As human nature and the quest for power would have it, we are always at a disadvantage in the world when we ask a stranger for something. So it is with interviews from the minuscule amount of ads that actually answer you back. The interviewer’s defenses are up and it’s damn hard to always resonate with him or her beyond small talk because the interviewer usually directs the interview direction. Unless we come into an interview through a contact or introduction, we are essentially communing with someone we’ve never met before and placing an essential need of ours for their consideration.

Job search advice is a dime a dozen and proliferating as you are reading this. The job search industry is big business. Sometimes the advice offered is contradictory. Do this, don’t do that…can’t you read the ad? Some recruiters and private counselors say ignore ads that read, “No phone calls please” and go ahead and call, some say don’t dare do it. Some advice tells you go in person to a company, some warn against it as the death knell to your application. Sometimes and in some situations, all of the job search advice in the world is true. One hopes to master every single possibility and eventuality and each scenario is different yet the same if no job offer materializes.

Some advice is obvious, of course. Some of it is common sense: be well-groomed, mannerly and friendly. Those are givens and stuff learned in kindergarten. OK, don’t pick your nose or chew gum and so forth and don’t be late for a very important date…

Please allow me to add one more strategy to the fray: Journal. Write about the lousy situations, the humiliations, the rejections—the crap of job searching—down on paper. The employer who disses you, promising he/she would get back to you in a week or who never looked at you the whole time you interviewed in what amounted to a diatribe with yourself. Why? Journal writing gets it out of your head and in a ‘place.’ It’s cathartic. You need to cleanse before dusting yourself off, picking yourself up and starting over with a clean slate. The simple act of writing it down empowers you because you did something with the anger and the disappointment. For the next interview, you are all the stronger and won’t beat yourself up if you don’t get the job.

There’s a thin line and a whole lotta luck to get onto the right vibe and slide into the right circumstances with too few job openings, a perpetual musical chairs game shucked in childhood. There have got to be jobs to slide into with those mastered good heads you’re trying to keep on your shoulders and readiness for right circumstances already! It’s hard to keep your spirits up for the umpteenth time after three or four interviews at the same company and three or four different outfits for which you had to lay out money and didn’t have—all while wondering who the heck is getting the too few jobs there are.

Gandhi, one of the most influential humanitarians of the twentieth century, said something beautiful about what harms human civilization. With profound regard, I quote him: “Wealth without work, Pleasure without Conscience, Science with Humanity, Knowledge without Character, Politics without Principle, Commerce with Morality, Worship without Sacrifice.” The commentary on wealth without work and commerce without morality seems to sum up what went wrong in our world today for millions of people who once worked and now labor to work again.

Those of you who are out of a job and especially those who have been for a long time know the suffering of being deprived of a basic human right, the right to contribute to a society and the dignity of supporting oneself. It’s hard to always keep your spirits up when you don’t have a job and can’t seem to find one. And it’s hard to siphon out just what will work when, with whom and where. We live in an imperfect world. All we can do is our best—even when we feel like a ship without a compass. All we can do is our personal best while riding out the storm until it passes. Here’s wishing everyone plenty of work to go around.

-By The Job Enthusiast Who Won’t Rest Till Everyone Is Put To Work!