Fired Or Fired Up? The Choice Is Yours!

If I pay too much attention to the news, I will find myself getting depressed. Perhaps entertaining feelings of giving up. No, I haven’t lost my job — rather, I can empathize with those who have.

Yet, I know for the person who has recently been fired that it is essential for them to move forward instead of dwelling on their loss. Not to say that it isn’t good to reflect, but only for a little while. Much better off is the person who takes quick and decisive action as that will bring them that much closer to landing a new gig.

Advice For The Newly Unemployed

Lots of people are offering advice to the newly unemployed, but there is no “one size solution” that will fit every job seeker. But there are a few things that I believe can light the fire in the belly of the individual seeking employment including:

Get in a routine — After a few days of rest and reflection, you need to get back in the grind by establishing a daily routine. This means getting up at the same time each morning, going to bed early and using your time wisely throughout the day. This isn’t the time to catch up on your TV watching — you’ll need to make some contacts, people who can help you land your next gig.

Rub shoulders regularly — As easy as it is to stay at home and make your contacts via phone or internet, you’d do well to get out of the house often. Take in a seminar, join a job seekers group (only if the other members are positive), volunteer your services and above all else bring plenty of these wherever you go: business cards.

Stay accountable — Find a friend who can encourage you along the way, a person who won’t allow you to get caught up in a pity party. Allow this person to ask you the hard questions on how you’ve been using your time, your thought life, etc. Be honest with yourself and avoid answering to an enabler!

Reward yourself — If you have been following your daily routine, have been getting out of the house on a regular basis and are staying accountable to at least one special person, then you should periodically reward yourself. No, that does not mean you should run up your credit card nor ignore your other responsibilities, but at the end of the week you should give yourself a “mental health break” and do something really fun for a change.

The Road Ahead

The road back to work can be long or short, bitter or sweet — even costly.  Manage your time wisely and you’ll be that much closer to getting a job, returning to the workforce fired up and ready to go.

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You Can Work Better, Faster, And Smarter Without Feeling Overburdened

Chilling: Obama’s OFA Indoctrination Squads

It has been just over two months now since Barack Obama ascended to the presidency of the United States of America. Since then, we’ve heard and seen the president at news conferences, on Jay Leno, 60 Minutes and other shows. His image seems to be cropping up almost everywhere; one neighbor still has a huge poster of Obama plastered to their living room window with the word “hope” underneath it.

Clearly, these are interesting times. Interesting as in weird.

Obamaism v. Nazism

People get angry when any sort of parallel with Hitler’s Germany is offered when mentioning Barack Obama and his magnetic appeal to the masses, but I cannot help but see them. Well before Germany’s turn to national fascism (Nazism) the country was a fractured, but rising power which came together in 1871 to form what historians call the German Empire.

Stretching from France to Russia, the new German state was an industrial powerhouse with Chancellor Otto von Bismarck holding sway until 1890, a man widely credited with rolling out national health care and old-age insurance plans during the 1880s. The country was also fairly tolerant to foreigners, including Jews, whose numbers topped 500,000 as the Nazis rose to power.

When Adolf Hitler took office he unified a defeated, demoralized country which was still reeling from its humiliating loss in The Great War (World War I) fifteen years earlier. Hitler was instrumental in imposing “Gleichschaltung” which was a way of getting rid of individualism in favor of have people adhere to a unified way of thinking, in order to exert totalitarian control over the masses.

A Successful Grassroots Campaign

People rightfully credit Barack Obama’s grassroots organizing campaign for his victory last fall. Certainly, the collapse of the economy ensured his triumph, one that was threatened when Sarah Palin emerged as John McCain’s veep choice just weeks earlier. Obama immediately blamed Bush for the country’s economic woes, easily associating McCain with the sitting president’s policies.

The organization that Obama established was called Obama For America (OFA), with millions of Americans giving their financial support (and email addresses) in a bid to form a strong base. In January, Obama took the unusual step to encourage the organization to continue, renaming it Organizing for America, keeping the trademark campaign logo and tasking its members to help transform American society.

Run By The Democrat National Committee

Specifically, the OFA is a political group run by the Democrat National Committee tasked with supporting and advancing the Obama legislative agenda. Now, I’ve learned that the OFA has mobilized its members to go door to door in a bid to sell the president’s health care, energy and education agendas to the American people. That first campaign launched this past weekend; we weren’t home so I don’t know if we were paid a personal visit or not.

I don’t have a problem with people campaigning, obtaining signatures for a petition, asking for financial support, etc. If the OFA wants to do that, it is within their rights unless local laws forbid door to door solicitations.

What I don’t like is that this campaign is under the OFA umbrella, a DNC group with a clear political agenda, one which I do not support. While campaigning, Obama rightfully took George W. Bush to task for spending hundreds of billions of dollars and running up our national debt but is hypocritically spending trillions more himself in a bid to implement his plan for America. Our country is being hit with a social agenda contrary to what many Americans believe in while burdening us with a level of debt that won’t easily go away.

What are those parallels to Nazism that I see with Obama devotees? It is their blind support for a charismatic leader who has stumbled early and often as he attempts to lead this nation. If people can support initiatives that promote abortion, increase spending, attack free enterprise and push an undefined social agenda without question, then those seeds will take root, changes which will mold America much in the way that Germany was reshaped prior to the second world war.