One of life’s brutal realities is the loss of employment. Coming to terms with your layoff or termination is not easy.  It is particularly difficult when:

• your pink slip marks the separation between you and a position that you have worked diligently to achieve;
• you must leave the corporation to which you have given many years of your loyalty;
• you are an older employee, perhaps in a managerial capacity.

While we are not psychotherapists, our position as well-established career professionals has allowed us to experience, via interaction with our clients, the desperate, very real, and sometimes heart-breaking results of unemployment.  As means of counteracting these results, we offer the following insights and suggestions.

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The process of confronting one’s own termination can be rather similar in its phases to the loss of a loved one.  This is especially true of employees long embedded in their career with one particular company.  The immediacy of disbelief is followed by a sense of betrayal, engendering the next stage, which is anger:  itself a two-edged sword.  Properly channeled, righteous anger can serve as the impetus through which you vow to succeed and begin to do so by devising a well thought-out job search.  Directed inward, however, with self-recriminations of – “What did I do wrong?” - anger may lead to depression and ultimately, inertia:  the inability to move forward.  The longer you are held captive by your emotions, the more difficult it is to resume your entry into the work force.

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Virtually every serious job candidate has received the following advice from professional career counselors, high school and college guidance professionals, reputable resume writing services, knowledgeable human resources managers, or other experts positioned to offer well-informed resume writing tips: “highlight your accomplishments on your resume!”  But, in articulating your achievements on your resume, remember to make them “SOAR.”

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Riddle:  When is a woman most like an octopus?

Answer:  When the woman is a single mother.

Every mother fills multiple, evolving positions that include and are not limited to educator, mentor, coach (literally and figuratively), chauffeur, cook, laundress, seamstress, baker of goods for last-minute school fundraisers, confidante, role model, and disciplinarian.  Carrying these responsibilities without the aid of a mate or partner, it is the shoulders of the single mother, however, that bear the heaviest weight.  The necessity to provide her child with the basic necessities propels her into the work force where, spurred by fears of impending unemployment, her productivity and efficiency can exceed that of her colleagues.  If unemployed, she must work diligently at the job of securing work:  devising resumes, cover letters, follow up letters and integrating them into a well-planned and executed employment strategy.  If employed, she must often juggle two jobs simultaneously with other needs that can appear, perhaps superficially, to be less vital.

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In the 1978 blockbuster motion picture Superman, Lois Lane falls from a rooftop in New York City.  Recognizing her peril, the “Man of Steel” swoops down to catch the falling Lane.  “Easy, Miss. I’ve got you,” he says with his trademark grin.  “You, you’ve got me? Who’s got you?” replies Lane, looking down over his arms to the sidewalk hundreds of feet below.

In works of fiction, it seems that most all of the “good guys/gals” portrayed have a guardian or safety net protecting them from the direst consequences that life may present.  How about you?  In your life and, most particularly, your career, do you have a safety net?
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