Category: Career Counseling

Therapy as a Rehearsal Ground of Courage

Posted on by rezendevknowfully.com

“I just don’t know if I can say it,” a client whispered in session the other day, eyes darting toward the door as if the world outside might overhear. Moments like this are becoming increasingly familiar to me. In a society saturated with political conflict, social media outrage, and a nonstop news cycle, clients struggle to trust that therapy is a truly nonjudgmental space. In a country that prides itself on freedom, fear has taken root so deeply that honesty may be perceived as dangerous. This is the world many of my clients now inhabit—a world shaped by social media outrage, relentless news cycles, and political extremism.

They come in carrying the weight of public scrutiny before they even open their mouths. They judge me, assuming I hold beliefs or biases that may harm them. They expect I know every misstep they’ve ever made. And they sit there, waiting for judgment—even when I have never met them before. Social media has changed the rules—it has made people hyper-aware of how they are seen, feared, and judged by the world.

The Collision of Social Media, News and Psychotherapy

These fears have intensified post-pandemic. Many of my clients enter the room with palpable anxiety—not just about their personal lives, but about the world at large. They recount violent events, ideological extremism, and tragedies they have seen on their social media feeds. They speak of a constant fear: “What if saying what I really think could get me hurt?” And they do not mean hurt in a metaphorical sense—they mean physically. In this climate, self-expression can feel like a risk too high to take.

As a clinician, these dynamics add yet another challenge to my practice. Real growth in therapy requires honesty, yet fear can paralyze even the most willing client. And how can I fault them? Everywhere they look, there are examples of people punished for their beliefs. Even I, trained in the ethics and boundaries around the therapeutic space, feel the need to tread carefully in daily life.

Yet this fear also underscores the vital role of counseling. Therapy is uniquely positioned to provide a safe place for my clients to explore their values, confront their fears, and consider alternative ways to cope with anger and frustration. For those on the edge—clients who feel tempted toward harmful behavior, therapy offers a way to process intense emotions without causing harm. It is a space where honesty is not punished, and curiosity is welcomed.

Every day, I watch as Americans relinquish freedom—not through law, but through fear. Fear of judgment, fear of reprisal, fear of being misunderstood––therapy can counteract that fear. It can teach clients that differences in opinion do not have to lead to conflict or violence. It can empower them to embrace their values and navigate the world safely, with empathy for others and themselves.

Case Illustration from the Front Lines of Therapy

A client once shared with me, “I want to tell him how I feel, but I also need a job. I want to tell my mom how I feel about her comments about my parenting, but I need all the help I can get. I want to tell my landscaper I am not happy, but he is the only one I have hired that has shown up. I have so much I keep burying deeper and deeper because I am scared to be abandoned when I need help most—even if what they are doing is not to my liking and even hurts me.”

Fear was ever-present in this client’s life. Fear existed for her in the realities of the world—fear that speaking openly about her beliefs or setting boundaries might result in rejection, loss of resources, or even emotional harm.

As her counselor, I did not dismiss these fears as irrational; instead, I acknowledged their legitimacy while also helping her see where she could exercise agency. Together we carefully distinguished between relationships where safety was truly at risk and those where her voice could be tested. In our sessions, I offered space to rehearse language, weigh possible outcomes, and build confidence in her ability to respond if conflict arose. Therapy became both a sacred shelter for her buried truths and a rehearsal ground for courage, allowing her to honor her feelings while navigating a world that sometimes punishes vulnerability.

A Call to Action

I offer these reflections as a call to action for my mental health colleagues. Share your work with your community. Let people know that therapy is more than a conversation—it is a protective space where they can confront fear, unpack judgment, and reclaim agency in their lives. Let those struggling with violent thoughts know they can explore these feelings without harming themselves or others. Encourage the vulnerable to uncover what they value most and find constructive ways to live it out.

America celebrates freedom, yet fear threatens it every day. Mental health professionals are in a unique position to reclaim that freedom—not through grand gestures, but through quiet, consistent, ethical, and compassionate work. Our expertise allows us to illuminate the power of difference, foster understanding, and help clients navigate fear without being consumed by it.

Nonjudgmental spaces are not just ideals…they are lifelines. And in times of division, outrage, and uncertainty, the work we do matters more than ever.

We counselors are uniquely positioned to educate, model, and empower communities during politically discordant times. By combining advocacy, education, and skillful facilitation of communication, we can help communities navigate change with empathy, respect, and informed action. In the last few years, I have learned to accept that political leadership and policies will continue to evolve, and communities may face challenges as a result.

With my clients, I have had to emphasize resilience, informed decision-making, and equitable engagement to help communities thrive despite adversity. I model active listening and authentic sharing, emphasizing the importance of validating each person’s voice. I strategically infuse examples from counseling, such as couples in disagreement, to illustrate how respectful dialogue can bridge differences. I work with clients using social cognitive learning to help others recognize that small, intentional steps in promoting understanding and respectful communication can lead to broader good. I spend extra attention guiding individuals on how to validate what they hear or see before responding, ensuring their perspectives are shared constructively.

