If I were to every start my own private practice or mental health center, hiring a business manager would be my most crucial task. I don't consider myself to be totally ignorant of the workings of technology but I certainly don't represent the technical savvy commonly associated with my generation. Despite the fact that I have been absent from the present forum for all five weeks of class, I have been diligently writing in a blog I had created for the class, thinking that it was automatically accessible to Dr. Baker. As a result, following the most relevant blog entry for the current topic, will be the posts that were mistakenly posted to an unconnected blog.
In the process of analyzing and critiquing career development literature for class, I have regularly found my opinions changing as I go through the discussion prompt. At the start of the semester I was skeptical of the usefulness of the career counselor's focus on spirituality and a search for larger life meaning. In short, I saw career guidance as a solely problem-focused approach that had no use for deeper exploration of meaning.
This week's study of Jung's theory of synchronicity has been particularly persuasive support of the validity of ethereal content in session. In my formal post I argue that we, who make up the Psychology discipline, are anxious to shed the label of "soft science" and increase the empirical validity of the work we do in line with medical interventions. The goal of psychological research is, in essence, to quantify abstract concepts for the purpose of proving or disproving its existence. If it's agreed that the variable cannot be measured, it is regarded as fantasy. I wonder if we have not devalued in depth exploration of spirituality in career choice and mental health to the detriment of the individuals seeking our help. Are we missing the obvious path to meaningful change because we cannot accept something our contrived measurement system cannot detect?
Sunday, September 20, 2015
Woops.
Hello! Here I am again, posting twice in the same night! Why am I
doing this? Well, you may notice that I neglected to post before the
due date last week, so here I am making up for it now! What the heck
happened last week, self?!
Always lurking around the corner is a big, furry, purple, polka-doted monster and he's waiting for the moment when it seems I have my life organized. About once a semester, at the perfect opportunity he will strike by disrupting my routine with a life curve ball. Last year was when my roommate left the house to seek drug treatment. The year before I was battling depression. Every year I try to make things different but the monster is just so sneaky! I know, I know, I didn't hand in my work in time and here I am now doing a blog post a whole week after it was due! In the past I have not been able to pick myself up from this type of stumble very easily but this time was different. I don't know if it is because of the counseling I am getting, the medications, or both (probably both), but that lug of a monster wasn't so quick and I could see him coming.
Over the week of Labor Day I was just starting a new job and had my days thrown off because of the Monday holiday. All week I basked in the plethora of time I had to complete my work and was feeling mighty good about it. On Thursday a failed root-canal and pain medication that put me to sleep was the monster's trick to steal my focus. Unfortunetly, that week he succeeded in distracting me from responsibilities but this time I was able to shake from his grasps before the consequences began to escalate.
How does any of this relate to career development? The first, obvious, point is that it is neither productive nor sustainable to have a working style that is unreliable and unstable. Second, I feel there needs to be much better career education in schools. It's possible that I am having such a difficult time subscribing to the theories we have studied so far because a detailed, in-depth, career education is not something I had ever experienced. Although impossible to tell, I might have discovered the way to thwart the monster much sooner in life, if my teachers had been focusing on basic skills early in school. For example, my lack of organizational skills got me in trouble in grade school when I would forget my homework all the time and keep a messy desk. Maybe I'd be a rich entrepreneur by now if only I could keep my on track 100% of the time.
Always lurking around the corner is a big, furry, purple, polka-doted monster and he's waiting for the moment when it seems I have my life organized. About once a semester, at the perfect opportunity he will strike by disrupting my routine with a life curve ball. Last year was when my roommate left the house to seek drug treatment. The year before I was battling depression. Every year I try to make things different but the monster is just so sneaky! I know, I know, I didn't hand in my work in time and here I am now doing a blog post a whole week after it was due! In the past I have not been able to pick myself up from this type of stumble very easily but this time was different. I don't know if it is because of the counseling I am getting, the medications, or both (probably both), but that lug of a monster wasn't so quick and I could see him coming.
Over the week of Labor Day I was just starting a new job and had my days thrown off because of the Monday holiday. All week I basked in the plethora of time I had to complete my work and was feeling mighty good about it. On Thursday a failed root-canal and pain medication that put me to sleep was the monster's trick to steal my focus. Unfortunetly, that week he succeeded in distracting me from responsibilities but this time I was able to shake from his grasps before the consequences began to escalate.
How does any of this relate to career development? The first, obvious, point is that it is neither productive nor sustainable to have a working style that is unreliable and unstable. Second, I feel there needs to be much better career education in schools. It's possible that I am having such a difficult time subscribing to the theories we have studied so far because a detailed, in-depth, career education is not something I had ever experienced. Although impossible to tell, I might have discovered the way to thwart the monster much sooner in life, if my teachers had been focusing on basic skills early in school. For example, my lack of organizational skills got me in trouble in grade school when I would forget my homework all the time and keep a messy desk. Maybe I'd be a rich entrepreneur by now if only I could keep my on track 100% of the time.
