Career Adaptability: What I Preach Versus Who I am

Division 17 Fellow Address - Delivered August 19, 2005 At the Annual Convention of the American Psychological Association

Good evening. It's pretty intimidating being up here in front of all of you, but not as bad as yesterday, when I read through my talk and instead of the 10 minutes I'd been given, it took me 25. So this is the 4 page version. If you'd like to see the 10 page version, the one where I mention you by name, email me at the University of Kansas.

I never intended to be a psychologist. Actually, from 3rd grade on I was completely convinced I was going to be a Roman Catholic priest. So certain was I of that vocation, that I left home at the age of 14 to attend a boarding school seminary with like-minded boys who all felt called to the priesthood. Actually, only about half of us felt called. The other half had been sent there by their parents in hopes that they'd avoid jail time, which made for a very interesting campus life.

I learned a lot of very important things in the seminary, like how to study, how to be away from home and be okay with that; how to be quiet and like it; how to be a friend. But then came puberty, which turns out was on a collision course with the Roman Catholic tradition of lifelong celibacy in priests, and only puberty survived that collision. So as a high school junior, I started attending to the same confusing future-world my peers had been attending to since third grade, when I had pretty much stopped paying attention. Talk about premature foreclosure.

For several years, I made my way as an undecided major, fortunate to have fallen into a job after college as a music director for a campus ministry at Bradley University. Within a month of starting the job, I got invited to a workshop put on by Dick Bolles called The Campus Minister As Career Counselor, and I had received my second calling.

But it became evident, around the birth of my first child, that being a lay campus minister in the Catholic church would never support a family in the lifestyle to which we'd become accustomed - that being just above the poverty level. So I applied to myself the tools I'd been using on others, and decided to become, what else, a career counselor.

I enrolled in the masters program in counseling at Bradley, and in my first semester met Monte Bruch, now at the University at Albany, but who at the time was in the Counseling Center at Bradley. Monte eventually supervised me, and he was the one who introduced me to Division 17 and counseling psychology. He shared with me an issue of the Counseling Psychologist, the one on professional identity, okay, the third one on professional identity, and I was hooked.

Monte saw to it that I made my way to Joe Johnston and the doctoral program at the University of Missouri, even then a hotbed of applied vocational psychology. On my first day on the job as Joe's Graduate Assistant I met my office mate, Mary Heppner, who with Puncky had just moved to Missouri to begin work there. Over the years Mary and I have been cheerleaders for each other, and I have great fondness for her and for that little hallway that served as our first office.

Joe Johnston taught me so many things about being a professor that I had no idea I was learning, until I'd catch myself doing those things or using his words. He taught me to think BIG, and to integrate stuff from disparate areas, not to be too wedded to whatever I considered my own specialty. And about that, he was more on target than anyone, because that's where the world has gone since.

I never intended to be a scientist, but a funny thing happened to me as I immersed myself in the literature for an assignment given to me by Mark Savickas, one of my long distance mentors. The scientist in me was awakened. And as a scientist I've come to the following conclusions, some of which I actually believe. Others of which I'm still not completely convinced of, but they scare me so much, I keep being drawn to them, like a moth to the flame. Because if they're true, they have very big implications for how we do career counseling, for how we do relationship counseling, for how we do life.

The first thing I've become so convinced of is that we don't know why we do the things we do. If you ask me why I buy Cheerios, which is my favorite cereal, I'll tell you I buy Cheerios because they're made from whole oats, good for the heart, stay fresh a long time.

Now, why do I really buy Cheerios? Maybe it's because of those things, but maybe it's also because they come in a pretty yellow box, because I've eaten them since I was two years old, because the commercial implies that if I eat Cheerios I will be young and virile -- I will remain young and virile.

Vast amounts of research contend that as humans there are many things that go into our motivations and behavior of which we are completely unaware. Cheerios is a simple example, but why are we attracted to our partners, why are we drawn to psychology?

I can think about these questions and give you answers, but what I'm really giving you is an answer to a very different question, that being, "Why would someone like me be interested in a person like my partner?" or "Why would a person like me be attracted to the profession of Psychology?" There is even research that says someone who knows me well could render just as accurate an answer.

Attending to these findings in cognitive science, my research team has moved away from a model of the person as an agent who is willing and able to consciously arrive at rational conclusions about how they fit in the world. Instead, what emerges from the literature is an agent whose behaviors are driven largely by non-conscious processes, to which the person often has little or no access, even after decisions have been made and implemented.