During times of political discord, we are called into action as advocates. I find myself in these times desperately seeking others to join me with advertising our space as a lifeline for everyone.

The Therapist and the Marriage

Posted on by Psychotherapy.net Team

A Marriage Fable

One bright morning, as the therapist was sitting by his window watching the clouds, in walked a marriage. It had one body with two heads. This was not the first marriage the therapist had seen, as he had been working at his craft for some time and had met many marriages with many different forms.

“Hello,” he greeted the marriage, inviting it to sit, watching as it shifted in its seat, straining to get comfortable. “What brings you in?”

One of the marriage’s heads mumbled under its breath, sighed, and then the other one began to talk. Moments later, the marriage became distraught, each head trying to speak over the other.

The therapist reminded himself that these marriages will devour anyone who tries to fix them or tell them what to do. They are sensitive in that way.

Each of the heads began to blame the other, asking how they could get the other to change, declaring what the other did wrong… As it argued with itself, the marriage kept growing and growing, beginning to press against the therapist.

The therapist wanted to push the marriage away, tell it to stop. But he knew that doing so would only make it grow larger, and that he would then be lost forever.

He anchored himself to his own thoughts, to his curiosities about the marriage, and raising his inquisitive pen, said, “I have a question.”

The marriage shrank slightly at the sound of his voice, allowing him to take a deep breath. He recalled everything he knew about the origins and histories of marriages, and he focused on it.

“Was there ever a time,” he asked one of the heads, “when you had your own body?”

The other head jumped in immediately and started to speak, and the marriage started to grow again. But the therapist spoke up, “Actually, I was speaking to this head, and would like to hear what they have to say.”

As the one head began to talk, the marriage shrank again, further this time. Then the therapist spoke to the other head. And as the therapist addressed each head, one at a time, the marriage began to shrink, until it was smaller than the form with which it entered. As the therapist stood, the marriage noticed for the first time since the day it was born that it had two bodies as well as two heads.

“Well,” said the therapist, “it was nice to meet you.” He brushed off some of the dust that had fallen from where the marriage had earlier scraped against the ceiling.

“Goodbye,” said the marriage, “Goodbye.” And, noticing its separateness, the marriage felt closer and more open than it had ever been.

The therapist smiled and went to write down his latest encounter with a marriage.

A Bowenian Paradox

In the emotional closeness of marriage, the two partial “selfs” fuse into a common “self.”
 Kerr & Bowen, 1988, p.473

A marriage with one body and two heads is a marriage where each person has lost “self” to the relationship.

But what is self? Let’s begin by saying what it’s not. It is not rugged individualism, nor is it isolation or being an island; it is not denying connections to others or to one’s environment, nor is it selfishness. The idea of “self” has more to do with the ability to stay in your own skin while being connected to important others. None of us are as good or adept at this as we think we are. We all fall prey to relationship pressures, which are ever-present and in constant operation. When confronted with the pressures and tensions inherent in all relationships, we tend to react in automatic ways to alleviate those very pressures and tensions. The irony is that those automatic reactions serve as fuel that helps drive the pressures they are attempting to relieve.

So the problem is that the things we do to relieve relationship tensions often exacerbate them. This happens because our automatic reactions emerge from the instinctual part of us, with little to no clear thinking attached to them. Those reactions are driven by emotions and feelings. In fact, much of the time we will tell ourselves we are thinking clearly, when in actuality we are thinking the thoughts our emotions and feelings suggest. In other words, it is often our emotions and feelings that drive and guide our thinking, rather than our thinking governing our emotions and feelings. When we react emotionally, guided by feeling, it tends to add to the relationship pressures to which others are equally reactive. Both people end up reacting to the pressures and tensions each helps to create. The more intimate the relationship, the more potential for intensity to increase and stimulate our reactivity. This happens because human relationships are reciprocal; each person contributes to what happens, as each person influences and is influenced by others.

The degree of our reactivity is connected to the degree to which we are able to be a self in relationship. The less defined we are as a self, the more reactive we tend to be. The more defined we are as a self, the less reactive and more thoughtful we can be.

Being a self in a relationship has little to do with what you say, i.e. communication, and has a lot to do with your ability to separate your clear and principled thinking from thinking clouded and governed by the emotionality of the moment. The ability to be a self will be communicated by what you do, not what you say. If you can work on being clear, calm, and thoughtful in the intensities of a relationship, the other person will respond to that. Reciprocity works in both directions; it can work to increase tensions, or it can work to calm things down.

The less defined we are as a self, the more of ourselves we trade in relationship to others. Borrowing and trading of self is a way people adapt to each other to reduce anxiety. In a marriage, people tend to be in relationship to those of the same emotional maturity, and so each has about the same amount of self to give up to the relationship. That giving-up, however, is not a thoughtful and principled support of the other, but is, rather, a reactive attempt to mitigate the anxiety generated by relationship pressures and tensions. That giving-up is automatic and reactive. This is not to say that people do not thoughtfully support their spouse in certain ways, but that much of what we do in relationships is more automatic and driven more by our reactions to perceived pressures than we think.

