The Unemployed Life

Gigonomics: Taking Inspiration

For those of us slogging through the boggy labyrinth of the job search, it can be a challenge to get out of bed and don the Wellies for yet another muck-sucking trudge. We need occasional doses of inspiration—a piece of high ground from which to draw a deep cleansing breath and make some progress.

I was lucky enough to find some inspiration at a job fair last week by running into Liz Nead, whom I mentioned in last week’s blog. Liz is heavy into inspiration as a modus operandi, and a few minutes chatting with her and you understand why.

“I never spent a day mourning for my old job,” says Nead, who was laid off from her corporate IT job seven months ago. “Instead, I asked myself where I wanted to go in life, what was my game?”

Her answer was to create a “vision board,” a collection of photographs, magazine articles and clipped quotations about all the things she imagined for herself. She made it from a simple piece of butcher block paper and hung it at the foot of her bed where she had to look at it every day. Placing the board front and center in her life made her dreams inescapable—and provided constant focus during her career transition.

“I never spent a day mourning for my old job. Instead, I asked myself where I wanted to go in life, what was my game?”

“I even put a copy of my bank statement on it and whited out the balance and wrote in the balance I wanted,” she says. “And I did make myself look at it and add to it because I needed the mental support.”

“You have to take advantage of your unemployment,” says Nead. “This is the time to examine your true priorities, then brand yourself. What’s your game? How do you want to present yourself to others? What sets you apart? When you’ve established your message and prepared yourself to deliver that message, then use your networks to reach out and let everyone know what you want to accomplish.”

Not surprisingly, Nead wanted to build a business that helps people find inspiration, a you-can-do-it company that gets folks pointed in the right direction. Naturally chatty and engaging—in a good way, I’ll add—Nead decided to sell her positivism through lectures and CDs. The result is Nead Inspiration, a forward-charging romp that soars over the bog rather than slogging through. Wanting to use radio and television to distribute her message but without any media background, Nead posted on her vision board a desire to be a radio or television personality. To help activate her vision, she constantly let her close personal network know what her goal was. Before long, a friend of a friend offered to let her fill in for an absent radio personality. She impressed the producers enough that she was invited back, and now is a regular host at WHO in Des Moines.

“The difficult part can be choosing your path,” says Nead. “Most of us have many possibilities and different ideas of what we’d like to do. Hopefully, the answer isn’t simply, ‘get a job.’ Each of us has a game, something we like to do that we do better than most. Once you decide what that is, once you’re on a path, everything gets so much easier and all your connections fall into place and help you along the way.

“I’ll never again believe that a company will provide me with security,” she adds. “That doesn’t mean I wouldn’t work for a company. But I want that relationship to be a partnership—I would want them to help me along the path that I’ve selected. A job should be a two-way street.”

Other good advice from Liz Nead:

• Volunteer. It’s good for the soul and it aligns you with an organization and provides an active, purposeful identity. So instead of saying, “I’m between jobs,” you can respond, “I work at the Animal Rescue League.”
• Be a networking activist. Join groups, participate in discussions, post comments, links, and videos. Create your self-branding message and broadcast it.
• Rely on your close personal network. Even though you may have hundreds of contacts at Facebook and LinkedIn, the people who truly know you and will be honest with you are your best opportunities for good advice and helping activate your message.

The idea of creative visualization has been around since the late 1800s, and the idea remains effective to this day for the simple reason that it works. Sticking your hopes and dreams on a piece of butcher block paper may seem a bit middle-schoolish, but I’m heading for the meat market as soon as I wrap this up.

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John Riha spent more than 20 years in magazine publishing including stints as managing editor of Traditional Home and executive editor of Better Homes and Gardens before being laid off in January. He now produces multi-media content, video, and, yup, is thinking about cranking out that novel. You know the one.

You can read all of John Riha’s columns here.

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Tags: Gigonomics, inspiration, job-hunting