Week 4

Nathan Scarbrough

Week 4 Discussion: Constructivist Counseling for Career Indecision Article

                I really enjoyed the article we read on Constructivist Counseling for Career Indecision.  The article addressed career indecision from a unique standpoint.  While previous research had taken an empirical and scientific approach (which I normally condone), this article made the point that career development and indecision is a subjective experience.  It is different for everyone due to their different environments, opportunities, values, and goals.  The constructivist position puts a strong emphasis on the fact that individuals have a widely varied array of life experiences, developmental paths, and critical periods in which they find themselves searching for meaning in a changing environment.

Constructivist counselors focus on meaning, not necessarily goals.  While setting goals is a necessary step in constructivist counseling for career indecision, the counselor must first help the client to recognize their own life themes, and develop a solid self-definition.  The first step of this career indecision counseling is for the counselor to encourage the client to tell stories.  While the client tells his stories, the counselor should keep an ear open for life themes and patterns regularly occurring throughout the stories.  The counselor should then help the client clarify and articulate his/her life themes, then plan ways for the client to work towards his/her goals.  After the counselor narrates the stories back to the client, the counselor and client can discuss the meaning in the stories, identify themes, pick jobs suitable for the client’s interests and values, and plan a course of action along with proactive behaviors that will help the client to achieve his/her goals.  Because the problem of indecision is rephrased in the shape of a story, it becomes easier for the client to move past their hesitancy in the interest of completing their life stories.  It is the intention of these counselors to help the client find meaning by meeting their goals and fulfilling their now identified life-themes.

Perhaps the greatest strengths of this article is that it approaches the issue of career indecision as a subjective experience, and it approaches the issue from the standpoint that this indecision is caused because the client is in a critical period of their life during which their environment is altered.  Essentially, they no longer know what they need to do to feel fulfilled.  This article is brilliant in that it doesn’t approach the issue with the attitude that all people are the same and will be satisfied in the same ways.  The emphasis constructivist counselors put, on learning about the individual, learning the individual’s unique life-themes, and developing a very personal plan of action for the client to ultimately find meaning in their work, makes this approach seem like it must have a great rate of success.  That being said, I would be most interested to see a body of research on constructivist counseling for career indecision to see if it supports the claims of this article.