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.

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.

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.