The Pragmatic Strategist

Not working is easily ten times more stressful than working — unless, of course, money is not a concern in your life. Unemployment or underemployment is difficult to manage on multiple levels, because — just to name a few examples — it has such a huge impact across all spectrums of your life:

• Financial stability

• Self-esteem
• Relationships
• Plans/Expectations
• Routine Daily Habits

For workaholics with a track record of success, the ego hit is often the most difficult — particularly once the pressures of the new financial reality start impacting everything from eating and entertaining habits (thanks to cost) to feelings of isolation (not being in an office every day) to canceling plans that you would not ordinarily consider canceling because they are no longer affordable. It fast becomes clear that we are used to taking a certain income level for granted — and it is hard not to chaffe under the restrictions of a radically cut-back lifestyle.

And, of course, all of that strains relationships: spouses fight about lights left on and what is a realistic grocery budget; friends and family inquiring about ‘how the hunt is going’ is inadvertant salt in the wound and so it becomes easier to avoid them than to rehash the agony; social and professional networks are inundated with pleas for help from talented, unemployed people who are a loss for options.

And those who were laid off have an advantage, because they can collect Unemployment Insurance. If you’re unemployed because your business plans have fallen apart, or because a job you had lined up fell through after you quit your last one, then (depending on what state you live in) you could well be completely S.O.L.

So what are the tricks for surviving unhappy unemployment that don’t result in death, divorce or a seat in an AA meeting? Obviously those depend on how you handle acute stress personally, but I’ve discovered that some of my great work qualities make managing my own stress particularly difficult, so this is the list of nine things that I’ve learned to do to manage my unemployment-related anxiety.

Stress Eating – Find an Alternative

I’m a stress eater. Bad stress eater. I can go through insane volumes of food without ever realizing it. And, worse yet, thanks to my gastric by-pass back in 2003, over-eating makes me sicker much more quickly than most normal people. (To say nothing of re-gaining the weight I was supposed to have lost permanently.) Stress eating is a huge problem for me.

My “alternative”? Ice. Annoying to others and bad for my teeth, yes. But I swear, it’s actually a huge help when it comes to consuming hollow calories or large volumes of food that end up making me ill. Be careful about chewing on it if it’s too hard, but if you have an oral fixation and a compulsive eating habit, finding something to fill the void is key. For me, ice works. Even if it drives my husband up the wall.

Email Stalking – Move Away From the Computer

This is a hard one for information workers who are used to spending all day in front of a computer. Checking your email every 30 seconds is not going to make a job offer show up any faster. And you’ll just drive yourself nuts while you wait. Even worse, over time, the tone of your emails will start sounding more and more hysterical and desperate — and that’s not going to help you at all. Find other things to work on, and stop hovering over your email. Even if you are still working on your computer, close your email client/browser and only allow yourself to check it on a schedule. Nothing says “desperate” like when you respond to a recruiter within 15 seconds of them hitting the “Send” button.

Physical Impacts the Psychological – Get Up and Move

Tony Robbins has this one down: physical movement absolutely impacts your state of mind. And while it is good practice to get up and move around even when you are working in an office like you are used to, it is even more important if you’re concerned with your mental stamina and keeping an upbeat attitude.

Other impacts to your physical space that can help: I replaced my hard, uncomfortable dining room chair with a very inexpensive yoga ball (Note: the size you’d need to use as a chair is much bigger than what you’d need to use for actual yoga — go for the largest size as a chair, even if you’re a shorty like me). This makes a huge difference on the posture and physical awareness (balance) that helps prevent getting sucked into a digital abyss without realizing it. (And, for as goofy as it sounds, there is something very playful and light-hearted about sitting on a yoga ball; both my husband and I have found it causes us random moments of amusement, which help keep both of our moods elevated.)

My husband often finds that going for a walk is helpful. Because I don’t enjoy walking all that much in the first place, this doesn’t typically help me and, in fact, I find that the warm weather in Austin usually makes a mid-day walk very draining; though a walk in the evening after things have cooled down can sometimes help. On the other hand, happily, our apartment complex has both a gym and a swimming pool. Both of these things do make me feel better. So find something that works, and then do it.

And in the bizarre and inexplicable category: there is a yoga pose that, for some strange reason, has been making me feel better recently (‘bizarre and inexplicable’ because I am not a yoga person; I think I’ve attended one yoga class in my entire life). I go into the bedroom, where it is semi-dark and cool, and I get in the Cat Flow pose on the bed for a few minutes. This elongates my spine and stretches out the tense muscles in my neck and shoulders tremendously. And doing it in a cool, dark room also helps me insulate myself a bit to breath deeply and regroup. I have no earthly idea why that particular pose makes me feel better when there are plenty of others that could also do the trick, but it does, so I go with it.

