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

The Benefits of Assessment Tools

The first step to creating a new future is to make sense of what you’ve been through so far.

Career Assessments may not be for everyone. Nothing is.  But they can be a very useful tool to bring into the process of defining what you want in your work life.

When you have a career problem, it helps to bring new things to the surface that you may not have been aware of.  Maybe you want to better define what you are looking for and create a path towards that goal.  You are looking for solutions. 

Career Assessment tools are online tools that help you to explore your career interests, your personality and other aspects that all become part of answering those questions you have about what you’re looking for.  In my work I offer MyFuture+ which are well-researched, adult-oriented tools from the Careers Portal platform.

My Future+ tools are freely available to all my clients

The benefit of a Career Assessment is that it can highlight to you that there is a suitable work environment that you are likely to find rewarding and satisfying.  We are trying to find career options that are a good fit for you.

Here are some things to consider about assessment tools. 

·       The tools are realistic.  They may not necessarily tell you what you want to hear but they will hopefully provide you with insight into what would be a satisfying career for you. 

·       The tools are self-reported.  There should not be any major surprises here.  Done right, the results should feel like a good alignment with the way you see yourself. 

·       The tools are not right or wrong or set in stone.  Rather, they provide us with questions to consider. 

·       The tools should only be considered as a support to the career counselling process.  They are an aid to decision-making, not an answer in themselves. 

·       Discussion with your career counsellor can help you to narrow down choices into careers that you would be both good at and passionate about.

Here are some of the assessment tools I use:

Interest Profiler – This tool identifies career categories and specific occupations that are interesting to you.  By narrowing down a range of 8 interest areas to a top 3, and by thinking about which job sectors interest you the most, you start to think about how to combine these into satisfying work. 

Example: A person works in construction but their Interest Profiler shows a strong interest in Investigative/ scientific work and STEM sectors (Science, Engineering and Construction).  They start to consider options outside construction that build well on the career they have.  They show an interest in Robotics and upskilling in Automated Systems.   

Personality Quiz – What does personality mean to you?  I see it as the thoughts, feelings and behaviours that make us unique.  We use this quiz to explore your innate traits and how they relate to the work environment  Certain job environment will allow certain personalities to flourish.

Example: A conscientious person will enjoy a stable, ordered environment, while an idealistic personality seeks meaning and purpose through their work.

Career Values – It can help to look at your life values and whether your career choices relate well to these.  Do they align and bring satisfaction, or are they misaligned and lead to frustration?

Example: A person’s top career value is ‘peace of mind’ but they have worked as an Event Planner for five years.  Seeing these side by side helps them to appreciate that their career choices do not relate well to their top values and that this is generating stress in their life.

Career Skills – This tool separates skills from academic achievement.  It can help you to identify the skills that you have picked up through work, lifelong activities and friendships.  It can also help you to identify those skills that you (perhaps secretly) most want to learn.

Example: A person rates themselves as highly skilled at presenting ideas and public speaking.  This helps them to see that they would like to develop these skills further and become a trainer.  They have more to offer.     They also identify that they could learn practical task skills that would help with their new choice of career such as computer skills and working to deadline.

Multiple Intelligences – The theory behind this tool is that rather than a person having one intelligence pre-determined at birth, there are eight types of intelligence that we can grow and develop throughout life. This tool aims to connect people with their strongest intelligence areas and how they could apply that to their career search.

Example: A person’s top scoring intelligences are Intrapersonal (Self Smart) and Interpersonal (People Smart).  They have been considering retraining as a psychotherapist and this reaffirms to them that it is a good fit and they are likely to enjoy it.

As a career counsellor, I believe assessment tools are a really useful tool.  They can throw new light on a familiar situation. 

They can provide you with language to describe what you are already experiencing. What you have learned about yourself. What skills you have to offer. What you want your future to look like.

They can offer you a portfolio of yourself that you can bring with you and incorporate into future plans. It can be motivating and gratifying to see yourself clearly described in black and white.

But it is the discussion they generate – and the decisions and plans that come out of that discussion - that is their greatest value.  Learn from the past. Think of the future.

For more details on MyFuture+ see MyFuture+ | Irelands National Career Development Programme (careersportal.ie)

How to Change your Career

The feeling of being trapped in a job you don’t want to do is a very overwhelming and blocking feeling. 

Change is rarely a single distinct event.  The change process usually begins when you move from being unaware of something being wrong to gradually becoming aware of an unhappiness and a change that you want to make happen in your life. 

If you are feeling stuck, trapped, restricted: pay attention to that feeling.  It is trying to tell you something.  Try asking yourself what is happening for you here and what can you do to relieve it?

