After losing a job, it is easy enough to follow the inevitable depression down, falling in a tailspin of defeatism. How to get out? How do you bolster your energy to prepare you for the failure-strewn path of getting a new job, where the effort-to-result ratio could discourage even the most dapper of pursuers, where even the best of us start contemplating the chances of perpetual failure? Well, nothing succeeds like success. All the advice to “Fake it as you make it,” or to act confident in your interviews pales compared to the real confidence you can wield, not faked, the deserved swagger you can hold if you get some real successes under your belt.

How to get those successes? By proxy. It is time to set some personal goals that don’t relate to work. Some immediate possibilities regard exercise and diet. If until know you haven’t disciplined yourself in this way, now is a good time to try it out. If you make your goals reasonable, and find out what you are capable of, improving your diet and daily exercise will not only give you a sense of mastery, a deserved confidence that generalizes to all situations, including, of course, the interviews, when you land them, but exercise and proper diet will also adjust your chemical balance, making you less depressed and more energized, to have the physical endurance to bolster the psychological endurance you will need to keep at the job search.

Faking confidence looks like what it is — mere bravado, nonsense, pure bluff. But by getting some indirect career confidence through mastering your body, through exercise and diet, you will have a stronger sense of what your will power feels like, when you push it to its limits, and come to know who you are and what you are capable of.

This will help your sleep, depression, anxiety, and, depending on how and when you exercise, if you do sports, or join a gym, could lead to some networking — the possibility of which you must always leave open, speaking of your goals and interests and seeing who expresses an interest.

Once you’ve gained some modest wins with your exercise and diet, you will feel invigorated to set up more goals, seeing your life in terms of a set of strategies, practices, skills, that can be each improved in turn. Having such a self-improvement, all gears forward attitude translates to impressing human resources, to wowing the interviews, to landing your job.