This is how a marriage can become a monster with one body and two heads. It happens slowly over time, as two people give up more and more self to the relationship through their automatic reactions, which begin as attempts to stabilize the relationship tensions and manage their own anxiety. This process can begin with people in radiant love and end with people feeling war-torn and distant. This has less to do with whether the marriage is “the right one” or whether it’s “good or bad,” and more to do with how each person has managed the tensions and anxiety that are present in the relationship. The more of the self that people give up in reactive ways to the relationship, the less flexible and adaptable they will be, and the more rigid and inflexible the relationship will become.

People are drawn to the comfort, support, and affection of intimate relationships. The desire for closeness pulls us together. That togetherness can be the source of both satisfaction and anxiety. We desire closeness and togetherness with others but can be allergic to too much of it.

For instance, in the beginning of the marriage, one spouse was viewed by the other as a good listener, but over time, that “listening” becomes viewed by the other as passivity, and the “listener” begins to be pressured to talk, to say something, anything. Perhaps they will be accused of never having an opinion. What the “listener” does not realize is that a large part of their listening was emotional distance they employed to manage their own anxiety over the relationship intensity. What the “talker” does not realize is that their intensity had more to do with the off-loading of anxiety than about thoughtful sharing with the other. In the beginning, this off-loading of anxiety, and the listener’s passively distancing from it, managed the intensity of the relationship. It was the desire for closeness in the relationship that enabled the pattern to be successful for the length of time it was. Thank goodness it happens that way, or we might never enter into marriages. Over time, however, the initial pattern becomes less effective. Neither partner has an awareness of this deeper emotional process of off-loading and distance. What drew them toward a comfortable togetherness in the beginning, now pushes them apart.

This couple will often come to therapy each believing the other is the problem. One thinks the other is passive, while the one labeled “passive” believes the other is too “intense” and needs to calm down.

The reality is that each person is overly sensitive to the emotional state of the other and is reacting to the pressures of the relationship by automatically focusing more on the other. Under stress and pressure, our focus shifts toward others because we are threat-assessing creatures. This can be useful if it is used to plan and adapt to difficulty. It becomes problematic when our thoughtfulness is overrun by our emotions. It loses its adaptive quality and will inevitably exacerbate the issue that makes us anxious. When we react automatically to relieve the anxiety of the moment, we further entrench ourselves in problematic patterns.

In the example above, each partner reacted to relationship pressures by off-loading on one side, and distancing on the other. Initially this process managed the anxiety, but over time it added to the degree of anxiety in the relationship.

A marriage with one body and two heads is an instinctual creature, tuned in to threat, and ready to react by fighting, running, or becoming static. Each person has become absorbed in their reactivity to the other, and neither is doing any clear thinking for self. Because the marriage has two heads, each person believes they are thinking clearly, but they do not realize the degree to which they are bound-up and fused emotionally as one body.

“Fixing” a Marriage

As a therapist, you cannot do surgery. It is not your job to try to pull each person back into their own body. That attempt will surely end up in the marriage’s absorbing you. Nor does improving communication fix the issue; rather, this enables two heads to talk about their one body more efficiently without anything changing.

So what can you do? I believe that question begins with thinking differently about who is in your office. When you are sitting with a marriage, are you finding yourself siding with one spouse over another? Do you see the “problem” as being isolated within one individual? If so, you are thinking in a cause-and-effect framework and not in terms of reciprocity. Cause-and-effect thinking will inevitably lead a therapist to the position of “fixing” a marriage. At best, a cause-and-effect framework keeps the therapist focused on behavioral dynamics. But helping people shift their behavior or dynamics doesn’t address the emotional process underlying a relationship issue. When the therapist is bound up in cause-and-effect approaches, the end result will always be an involvement in the dynamics the therapist is trying to help the couple shift.

Thinking reciprocally means leaving cause-and-effect behind when it comes to relationships. Reciprocal thinking means seeing the mutual influence of the relationship; that each person contributes to the creation of a relationship atmosphere to which both respond or react. This isn’t just about behavior. Behaviors are only markers of a person’s degree of self. Behaviors point to an underlying emotional process. That emotional process is not isolated within the individual, it is alive in the interactions between people. We are born into a multigenerational emotional process, and each time we enter a relationship, we carry that inheritance with us as we attempt to define ourselves in that relationship. Our inheritance determines the baseline of our ability to define a self in those relationships.

Thinking in terms of reciprocity is a broad-view perspective in which the therapist is focused on the interactions between people rather than what occurs within an isolated mind.

