There Is Hope

“Starting today, we must pick ourselves up, dust ourselves off, and begin again the remaking of America.”

President Barack Obama 2009 Inaugural Address

President Obama is calling to each one of us to start moving toward the future by placing one foot in front of the other full of hope, confidence. We might be knocked down due to circumstances beyond our control but we are not out. In fact, we are just resting between rounds and we have to tap the strength from within to get up and fight the next round. We are down, but not out of the fight.

Job loss is one of the most difficult events in life for a working adult. Whether it’s called a termination, lay-off, down sizing, responding to business needs or workforce adjustment, the effect is the same: you are no longer working. And, as more and more people are losing their jobs and fewer jobs are available, it takes a longer time to get a new job. Talk about a perfect storm.

And, it doesn’t matter when a job loss happens – whether we are in a time of economic growth when jobs are easy to get; or, we are in a time of economic retreat when jobs are hard to find. The effect to the individual – to you and me – is devastation. What are we going to do to move forward? How are we going to move forward?

How do we pick ourselves up, as President Obama tells us we must do? How do we get up from the mat? How do we face our family and friends when we have lost jobs? How do we meet our commitments and responsibilities? How do we feed our families? Keep a roof over our heads? Keep our families together? Keep our relationships alive? And, how do we prepare ourselves to prosper as America is remade?

I have been through a job loss and a lengthy time of unemployment and found there are steps you can take to make that time easier. Guidance to get through this period of time has not been available; it was trial and error for me to find a successful trail, but there is a way to get to that light at the end of the tunnel. I am not saying there won’t be hard times, but I am saying you can make it through them one step at a time by placing one foot in front of another. It will take courage. It will take hope. It will take determination and persistence. And, it will take the knowledge that the future comes at us one day at a time.

You have a choice to make right now. You can choose to lie down and not get up. You can choose to just take the hit and stay on the mat. You can choose to stay at home behind closed drapes, drown in self-pity and doubt and end up destroying your family.

Or, you can choose to get up and find your new life and find your place in the finest economic system the world has known. It will take courage to make the first step, but every step after that becomes easier and easier. It will take work to find your new life; it may be the most difficult work of your life. But, do you have a choice? You do have to get up, dust yourself off and remake yourself.

Look, it’s not going to be easy to remake yourself. I have found that most Americans don’t mind if it’s not easy; we don’t mind hard work. We have always wanted to leave our children a better place in which to live – and we can still do it, but it’s going to have to start with you. You are going to have to examine your life to determine where you will fit in, don’t worry though, a bit later in this book you will find out how to do just that.

When you lost your job, you did not lose the knowledge and experience you have gained over the years. They did not suddenly fall away at the company gate. You still have them. They have to be identified and optimized so you can find your new job, and this book will help you do just that.

Choose any direction as long as it’s forward.