Habits: Remind your host of ability to adapt and reshape yourself which has kept your thinking young. Stress your relish for new challenges and innovative approaches. Cite some examples from your past about how smoothly you have been able to change to new workflows and procedures.

Flexibility: Discuss your dislike of unproductive routine and your preference for trying new methods of approaching tasks. Stress those times in past when you were able to develop creative solutions to long-term problems and how your resourcefulness helped your previous employers.

Technology: Identify new technical advances within your field and address how you have internalized those changes. If you have successfully transitioned from dictating to a secretary to email and instant messaging, if you have moved from a manual adding machine to competent computer literacy, then small changes like learning new software or novel production systems should be a snap.

Authority issues: You have attained authority in past and you have also worked under a variety of supervisors in your long career life. Clarify your relationship with power: respect you extend to those who are knowledgeable, loyalty and support you offer any leader of your team, self-respect you enjoy which allows you to participate in group goals enthusiastically without feeling that you need to be in charge or command top title.

4. Once you have demolished myths of age, emphasize its strengths: reliability, mature judgment, lack of impulsivity, timeliness, a strong work ethic, and ability to perform without outside distractions such as personal relationship problems, child commitments, and social responsibilities.

Undoubtedly, there are individuals out there who have their own issues with hiring someone who reminds them of their father or who have had problems in past with an underperforming older worker who was difficult to terminate. There will always be those you cannot reach, no matter how convincing your logic and your presentation.

There are many more who are open-minded and seek not to make rash judgments. Address their semi-conscious fears face to face and interview may end successfully - for both you and your lucky new employer.

2.Concentrate on not over-committing yourself. You may be used to working 8 or more hours per day and think that is what you will now spend on job search. Remember that adage: your hunt for work is a lot more difficult than simply walking into a familiar employer and pursuing your daily routine. Recognize that and limit your job hunting to fewer hours per day.

3.If you rigorously limit your job hunt-related activities to 4 hours per day to start (you can always increase later), you may find yourself forced to stop before you are ready. This creates impetus to get you going following day -- you can hardly wait to get back to what you are working on.

4.When your "work time" is over, stop. Consciously focus your attention on relaxing: take a walk, read a book, throw a ball, watch television, whatever pleases you. You will be able to relax because you know you completed exactly what you planned. The guilt, and sense of "I should have, I should be" no longer exist and you are free, for a short time anyway, to do anything you want.

5.Identify your priorities by looking at what day of week is best for each kind of activity. If you are searching classifieds, Sunday is premium time to do it. If you are networking or cold calling, concentrate on morning weekday hours. Agency visits, whether for temporary work or head hunting, can be relegated to afternoons when employers are difficult to reach and already fatigued.

6.Analyze your own daily energy patterns and put them to work for you. Make sure that during your high energy periods you are "out there," contacting people and presenting yourself. Use your low energy times for solitary, mundane tasks: researching companies and jobs, organizing your paperwork, planning your next day's activities.

The inevitable stress of unemployment and job search can never be totally eliminated, but managing your time and being gentle with yourself can turn a painful situation into simply an uncomfortable nuisance.