Coping With Coping...

I'm finding that you need to develop coping skills pretty quickly when you're looking for work... You need to cope when you're waiting for an e-mail or for the phone to ring. You need to cope when you've looked through every job search engine you can think of and can't find any more jobs you want to apply for. You need to cope with feeling like you are doing nothing productive... My answer for that dilemma was starting this blog, which I find simulates productivity extremely well. In fact, I'm simulating being productive as I write this because it helps me avoid the fact that I have reached a plateau in my job search.

For the first two months, I was able to find something to apply for nearly every day, or work on my resume, or work on my website, or fix up my blog and rationize that I was creating "writing samples". Now I've reached the point where I pretty much know what's out there, and hitting up careerbuilder.com and monster.com and journalismjobs.com and mediabistro.com several times a day is yielding little more than boredom.

I hate like hell to take a break from looking, because every time I stop, the little demon inside me that tells me I'll never find a job again grows a little stronger, and the clock on the wall ticks a little louder, reminding me that my time on the beach, by necessity, will soon have to come to an end.

But sometimes in life, benching your cleanup hitter because he's batting 1 for 20 is the best thing you can do to kick him in the ass and get him to start hitting homers again. Maybe I'm striking out with the job search because all of the jobs are starting to look the same, and the thought of settling for something I don't really want is starting to overshadow the excitement of moving on to the next chapter in my life. So I think I'm going to take a couple of days off to let the search engines fill up with some more exciting opportunities... recharge my batteries and get set for life AFTER the plateau!

I won't give up the blogging though... I have to find some way to cope!