Worry

As I am working on perfecting my personal marketing materials, my wife speaks up and confesses that she's a little worried---I've been laid off/restructured/downsized/right sized out over 2 weeks ago, and the phone isn't ringing. I was very quick to tell her I'm not worried and that it will. The best part of it is that I was telling the truth---I'm not worried.

Worry is one of those emotions that really isn't logical or beneficial, but we all do it. It can have some unfun health effects such as stomach ulcers, higher blood pressure, etc., but even more for the job seeker, it saps energy you need to carry on a full-body contact job search.

So I looked into "worry" a bit more. According to Webster (http://www.merriam-webster.com/dictionary/worry) the word worry comes from
"Middle English worien, from Old English wyrgan; akin to Old High German wurgen to strangle" (emphasis mine). Hmmm.....have you felt "strangled" by the worrying you're doing about how to pay bills, when you'll get a job, the state of the economy, or whether the sun will come up tomorrow? Most of you were with me until the statement about the sun coming up, but consider this: if you WORRY, can you make money fall from the sky to pay your bills? Can worrying make the phone ring with job offers? Can you worry the economy to improve? No amount of emotional stress on your part is going make any difference to any of the above mentioned items..

Curious, I looked around for what others had to say about "worry":

"Worry is the stomach's worst poison." ~ Alfred Nobel (wasn't he ever worried while inventing dynamite?)

"The reason why worry kills more people than work is that more people worry than work." ~Robert Frost

"As a rule, men worry more about what they can't see than about what they can." ~ Julius Caesar

"I believe God is managing affairs and that He doesn't need any advice from me. With God in charge, I believe everything will work out for the best in the end. So what is there to worry about." ~ Henry Ford

And that brings me to the heart of the matter on worry, addressed by this one last quote:

25"Therefore I tell you, do not worry about your life, what you will eat or drink; or about your body, what you will wear. Is not life more important than food, and the body more important than clothes? ... 27 "And which of you by being anxious (or "worrying" Gk. μεριμνάω, "dividing care or distracting the heart from the true object of life" --Vincent's Word Studies) can add one cubit unto the measure of his life?" ~ Jesus

The message is clear, and I think we all intuitively know it: worrying is not going to accomplish anything, yet we persist in wasting time and energy worrying. In the interest of accuracy, I have to mention that you can actually accomplish some things by worrying: eating your stomach lining, turning your hair gray, getting wrinkles, raising your blood pressure, having a stroke, and most of all, enriching your physician and/or the drug companies.

So while you're out doing battle in the job-hunting jungle, consider what good all that energy you're wasting in worry is doing...it's actually slowing you down, lengthening the time you will be hunting for a job.