters and Companies on a regular basis. In caopching sessions, we invariably review the jobs that come up and role play for any interviews. We strategize about ways to find job openings on a regular basis. This client knows the drill and goes right into an almost automatic series of responses that are known to work when something comes up. It took a time for me to teach this, but it gives her a methodology to use at will.

So, please, don't paint yourself, dear reader, in a corner by axiomatically deciding that the economy is so-o-o-o-o bad, so rotten, that nothing exists out there for you.