I have a friend who was struggling a couple years ago in her primary relationship. Her husband had told her he wasn't sure he wanted to be married anymore. When she asked him why he was feeling that way, he gave her several reasons, most of which didn't make any sense to her. She was struggling desperately to understand the reasons he gave her, but I was thinking even he didn't understand. All he really knew was that he was unsettled, and that everyone, including himself, was expecting him to come up with good reasons for putting their relationship in jeopardy. So he complied. My advice to her was: Don't trust those reasons. Don't get into arguments trying to disprove his reasons, because chances are they aren't what's really driving him.

Pascal said it well, "The heart has its reasons, that reason knows not of."

So, the first conclusion that shatters my world is this: we really don't know what's going on inside. Over the past few years, as my research team has struggled to understand the human maker of complex life decisions, we've been led to develop a model of career adaptability, with its evolutionary overtones on survival. By Adaptability, we're referring to a person having a healthy relationship to the marketplace, that is: an Ability to move about in, Transition into and out of, and Accurately appraise one's strengths and weaknesses as a player in the world of work. We aren't referring to one’s abilities as a worker per se, because someone could, by every measure, be a terrific worker, but if tomorrow lost their job, still be lost.

Over time our model of the adaptive decision maker itself evolved to include a rational component, an intuitive component, but the strongest possible statement of the behavioral component, what we are calling engagement. Our emphasis on engagement is driven by research that says even when we fail in our attempts to articulate our intuitive and rational knowing, our unconscious processes, which are more often guiding our decisions anyway, are still informed and funded to the extent of our contact with the world. In other words, in a world where nothing is predictable, and even our own decisional machinations are hidden behind a veil, our money is on experience.

So, just to make the logic clear, if we don't really know why we do the things we do, we better get out in the world and feed our non-conscious data handlers, so they can do whatever in the world it is that they do. Thus: Be engaged!

"So, what kind of work should I go into?"

The only other thing I've become convinced of -- is that the things we have traditionally done so well to help people answer that question, are not working as well as they used to. In part, because that question is less salient now than it has been over the past 50 years. No matter how good a job we do helping people find their match, in so many cases, people won't get to keep their match.

If I only get to meet with a client for one session, which is the mode, should I spend my time helping them figure out a match? or should I jump on them with both feet, and say, "You have to learn how to adapt. Don't pick ANYTHING. It's a crazy world out there. Learn how to be flexible, ENGAGE!" I'd scare them so much I'd be lucky to keep them for even one session.

That's what I want to say, not to scare them; but this stuff is scary, heck, it scares me. I think I'm a great worker, my relationship to work is solid. I love my work, and most days I even get to work early. But my relationship to the marketplace...not so good...and that scares me because, if tenure went away, I suspect I'd be a lost soul, like so many of the lost souls we see when we work with people who've been laid off.

I'm an introvert, from a family of introverts who I love dearly and who have certainly contributed to my being here. So, my own personality style is not well suited to adaptability in today's marketplace. How do you help somebody like me with that? I don't know the answer, but I suspect it doesn't start with going over my interest inventory results.

Don't get me wrong, I love John Holland, and I've done a fair amount of research on his theory myself. But I worry that in teaching my students how to do career counseling, if I teach matching, they'll fall in love with it, and think it's really cool stuff: well it IS really cool stuff. But is it the most important stuff if I only get somebody for one session? Would I do better to teach them guerilla tactics for how to be adaptive in today's marketplace. I'm thinking maybe what I need to be doing is more like Motivational Interviewing, assertiveness training, or ambiguity tolerance training - if there is such a thing.

As humans, a part of our evolutionary success story is our ability to look at vast amounts of data, and to find patterns. But a less adaptive byproduct of that legacy is our inclination to find patterns... even when none are present. We need to be teaching people to understand the limited availability of order in the world of work, and teaching them how they might go about adapting on the fly, and capitalizing on idiosyncratic events.

Maybe we should also be teaching people how to sit in the midst of chaos and accept it: Find order when we can find it, but let go of our demand that the world be completely ordered. Buddhism and Adaptability both say you have to soften your rigid hold on reality. I have an image of teaching people how to run point, how to be out front with a plan they're passionate about, but every day wakening up to the possibility that: Today might be the day I receive my next calling.

So, today I am sure of three things:

1. We don't know why we do the things we do.
2. Our highest priority in career counseling needs to shift from helping folks learn about matching, to setting them on fire about engaging with the world.
3. I am wrong about numbers 1 and 2. If history is on my side, a hundred years from now, anybody who reads our science will think it simpleminded and downright wrong. That's the nature of science - whatever you think is right is eventually wrong, it's just our best narrative of things today. That great dialectic: it's the best we have - and it's wrong. It's always wrong. And if you can't accept that, then you can't be a good scientist, because you'll be too wed to your truth. We have to remember that we don't own the keys, we're just renters.

Thank you.