It’s time to find your growl. Maybe your purr, too…

Reading Pamela Slim’s groundbreaking new book “Escape from Cubicle Nation” (Portfolio/Penguin, 2009) is a potentially liberating experience. It reminds me just a bit of John Eldredge’s “Wild at Heart” (Thomas Nelson, 2001), in the way that book helped me understand all the emasculating influences around me.

Pamela Slim’s book–subtitled “From Corporate Prisoner to Thriving Entrepreneur”–shows us how unnaturally domesticated and tamed working inside the box has made us. It makes us forget how to growl–and purr. She writes:

Keeping an active tiger chained up inside you takes a lot of energy. It saps your life force to continually pretend to be motivated, to feign enthusiasm for your life or job, to grind through another day at the office when you can feel that it is strangling your spirit.

… I have spent lots of time in cublicles. Even as a consultant, I would often get assigned a cubicle to work in for a long-term project. And as much as I knew that I was not an employee and had a vibrant life outside of work, I would sometimes slip into a bit of a coma.

This is such a common feeling that I sometimes wonder if cube furniture comes with a strange chemical pheromones that actually draws your life force out of you.

Her antidote? Pamela recommends a variety of strategies to “thaw out your soul … find out what makes you purr …  reawaken your curiosity, your muse and your creativity.” For some of us thawing out might have to be preceded by a period of hibernation in order to “detox from corporate life.”

If you’re still grinding it out in the cube farm while dreaming of launching your own business, she advises building at least six months worth of living expenses in advance as a cushion for the transition.

If you’re one of the hundreds of thousands who have been involuntarily launched–terminated or “streeted”–during the Great Recession, you may have to be even more enterprising. You probably won’t have anything like that six-months cushion. And, you’re liable to be a heck of a lot more emotionally bruised.

Let yourself heal a bit. Understand your plight is not your fault. Resist the dark side–anger, fear, blame, discouragement. Start to discover what makes you purr. Find your growl. Become what you really were at heart before your unfortunate domestication.

And then celebrate your Escape from Cubicle Nation. It could turn out to be the best thing that ever happened to you.

People want to be helpful. They really do. But when it comes to the big crashes in life–divorce, death, unemployment–they really feel inadequate as your friend. They think they should have some magic words of comfort, and they don’t.

That’s probably the most frequently asked question I get when I’m doing public speaking or radio interviews: What do you say to someone who’s suffered a job loss? How can you help?

I’d probably still be pretty clueless myself were it not for the fact that I’ve had the opportunity to look behind the curtain as few people have. My wife, Mary Jane, and I have a son in heaven who would be turning 16, had he survived those first two weeks of life. In fact, David’s birthday is tomorrow, Dec. 3.

The circumstances of his demise are not germaine to this discussion. Suffice it to say that we were rocked, and so were our friends. We had a big church network of folks who loved us and wanted to help. But for all their good intentions, the best they could do was offer look-on-the-bright-side type cliches. I totally do not blame them; I’ve done the same myself.

“It will be better tomorrow. … Remember, you have four other beautiful children.” Etc. One high school girl assured Mary Jane that she understood a little of what we were going through because her dog had died the week before. Bless her; she really wanted to help.

But there was one person who did minister to us. As we stood at graveside, completely drained and numb from the two-week ordeal, there was one voice that stood out, about two rows behind us–the youth pastor’s wife, Jennifer–but not with words.

She wept. She sobbed. I thanked God. At least one person could give voice to our agony. Jennifer didn’t try to minimize with magic words of comfort. She just mourned with and for us. Thank you. Message received.

So, now I tell people: Get rid of your mistaken assumption that you should have some magic words of comfort. They don’t exist. Just be there. Just rejoice with those who rejoice–and mourn with those who mourn.

Don’t pretend you’ve got a silver bullet for them. You don’t. That’s not what they need right now, anyway. They only want to know that you feel their pain, too. Don’t make them feel they’re somehow wrong to be in pain. Don’t try to fix them. They need to go through this valley to get to the other side.

What does that look like? It’s easy. Just be there for them, for whatever they need. If they need to talk, listen. If they need someone to mourn for them because they’re too exhausted, mourn. If they need the daily phone call or e-mail to let them know you’re there for them, do that. Let them drive it.

It’s not that hard. You don’t have to have all the answers. No one does. Just be there.

You think you’ve got stress? Try dodging bullets for a living. Concerned about an upsurge in suicides in the past year or two, the Army retained the services of an expert to help devise a response.

