Career Counseling A Sharing from the Narrative Perspective

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Career CounselingA Sharing from the Narrative
Perspective

• Yeung Ka Ching
• Dec. 1, 2005

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Tradition vocational guidance

• Emphasizes objectivity in helping individuals
  select and succeed in occupations. As an applied
  science, guidance uses rational decision making
  to logically match individuals to fitting
  occupations.
• Guidance personnel make the march by comparing an
  objective picture of the individuals talents,
  interests, and goals to the ability and
  personality requirements of jobs.
• What has all too often been absent in guidance
  interventions is counseling that focuses on a
  clients private sense.

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Drawing

• on an increasingly sophisticated reserve of
  tests, workbooks, computer programs, and
  occupational information, the objective approach
  is direct, sensible, and beneficial.
• Yet it is quite limited, and inevitably so,
  because it neglects the subjective perspective
  that a person lives.

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Psychology A briefer courseWilliam James
(1892/1963)

• Career counseling is concerned with the kind of
  main character to be lived out in a career plot.
  Suitable employment is not only about matching,
  but also about the proper vehicle through which a
  certain character can be enacted in a certain
  kind of drama.
• From the multitude of possible selves that might
  be actualized in work, a person must settle on
  but one or one small set.
• Otherwise, living out one character would soon
  conflict with another character

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A person might want to become a wealthy
entrepreneur, a sports star, a missionary,

• To make any one of them actual, the rest must
  more or less be suppressed. So the seeker of his
  truest, strongest, deepest self must review the
  list carefully, and pick out one on which to
  stake his salvation. All other selves thereupon
  become unreal.

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Future

• The basic subject of career counseling is a
  persons future. Although career counseling might
  involve a variety of immediate adjustments, the
  most fundamental outcome is a persons design for
  his or her future career, a projection of a
  course of life in working to produce ends.
• Of necessity, the design of a persons future is
  a representation (a vision, an image, an
  orientation, a projection )

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Self-invested rather than self-divested

• A future representation is self-invested rather
  than self-divested.
• We would expect an economist to make economic
  projections based on an objective body of
  knowledge and evidence. We would not expect them
  to be based o preferences, interests, and
  personal values. Personal wants would be regarded
  as bias.

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However,

• For a representation of ones own future,
  personal orientation would be dominant, whereas
  objective information would be secondary and
  supportive.
• What a person wants forms the basis for a
  representation, whereas the objective information
  concerns viability.

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Narration and Meaning

• Composing a narrative is our primary way of
  making meaning. A narrative provides a temporal
  organization, integrating a beginning, middle,
  and end into a whole.
• Meaning is created in at least three major ways
• Something is meaningful if it has a purpose.
• Something is meaningful if it has rich
  implications
• Something is meaningful if it has a sensible point

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Decisions as narrative constructions

• The basic function of a representation of the
  future is to create a meaningful narrative of the
  future that a person can live out. A decision
  situation is one in which the future is in doubt.
• On the basis of memories and current experiences,
  a person implicitly or explicitly composes an
  ideal narrative of the way his or her life should
  be. This is a task that might be done well or
  poorly. A person might not have unified division,
  settled upon a coherent narrative, or developed a
  very rich vision of a more ideal life.

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Dialectic process

• One matches narratives of options to the ideal
  narrative in order to identify the option that
  best encompasses ones idealized view of the
  future.
• The process is more of a dialectic than a series
  of stages. Dialectic involves a mutual fitting of
  ideal to actual and actual to ideal.
• The idea of matching one static list of features
  with another static list is misleading. More
  accurately, there is a dynamic adjustment of
  constructions.

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Adopting a Career Narrative

• Career decision is a movement from being a
  spectator on ones life to entering within a
  drama that is life-defining in whole or in part
  (Cochran, 1992, p.29)
• Traditionally, matching has been conceived in a
  static way. In a dialectic between the ideal and
  the possible, matching is ongoing. It is because
• Both an ideal narrative and optional narratives
  changes over time. They are not fully formed, but
  forming as one goes along.
• The ideal and the possible are interdependent.
  One must adjust the ideal to what is possible and
  the possible to what is ideally desirable.

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Adopting a Career Narrative

• Although matching is clearly necessary, it is too
  limited a term for the activity. In a dialectic,
  a person is actively constructing meaning.
• Meanings are expanded, refined, tested, and
  revised.
• Tiedeman and OHara (1963) appropriately
  described deciding as an activity of
  differentiation and integration.
• A decider makes distinctions, yielding an
  increasingly differentiated map of
  self-in-situation. Increasing differentiation
  requires proper integration for closure, and the
  parts are properly integrated in a narrative.

