4. Maintain your sense of self. Follow familiar routines you devised while working so you continue to feel like you.

5. Identify multiple resources: newspaper ads, job lines, internet sites, agencies, networking. Knowing that multiple options are available can counteract negativity about future and feelings of panic.

6. Treasure your support systems. The frustration you feel is often misdirected towards those closest to you. Appreciate your family and friends and banish self-pity that often comes with stress.

7. Treasure yourself. Don't berate yourself for mistakes you make. Concentrate on remembering things you have done well, that show your individual value.

8. Pace yourself. Allow for periods of not thinking about work. Do something active that you enjoy even if only for an hour or two at a time.

9. Maintain your objectivity. Not being offered a job does not reflect on your personal competence. It simply indicates a mismatch as if you had tried unsuccessfully to sell a shack to a couple secretly seeking a mansion.

10. Manage your job search as if it were a sales campaign. Even world's best sales person will not make every sale but knows that each new contact increases chance of success.

Practice these tips to build a sense of security, even if initially fragile, and your mental outlook will bloom, allowing you to remain calm in face of panic of those around you who walk in constant fear of layoff.

2. You have general job skills which work in any industry: negotiating, inventiveness, sensitivity, understanding, creativity, ability to write clearly, assemble things, or operate machinery and experience in computing, classifying, investigating, evaluating, or synthesizing data.

3. You have specific job skills which have been acquired in all of your previous work experience.

4. You have multiple layers of value as a significant other, a parent, a brother or sister, a child, a friend, a community worker.

List out each area as a reminder that not finding a job does not mean that you are worthless. Reread list several times a week, keep adding to it as you remember skills, read it before every interview or employer contact.

The world may not seem to need you right now but it is important that you know your own worth and stop buying into that sense of incompetency and despair that prolonged unemployment (caused by economic and political forces, not by you personally) can produce.