Three Ways to Manage Stress While Looking For Jobs for Disabled Veterans
It doesn’t matter who you are, looking for a new job is a stressful proposition. This is doubly true if you are a dAv since quality jobs for disabled veterans can be hard to come by unless you know of a good place to look for them.
In any case, the first thing I’d like you to take away from this post is that getting anxious or even frustrated as you go through the admittedly difficult process of finding a job, while still working on overcoming daily life challenges. This is normal. It just means that you are a red-blooded human being with a working brain.
As part of the process that forged them, most vets have a tough time admitting or even realizing when they are going through emotional challenges, and I’m here to tell you that you don’t have to.
Keeping your cool while under enemy fire requires an entirely different skill set than it does keeping your cool as weeks or months go by while you continually put your best foot forward and keep sending those resumes and going to those interviews.
You most likely have the former highly developed, while the latter might benefit from some new tools, which is precisely what follows. A couple of strategies and mindsets that I believe can help you greatly as you search for jobs for disabled veterans.
Do not take it personally:
This might be the hardest one to pull off, so this is the one I’m starting with. Whatever mindset you manage to keep while searching for jobs, will have a massive impact on how easy or grueling the job-hunting process gets. The best guidance I can give anyone going through it is not to take rejections personally.
This might seem counterintuitive at first glance. The job seeking process is a highly personal one, as you send summaries of your life experience and seemingly get personally evaluated during interviews. However, there’s so much that goes into the hiring process that chances are, if you aren’t called back after an interview, it probably doesn’t even have to do with you.
Another applicant might have clicked better with that particular interviewer, or a fellow DAV might merely have one specific skill unrelated to the post that the employer thought could be useful to have around.
Not hearing back from a potential opportunity should never be taken as a reflection on yourself or your skills, it should be viewed merely by what it is: another step in the process of you eventually getting a job. Do not take it personally, and do not be deterred.
Keep Motivated:
This shouldn’t be something new for someone with a military background. When we are trying to accomplish a difficult task, focus and motivation have vital roles in determining our success. However, even though most people understand this, they fail to act effectively on that intel.
Staying motivated while searching jobs for disabled veterans can be a challenge, but like anything else in life, it gets easier and even simpler when you know what to do and practice it.
There’s an excellent write-up about it here, but let me give you the general cliff notes:
Motivation doesn’t have to be an ethereal, hard to grasp the concept, but a skill you can nurture and grow to the point of honing it and wielding it at will. You just need to understand it, know how to work it, and practice. Just like every other skill you’ve ever mastered.
Here’s some good advice on how to get started:
• Schedule: Dedicate a part of your day (ideally early in the morning) to read, write, and practice motivational exercises. Dedicate another part of your day to reading job postings and sending curriculums, even if you don’t feel like it.
• Stick to a sleep routine: You’d be surprised at how pivotal your energy levels are for your mood and general motivation. Try to maintain a proper diet and healthy sleep patterns.
• Set goals based on yourself: Focus on the things that are under your control. Do not think in terms of “Am I getting that job?” which is out of your control. Instead, measure the things you control, like how much time you spend a day going through job postings, learning a new marketable skill, or even networking online and in real life to eventually land that job you want.
Meditate:
Lastly, and I can’t really oversell this, you’ve got to at least try to meditate.
People have different views on what meditation is and how to go about it, but at its bare bones, you should know that meditation is a mental exercise that will give you more control over your psychological state.
It is an all-encompassing tool that will even help you not to take things personally, to stay motivated, to focus on the task you need to accomplish without too much effort, and to stay positive while surfing sites with jobs for disabled veterans.
Meditation is not religious, metaphysical, or magic. Is just another skill you can (and should) practice to help you achieve your objectives.
Now, there is a lot of great resources online that can help you start meditating in a myriad of ways, but I’ll leave a simple method here to get you started:
Put on a timer – begin with a short time but make it as long as you can comfortably manage – close your eyes for easier concentration and start breathing in and out, slowly and deeply. The trick is to try and keep your mind focused on your breathing and keeping all other thoughts out, not by wrestling them, but by letting them go. Count your breaths up to ten, and then back up to 1, as many times as you can until the timer chimes.
Doing this for even a few minutes a day will have a huge, positive impact on your life, and make your job search much more effective and manageable.
As I said at the beginning, looking for jobs for disabled veterans can get difficult at times, but I’m confident these three simple strategies can make the whole process at the very least, more manageable, and will net you an easier time until you land that job you are looking for.