Take time for yourself

It is tempting to always want to be somewhere else but it is really important to focus on what is going on for you and to develop a response to that in the here and now. 

I believe there is always a solution and that there is real power in clearing an hour of your day to focus and to clearly articulate to yourself what is going on for you and how are you experiencing it.

Look at your whole life.  Look at how you spend your time.  What qualities in yourself are important to you?  What are the supports and interests that sustain you?   Outside of the personal elements of your story, what are the systems that are holding you back.  Are you blaming yourself for feeling a certain way when there are other factors (such as time shortages, financial hardship or a toxic boss) that are having a negative impact on you.   

Making changes needs to wait until you have defined what is causing you stress and suffering. 

Explore how much you want to change

Think of dropping a pebble into a pool of water and the ripples it causes.  Sometimes a small change can have a very big impact.  Be honest with yourself so that you can more closely define what you are looking for.  Career success and career contentment are very different things.  

Are you suffering from a lack of meaning or are you experiencing daily stress that a change of context (such as a change of team, of leader, or an adjustment to your expectations) would improve.  If it is a problem of burnout, explore whether this is a repeating pattern in your life and whether the changes that you need to make are in how you respond to stress, rather than allowing this pattern of burnout to continue to follow you into a new role.

You need to define what this change means to you so that you recognise it when it happens.  Try to define what would help you to feel a little bit better.  Hopefully you’ll gain insight from that. 

Make a decision on what you want

At this point it can be helpful to broaden your thinking.  Do you want to change your job or do you want to change your relationship with your job? Allow yourself to daydream.  What subjects did you like most in school. What did you want to be when you were a child and what does that tell you about yourself? 

Would you feel happier in your job if it was meeting more of your needs, and can you reconcile those needs at work without making bigger changes.  For example, if you are experiencing a lack of control in work, is there an aspect of work that you can request to coordinate or manage, to meet that need for control without changing the entire context.  

What would happen if you got involved in projects or causes that reflect your interests so that energy flows back into you.  The more practical the better.

Defining what is causing your distress is not easy to do alone, which is why I believe career guidance can help you build the life you want.

Act on your world so that it better matches what you want

It’s time to take action when you decide that there is a definitive change you want to make in your life.  Once you know what you want, then break it down into steps.  What do I need to put in place to make it happen? 

When planning change, it’s important to know how far into the future you can see.  If you can only see the short term, plan only for short term change.  However, if you have decided where you want to be in 5 years, then set that goal, and break it down into stages with milestones along the way.

As you contemplate change you will come up with arguments against yourself.  You may experience ambivalence where you counter the reasons to stay unchanged in your career (the hassle, the fear the risk) with potential benefits of change.  The way to combat that is to ask yourself honestly, what are the good things about changing, and what are the not-so-good-things.  And which do I want most?  

Life is a complicated compromise between what you want and what is enough.

Setbacks are as human as you are

If you are changing and able to maintain that change consistently, well done.  Your goals are clear to you and your steps are achievable.  

If you are changing and experiencing a loss of motivation or a setback, be gentle with yourself.  Setbacks are part of being human.  Ask yourself what has worked so far and what can you learn from that? 

How can you raise the quality of your thoughts again?  How can you prevent your energy from continually flowing away from you?   What has worked in the past and what does that teach you? Don’t be hard on yourself, long term change takes a few cycles before we get it right.

Perhaps bring the plan for change back to little changes and leave the bigger changes until the timing is right. 

I am sure there is one thing you can do this week that can take you a step in the right direction.

Take the Mystery out of the Interview Process

job Interviews are draining experiences for many of us, made all the more stressful when there is an information gap about what we can expect.  Here are some tips to help to reduce the stress of the unknown when preparing for a formal job interview.

1.       I am not sure what I’m being tested on in an interview

An interview can feel like an unknown entity where you fire word missiles into space and hope that by some miracle you score a hit.  The hiring panel are there to make a decision, and they will have a methodology and a scoring system to select candidates.   You can contact the company in advance and ask if you can have the interview process explained to you and what you can expect.  For example, in a structured competency-based interview you can expect to be scored across 5-6 competencies, which are probably listed in the job spec to help you prepare.   

2.       Interview panels intimidate me

An interview panel is actually a good sign that a company is aware of the risk of bias when hiring and is trying to use a structured method to reduce it. If your interview panel has at least three people and reflects gender balance, then it’s a signal to you that the company is trying to have good hiring practices.  A panel might comprise a HR Representative, a Manager and possibly an external interviewer or Board Member.  The interviewers listen and score your answers and the person who scores highest will be offered the position first.  By understanding the reasoning of this system, you can prepare better for the task.   