From that perspective, a therapist can ask questions about the interactions, helping people to think about what they are doing rather than to react to the emotions generated by the other. Getting people to think about their contribution to the reciprocity in a relationship is perhaps the most important step toward making a deep and lasting functional shift in that relationship. That shift however comes from observing, focusing on, and managing one’s self, not the other. Helping people think reciprocally presents the idea that improving a relationship comes from improving one’s own functioning in that relationship, regardless of the other. If one person in the relationship takes on the challenge of defining their self more thoughtfully, they will begin the process of separating themselves emotionally from the fusion in the relationship. That definition is not emotional distance, nor is it selfishness. It allows one person to be more thoughtful about what they do in that relationship. In fact, a marriage with two heads and two bodies means each person is thinking and acting for self in ways that improve and grow the relationship. That marriage will be more open, flexible, and equal, each person free to be themselves and bring their thoughts and feelings to the other.

In order to help people think reciprocally, the therapist must maintain a broad view of whomever is sitting with them. If the therapist can maintain that perspective and focus on reciprocity, they will be of more use to their clients. From that position, the therapist is less likely to get caught up in the emotional dynamics of the relationships that walk into their office and will have a greater freedom and openness in their position to ask questions that help others think about their part in the relationships that make up their life.

Working on self is an idea that translates to all relationships. Just as working on the marriage means working on one’s own part, being effective therapeutically increases with the ability of the therapist to manage themselves.

References

Kerr, M. & Bowen, M. (1988). Family Evaluation. NY: W. W. Norton & Co.  

Spencer Niles on the Latest Developments in Career Counseling

Posted on by rezendevknowfully.com

There's Got to Be a Better Way

Greg Arnold: Spencer Niles, you’re an expert in the arena of career counseling and are the star of our new video, Career Counseling in Action: Tools & Techniques. You currently serve as dean of the school of education at William and Mary, after many years on faculty at Penn State. Have you been focused on career counseling throughout your career?
Spencer Niles: Career counseling has pretty much been my gig for the last several decades. It’s what captured my focused interest, and I’ve been surprised at how my interest in it has stayed with me all these years.
GA: You thought it was a phase?
SN: Yea, I thought it was a phase. And maybe it is a phase, a very long phase. But I’ll tell you what happened with me.

GA: How did you get interested in career counseling in the first place?
SN: Well, my first graduate school experience was at a very liberal protestant theological seminary that was very much focused on social justice and social action.
GA: Wonderful.
SN: Theology was a great way for understanding how people make sense of the things that happen to them in life. And I still believe that’s true, but working in a religious institutional setting wasn’t quite right for me. It was way too restrictive and not inclusive enough, so I decided to go get some career counseling for myself. I was about twenty-three at the time.

Somebody referred me to this career counseling center, which was actually a vocational assessment center, they weren’t actually doing career counseling as it turned out, but they called themselves that. I was living in Rochester, New York, and it was in Lancaster, Pennsylvania, so I called them and they said they could work with me for a fee of $600.

At the time I had dropped out of graduate school and was substitute teaching in Rochester city schools and working in a gas station kiosk collecting money from people after they pumped gas. That was my life at that point. Just barely getting by and kind of desperate.

A standardized assessment arrived in the mail, and I filled out the bubble sheets, sent them in, and then about six weeks later, drove down to Lancaster, Pennsylvania where this assessment center was and had a series of meetings over several hours, culminating in a meeting with the sort of lead person in this center. $600 was more than a couple of weeks income for me. I was really desperate.
GA: Sure, that’s a chunk of change even by today’s standards.
SN: I was living in a house with about four other people in a little room, having pop-tarts for breakfast and on a good night, a TV dinner for supper.

But I’ll never forget walking into this guy’s office. He had an impressive office, a nice big mahogany desk and he sat on his side of the desk and I sat on my side of the desk, and he proceeded to debrief me and go over the assessment results.

I remember him saying, “If you do anything in psychology, make sure it’s clinical psychology—don't think about counseling psychology, clinical psychology is where it’s at.” But he honed in on speech therapy for some reason. At one point, he asked me a question and I turned to my left to think about it, looked out the window. It could only have been a few seconds, but when I turned back to answer, he had fallen asleep! And I think “oh shit, what the hell do I do now?”
My self-esteem at that point wasn’t all that great, and now I had managed to put my career counselor to sleep. That’s how boring I was.
My self-esteem at that point wasn’t all that great, and now I had managed to put my career counselor to sleep. That’s how boring I was.

Luckily, he woke himself up and went on with the interview, but I was too meek and insecure to say anything to him, so I just pretended nothing happened. And that was it. I left there thinking, “There’s got to be a better way to do this.”
GA: I would hope so! Besides him falling asleep, which is an obvious empathic failure, what else went wrong with that scenario?
SN: Well, to begin with, they used this very rigid, narrow set of assessments that had nothing to do with me. They were just generic questions with no tailoring whatsoever, which was the norm at that time. This very dry, routinized, mechanical directive process.
GA: Impersonal, disconnected.
SN: And the active/passive, expert/novice dichotomies that get set up that are not very empowering.
The truth is that there’s no assessment in the world that can tell you what you should do. It just doesn’t exist.
The truth is that there’s no assessment in the world that can tell you what you should do. It just doesn’t exist. There’s an illusion of precision with these assessments. We pretend that they have more power than they really do. So I’m not a big fan of that style of intervention at all. It’s grounded in my own experience.

