It is the beginning of the year. For many years I have spent January reflecting on what has happened in the last year and what, if anything needs to change in my goals and behaviors going forward. It is a time of taking stock and deciding what to focus on in the coming year.
I can’t believe this transition phase in my career has lasted as long as it has. I was easily prepared to last 6 months, figuring that I would be able to find something in that time. Even as I was planning this, I was hearing that the average time to find a job was taking 8 months. Now I’m moving past this mark and not feeling good about it.
In order to last 6 months or more I decided to set my priorities as the following:
- Find a job
- Become the stay at home Dad
- Get in Shape and improve my health
- Complete a large remodel in my house
- Move forward on an idea for a non-profit that I had
In this blog I wanted to step through each of these and relate to the progress I have made in each are and then try to capture where I am now. In some later blog I will discuss changes that I will make to these.
Finding a Job
Still looking and this is still the first priority over everything else. It seems that in the last month the pace of interesting jobs being advertised has increased greatly. I have had more interviews in the last month than I had in the previous 6 months. Since I have been laid off, I have learned how to search for jobs and refine my resume for the particular job that I am applying for. I am learning about the interview process and how to best prepare for an interview.
I have been working with the Leadership team of a local professional organization. This allows me to keep in touch with the profession and do some “real work” which helps my sanity. I am also working on becoming certified in office 2010 by completing some courses from Microsoft.
Over all, I think I have been doing well in this area and I am still failing. I need to do more. I am considering volunteering for my Master’s degree alumni association, as a way to network and again do something inspiring.
Become a stay at home Dad
I have been keeping the house clean, though not as clean as when I started. I have backed off how I clean the house and now keep the house reasonably clean. Using the hours saved in the other areas.
I also feel that I have done a good job with the shopping and cooking. There has been grumblings from time to time, but no mutiny from the recipients of my cooking. I have tried to cook in a healthy manner and with a minimum of processed foods. Though the time and labor convenience of processed foods keeps from fresh preparing every meal.
Get in Shape and improve my health
I was doing great with this until the end of August and then I injured my foot and had to back of my walking. Unfortunately, I backed off much more than my walking. In addition to my injury, two other activities bumped up against this goal.
The first was that I was approaching my mental milestone of 6 months since being laid off and I wasn’t all that close to getting a job. My anxiety level was increasing, so I increased the amount of time I was spending on looking for work. I don’t know if I was more effective, but I spent more time doing it.
The second had to do with the remodeling. Instead of my health being my third priority I move the remodel ahead of this. There was a lot of work that needed to be done. My family was getting anxious to see more get done here. It as also nice to have something that I could see the physical transformation happen in real time, as opposed to the job hunting that takes place over longer periods and involves a lot of non-response.
Basically, these trends continued through November, and getting in shape has taken a back seat. Starting in December, I started reversing this trend, and have been increasing the amount of exercise that I have been doing. And as many people, I have been especially good at this since the New Year.
Complete a large remodel in my house
I made great progress on the remodel in the Fall. Now I’m trying to find a good sheet rocker that I can hire to do the next big step. The one we had lined up fell down a flight of stairs and busted up his elbow in December. So I need to scramble to find a new person.
I’m pretty happy with how the remodeling has progressed, though it has been very slow. Keeping my priorities in order has caused this and I still think I have them in the right order, so I guess I can expect that progress will be slow going forward also.
Move forward on an idea for a non-profit that I had
While it was not the progress that I expected when I started this, I have made great progress here. I have decided that my idea wasn’t needed at this time and that I shouldn’t spend any more time on this. So this one is complete.
Current State
Surprising, I feel I am in pretty good shape emotionally. I am mostly upbeat and optimistic about the future. The amount of interest that I have received in the last couple of months has been much better than in my first part of this journey.
Though, I found that I go through times which can best be described as a funk. A funk where I don’t feel very optimistic. I feel that these times hold important messages. I don’t want to get lost in the feelings themselves, but I do want to understanding what brought on the funk and decide what, if anything, I need to change in order to improve the situation.
This happened recently on what I felt was a successful interview. They called back the next day and told me they decided to cancel the job. It took a while to recovery from this. When this happened, I felt somewhat helpless. I felt I had the best interview yet and they still didn’t want what I had to offer. It was hard, because I couldn’t understand what I could do to improve my performance. And I was also feeling sorry for myself. It took a while to come to the conclusion that I had done fine, and I just wasn’t right for that particular job. And this was a case where the job requisition was actually opened just to interview me and then closed right after. This tells me that my resume is working. Now I need to work on the interviewing end.
I find that I’m spending more time worrying, I am more anxious, and I’m finding it harder to concentrate on things. Being more consistent on my exercising should counteract all of this. And I need to expect that going through this is going to be a more emotional time than normal and that I need to deal with these emotions as they come up. It gives me a chance to use my emotional intelligence training.
I am optimistic about the changes that I am seeing in the job market. I have been able to apply for many more jobs that I feel I have a chance at. I feel that my resume is working and my interviewing to pretty good. Tomorrow, I have an interview for a job I didn’t apply for, but for one which my resume was passed along after a different interview.
I’m also excited because I have several things to try as I go into this new year. I’m going to increase my volunteering and networking. And I’m going to complete some training that I have in progress and see if it is possible to get some other training paid for.
I have also received an offer from a friend to become a facilitator for a workshop called appreciative circles. It is a 4 week training program to help people add deep appreciation into their lives. These are workshops that I can facilitate and may in the process bring in a little money towards the family expenses which will be helpful.
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