When the wrong time is the right time

Lots of people are feeling the pinch of the recession at the moment.  Fewer jobs, high prices, having to think more carefully about what we spend our money on.  It would be fairly logical to think, therefore, that it's not a good time to make changes at the moment.  Sit tight and wait for things to get better....
From an economic perspective, I think better things are going to be a long time coming, so are we prepared to sit and wait for someone else to take action?  I'm not advocating a revolution - well, not at the moment anyway - but we can often tell ourselves that difficult times are not the right time to think about change in our lives.
When times are difficult, we can sometimes sit nursing our wounds until the immediate pain passes, but what about using the negative feelings of things not being as we want them to be, and turning them into positive energy, which we can then use to give us focus and make things better, even if it's only in small steps to start with?
An obvious example might be where you want to change job, but there aren't many around.  You could just sit at your desk everyday getting more and more frustrated with doing 'the wrong thing'.  Alternatively, you could spend time finding out what work you would really like to do - perhaps do a training course in it, to give you a taste of what your new work might be like.  If money is an issue, spend time on free e-learning and research - there's lots of free information around if you have a look.
A good starting place is the 'What Colour is your Parachute' workbook.  It's good because it starts by helping you to identify your best skills.  This will raise your awareness of them and encourage you to feel good about them.  The likely outcome is that you'll use those skills even more in your current work, simply because you are thinking about them more, making your present job more satisfying while you're planning your escape!  You can also use your current work situation to refine your best skills even further, to make them even better for your new venture when it emerges. 
If you don't want to get the book, just write down a list of 10 things you do really well, either in your current job, your home life, or anywhere and have a think about how you will use those skills in your new work, however different that work might appear to be on the surface.
All coaches and NLP practitioners will tell you that we get what we think about, so while you're noticing the great skills you already have, which you are improving even further for your new work venture, life will seem more positive, and that new opportunity could present itself even quicker than you're expecting, just by virtue of the fact that you are focussing positively on what you are planning to do in the future (and are actually doing a bit of now).
I think it was Anthony Robbins (apologies if it was someone else!) who said that if you write 10 goals down, put the piece of paper in a drawer and don't look at it again for years, you'll find, when you do finally look at it again, that you have achieved about 8 of them.  He probably said it more elegantly than that, but you get the idea - it's your intention that counts, and once the intention is there, the energy flows along that path.
Have a think about what you can do today to bring the future a bit closer.