From Fired...to Fired Up: Six Positive Choices to Keep You Motivated During Your Job Search

We're in a recession and you're out of a job. That's the bad news. The good news, says author Jon Gordon, is that by making a few key decisions you'll not only make your job search a thousand times more pleasant, you'll actually make it successful.



Hoboken, NJ (April 2009)—The days following those fateful words, "We have to let you go," are dismal ones indeed. Some mornings, it's tough to even get out of bed. As you scour the skimpy classifieds and job boards, grim scenarios play in your head on a repeating loop: We'll lose the house...We'll have to move in with my parents...I'll never find work in this economy. Tangled in despair, you can barely move, much less move on. Are things really as hopeless as they seem? you wonder. And if they're not, how can I clear away the dark clouds and see the light on the other side?



Jon Gordon has been where you are right now, and he has some good news: the layoff you think is bad today will actually lead to great events in the future with the right approach and action plan.



"It doesn't mean that you don't allow yourself to get down," says Gordon, author of international bestseller The Energy Bus: 10 Rules to Fuel Your Life, Work, and Team with Positive Energy (Wiley, 2007, ISBN: 978-0-4701002-8-8, $21.95) and its follow-up, The No Complaining Rule: Positive Ways to Deal with Negativity at Work (Wiley, 2008, ISBN: 978-0-4702794-9-6, $19.95). "But rather it's all about implementing the strategies that will help you focus, make changes and turn things around."



Gordon speaks from personal experience. During the dot.com crash, he lost his own job. And that's when his journey of reinvention began.



"I thought it was the worst event of my life," recalls Gordon. "I was two months away from being bankrupt. I had a mortgage, two kids, no insurance and very little savings. I was a paycheck away from losing it all. It sounds bad. It felt bad. Seen from one point of view, I suppose it was bad. But then, one day I decided that I wasn't going to let this challenge take me down. And that's when I knew I had to change what I was ...