This will help you move beyond grief of your job loss and increased solidity and support will allay your sense of worthlessness and failure.

3. Appreciate.

Use your job search activity to bolster your self-esteem. Your confidence is already in jeopardy and your sense of self-value under constant attack. As you take physical steps to find new work, take time to nurture your emotional needs. Read your resume not just as a document outlining your experience but as a conduit to your character. Think back to your prior work and education. Give yourself a mental boost for successes you have enjoyed, no matter how small. Pat yourself on back for efforts you expended and your value as an employee. If there were failures, as is usual for most of us, remind yourself of what you learned and how you became a bigger, better person for experience. Reread any awards, special recognitions, or recommendations you ever received and internalize such paper symbols as evidence of your value, your worth, your ability to contribute to world.

When you take to street and visit employers, agencies, or obtain interviews, don't just focus on outcome. It is so easy to interview, not receive an offer, and bear down on yourself as a no-good failure. The right offer will eventually come if you persist. What is important now is to appreciate what you have actually done. Give yourself credit for actions you personally took to get that interview: resume submission, telephone calls, agency referral --whatever steps were needed. The job might not have been a good fit, that's why it wasn't offered, but you did all right things to get opportunity that a personal interview affords. Revel in fact that you are taking right steps in right direction and that just a little more time and similar effort will lead to success.

Use your mind as a source of constant self-support and self-appreciation and it will counteract stress you're now feeling. Use it frequently, and use it positively, as one source of help and affection that will never desert you.

Does all this monitoring and second-guessing have an effect on employees? Personal trust is something we rate highly. Talk with someone whose spouse has cheated on them and you will find that emotional pain has little to do with sex but everything to do with loss of trust and doubt that a relationship can ever really survive such a loss. Although secondary to intimate relationships, we would like our coworkers and supervisors to trust us also, as a mark of respect if nothing else.

On other hand, we are aware that world is full of cheaters, those who would break any moral, legal, or ethical code if it gave them an advantage in race for success and financial independence. We want to be trusted to act responsibly and do right thing but we are just a little reluctant to trust others to quite same degree.

Close oversight of everyone gives us a certain sense of security - it levels playing field for us all by rooting out those who would bend rules to get what they want. We tell ourselves that we have nothing to fear because we are innocent and that will protect us.

Then we read about long-convicted prisoners whose innocence has been belatedly proved by newly developed scientific forensics. We miss a familiar face at our favorite casino and finally learn that individual left town after an error-inspired accusation of misconduct resulted in termination and blacklisting from industry.

Where there is cash floating around in generous amounts, there will always be temptations, overzealous suspiciousness, justice and injustice on all sides because truth is not amenable to scientific analysis and every event has multiple explanations and perspectives.

So we keep on watching ourselves and each other. Those of us who loathe concept of big brother and snitching on friends, draw back in disgust as we see need for security invade our lives. We can stay out of gaming world with its cameras and minutely regulated transactions but how do we avoid monitoring threatened with every call for customer service or cookies embedded in our computers to track our wanderings through Internet?

The cheaters, scam artists, swindlers and frauds have won. It is we, innocent, who must dwell in prison cells of continuous third degree scrutiny.