The externalization of work failure is vital to preserve the mental health of people who are unemployed, laid off, and people exposed to work trauma.
In a world where we spend most of our lives working, with the work environment being a source of reference and prestige, it is necessary to prioritize work as a key element for mental health.
If work is vital, unemployment becomes a situation that has a direct impact on our self-concept. Not only that, but it generates a story of failure that is shared with the rest of the people and communities that are part of our existence. In the end, the result is a false attribution that all responsibility for searching for employment falls on us, without considering the variables that influence your repeated attempts to search for something to which you are entitled.
Saturated with magic formulas for looking for a job and the mantra of “there are jobs…” a person can apply for a job 200 or 300 times, without any response. What’s more, the silence in the processes has an even greater impact on our own perception.
This situation becomes more significant in people over 45 years of age who only have real possibilities in those jobs based on selective processes with a merit scale, which shows me that success in the BAE is based on external variables that have little to do with your capabilities. Ageism has been implemented in our country based on the fact that, in most cases, the new generations are much more conformist with very demanding, precarious work environments, with working conditions very far from a fair environment.
What is required within a selection process becomes an emotional burden for the interviewee, especially when there is no feedback about their potentials and weaknesses. Feedback, absent in almost all processes, is a fundamental element for the mental health of the person applying for new positions. When silence is imposed and there is no response to your applications, when the interviews are focused on carrying out a kind of exclusive exam and do not focus on evaluating competencies, the result can be disastrous, saturating the person with a more circumstantial or contextual problem. how own
Not long ago, I had the opportunity to work with a group of long-term unemployed people. The previous evaluation is that the majority of these people experience the problem of unemployment in such a way that the situation saturates their own perception, conditioning all aspects of their life, preventing them from seeing it as an external problem that has little to do with their own capabilities.
After group work based on narrative practices, we observed how the externalization of the problem, along with activities to improve self-perception and personal agency through narrative practices, improved not only expectations but also emotional well-being. Narrative practices undoubtedly contributed to improving its own concept.
Outsourcing work is based on a process that is in turn deconstructive of your situation, which paradoxically leads to an internal locus of control. It is not just about attributing what happens to me to external elements, but about knowing the external elements that influence it and knowing how to manage my skills to deal with it.
One of the fundamental elements is to work on self-esteem by looking for moments of professional success, of empowerment of your professional skills, deteriorated in the job search process.
