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"I'm trying to get people to be comfortable enough with looking for work on an ongoing basis, because that's what a business owner has to do."

To succeed in today's environment, we have to think of ourselves as if we were small business owners.

Watch the video.

A 2005 article in the London Evening Standard about overwhelmed working women advised them “not to struggle into work when ill but to stay at home and rest.” Likewise, the November 2009 issue of Working Women magazine cautioned readers against “dragging [their] fever-ridden [bodies] into the office.”

Under ordinary circumstances, this would be simply a matter of common sense, but the economic slowdown we are experiencing has eroded our sense of work security and had the effect of making people fearful that their absence from work, even for a day or two, could have disastrous consequences. In a new context, this simple advice deserves a closer look.

In Crazy Busy, author and physician Edward Hallowell talks about having to go to work regardless of your physical condition as if it were something that belongs to the past, like the experience of the lower classes as described in Dickens’s novels. But is it?

Judging from conversations I’m having these days with loved ones of those who have suddenly found themselves unemployed, or fear that they might be, there are a lot of people entering 2009 with concerns about another person’s employment status.

While we all recognize that it’s difficult being the one out there looking for work, we sometimes forget that it is also emotionally challenging for the spouse or the parent of that person.

You want very much to be supportive, to be wholeheartedly there for your husband, wife or child, but at the same time you are grappling with your own fears. Keeping your anxiety from overcoming the goal of providing support and encouragement to the work-seeker is a tricky business.