The Psychology of Possession

GA: Your style is actually quite personal in the video we’re releasing this month. Can you explain how your approach differs from this old-school style and how you’ve refined it over the decades?
SN: Well, first of all, we start with the belief that there are few things more personal than a career choice and we link career development with human development. We’ve often treated it as if it were isolated from human development rather than a key component of human development.

If we think about setting it in a context of developmental competencies, for instance, then we look at how careers unfold across the lifespan. It wasn’t until the 1950’s when theories that were more developmental in their orientation began to emerge in the work of people like Donald Super, who is a very well-known vocational psychologist who used a developmental perspective. He was on the faculty at Columbia for years and I was part of his research team toward the latter part of his life. It was people like Super that began to say we have to look at longitudinal expressions of career behavior. We can’t look at it as a single-point-in-time event.

For too long the focus on career intervention has relied upon the psychology of possession. What do you possess relative to specific traits that are relevant for career orientation, career decision-making, career planning, etc, relative to a normal curve. So what that guy who fell asleep was doing was looking at the percentile ranking of my aptitude test results and deciding for me what the implications of those ranking were for my career possibilities.

But most of us do not think of ourselves as locations on a normal curve. Nor are we static in our capacities. A psychology of possession focuses on how much we possess of certain traits and qualities, and what our probability for success is relative to others on the curve in particular occupational fields.
GA: Which, as you say, is a very static way of looking at people.
SN: And what it ignores is the psychology of use. How do I use those traits, those qualities, those experiences I’ve had in my life and how do I translate those qualities and those experiences into meaning and purpose?

Now I’ve been interested in career development since about 1980, and I still love it. It hasn’t died. Why the heck is that? There are times I kind of reflect upon that and I think why do I love this stuff so much?

Getting Out of Our Predicaments

GA: Yeah, why do you love it so much?
SN: Many people would say it’s very boring and they don't want to have much to do with. But most people are thinking of an anachronistic version of career counseling when they think that. It’s very exciting work.

In response to your question of how my model is different and more personal, I use an Adlerian-based model that hypothesizes that we’ve all had particular experiences in our lives that capture our attention. And when it comes to our careers, often what captures our attention are the things that happen to us early in life, and more than that, it’s events that were painful. These painful early events create predicaments for us in our lives. And at whatever level, we seek ways out of our predicaments in living.

We seek to make meaning, to turn an early life pre-occupation to a later life occupation, to hopefully make a social contribution.
We seek to make meaning, to turn an early life pre-occupation to a later life occupation, to hopefully make a social contribution. In that process what we do, even at a very subconscious level, is identify role models. Heroes, heroines—real or fictional characters that we see as guiding the way for us out of our life predicaments. As people who have actively mastered what we are passively suffering.

So if you identify an early life hero, heroine, role model, however one wants to frame it, we’d ask the question, what is it about that person that attracts you? In what ways are you like that role model today? What are the solutions you think that role model offered you, given your early life predicaments?

I remember when I was five or six years old—so this was about 1960—my mother calling my sisters and me together to tell us that she was going to get a divorce. I didn’t even know what the word meant, but my sisters immediately started crying and my mother was crying so I knew it wasn’t good.

From that day through the next ten years or so, my life was really turned upside-down. My family was split apart, we moved every couple of years. I went with my mother, one sister went with my father and my other sister kind of went back and forth. In that period in history, no one talked about this stuff. It was a source of shame.
GA: I can only imagine.
SN: So I repressed a lot of that experience, but I remember early on wondering how people make sense of this kind of stuff when it happens to them. It was part of the reason I decided to go to graduate school in theology, to find out how people make sense of their life experiences, their purpose, their vocation. And then when I had the experience of my own career counseling and then eventually took a career counseling course, there it was.
GA: Your own vocation.
SN: Career development ultimately speaks to these questions of meaning and vocation. How do people make meaning out of their life experiences and translate that meaning into a direction, into an activity that they find meaningful and purposeful?
GA: When you couch it in those terms, it’s anything but boring. The person seeking career development is an agent in the act of self-expression, of working through their personal journey that started with these childhood experiences, and they’re informed by heroes. It’s an incredibly significant part of their health and their journey to self-insight and working through their childhood experiences.

Your path reminds me a bit of Carl Rogers, who was initially called to theology, and also Brad Strawn, whom I interviewed recently for psychotherapy.net. He had a similar attraction to theology and the way it can inform our lives and similar frustrations about what theology couldn’t provide that psychology could.

It’s exciting to hear you speak about career counseling in this holistic way. I have to admit I had conceived of career counseling as kind of boring before diving into your work. But I was wrong. In retrospect I don’t think it was boredom as much as a kind of learned helplessness, or this sense that of all the ways we can help people, helping them find the right job feels kind of hopeless to me, and we’re the bringers of hope. It’s just so hard and so informed by factors out of our control. What would you say to counselors who think of it in these hopeless terms?
SN: It makes sense that you would have felt the way given the objectifying way we usually think of careers. As if it’s about getting or possessing certain skills so that you can get some kind of occupational title.