3.       The thoughts of travelling to the interview fill me with anxiety

If you have reasons for why you would strongly prefer an interview by Zoom rather than in person or if you need to gain a good understanding of their interview process and what you can expect in order to prepare, don’t be afraid to reach out when you are offered the interview.  Don’t let anxiety of the unknown harness this moment and become a barrier to you.  Contact the company for more information or to request adaptations to the interview process.  And trust your gut feeling; if they’re inflexible about accommodating you, perhaps their company culture is not the right fit for you anyway.

4.       I’m never sure if I am waffling

If you are told in advance the length of an interview and if you know the size of the interview panel, you can calculate how many questions you’ll be asked and how much time you’re expected to spend on them.  30 minute interview?  You can probably expect 10 questions, and you should spend about 3 minutes on each question. 3 person interview panel?  You can expect that each interviewer will ask at least 3 questions.  Therefore if you have not heard from one interviewer yet, make sure you allow yourself enough time and material to answer their questions.  Using these benchmarks can help you prepare a balanced picture of yourself and an opportunity to score points across the board.

5.       I couldn’t find any information on the company

When you are researching the company in your interview preparations, you may want to consider contacting them.  The team you wish to join might be happy to hear from you and to answer some questions you have.  Be sure to have your questions ready and double check that they are appropriate to ask.  Always know the reason that you are asking a question and if the reasoning is unclear to you, drop it from the list.

6.       I don’t know how to handle myself when I walk in

While most interviews are now on Zoom and walking in is less of a worry, you are still auditioning for a role in a company that has an existing team and you want to demonstrate that you align well with the culture of that team.  Don’t enter the meeting until you are ready to start a conversation.  And when we do go back to interviews in person, be on form from the moment you enter.  Be courteous to people you meet in the reception area, be warm and professional to the person who comes down to escort you to the interview room.  If you are nervous or tense, take five deep breaths to centre yourself.  First impressions of you are important. 

7.       I like to prepare really carefully for my questions

It’s great to know your key examples for each competency but the most important thing is to listen to the question you are being asked.  It is tempting to launch into prepared material  but it may not be that relevant to the question.  If you’re not answering what they’ve asked, they can’t score you on it, and you are losing yourself points.   Know your key examples for each competency.   Similarly, you may have that one question you are nervous about answering, but if you spend all your time preparing for one question, and if you spend ten minutes of your interview answering one question, you are not giving your interviewers enough material to score you across competencies.

8.       I don’t know what to say when I’m asked about a work skill I know I haven’t done before

You want to communicate hunger, preparation and interest.  Your interviewers want you to do well and are often eager to hear you speak the words that allows them to score you highly.  Know that women are much more likely to stick with what they’ve already done, while men come in and speak about what they can do.  Practice saying ‘YES I can do that’ and keep practising until you can say it with conviction.  Demonstrate that you are able for new tasks, rather than focusing on whether you have done them before.  Because if you don’t say you can do it, the next person being interviewed is going to score those points that you have passed up. 

9.       I would love to get to the point where I feel ready for the interview

The night before the interview, think about the three core messages you want to get across.  Know the job description really well and relate it to what you can do.   Know these three messages and go into the interview with a clear and open mind.  This is your moment. 

And honestly, breathe into it and enjoy the moment.  You’re at the table.  You’re here.  Be proud of yourself that you have made it this far.

How a Guidance Counsellor can help with Career Burnout

‘Stress is a reality – like love or electricity – unmistakeable in experience yet difficult to define.’[i]

Career Burnout is a form of stress.  It is a gradual building up of work-related stress to the point where it is having chronically negative impacts on your life.   

The Lobster Pot

Burnout is hard to recognise because what can often start as high job satisfaction becomes over time a waning optimism and eventually chronic stress.  You can’t quite figure out what’s wrong but something is wrong.  It’s the lobster pot metaphor: it heats up gradually and you can’t quite tell whether the problem is with you (the person) or with the pot (the context).

Burnout is depicted as having three strands: if you are feeling exhausted in your work, cynical about your work (and losing your sense of identity with it) and feeling reduced in your ability to do your work, you are exhibiting warning signs of burnout.

Fuzzy Thinking

The trouble is that stress can lead to fuzzy thinking which makes it hard to define and even harder to imagine that the solutions available to you will help.  You are being asked to think clearly at a very moment where you are feeling unable to do so.  It is difficult to live through something and make sense of it at the same time.

Here are the ways that I think a Guidance Counsellor can help:

1.       Making Sense of What is Happening to You

Life is made up of everyday individual actions and interactions.   Guidance counsellors are trained to help you bridge the divide between who you are and the world in which you exist.  By making sense of what is happening to you, your understanding increases.  By making meaning from your experiences,  you become able to separate what you need to respond to and what is outside of your control.