Don’t Just Network – Socialize

Yes, networking is always important — never moreso than when job hunting — but online networking like Twitter, LinkedIn, Plaxo, JobFox, Naymz and Facebook are only going to do you so much good. If you are like us, and new in town, go to Meetup.com and find an actual physical, social event and go. Talk to people. Interact. Pick up a new (cheap!) hobby. Just get out of the house before you can’t stand the sight of it anymore, and interact with people. Go to one or two for business-related topics and go to one or two for personal enjoyment. Shop around until you find one with people you like, and then make a habit of going.

My husband and I attended several before we found one that we ended up really liking: we watch totally over-the-top, campy, cheesy sci fi movies with a bunch of other people and laugh hysterically all night. No matter how beaten up we have ever felt clear up until we walked in the door at the Meetup, by the end of the night it has never once failed to be the highlight of our week. Who knows? If you aren’t careful, you might even make some new friends.

Even better, go find something you care about and volunteer some time. It doesn’t have to be a lot, just mix it up a bit. And doing something worth feeling good about is always the best way to counter-act feeling bad about how life is going. On top of which, it helps fill in gaps on your resume and do some networking with people you wouldn’t necessarily have thought to tap before. You never know how valuable that can be.

Iron Out Your Personal Support Network – Talk to Them!

This one is one of the hardest for me, because both my husband and I are home all day now. Even if we are both working on something in different rooms, we are both still around. As someone who needs a lot of space, this is something that is often likely to make me irrationally cranky. And the couple of times that I have come close-but-no-cigar to a job or landing a client and I felt acute despair, the most important thing to do is to get it off my chest.

Sometimes when I start to unravel, I’ll do it to my husband. But since we’re in the same boat, and since he likes to ‘fix’ things (which I can’t stand, even when things are going well: I need to vent so that I can fix my own mess, not have him tell me what I need to do), and since there are times when I need some space from him, I have to rely on other people. Fortunately I have some wonderful friends. Unfortunately, as someone who created this situation herself, I often feel so distressed (and stupid) for having been responsible for putting us in this situation, that I don’t feel like I have a right to whine or vent. And maybe I don’t, but there are two things to remember:

1. Trying to keep that feeling bottled up doesn’t work. And if I don’t get it off my chest, it will bleed into my attempts at productive conversations with recruiters and prospective employers/clients.

2. They are my friends and they love me. And while I am sure the thought, “I told you so!” runs through each of their heads on a regular basis, the fact is that when they realize that I’m truly upset, they are all gracious enough to avoid saying it. (They’ll wait a year and say it over drinks or dinner, which is fine with me!)

Just watch it: whining hysterianics are trying even for the best sports. Don’t abuse your friends by flipping out and expecting them to help put Humpty Dumpty back together over and over again. Carry your own water, just reach out to your friends when the load is extra heavy and you need a bit of a boost.

Stay in Control of Your Time – Live by a Schedule

This is a hard one in our house, because I am a morning person and my husband is a night person. And if I’m not careful, I’ll find myself sucked into the gravitational force of his schedule. Next thing I know, I’m up until 4:00 a.m. and sleeping away the day. Bad, bad, bad. You can’t interact with your network (online or otherwise), you can’t make follow-up calls, and you can’t be available for impromtu appointments if you are sleeping during the day and awake all night. That is how you miss opportunities. Unless you are trying to compensate for a time zone differential, beware of this.

The other thing that is really hard about being at home all day is the whole get-up-and-get-ready-for-the-day routine. It is far too easy to sleep a little bit late, roll out of bed, grab a cup of coffee and just get online. Beware this trap. Just like getting up and moving helps your state of mind, so does getting dressed. Mary Kay Cosmetics teaches their sales force to never get on the phone with a client until they are dressed and ready to face the day. While this may sound trivial, there is plenty of supporting evidence to validate their point: when you look professional, you feel professional, you sound professional and people are more likely to think of you as professional.

And all of that is even before we get into the whole area of video conferencing, surprise visitors, impromptu meetings or urgent errands. Get up and get ready for your day like you would if you were going to work. It’ll make the transition back to a normal schedule easier when it happens. And it’ll help your state of mind from wandering too far.

Another reason to get up and get dressed: it helps avoid weight gain. Studies have shown that people who get in the habit of wearing loose, baggy, comfortable clothes will put on weight quickly and without realizing it, specifically because they are not getting any reminders about their size from how well their clothes do or don’t fit. You don’t need to sit around your house in a suit, but if you are wearing sweats or your bathrobe all day, you are in danger of packing on weight without realizing it. But if you’re putting on work pants and shirts every day, you’ll discover pretty quickly if your waistline is expanding. And the last thing you need is to try to get dressed for an interview one day, only to discover that you can’t fit into your work clothes.

