The Psychology of Career Decisions | Sharon Belden Castonguay | TEDxWesleyanU

Recently I was forced to assume an alternative identity. I started with this cane. I suffered a knee injury and although I will soon have surgery and be able to walk normally again, my orthopedist assures me that my running days are over for those of you who only run. When they chase you, you may be thinking what a stroke of luck, a doctor-approved excuse not to exercise, but since I started running after college, it's become more than just a hobby for me, but part of the that I am. Runner has become one of my identities and my gift.

Until that identity turned out to be more painful than the injury itself. Now, like everyone, I have many identities. I am a woman, a mother, an American, a proud Rhode Island native. I have had several professional identities throughout my life. guide I can't counselor school teacher graduate student in developmental

psychology

podcast host professional counselor and it is through my

career

counseling practice that I have come to recognize how personal identities can affect and create professional identities that I am going to talk about a little more how and why this is the case, but first I would like to address why it matters, according to Gallup, eighty-seven percent of employees worldwide are not engaged in their work;

There are many people who study this phenomenon largely because it has a fairly substantial impact. effect on the bottom line Now organizations and consultants who study this tend to look at external factors that explain why people are not engaged, such as office culture or

career

counselor salaries. I'm more interested in internal reasons, like why someone shows a certain line of work in the first place and my field of professional development has looked somewhat different over time, of course, for much of human history, people didn't really choose a line of work, you basically did what your parents did and what you did for a living.

It was prescribed by gender and social class, but during the first and second industrial revolutions, when people began to move from farms to cities, the world of work expanded and the first open career advice office was opened in 1908, the Vocational Training Office. It was located in the North End neighborhood of Boston and served the local community for free to help them navigate this new world of work. They interviewed them extensively about their backgrounds, skills and interests and provided them with information about local employers. Now, obviously, this was not a particularly widespread phenomenon. but the military began to take an interest in their work, they needed to find a way to place workers in jobs to help the war efforts during World War I in World War II and by World War II they had many psychologists. that they had hired to develop tests specifically for this purpose, some of these tests are actually still used today in various forms and some of you may have taken them perhaps through a high school guidance counselor through from an employer now when I started in the career counseling fields in the late 90's we were in the middle of the third Industrial Revolution, the digital age and the testing industry were still alive and well, but by then a new paradigm had emerged that He argued that what we really needed was to care about our clients' passions—do what you're passionate about and you'll never work well a day in your life.

I remember early on I attended a professional development session with a woman who was considered one of the biggest names in my field, a very successful person. The author told the story of a client she had worked with who was really difficult simply because she didn't have any clearly articulated passions. Finally, one day, in desperation, the counselor said to him: Give me an idea of ​​something. You are interested in anything. not at all the woman shrugged her shoulders a little sheepishly and said well, I've always been interested in triumphant gorillas, the counselor announced that she had gone to work for a local zoo and voila, the problem solved gains passion now the moment she I worked.

With business students who generally don't care for gorillas, I actually discovered that the dirty little secret of most MBA students was that they went back to school because they didn't like their first jobs after college. and were looking for a socially acceptable way to hit the reset button, if I suggested that they should find their passion, they would respond that they were tens of thousands of dollars in debt and that while they were interested in finding a good professional, they would What they were most interested in was generating a paycheck Now for the last ten or fifteen years there has been a lot of pushback around the idea that passion dictates career

decisions

and there are a couple of reasons why this is the case: most of people have no idea what their passions are. but another reason for this setback comes from the fear of the fourth Industrial Revolution, what difference does it make if we are passionate about something, if artificial intelligence is going to take away all our jobs, even those who embrace our robotic overlords will admit that no one really ?

You know what the jobs will be in twenty ten and even five years, so how do we help people make career

decisions

in this new world order? One potential framework that has emerged from this conversation actually comes from the field of design, the design thinking process. designers work with clients to get to know them really well understand their problems help define them work with them to exchange ideas and possible prototypes and then test possible solutions those who propose applying Design Thinking to professional decision making maintain that people Those who work Today they will have to go through many different iterations for the jobs they do.

They may have to test many different cells and avoid premature exclusion of any area. The problem with this is that most people don't have the self-awareness to do it well, most people don't take the time to discover who they are before making a decision about what they want to be now, if there is something we have learned in the fields of economics and behavioral

psychology

in recent times. years is that we, as human beings, are not as rational as we thought we were, for example, we are predisposed to make bad financial decisions, such as spending too much money today and not saving enough so that in the future we can enjoy retirement.

I suggest that we are just as rational as we thought we were. irrational when it comes to making professional decisions, let me give you an example, a few years ago I was working with a law student who came to my office very angry because she had just received her grades for the year and realized that she had done so poorly that she was going to be excluded from jobs that would pay her the kind of salary that was going to be necessary to pay off her considerable lost school loans while she sat there sobbing in my office, she admitted that she just didn't like studying law so I told her well, What made you decide to go to law school? because I didn't want to go to medical school, she is a gentleman of the jury.

I present to you that the majority of people do not make professional decisions rationally but based on deeply rooted, often unconscious, prejudices that they received from their social environment, they are greatly influenced by their parents, their peers, their local communities and they internalize many of these prejudices that they see around them and then tend to follow others in things that they have done as well, they also tend to internalize the messages they receive from their local and national cultures, particularly around personal identities such as gender, race, religion or socioeconomic status, and will tend to accept or exclude options accordingly, particularly if they anticipate barriers to success and recognize that many people face barriers to success, particularly in terms of gender, race, religion, socioeconomic status, sexual orientation, but it is exactly That's why I think self-awareness is so important because not only can it help us not internalize these biases that come from culture, but it also helps us avoid making false assumptions about others when it comes time to hire.

The complicated thing is that each of us, as individuals, will internalize and make decisions about many of these unconscious and conscious personal factors. identities at different times throughout our lives and this will be constantly changing for those of you who are more quantitatively oriented. Let me present this as an equation where professional identity is the sum of all the possible identities you could have that influence you. in different ways in different periods of time, many of them unconscious, but I admit that this is not my favorite analogy. I tend to think of all those individual variables, all those identities put together, not an equation but a script for a deeply personal life. and a professional narrative that tells the story of who we are and guides our decisions.

That's why in the fourth Industrial Revolution we can't program computers to make career decisions for us. A script is deeply personal, but we must also learn not to follow it to the end. letter we must learn to understand it and question it, its script is iterative and like any writing process it is likely to be complicated. I urge you to embrace that mess and own your story and not let others write it for you and know that this process has I have always been complicated if one of my identities is a former runner, another of my identities is a college graduate from liberal arts and as such I cannot finish a presentation without including a quote from a dead white man, so I offer you this from Cicero to underscore that over time this is the hardest problem in the world thank you very much