How do people make meaning out of their life experiences and translate that meaning into a direction, into an activity that they find meaningful and purposeful?
What matters much more are the subjective experiences you have in living your life, where and how do you derive meaning and purpose and where have you been struggling to overcome that sense of hopelessness. We need to make the implicit much more explicit. We need to help our clients articulate those kinds of experiences in which they find that kind of meaning.

There’s no test that will help you identify those things, but what I can do is collaborate with you to find it. I can walk with you on that journey of clarification and articulation of how you find meaning out of the very personal things that have happened to you. But ultimately I’m bringing the same skills to career counseling as any good therapist does to therapy. All those competencies that are essential to effective psychotherapy are essential to effective career counseling.

So You Want to Be a Professional Guitarist…

GA: Is there anything over and above that or is it just using the same common factors that apply to any good therapy?
SN: It’s the common factors of good therapy with a focus on helping people make informed decisions about their career changes and choices. For example, if I were to tell you I wanted to be a professional guitarist—and I kind of do, actually—
GA: Me too!
SN: Here’s the problem though.
I didn’t start playing the guitar at all until I was fifty. And I am bad. I don’t lack for enthusiasm, but I do lack for talent.
I didn’t start playing the guitar at all until I was fifty. And I am bad. I don’t lack for enthusiasm, but I do lack for talent. I love to listen to a great guitarist, I love to play my major chords and every once in a while maybe a little bit of a minor chord or a bar chord thrown in there, but that’s about it. It’s never going to happen.

At one level, it’s important for me to have some clarity about that, but I don’t want you as my career counselor to tell me it’s not going to happen. You might ask questions about the probability of that given my competency level. And I might say, as the client, “I hear you, Greg, but this is my passion.” And you’d start to dive into that with me. What is it within that activity that you really resonate with? Is it truly just knowing where a particular note is, or the shape of a particular chord, or is it something deeper than that? Is it more about your creativity? The emphasis in that process is about clarifying and articulating that passion.
GA: Beautiful.
SN: You’ll table the goal for a bit in favor of helping me describe and name the contours of that passion. You’d encourage me not only to come up with real occupational titles, but to make some up, expand the list, really let my imagination run wild.

The process of identifying the passion allows us to connect to our passion and then to look for opportunities that will elicit that passion. We in the West are lousy at really owning the fact that when people are busy making a living, they’re busy living a life.
GA: What do you mean by that?
SN: I don't know of any occupational nirvanas. We create these false expectations for work. I think what is really important is identifying possibilities that allow us to create a life structure that we find meaningful and purposeful. One of the specialities that I’ve worked with over the years that is so effective at ignoring this is lawyers.
GA: How so?
SN: Lawyers, especially new lawyers, if they are doing their job well, they’re probably working a hell of a lot of hours each week. What happens to the rest of your life? Law is an occupation that has among the highest turnover and dissatisfaction rates.
GA: I’m not surprised.
SN:
People simply ignore the fact that work is also life; it doesn’t happen in an isolated, compartmentalized silo.
People simply ignore the fact that work is also life; it doesn’t happen in an isolated, compartmentalized silo. Work happens within a context, and if the context in which it happens doesn’t allow you to express the life-structure that you find meaningful and purposeful, then life’s not going to be good. It’s not going to last long—or if it does, you may end up compensating in ways that are highly dysfunctional.

So we ask, how does this purposeful goal that you might articulate based upon your meaning and passion feed into a life-structure that you would prefer living?

So if you’re a parent, how do you effectively parent if you work sixty hours a week? It might be possible, but I have to say that those times when I’ve worked like that, I probably was much less effective as a dad. And if I had the chance to do it over, I wouldn’t do it again that way. That’s just me.

"Positive" Addiction

GA: That’s a powerful realization.
SN: I wasn’t aware of the tradeoffs as clearly as I should have been. And of course this gets into positive addiction. We get positively reinforced for being workaholics. We get positively reinforced for achieving in our professions at a high level.
GA: Absolutely.
SN: And that’s OK, as long as we make informed, conscious decisions and we’re aware that it comes at a cost. Maybe it’s a tradeoff that we’re just fine making, but we want to be aware of it.
GA: So what you’re saying is that in the West—at least until recently—we were led to believe that we could find the “perfect” job through these assessments that looked only at static traits and matched us based on some normed statistic, which contributes to grand illusions about what is possible in our careers. And then our society promotes workaholism, which creates even deeper dissatisfaction and often leads to unhealthy coping mechanisms. Your way of working is much more nuanced, developmental, humanistic view of career counseling. How prevalent is this in our profession right now?
SN: I won’t be overly optimistic here.
We get positively reinforced for being workaholics. We get positively reinforced for achieving in our professions at a high level.
I’d say slightly more prevalent today than it was fifteen or twenty years ago. A lot changed about the work world in the last part of the 20th century. Layoffs and the notion that the workers are expendable became a fairly well-accepted ideology, which ran in contrast to what we used to think of as kind of a social contract or career ethic between employer and employee. You know, work hard, put your nose to the grindstone, be loyal to your employer and he will be loyal to you.

