St.Louis Business Journal
STILL HAVE A JOB BUT SCARED IT MIGHT DISAPPEAR?

By Anna Navarro April 2010  

Examples in this column are fictionalized to protect privacy.



Merryl was very concerned she’d soon lose her job. She was an architect who worked for a firm serving the commercial real estate market. The company had let go of half its work force in 2009. It had survived to this point thanks mainly to contracts that had come in during the first half of 2008. But they only had a few jobs on the books to help them weather 2010.

Understandably, she was very anxious about her employment situation. She was having trouble sleeping. Her worry was distracting her at work and cutting into her productivity. Always a thin person, she was losing weight.

It was apparent during our first meeting that she needed to operate on two different fronts simultaneously. She had to get control of her internal state or she wouldn’t be effective at job hunting. And she had to have a solid job hunting strategy in order to feel more centered. The two were inextricably linked, and both were necessary to improve her situation.

Because of space constraints in a column, however, I will tell you her story in two segments. This column will deal with how she moved to a calmer and stronger state within herself. The next column will focus on how she handled the job hunt.

As a first step, I recommended she see her doctor, describe her symptoms (insomnia, weight loss and difficulty concentrating) and ask if he thought she needed an anti-anxiety medication to help her through this difficult time. After listening to her, he strongly advised she take medication and gave her a prescription that helped greatly. Within a few weeks, she stopped losing weight and started sleeping better.

That gave her enough calmness to enable her to get ready for job hunting. But it was clear she still needed some additional stress management tools to deal with the situation. The medication by itself wasn’t enough.

I taught her how to do a simple relaxation exercise that takes 20 minutes a day. It’s a technique that was developed quite while ago by Dr. Herbert Benson, author of The Relaxation Response, while at the Harvard Medical School. It consists of sitting comfortably in a quiet space, closing your eyes and breathing deeply. While breathing in, you say to yourself “I am” and while breathing out, you say “relaxed”. You continue doing that for 20 minutes.

That’s all there is to the technique, but it has remarkable effects. Merryl was amazed at how peaceful she felt after she did it for the first time in my office. She felt more relaxed than she had in a long time. She readily agreed to do it daily, as soon as she got home from work and on weekends. That gave her an island of serenity every day.

I also showed her another breathing technique she could use anytime she felt tense and was engaged in a solo task, like working at the computer or driving. It consists of inhaling deeply through the nose, and exhaling very slowly through the mouth. It’s a rhythm that’s readily learned and that has a powerful neurological impact. Like Benson’s technique, it leaves you feeling at peace. Its major advantage is that you can integrate it into many other activities relatively inconspicuously. Merryl used it several times a day, for maybe five minutes at a time.

On yet another front, Merryl and I talked about the importance of exercise, eating regularly and having fun. She’s now doing an aerobics class three time a week at the YWCA in her neighborhood, and making sure she gets three square meals a day. She plans at least two fun activities every weekend to get the emotional lift that provides.

We also worked on one more aspect of her situation: how she manages her time at work. She now catches herself when she gets sucked into worrying about the future and redirects her attention to the present moment and the immediate task at hand. This is calming and helps her be more productive. She pays attention to not working more than nine hours a day so she has the time to take care of herself.

All these techniques helped Merryl feel stronger, more resilient and better able to tackle the challenges she faced.

While she was learning them, we were also developing a strategy for re-positioning her in the employment marketplace. That part of the story will unfold in the next column.

Anna Navarro is the founder of Work Transitions, a nationwide career consulting firm that works with clients on an individual basis to help them find more satisfaction and fulfillment in their work-lives. She can be reached by phone at (314) 367-0008 and her e-mail address is email@worktransitions.com. For more information visit the worktransitions.com website.

This column was originally published by the St. Louis Business Journal. The actual title of the column and date in which it appeared in the Business Journal may be slightly different from what appears on WorkTransitions.com.