Post 3

As I am reading through Chapter 3 and reflecting on our most recent classroom discussion, I am thinking about willingness. Willingness seems to be a powerful component in the career process. Whether we ware talking about career decision making or work adjustment and satisfaction.  What are we willing to consider, reflect on, ultimately act on and revise or persevere through. I continued to think about the case study of Melissa and I am wondering how much metacognition is happening for her.  Brown (2012) writes about metacognition in the Information Processing Model of career choice. It is a fundamental piece of the process. I think the ability to think about what we are thinking about is a crucial aspect of most counseling processes. It seemed as though Melissa could recognize discomfort and maybe even unhappiness/dissatisfaction within herself, but I am wondering if I was actually interviewing Melissa whether she would be capable of readily articulating her thoughts and feelings. I think we can get very “stuck in the doing” without much consideration for how we are or our “being”. As an essentially single mother of two children working fulltime – it makes sense to me that she would be stuck in the day-to-day of life. I think there was a lot of effort to say how perfect the relationships in her life are – with her husband and children, everyone having time for one another and communicating well. As a mom who works fulltime and attends grad school, I know better. Life is not perfect and often there is not enough time or terrific communication – and that is OK (at least it is for me – I’ve made peace with it). What stood out to me in those statements was the bar that she is holding herself to – so I would want to ask her about that as part of our counseling process. I am not sold on the idea that we can manage every aspect of our life perfectly all at once. I am also curious about her willingness to make any changes at this time.

In mental health treatment, we consider what stage of change the client is in – so we can tailor treatment or meet the client where he /she is. When clients aren’t ready to take action, but are considering a change or thinking about considering a change, we adjust our questions to potentially elicit motivation and we might be heavier on education. I am thinking this has a strong place in career counseling too. We can maybe use a theory like Holland’s in a variety of ways – highlighting options according to type and educating about those jobs maybe without emphasis on deciding for someone who is not completely ready to act or using it to really narrow choices and develop a plan for action and how to implement that plan. It is also making more sense to me that these theories can perhaps interact with one another and compensate for each others shortcomings. An example being while Holland’s theory tells us what might be a “good fit” for our interests, the Minnesota Theory of Work Adjustment can help elucidate that something is or isn’t working out in the career / job, and finally information processing looks at how we think about this satisfaction / dissatisfaction and make choices about what to do about it. I hope I am putting this together in a reasonable way. :-)

Reference:

Brown, D. (2012). Career information, career counseling, and career development (10^th                                    ed.). New York: Pearson Education, Inc.