The hardest part of looking for work isn't the applications, or the interviews, or even the rejections. It's the underlying feeling that the whole thing is happening to you: the market decides, the algorithm decides, the hiring manager decides, and your role is to sit in the queue and wait to be picked.
That feeling has a name in psychology, and it has an opposite. The opposite is called agency, and the research on it (most of it done by University of Pennsylvania psychologist Martin Seligman) says that people who build it get through hard stretches better, act sooner, catch opportunities others miss, and come out the other side less battered. Seligman defines agency as three things stacked together: efficacy (the belief you can act now), optimism (the belief you can get there in the future), and imagination (the ability to see possibilities that don't yet exist). None of them are wishful thinking. All three can be practised.
Here's how each one works during a job search, and what to actually do with it.
Efficacy: rebuild the sense that today counts
Efficacy is the belief that you can do a specific thing, right now, and have it work. It's the smallest of the three ideas, and it's the one that goes first when a search drags on. Every unanswered application chips away at it. By month three, a lot of people have stopped believing that anything they do this week will matter, so they do less of it, and the feeling gets worse.
The fix is to shrink the goal. "Get a job" is not a goal you can act on today. "Send three targeted applications by Friday" is. "Message two people in my network this week" is. "Spend forty-five minutes tomorrow morning practising the answer I keep fumbling in interviews" is.
Small, specific, done. That's the shape of an efficacy-building action. The point isn't the productivity. Three applications won't fix the search on their own. The point is that you did the thing you said you'd do, and now the part of your brain that was starting to believe you can't do anything has evidence against that belief.
A useful rule: measure the inputs you control, not the outputs you don't. You can control how many applications you send, how targeted they are, how many people you reach out to, how much you prepare for a specific interview. You can't control who calls back. Judging your week by the callbacks is judging yourself against something that isn't yours to move. Judging your week by the inputs is fair, honest, and repeatable.
Optimism: the pillar the middle stretch runs on
Optimism in Seligman's sense is not "everything will be fine." It's the working belief that, given enough tries, you will land somewhere good. It's what carries you through the stretch between application forty and application eighty, when there's no finish line in sight and nothing has landed yet.
That kind of optimism isn't a personality trait you either have or don't. Seligman (who describes himself as a natural pessimist) has spent decades showing that it's a skill, and the core skill is called disputation.
Here's how it works. Your brain, especially at 4am, will produce a thought like nobody's going to hire me, or I've been out too long, my CV looks like a mess, or I'm the wrong age for this. Most people either believe those thoughts (which is crushing) or try to ignore them (which doesn't work; they come back). Disputation is a third option: you argue back, out loud or on paper, the way you'd argue back against a person who was trying to make you miserable.
Nobody's going to hire me. Actually, I had two interviews last month. My CV has been landing at the shortlist stage. I got positive feedback from the last one, they just went with an internal candidate.
I've been out too long. I've been out three months. That is not "too long" in this market. And I've been picking up freelance work, so my CV isn't a gap.
The argument has to be realistic. You're not trying to convince yourself of something untrue, you're trying to stop giving airtime to something equally untrue in the other direction. Do it consistently and the automatic thoughts don't disappear, but their grip does.
The second technique is for the specific catastrophes: the terse email from a recruiter, the interview that went badly, the silence after what felt like a great conversation. Seligman calls it put it in perspective, and it's four questions:
- What's the very worst that could happen here?
- What's the very best?
- What's the most likely thing that's actually going to happen?
- What can I do to plan for the most likely?
The point of that drill isn't to reassure yourself. It's to notice that most of the mental energy was going into the worst-case scenario, which is neither the most likely nor the most useful thing to plan for. Once you've named the most likely outcome, you can prepare for it, which drops your anxiety and gives you something to do.
Imagination: the piece most job searches skip
The third part is the one that separates a long, grinding search from one that finds a way through. Imagination, in Seligman's framework, is the ability to see possibilities that don't yet exist: to leap beyond what's on the page and picture something that could be.
Most job searches don't do this. Most job searches type the same job title into the same three portals, week after week, because that's what already exists. That's a coherence search: you're matching what you already believe about your career against what's already been advertised. It's the most predictable path, and in a slow market it's also the slowest.
The imaginative version asks different questions. What kind of role would use the specific mix of things I can do (not the ones already written into a job title, but the actual mix)? Which companies would benefit from someone like me even if they haven't advertised for one? What adjacent industry uses the same skills under a different label? If I described what I do to a stranger, without using my old job title, where would they say I should be looking?
Practical ways to build this
- Talk to people whose jobs sound nothing like yours. Ask what they actually do all day. You'll find overlap you didn't know existed.
- Read job ads outside your usual titles. Not to apply, but to notice which of them describe work you could do under a name you hadn't considered.
- Write a version of your CV around what you're good at, not what you've been called. Then see which listings suddenly look like a match.
- Send speculative approaches. A short, specific message to a company that hasn't advertised, describing what you'd bring and why you're interested, occasionally lands roles that never made it to a portal.
Imagination is uncomfortable. It asks you to bet on a version of your career that doesn't yet exist on any job board. But the roles that come from it tend to be better fits, faster processes, and less crowded than the ones a hundred other people are also applying to.
The three together
Agency isn't one big move. It's these three things done at the same time, at low volume, consistently.
A workable week: a small set of efficacy actions you can actually complete (applications sent, outreach messages written, interview prep done). One or two moments of disputation when the automatic pessimism turns up. One imagination exercise: a conversation, a speculative message, a fresh angle on your own CV.
That's it. Not a heroic push. Just three practices that together rebuild the sense that you are still the person acting on your career, even in a market where a lot of things aren't yours to decide.
The future may still feel out of control. Your response to it doesn't have to be.