A Personal Account of Lifelong Guidance

When I was starting out in self employment, I was lucky enough to have the opportunity to tell my own career story in the NCGE magazine Guidance Matters. 3 years later, reposting this seems fitting because it contains so many of the philosophies by which I work.

First published Spring 2019, Guidance Matters

When I was 23, I worked as a waitress in a family style restaurant that I am sure you know well.  A man sat in my section one Sunday evening when the restaurant was quiet. In my memory, he greatly resembles Ernest Hemingway; he was a big man, white close-shaven beard and he wore a flat cap.  I irritated him when he ordered pork ribs for a starter and I advised that they didn’t come in half portions.  He ordered a bottle of red wine “and I’ll drink all of that as well.” I smiled and he smiled back and the tension was broken.  We chatted as I broke down my section.  He shared that he was very disappointed that his son was ‘only’ a waiter in a trendy city centre hotel.  I told him that I thought waiting tables was a great job: you work with a microcosm of society; you develop great coping and leadership skills; it is time well spent. I told him I had a Masters in History. He was greatly surprised.  I pointed out some of my colleagues.  Rita was a teacher in Lithuania before she came here, I told him, and Jane is doing her degree in Psychology right now. I ended up sitting at the table with him.  I don’t remember what we talked about but I remember how I felt and I hope he remembers how he felt.  I often think of him. I wonder did his feelings about ‘unskilled work’ change after we spoke.   

Luck

I am very fortunate, I have two parents who believed in me and believed in education and I had every privilege associated with that.  I am very aware that life has been made easy for me and that repeatedly throughout my life, I have been able to make decisions based on what I wanted to do rather than what I needed.  Still, my interest has always been to level the playing field for those less fortunate than me, and so I have found myself naturally moving towards the field of lifelong guidance.  

Persistence

While waitressing, I volunteered with the Dublin Simon soup run.  I discovered my sense of purpose there.  I began working in homeless shelters as a keyworker. Several years later, I moved to Canada and I tried to get employment there in a homeless shelter.  I remember the interview and how the HR Manager made me feel.  “My concern is that you just don’t know the local resources”, she said, shaking her head and smiling.  I made the point that knowing local resources is surely a matter of learning a handbook; that the people skills I had were less learnable and more important.  But she was immovable and I felt powerless against it.  It gave me a sense of how easy it is to close a door on someone who has less than you, someone you can classify under ‘other’.  I took a research job that I was grateful for.  But it gave me no energy.  I felt tired.  Again, I started to look for solutions.  I needed transferable skills to make me less vulnerable.  I needed qualifications so that HR Managers couldn’t shut me out. 

Purpose

I focused on where I got my energy. I thought about how I wanted to help people to develop their potential.  I began to study a Masters in Career Development through distance learning from ECU, an Australian university. 

Australian career theory is very exciting.  There is a focus on social learning theory and on narrative theory, and on chaos as a learning opportunity because life is, after all, not linear.  I learned a systems theory approach, where the importance of the individual is accompanied by an exploration of the system within which he/she lives.  There are Lifelong Learning Principles and Luck Principles and particularly interesting theories like HB Gelatt’s Positive Uncertainty Principles:

1.    Be aware and wary about what you know.

2.    Be focused and flexible about what you want.

3.    Be objective and optimistic about what you believe.

4.    Be practical and magical about what you do.

I loved these principles.  I loved how applicable they were.  They seemed to make space for the truth in between two extremes. 

Optimism

Halfway through my studies, I married and moved home to Ireland.  I found work in a Dublin Local Employment Service as a Guidance Worker in addiction support services.    I began to base my work on finding a realistic way forward for clients, grounded in their life experience and personal circumstances. 

In my work, I aimed above all else to give clients a positive experience of linking with the service.  I wanted them to develop a lifelong openness to new experiences.  I took the long view.  I believed in everyone and I met them where they were at. 

Flexibility

At 33, I moved abroad again with my husband’s work.  I was nervous about leaving a job that gave me such fulfilment and sense of identity.  I shared this with a colleague who said, “just think about all the things you would love to do if you weren’t working fulltime.  Now is your chance to do them.”  While abroad, we had our children.  I thought about my colleague’s lines from time to time.  At first I interpreted them shallowly.  I joined a cooking club (which I left), I thought about signing up for language classes (which I did not do).  Mostly I tried to survive those difficult, all consuming years of pregnancy and babies.  It took me four years out of the workforce before I connected with my dream.  I was standing in the kitchen one morning.  I suddenly thought, I have always wanted to write!  I hadn’t thought of this in 20 years.  It gave me a degree of understanding of how deep you need to go, how removed you need to be from external distractions, to remember your dreams. Connecting with it helped me to see how creative I am.  From that creativity came the thought that maybe I want to work for myself and follow my own interests and passions.  Being a stay at home parent has much of the autonomy of self-employment and now that I had that, I did not want to lose it.

Risk

Since coming home three years ago, I have reconnected with my professional self by studying modules of Adult Guidance and Counselling Skills at Maynooth University.  I have set up my own business – www.careercounsellor.ie- where I focus on the needs of people distanced from the labour market.  I am committed to the principles of social equity that have always driven my work.  I have become aware of how deeply skewed the world is against women.  I want to support people from immigrant and marginalised communities to feel valued and respected for who they are.

Lifelong Guidance

As a country, we tend to provide Guidance Counselling to young people before they start their careers and we offer Leadership Coaching to business people who aspire to or have reached executive level.  These are important interventions.  But most of us live in that space in between and many people are going through life with seemingly insurmountable barriers to progression.  

This is where I want to focus my work, to help people to make sense of their experiences and develop a response to them. I want to help people to develop the capacity to manage their own lives and their own lifelong learning so that ultimately they can define and create a satisfying life.  

Lifelong Learning Principles – J. Denham

These attitudes facilitate learning and help a person to adapt to changing circumstances 

·      Suspend assumptions and judgements.

·      Take risks and be willing to make mistakes.

·      Be willing to admit you don’t know everything.

·      Be curious, ask questions and try new experiences.

·      Apply what you learn and persevere.

·      Frequently remind yourself of strengths and preferences.

·      Be kind and patient with yourself while you learn.

·      Develop and maintain a support network.

 Planned Happenstance or Luck Principles - Krumboltz et al

These skills allow a person to capitalise on unexpected events

·      Curiosity.  Exploring new learning opportunities.

·      Persistence.  Exerting effort despite setbacks.

·      Flexibility.  Changing attitudes and circumstances

·      Optimism.  Viewing new opportunities as possible and attainable.

·      Risk Taking. Taking action in the face of uncertain outcomes.

View original article here