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)

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.

View original article here