Girl Gets Ice Cream, Has Revelation
Last night I was grabbing a little late night snack at the grocery
store. I rounded the corner to make a final stop at the bakery section
but got caught behind an older woman who was clearly not as hungry as I
was. She looked a little disheveled with a tank top and athletic
shorts. Her dyed hair with roots exposed was gently hanging to one side
in a ponytail. I noticed some scabs on her arms and legs and with her
sandals had on thick blue socks with a rubber design on the sole to
prevent sliding. Aha! I would recognize those socks anywhere as the
kind you get in a psychiatric hospital when you are not allowed to have
shoes.
When I consider this woman in the context of this career development course, I wonder what career guidance services are available to her. Abraham Maslow was a 20th century psychologist who developed a model for understanding a hierarchy of human needs. At the bottom, or the most basic, are the necessities of life such as food, shelter, health, etc. As you move up the ranks, you find needs such as safety and at the very top is self-actualization. I have found most of the treatment models we have covered in class to focus on the client who is in the upper echelons of needs. The person who has fulfilled all of their more basic needs, has the psychological space to consider which careers align with their personal actualization. In contrast, the woman from the supermarket might not have the mental energy to consider such a question when she must devote her focus to buying food, paying rent, and living in a dangerous neighborhood.
When I consider this woman in the context of this career development course, I wonder what career guidance services are available to her. Abraham Maslow was a 20th century psychologist who developed a model for understanding a hierarchy of human needs. At the bottom, or the most basic, are the necessities of life such as food, shelter, health, etc. As you move up the ranks, you find needs such as safety and at the very top is self-actualization. I have found most of the treatment models we have covered in class to focus on the client who is in the upper echelons of needs. The person who has fulfilled all of their more basic needs, has the psychological space to consider which careers align with their personal actualization. In contrast, the woman from the supermarket might not have the mental energy to consider such a question when she must devote her focus to buying food, paying rent, and living in a dangerous neighborhood.
Sunday, September 6, 2015
Getting a different view
It might only be two weeks into the semester but I'm seeing the
potential for an unexpected benefit of taking Career Development and
Multicultural Counseling during the same semester. Sometimes when I am
recalling information from the text of either course, the facts from
both merge. If I had taken Career development earlier in my coursework,
I might have formed opinions of the topics from the perspective of my
life experiences. I might have neglected the influence that the larger
social system has on every aspect of our lives, including work. Those
who associate with a minority group are too often handicapped by
majority social values. The types of jobs available to them, the
atmosphere of the workplace, and average wage, for example, are
influenced by the entire span of our culture's history. To only consider
counseling techniques and potential client needs from my spot in the
world, would be shortsighted and culturally insensitive. No client will
find positive change with a therapist who has no sense of how their
social orientation differs from people of infinite variety of
backgrounds.
Sunday, August 30, 2015
What is this?!?!
Until
the first day of class, I had not considered career guidance to be an aspect of
Clinical Psychology. In fact,
until the overview of the syllabus I was under the false impression that the
course was about how I could expect to develop in my own chosen career. I have very little knowledge of career
guidance and I was never a consumer of the service. After the first chapter of the text, I feel quite skeptical
of the topic. There lacked a clear
exhibit of the foundational theories that propel the need to improve career
education and provide more access to career guidance. In chapter one of Career Information, Career Counseling, and Career Development the authors
layout significant events in the history of career guidance and education (Brown, 2012). Publications like the Dictionary of
Occupational Titles in the 1930s cataloged available fields, professions,
and job descriptions for the first time but I just can’t seem to grasp why this
is so important!
Intuitively
I understand that a person’s daily working life can have a monumental effect on
mental health. I have personally
experienced depression triggered by an awful working experience. For two years I had been working with a
difficult client with whom boundaries were difficult to maintain due to his
approved treatment hours and the duality of working in both the school and home.
An adult suffering psychologically
because of a job can be helped with improved coping skills, alternative
cognitions, or motivation to find a new position. Guidance should come from a professional who is
knowledgeable about a variety of careers and educational requirements. Gender, culture, race, and education
all have the possibility of influencing the jobs available to a client. Therefore, the professional should be
trained to conceptualize how those personal factors manifest to bring about the
client’s unique circumstances. The
relevance of career guidance to an adult who is experiencing turmoil at
work. High school students are
especially primed for career guidance as they get closer to graduation and
making educational decisions for the future, but its application to elementary
school curriculum is not as obvious.
Is
there any evidence that children who receive career education early in their
schooling are more satisfied with their job in adulthood? Is the goal of career education to
expose children to a variety of available professions or to teach job
skills? Can it be shown that the
career information provided in elementary school is retained years later? None of these queries were granted a
satisfactory answer in the text and I feel they need to be answered for career
education to be perceived as necessary and effective.
Brown, D. (2012). Career information, career counseling, and career development (10th ed). New York: Pearson Education, Inc.
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