By Kathryn A. Thomas
Being employed in the conventional sense means working for a corporation or company who provides the employee with job and future financial security. Now with companies folding by the thousands that promise may seem less likely. So what does America do when her ample backside is against the wall? Well giving up isn’t the answer. Falling into doom and gloom isn’t the answer. Creativity is.
Recreate yourself with strong knowledge that there are many skills inside which make you who you are and no one else.
So, who are you?
The inclination toward fear can rock someone with great self-confidence and demeanor. The people winning the jobs are those finding connections, those not giving up, those finding an inner perseverance and belief in themselves that might have been undiscovered until the terror of unemployment. What if the successful people of 2010 will be able to look back on this recession as the most powerful catalyst they had yet experienced in their lives?
The last home I owned was a place in the path of Hurricanes Jeanne and Frances during 2004. Things began to change rapidly for me when I had to put my home back together without proper insurance compensation. It wasn’t until after the work was done and the home sold that I realized I could have asked for 3 times what I was offered. I should have asked for help.
Unemployed with my small house profit, I paid off debt and traveled in an RV. That too required income which I had not been able to find. Parks positions (which are no longer available) brought me a lot of peace, but none of that security I was sure I must have. As I have watched one thing after another go in the past 5 years, I am amazed at how little I have truly suffered. The pain of not knowing is invisible in the present moment. I have come through with a much stronger sense of who I am and what I have to offer. Tough lessons, but usable experience. My debt has shrunken to around $13,000 compared to others with debt in the $500,000 range.
I know that whatever I have to offer may need to be invented. Created from deep inside me. That individual gift that I have to bring to the table.
The gift of this recession is that I learn who I am, for better or worse. I exist with or without money. My perception can be changed at any moment, and life can change in the flash of a conversation I might not be having were I at that 8 to 5 job I had been a slave to for so long. Maybe, though it is tough to really grab hold of, I am completely free.
Any way, I am sure coming from freedom is a lot more effective that coming from fear. So keep on mighty blog readers and life livers, don’t give up, no matter what.
Didn’t your Grandma tell you? Anything is possible.
Superb read, I just now passed this onto a colleague who was doing a little research on that. And this individual in fact purchased me lunch for the reason that I uncovered it for him laugh So let me rephrase that: Thank you for lunch!