Ambivalence in Relationships: The unemployed older manager's role is strained by the conditions of unemployment. Relationships with family and friends become ambivalent. Even if the individual joins a group whose stated purpose is to help the person get work, relationships tend to be awkward and a little constrained, simply because unemployment may be "contagious." One man said it well: "Friends ask how you're doing, but they're petrified they may also lose their jobs." This ambivalence further aggravates self-doubt and causes people to have an almost perpetual preoccupation with the impression they are making on others. They are particularly concerned with the impressions they're making on interviewers.
They are also profoundly lonely. Even though many older managers may be out of a job, they are out of work by themselves, not out of work as members of a labor group, who are all out of work because of a layoff, or some other temporary work stoppage. And when older managers do get jobs, they also get them alone-by themselves.
Budge describes unemployment as a group phenomenon by using this analogy: Unemployment is like a group of commuters waiting for a bus. Each line of people (job applicants) is waiting for a bus (job) to come in, without knowledge of the bus driver's (employer's) exact position or even whether the bus (company) has broken down (layoffs, belt-tightening, hiring freezes). The bus driver is just doing a job (hiring) and doesn't know the passengers (applicants), nor in any way grasps their individual concerns. When a bus does finally arrive, if it isn't one's own, the destinations of its passengers are irrelevant.
Fear of Rejection: This fear stops far too many job-seekers cold and keeps them from trying. The scenario is something like this: "I've already failed once (or twice or a dozen times). If I try hard again, they'll simply tell me, 'No.'" This anticipated "No" finally becomes so big that many stop going out on interviews, or even trying. They just stay put-and do nothing.
Stanley Wynett, writing in the National Business Employment Weeklysays that many job-seekers are unaware that they fear "the Big Stanley Wynett."Overcoming the Big No," National Business Employment Weekly, No." They may still go out and make contacts, but after one or two tiny rejections, they quit for the day-or the week. They no longer "feel in the mood."
Dr. Herbert Fensterheim says in his best seller, Stop Running Scared that "persistent fear of an object or idea that originally does not justify fear, usually prepares you for the three Fs: flight, fight or freeze." He calls avoiding job interviews "fear-maintaining escape behavior." You can't keep the fright from occurring in a given situation, so you avoid the upsetting event that brings it on. You use every excuse under the sun to avoid getting and going on interviews. You don't face your fear and give yourself a chance to find out that what you think is going to happen won't happen and is only in your mind. According to Fensterheim, at some point, you have to take a stand and face your fear.
Some Guidelines to Handling the Emotions of Unemployment
Since managerial identity is threatened by unemployment, the development of ritual activities, of a job search routine, buffers the psychological ill effects. The following are particularly helpful:
- Accept that unemployment is a contingency in your career. Deal promptly with family and income problems to avoid destabilization. Maintain professional contacts and professional visibility as an aspect of working life that you can mobilize during unemployment. Continue your leisure-time activities, a hobby, small business or community activity and investigate them to see if they are exploitable reserve resources.
- Locate and associate with others who are also unemployed. Such relationships are inherently unstable, but they can be incorporated into a ritual of businesslike activity which is focused on getting a new job. It also helps substitute for informal work relationships and keeps alive the feeling of a peer group apart from family and friends. Such a group helps individuals discharge their constant feelings of worthlessness. The group gives consolation to the hurts and indignities of rejection, and provides a place where you can display your unemployed status without damage.
- Assess and reassess your status as a means of reaffirming the values of the business system without accepting any personal guilt. Decide for yourself which of the values you accept and which no longer are important to you. You may find you are hanging on to outmoded values or worse yet, to values which were never your own but were foisted on you in your childhood, in college, in your marriage or on earlier jobs.