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Optimal Standards for Adoption

• A decision is optimal to the extent that the
  adopted course of action promises to acutalize
  ideals for a career better than the other options
  do.
• First order evaluation is concerned with what
  will most satisfy a desire. Priority instead of
  efficacy. Will a persons desire for power be
  most satisfied by political office or corporate
  management?
• Second order evaluation is concerned with the
  qualitative worth of the desires one has and, to
  some extent, the desires one lacks. Is it better
  to have a higher salary or to have more autonomy?
• Wholeness, harmony, agency and fruitfulness.

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Agent or victim?

• The most basic division of future representations
  is that some involve an agent, and others involve
  a patient or victim of circumstance.
• An agent is one who makes things happens a
  patient is one to whom things happen.

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Agency

• The plot of an agent is one in which the main
  character strives to overcome obstacles to
  fulfill a purpose.
• The plot of a patient is one in which the main
  character is overcome by force of circumstance.
• The plot of an agent rests largely on personal
  causation, an individual try to bring something
  about.
• The plot of a patient rests largely on causal
  forces from other people. Policies, and so on.

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The striking difference is

• That if an agent stops trying, the plot ends or
  fades. However, if a patient stops trying or
  keeps trying, the plot still moves forward, since
  the causality of the plot is indifferent to the
  main characters actions.
• Thus, a person should adopt a plot that offers
  the strongest role of an agent, the fullest
  opportunity to shape a course of life in
  accordance with ones abilities, values, and
  interests.

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Margaret Mead, 1975 (p. 147)

• My decision to become an anthropologist was based
  in part on my belief that a scientist, even one
  who had no great and special gift such as a great
  artist must have, could make a useful
  contribution to knowledge. I had responded also
  to the sense of urgency that had been conveyed to
  me by Professor Boas and Ruth Benedict. Even in
  remote parts of the world ways of life about
  which nothing was known were vanishing before the
  onslaught of modern civilization. The work of
  recording these unknown ways of life had to be
  done now now or they would be lost forever.
  Other things could wait but not this most urgent
  task.

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Some approaches

• Stress an understanding of the way the world
  works. For example, there are excellent guides
  for how to find a job.
• Whether the focus is personal or situational,
  both approaches are concerned with means to an
  end, with how to do something they inform
  planning. For instance, to write a resume, a
  person needs to have an understanding of his or
  her strengths and weaknesses. To use a resume, a
  person needs to have an understanding of how a
  resume works in getting a job.
• A functional understanding of oneself and the
  situation helps a person to negotiate reality
  toward an end. It is clearly an essential part of
  practical wisdom, but a secondary or support part.

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Practical Wisdom

• In Aristotles original explication of practical
  wisdom, the dominant part was concerned with
  searching for a specification of ideals in
  concrete circumstances, answering the question of
  what one should do.
• What should one do to have a good course of life
  in work? Or what should one do to have
  interesting recreation, a pleasant weekend, a
  fulfilling family life, or worthwhile friendships?

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Practical Wisdom

• These sorts of questions are not primary about
  means, but about a specification of what would
  count as a good course of life in work (or
  whatever) within the limitations and
  opportunities of ones situation.
• Of necessity, practical wisdom is concerned with
  a persons vision of a good life and the
  particulars that make up his or her
  circumstances, for one is attempting to specify
  the ideal in practical situation.

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The first step

• Of career counseling is a formulation of the
  problem. The problem is the starting place,
  providing a grounding orientation for what to do
  in order to resolve the problem.
• Sometimes clients begin with statements of a
  solution, such as I want to take an interest
  test. To begin understanding the problem, a
  counselor would have to elicit relevant
  information For what problem is an interest test
  a solution?

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Formulation of the problem

• Sometimes clients begin with vague statements,
  such as I want to get a job I like. Such a
  statement names the general topic, but the
  problem must still be specified.
• Because an understanding of a clients problem is
  fundamental for initiating a relevant course of
  counseling, clarity is needed on what exactly
  constitutes a career problem.

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Nature of a Career Problem

• A problem is a gap between what is and what ought
  to be. There is an actual state of affairs, a
  desired state of affairs, and a gap between the
  two (Cochran, 1985)
• Three basic requirements
• Given an actual state of affairs, a person must
  be able to imagine possibilities
• The gap between the ideal and actual must matter
  to the person
• A gap is problematic because a person is
  uncertain of how to bridge it.

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To formulate a problem is to compose a story

• Because a career problem is embedded and
  interpreted, it is open and expansive, capable of
  extensive elaboration.
• A counselor would actively increase
  configuration
• If you continue on as you are, the future is apt
  to be
• Does the present situation remind you of any past
  situations?
• In contrast to the current situation, it would be
  better if
• So what?
• What would a better future be like?
• How does that matter?

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