Dr. Thomas Joiner, a professor of psychology at Florida State University, has done some of the most cutting-edge research on the subject in recent years. Joiner, whose own father committed suicide, has created a new model of behavioral theory that the Army is weighing. It involves three prime components:

1. Loneliness–a sense of isolation.
2. Worthlessness–the feeling of being a burden.
3. Fearlessness–one’s ability to overcome the natural fear of death.

Obviously, No. 3 is integral to being trained for warfare and not optional. So, the Army is looking to ways of combating and reducing the first two. These include building close-knit teams to ensure that soldiers never feel alone and giving troops a sense of purpose that increases their self-worth.

Notice I’ve added “Hopelessness” to the list. That’s for us civilians who might not be able to relate to Fearlessness. Not that it doesn’t happen. Joiner and other experts have found that fearlessness increases with age.

As one doctor put it, “As people age, they are also more likely to develop (based on various life experiences) the fearlessness which transforms the simple desire for death into a plan for action.”

Let’s bring it home: If you’re self-employed by necessity–your fulltime job left you–you must watch out. Small businesses typically don’t make money for several years. It’s easy to get discouraged and fall into loneliness, worthlessness and hopelessness.

Guard against Relational Deprivation. Work ever harder at maintaining and building your personal network. Seek “close-knit” relationships and activities that give you a sense of purpose. Often that means serving others.

My friend Mark Carlen understood this when he, too, was laid off a year ago from Focus on the Family. He immediately formed a support group, where I met him, called Out of Focus. I’ll close with this quote from Mark that I include in the book:

“The isolation one feels when looking for a job can seem overwhelming. … The knowledge that I am making a contribution to someone else’s well-being keeps my spirits high.”

For the first time since the Great Depression, the economy seems to be having a significant effect on one of society’s most dreaded metrics–the suicide rate. It’s up.

Our intent here is not to shock, but to offer a word to the wise: If you live in the United States, people are almost certainly killing themselves in your community over joblessness. It may not be the only reason a person takes his life, but it’s often a case of the last straw for a distraught individual.

Professionals tells us that unemployed people commit suicide at rates two to four times greater than the general population. And with the big spike in unemployment during this Great Recession, the preliminary indications are for a big jump in the suicide rate. There’s been a sharp rise in calls to suicide hotlines this year, according to MSNBC, from 39,000 in January to 57,000 in June.

Counties across the country are reporting a jump in the suicide rate from 11.1 deaths per 100,000 in 2006 (the latest year for which figures are available) to levels last experienced during the Great Depression–17 to 18 per 100,000. An added complication for the unemployed is that many of them have also lost their health coverage, including mental health benefits.

We’ll explore some of the implications of all of this–along with some new findings–here tomorrow.

The ‘Adversity Index’

In the same MSNBC post (http://www.msnbc.msn.com/id/33738656/ns/us_news-the_elkhart_project/sp-tx), we also find this useful utility:

Click on your state (or just roll over it)–on the actual site–to see employment, housing starts, housing prices and industrial production, each shown as a percentage change from a year earlier. Red areas are in recession; green, in recovery.

In a sense, there’s no such thing as unemployment. It helps to realize that work in the form of jobs has only been around for about 200 years, a product of the Industrial Revolution.

If you’re currently unemployed, your job is finding work. And in that sense, there are some occupational hazards of unemployment. Take Relational Deprivation, a relatively little known phenomenon.

Obviously, the person who’s just lost his job has also lost a major part of his social network. You might not think so, but it’s virtually inevitable. When I lost my job last November, my brothers and sisters at Focus on the Family treated me like a leper. They avoided me, apparently not wanting to catch what I had and not knowing what to say or do about it.

And these are Christians. Their own leader, Dr. James Dobson, has remarked upon how medical professionals avoid bonding with their little patients in the pediatric cancer ward out of self-preservation because it’s just too painful to invest your feelings in somebody who’s going down. It’s just human nature.

But the unemployed person has an even greater natural tendency to withdraw from human contact–out of shock, pain, embarrassment, shame or a combination thereof. And it is this tendency to withdrawal that is the jobless person’s greatest enemy, for it robs him of job-related relational and networking opportunities when he needs them the most.

This is one of those times when our natural impulse is our greatest enemy and the solution–becoming an all-star networker–is so damnably counter-intuitive.

So, if you know someone who is unemployed, reach out to him. He may be emotionally paralyzed. You don’t have to have magic words to say. Nobody does. But this is also true: Nobody cares how much you know until they know how much you care. Be one who cares.

And if you’re unemployed, get off your butt and get into relationship with other human beings. You may not see it from here, but it’s the way out. When you’re all wrapped up in yourself, you’re too small a package.

Unemployment: The movie

This will take your breath away.