This translated into people relocating their families with kids in 11th or 12th grade because the company said, “We’re moving you from Poughkeepsie to Omaha.” That was the ethic, but then people began to realize as this happened more and more frequently, that no matter how hard you might work, no matter how loyal you might be, it could happen to you. People began to say, “I’m not sure I’m willing to sacrifice everything for my employer when my employer is so willing to sacrifice me.”
GA: Amen.
SN: The wounds and the challenges created by that sort of lived experience shifted things quite a bit for many, many people. It’s interesting for me to talk with millennials.
GA: How so?
SN: My son is one. He was offered a raise and a promotion at his current job. He’s 24 and he told me this after the fact. I said, “So what did you do?” and he said, “Well, I turned it down.” I said, “You turned it down? What was the job?” He said, “I’m not really sure.” I asked, “What did it pay?” and he said “I don’t know.” “How don’t you know?” “I didn’t ask.”
GA: Wow.
SN: I said, “How could you not have asked these very basic questions?” And he said, “because I love what I do.” I thought, whoa. He loves his current position and he let that guide him in this process. He’s much wiser than I’ve been throughout most of my life, because I would have asked, “What’s the job? What does it pay?” And if it paid me enough, I might have taken the job even if I loved what I was doing. It’s the old idea of propping your ladder up against the wall and then getting to the top of the ladder only to realize you propped it against the wrong wall. So many of us have done that kind of thing. I certainly have.
GA: Sure, most of us have, I think.
SN: There are just so many dimensions to this work. One of the things we’re finding these days, which is becoming more of a focus in the area of career development, is that the self-concept—what we believe to be true about ourselves and all that that entails and all that means, including our passion and purpose—evolves over time. So career development also evolves. It never stops. If we get passive about that, if we ignore that, we do so at our own peril.
GA: Lifespan development.
SN: Indeed. I took a new job at fifty-eight. I’ll probably take at least another couple other jobs before I’m done with it all.

“Busyness is an Offense to the Soul”

GA: I saw a statistic in Forbes earlier this year that more than fifty percent of people are unhappy with their jobs. A huge contributor to that is the perceived instability and the breakdown of the social contract between employer and employee. But then there’s this silver lining of millennials who are pursuing passion over logistical necessities of income or geographical location. Is this preferable in our new world? And how do we accommodate the lightning fast progress of the twenty-first century? How do we prepare for jobs we can’t even imagine twenty years from now?
SN: Those are great questions. The first question, about which way is preferable, is informed both by generational and individual factors. For example, my father was born in 1921, the WWII generation, and lived through the Great Depression. From those experiences he developed a work ethic that he then passed onto me, and, on one level, that ethic has served me well. I’m a very hard worker, I’m success oriented, always have been, and those are attributes that we get rewarded for in this society.

On the other hand, this is an ethic that focuses more on human doing than on human being, and there’s a real cost to that. For example, the notion of being reflective about our experiences and what they might mean for ourselves, of actually scheduling in time during each day to be reflective about the countless number of experiences we’ve had just that day—these things don’t come easily to folks like me. We don't really allow as much time for human being as human doing, which relates to your question. If you’re going to journal, if you’re going to engage in meditation, mindfulness activities and so forth, those activities are focused on human being; they’re not productive in the doing sense.
GA: So has your model of career development taken in more of this human being aspect?
SN: A colleague at the University of British Columbia and one of my doctoral students at a university in Morocco and I have developed a model that begins with self-reflection. The steps are all in a book we published entitled Career Flow, and the first step is engaging in activities that focus on being and not so obviously doing—journaling, meditation, mindfulness activities, however you might define those. If we engage in those activities on a regular basis in very intentional ways, they foster a greater sense of self-clarity, which is the second step in this model.

We have to elevate the importance of self-reflection if we’re ever going to be able to sort through all the stuff that comes at us, sometimes rapid-fire, each day, and that lead us to being so busy.
Our editor asked, “Why did you separate out self-reflection from self-clarity? They’re the same thing.” And we said, no they certainly aren’t the same thing, and that’s part of the problem. We have to elevate the importance of self-reflection if we’re ever going to be able to sort through all the stuff that comes at us, sometimes rapid-fire, each day, and that lead us to being so busy. One of my favorite Christian mystics, Thomas Merton, said that “busyness is an offense to the soul.”
GA: That’s deep.
SN: And I know I offend my soul every day. So the question is, how can we be less offensive to our souls and honor our experiences and who we are by being much more intentional about engaging in self-reflection? There’s a poet, David Whyte, who has written quite a bit about work. One of my favorite lines of his is, “I look out at everything growing so wild and faithfully beneath the sky and wonder why we are the one terrible part of creation privileged to refuse our flowering.”