Don’t Limit Your Options – Re-evaluate Your Priorities and Goals

When I was in California in late March, I had dinner with a wonderful friend I hadn’t seen in ages. Last summer she was laid off, and she was having no luck on the job hunt. The stress was mounting, because even with unemployment, she and her husband were having to tap into their savings at about $1k/month in order to cover the most basic living expenses. Taking out a second mortgage on their house was the only way to keep them afloat for a while longer, though the impending expiration of both her Unemployment Insurance and COBRA loomed large.

This is a woman with whom I worked for years. We actually co-managed a massive project together once upon a time. We’d stay at the office until 11:00 p.m. working like maniacs, go home exhausted and come back the next morning to start over again. She is a ridiculously hard worker who, like me, always found herself being tossed into the deep end of the pool to forge a new role, to fix something that was broken, or to tackle a problem whose resolution was a total mystery.

And if she hadn’t been laid off, that would still be her habit. However, now that she has been laid off, she’s realized something important: her children are about to enter middle school. All of a sudden they are busier, need more time and attention, and have more activities in which she would like to participate. So suddenly what was unthinkable a few years ago — that she could want a “job” instead of a “career position” — is now, in fact, entirely true.

My transition is not entirely different. Over the past few years, my shift has been more and more on business process improvement and change management. But my default job hunting focus is always as a technical project manager. That’s my “safe job.” Aside from the fact that I can do it in my sleep, it’s also something that I do so well that it’s an ego boost (which is especially appealing after my ego has taken a beating from being unemployed). But is that my automatic first choice for a job? Probably not.

Personal branding is hard work if you are trying to change direction. My friend is often viewed skeptically when she applies for positions as an office manager for a small company or some other role that is better able to leave her family life intact. People assume that she’s only looking for something short-term and that she’ll leave as soon as she finds something better. She actually has to strip down her resume so that her work history doesn’t look as impressive or robust, so that it doesn’t scare off prospective employers.

My old friend and co-worker, the brilliantly talented Josh Ross, recently asked me what it is that I want to be doing. I told him that part of my problem is in marketing myself, because I’ve been angling for a change. The trouble is, I’ve still got an attraction to what I’ve always done in the past and I’ve had a great deal of difficulty forging a new personal marketing strategy that walks the line between both without making me sound desperate and scattered.

One of the reasons that I so thoroughly love startups is because I can do both: a little of what I know and a little of what I have to learn. But either way, no matter how stressful a time unemployment is, think about what you want. (Penelope Trunk discusses this a lot, too.) It may be that the first job back has to be what you’ve always done, but if you approach it with a plan to get where you want to be, it’ll give you focus and motivation that you probably didn’t have before.

Brush Up on the Basics – Read, Write and, well, Web

The one advantage you have when not working that most of us never seem to have while we are is time. Time to read, time to write, time to pick up a new skill. If I were a developer, I’d be taking this time to learn Ruby on Rails, because it’s a very hot, in-demand development language and could make a huge difference in my employability. As a project manager, in January I started studying to take my PMP Exam (though, unfortunately, the exam is too expensive to actually take until I get a job).

Beyond that, spend some time reading — whether it’s business books that you’ve always wanted to read, online magazines that cater to your industry or blogs of people who are doing interesting work. Whatever it is, read it. Consider it your between-jobs-homework to absorb as much information as possible. And then, if you can, write about it. Not everyone is up for the work involved in having their own blog, but if you have something to say, odds are you can find someone who has a blog (or, better yet, different someones) and would be happy to have you guest blog on their site. (This, by the way, is also helpful for personal branding.)

Control is an Illusion – Show Humility and Gratitude

Finally, as a die hard control freak, the hardest thing for me is when I feel entirely out of control. And while, intellectually, I recognize that control really is an illusion in most ways, that illusion has always been my security blanket. Being in a situation I didn’t predict and that I can’t fix immediately or entirely by myself is one great big, honkin’ ass lesson in humility. Truth be told, I needed that and it’s not lost on me.

Beyond that, though, it is also clear that I have plenty to be grateful for: the afore mentioned friends and family, the unconditional adoration of the cutest pooch in the world, and a husband who — despite having plenty of reasons to say it — has never once said “I told you so” either. Each of them has put up with the crashing and burning of my hubris (which isn’t always graceful), and they have all resisted the temptation to point out that it was only a matter of time before I made a risky gamble and lost my shirt to the house.

And, if that isn’t enough, then I console myself with knowing that I live in a beautiful city that spends most of the winter hovering around 80 degrees, where the people are friendly, and where our savings has lasted three to four times longer than it would have if we’d stayed in New York City — where I didn’t want to live anymore, anyway. (And where my old job was being shipped off to Orlando, where I would have found myself in an even bigger employment vacuum and trapped with even fewer options than I have now.)

The last thing I am is a Polyanna. But the fact is that I do have plenty to be grateful for, and even if I don’t say it regularly, I am still aware of it.

So, that’s it. My Nine Unemployment Survival Tips. What have you found that works for you?

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