The American Observer (http://cohort11.americanobserver.net/latoyaegwuekwe/multimediafinal.html) illustrates the deterioration of the U.S. economy from January 2007 before the start of the recession to the most recent period with available data.

See the black eating from both coasts toward the center right before your eyes.  Thanks to Professor Mark J. Perry’s Blog for Economics and Finance at http://mjperry.blogspot.com/2009/11/unemployment-movie.html.

Blessed are the flexible, for they shall not be bent out of shape. If you can’t see the lighter side of being out of work, you might be wound too tight. Lighten up, for your own sake.

One of the questions I get on the speaking circuit is some variation of “Yes, but how do you deal with the stress of being out of work?” It’s a great question, and there are many answers. One of the best is exercise. Getting and staying fit will work wonders for your mental/emotional outlook. The problem is most people just aren’t going to do it. Period, end of story.

So, here’s what I tell people now: Learn to laugh again. You may have to work at that. What tickles your funnybone? Go there early and often.

Dave Barry can do it for me. So can Tim Conway and Mr. Bean. An outdoors writer named Patrick McManus is so funny, he sends my wife into near hysterics. During my first unemployment I combined humor with fitness. For half an hour a day I’d ride the stationary bike and watch old Dick Van Dyke Show episodes. That got the endorphins going every time.

Other personal favorites: “My Little Buttercup” from Three Amigos and Steve Martin’s “King Tut” song. LOL time. Oh, and if you’re a Christian and haven’t seen any of Tim Hawkins’ videos, you haven’t lived. All these are on YouTube. I’d love to hear your faves.

And laugh at yourself. If you can do that, you’re going to make it, no matter what life throws at you. I tell this story every chance I get:

The highlight of my day is the afternoon mail delivery. Mailman comes. Dog barks. Steve boogies out to the box, hoping to find some kind of manna. Several months ago I got two very interesting pieces of mail on the same day. One was a No. 10 window envelope concerning important state business, and the other was a postcard.

The first piece was from the state unemployment office, notifying me that my regular unemployment benefits had expired, but I was eligible to apply for emergency extended benefits. The postcard was from an organization called the Neptune Society, wanting to sell me pre-paid cremation services. In fact, the card informed me, if I registered now, I would be entered in a drawing for a free cremation. I spent the next several days asking everybody’s opinion on which offer I should take–extended unemployment or free cremation?

Yeah, that’s a little dark, but so is being out of work. The story always gets a laugh. It still gives me a chuckle, too. We need that. My old pastor back in Ohio used to like to say, “When you get all wrapped up in yourself, it’s a pretty small package.” Unwind.

THE GRIEF CYCLE

You can’t go over it. You can’t go around it. You can’t go under it. And you for sure can’t stay where you are.

You have to move THROUGH it.

This may look like a roller coaster, but it’s the classic Grief Cycle. The number of peaks and troughs may vary, but the same general pattern holds true whether it’s the death of a loved one, a divorce or the loss of a job. Some people bounce back and heal more quickly than others. Some never entirely heal.

In all cases, psychologists have observed this same sequence. Wouldn’t it be nice if we could just go straight from Point A to Point B without all that other nonsense? Unfortunately, it doesn’t work that way. The danger here is getting stuck at any point in the process. Stay in denial, and you risk losing grip on reality. Stay in anger, and you can become dangerous to yourself and others. Stay in sadness of loss and pain, and you risk depression.

Like the child who feels misplaced guilt over his parents’ divorce, we can struggle unnecessarily. I’ve experienced guilt during the “relief” phase of the grief cycle, feeling like I should be suffering more. An unknown wise man once said, “Pain is inevitable; suffering is optional.”

Accept your own human feelings, and give yourself a break. Notice, too, that the low-energy trough gets shallower each time. This is the path to recovery. Christians should have a real leg up in this process, knowing there’s a heavenly Father who cares when even a sparrow falls. It’s why Paul in his trials and tribulations could say he was “sorrowful, yet always rejoicing” and mean it (2 Cor. 6:10).

UPDATES

It’s here! My two advance copies of “Back to Work!” arrived this afternoon via FedEx. Check out the back cover:

You’re not alone–and there is hope!

Ohio-Bound: I’m tentatively scheduled to speak at 7 p.m. Monday October 19 at Grace Church in Cleveland (Middleburg Heights) on the whole issue of job loss from a Christian perspective. Working on another venue as well. More as it develops.

STAY TUNED: I’m working on something extra special that you won’t want to miss. Next week I’m hoping to present a strategic alliance with a provider of services that promises to put some power tools for the job search into your hands. Is that enough of a teaser? Yeah, we want you to keep coming back here.

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