Like most of us, I’ve become a newspaper junkie: whether paper or on-line, luxuriating in the onrush of information as markets fluctuate and both corporations and nation-states tremble in the shadow of Moody’s. It’s a pleasure akin to visiting the dental hygienist: the discrete pain of acceptable bloodletting.

But then, I have to be in a state of mind that tolerates all this information as acceptable. Otherwise, I’m a basket case.

Luckily, I was feeling pretty stable when I entered the conference room, not so long ago, to talk with 20 or so high-level professionals, until recently—very well employed, about their lives. As individual after individual contributed to the meeting, the collective angst rocketed, punctuated only by occasional moans and protests along the lines of the Book of Job.

What could help?

Working in break-out groups a bit later, I discovered the beginnings of the same process. But because the groups were smaller (and perhaps, participants’ willingness to marshal collective hope greater….) it was possible to question the kinds of assumptions that had merely gathered anxious emotion, like a snowballing avalanche, in the previous meeting.

Primarily, I found that when individuals were fixed in a solid conviction which admitted no productive possibility, an escalating terror was created. For example, after demonstrating to his own satisfaction that no viable jobs existed any longer in his field, a former executive explained (gritting his teeth) that he would send out even more resumes! Had it occurred to him to stop? STOP???? He asked as if I were mad. STOP???

If he stopped, what would he gain? Well, it seemed to me that he was distraught because this line of action was gaining him nothing anyway. Livid, he told me that it was keeping him busy. Now we were getting somewhere!

He had confirmed that the exercise in resume-submission had purpose and meaning. Only, his outrage at its ineffectiveness in getting work was misplaced. He had proven empirically— through personal experience—that its only current productive use was in keeping him occupied.

The UTILTY of the exercise then, had merit; but not the merit of securing employment. Significantly though, work-seeking was also a crucial challenge; and the merits of resume submission did not address this. In fact, his rage was centered on this inefficiency. Only by clarifying, in tiny steps, what worked and what didn’t and toward what ends, was he able to conclude that some other activity— equally effective in its own sphere—- needed to be added.
My question about stopping the activity he’d complained about had precipitated an outraged response: not so much at me as at the activity’s ineffectiveness in solving all that he’d wished for. Now, holding on to that activity as a partial solution he could bank on, he was ready to consider something else to add to the mix.

Confirming what’s real: putting the brakes on assumptions that lead to non-productive chains of thought, and clarifying what works and what doesn’t, is a beginning level step in getting beyond the personal depression experienced from the current Recession. Like reading the newspaper, we can only think productively when we’re not overwhelmed and disabled.

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