Life experiences can feel like fact but the very act of talking them through with someone else can change them.  This act can help you to reframe your understanding of yourself and think more clearly how the world in which you exist is impacting on you. 

2.       Adding in Objective Information

Sometimes an objective assessment such as a Career Assessment provides useful information to add to the context of your experiences. Tools such as an Interest Profile, a Personality Quiz or an assessment of your Career Values can help you make sense of your career issues and why your current context is no longer working for you.  You can also reconnect with forgotten career aspirations and begin to consider whether your current work is still meeting your needs.

Whether you need a big change such as a change of career, or a small change such as a change in your hours, your responsibilities or your communication with direct management, assessment helps you to gain awareness of your skills and how you can use them to change your context and ultimately help you to cope. 

3.       It’s not You, it’s Them

Many coping strategies for stress and burnout focus on developing personal resilience.  These elements, while helpful, don’t suit every person and every situation.  There needs to be a recognition that sometimes people are being asked to deliver beyond what would be considered reasonable. 

Example of an approach that focuses only on personal resilience. Source: hellodriven.com

This HBR article quotes a survey by Gallup that found the top five reasons for burnout are:

1. Unfair treatment at work

2. Unmanageable workload

3. Lack of role clarity

4. Lack of communication and support from their manager

5. Unreasonable time pressure

While a focus on personal resilience is a valuable tool, workplace practices and expectations feed into personal burnout and a person’s context needs to be addressed if they are to break the cycle.  Burnout is a system problem and most likely things at work will need to change.

Knowing Yourself Better Helps You Plan For Change

The process of guidance counselling can help you to bring yourself to an a-ha moment of what kind of change you are looking for.  Clarity – the very opposite of fuzzy thinking – is a major component in planning for change.  By taking a step back, you begin to explore options which you have not been considering because you have been feeling overwhelmed from your current work context. 

Sometimes a dilemma enhances our freedom to choose.  The process of guidance counselling can give you a new vocabulary for breaking down your old coping routines and building new ways of developing your career.

i Eugene Kennedy and Sara Charles. On Becoming a Counsellor. Gill & McMillan 1977

Why Adults need Career Guidance Too

It’s funny how an idea has taken hold in society that career guidance happens in school and that once you are an adult, you are on your own.

This is so strange when you think about it. The idea that at 18, before you have ever taken a step into the labour market, you have finished receiving career guidance. You were expected to come up with an answer then, and if you didn’t you missed your chance.

If you were lucky enough to go to college, you may have received some career guidance there. Or perhaps you were aware of a college career guidance service which may have reminded you that questions like ‘what do I want?’ were important ones to ask yourself. If you saw a college guidance counsellor, the chances are that you saw them once.

Now as an adult, you’re wondering about career guidance. Is it something you should have sorted when you are young. You’re wondering if it is OK to be thinking about going for career guidance now?

But times have changed. We are getting more used to the idea of asking for help. We are getting more used to the idea that it’s OK to not feel OK.

Understanding is everything

Career guidance is the act of admitting that everything is not OK in your career. There is a feeling of unhappiness or a lack of purpose permeating your everyday experiences.

When you come to see me, it means you have a career-related problem that you can’t seem to solve on your own.

You have decided to make time and space in your life to sit down with a person who is listening to you, who is fully present for you. Someone who is ready to hear your problem and how it is impacting on you, and how that impact is happening in a negative and harmful way, and preventing you from living the life you want.

As a career counsellor, I can’t take responsibility for your problem or promise you that we can fix it. What I can promise you is that I will hold a mirror up to you and help you to find the belief that you can fix this for yourself.

My hope is that you will feel clarity; after our sessions, you will feel clear about what you want and how you are going to get there.

You can build the life you want

The key word here is ‘build’. Building requires a little bit of work and patience and self-awareness. You cannot build until you know what you want.

Our sessions follow a simple format.

We will work through key questions during our sessions.

• What is going on for you?

• What do you want?

• What is it within your control to change?

• Are the things you are doing now bringing you closer to (or further from) what you want?

• What can you do differently to get what you want?

• How are you going to do it?

• How are you going to know it when you get there?

Small Changes Can Make a Big Difference

Change happens slowly. It is not easy to change. It is not easy to look at an old problem alone and come up with new solutions. I am here for you.

You can do it. You can make time for you. One session at a time.

A Personal Account of Lifelong Guidance→

This article was featured in the NCGE publication Guidance Matters, Issue 2, Spring 2019

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.

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