Squirrels are out there doing their squirrel thing. Same with golden retrievers, same with trees, but we can get misdirected in so many different ways, by so many external influences and so many factors. We seek to please people in a variety of ways that move us away from who we are. Or we chase certain things that in the end don't provide much in terms of meaningfulness and satisfaction. So we have this “privilege” that often leads us in that way. I think if we were more mindful, more self-reflective, and asked the tough questions, lived the questions, we would be less likely to refuse our flowering. So finding a balance of being and doing is an important dimension of creating careers for ourselves.

The CEO of Netflix takes six weeks of vacation each year, and when he’s on vacation, he’s really on vacation. I officially get two days of vacation a month, and I’ve been in this job for three years. I don't think I’ve used more than three weeks of vacation in three years. I mean how goofy is that? That’s really goofy. I’m in a job where you get every six or seven years, you get a sabbatical. This is my twenty-ninth year as a faculty person. You know how many sabbaticals I’ve taken? Zero. These are not things to be proud of.
GA: Well thank you for airing your dirty laundry with me. This is a relic of the depression era, don’t you think? This work ethic of human doing over human being, where we’re rewarded for workaholism. It’s understandable how we fall into these patterns of busyness. So you’re not taking vacations but hopefully you’re finding time for self-reflection.
SN: I’m much better at it today than I was. It’s not something that garners external rewards, but it certainly brings internal rewards.
GA: It seems like you’re really advocating that work be considered holistically as an integral part of health and wellness. That there should be no separation of “life” from “work” in developmental terms, and that therapists need to be considering career development as a fundamental part of human development.
SN: That fifty percent of people who are unhappy with there jobs that you referred to, the majority of those people have no clue what to do about that. We as mental health professionals have done them a great disservice by perpetuating this notion of the separateness of work from other dimensions of life.
GA: So what can we do? What can practitioners do to more effectively work with career issues and actually help clients with these issues?
SN: That’s a great question and challenging question. The National Career Development Association in the United States is a great organization and some of the leading thinkers in this area attend and present workshops at their annual conferences.

I’ve done a lot of work in the area of policy as it relates to career development. I’m on the board of directors for something called the International Center for Career Development and Public Policy. One of the things I’ve learned from working with them is that here in the United States, we don't have many policies and legislation that support the provision of career intervention across a lifespan.

So even those who are from the mental health professions, who are trained in this area, aren’t addressing these issues and intervening at critical moments in people’s lives.

Take school counselors. Career development is supposed to be one of their three major areas of involvement, but it often isn’t because of other pressures that force them in different directions, but they can be absolutely critical with early-life interventions. There are research studies that show that adolescents who leave school early, at maybe seventeen or sixteen, have psychologically left school long before that, often because they see no connection between what they’re doing in their day-to-day activities and their possible futures. Being informed about career development across the lifespan and this more holistic way of approaching it could mean that a school counselor makes the difference, could connect the dots, for a kid who would otherwise drop out.

So there’s a lot of work to be done and it requires engagement from multiple perspectives and multiple stakeholders. It starts with valuing the developmental perspective that you and I have been talking about relative to helping people begin to make much more informed choices about how they find and express meaning in their lives, including within their work.

Also, I think people in our field often denigrate career counseling, but understand that the version of career counseling that is being denigrated is frozen in time and anachronistic, it’s not what many practitioners these days are doing. The National Career Development Association has a list of practitioners who people can be referred to.
GA: Thank you so much. We hardly touched the tip of the iceberg, but I for one take your call to action to put a new face on career counseling, to revise outmoded, anachronistic definitions and learn about and be a practitioner of this developmental, humanistic, optimistic, hopeful model that brings dignity, respect and a personal connection to people seeking work and wellness throughout the lifespan from cradle to grave.
SN: Well said, my friend.
GA: Any parting words you’d like to leave our readers with?
SN: Well, I’ll leave you just with one brief additional story from the poet David Whyte. At the time we was working at a non-profit, and he noticed how bored and exhausted he had become in his day-to-day experience in that work. He was trying to do poetry on the side and fit it in where he could, and he had this ritual of getting together with a friend on Friday evening to read poetry together.

He viewed this person as very wise, a person of good counsel, and so he decided to talk to him about the exhaustion he was feeling. So one Friday night, he confides in his friend and his friend reflected with him that the antidote to exhaustion is not always rest.
Many times the antidote for exhaustion is whole-heartedness.
Many times the antidote for exhaustion is whole-heartedness. Doing those things that engage us in a whole-hearted way. The conversation led him to leave that job and do work in which he felt that sense of whole-heartedness. So we have lots of clues, lots of indicators along the way. Exhaustion can be a clue. The key is to pay attention. It’s our soul’s way of telling us if something is amiss and if we need to redirect our path.
GA: That’s such an inspiring message and also conveys to our readers how inspiring career counseling can be.
SN: Thanks so much for the opportunity to talk with you about it. It’s been a lot of fun for me.
GA: Likewise, it's been a great pleasure.