Work in progress

Work needs to be regarded as an opportunity, not simply a necessity. However, statistics show that out of any 100 people, 30 are actively looking to change their job and 20 more are contemplating it. Why is this? The truth is that for a career to be satisfying, purpose and meaning have to be at the centre. Careers counselling helps people become aware of what their central purposes are, and then develop strategies for pursuing them. If, in this way you can become commited to the ‘why’ of your work then you are much more likely to succeed – and to make money doing it.

Purpose, however, does not develop in a blinding flash but, rather, develops over time. Assuming your own responsibility for starting this process is the key to making all other objectives possible.

Develop your career imagination. Counselling can be the catalyst for your deepest career longing. You have a lot of information about yourself that can produce career ideas. You have an ‘abundant career imagination’. The counselling room can be a great place to let these ideas fly around and be talked about.

Often experiences of rejection and self-inflicted wounds of self-doubt can flatten many careers before they get rolling. Facing these anxieties, fears and self-defeating thoughts head-on can lead a person into discovering their key assets, and also clues that have, so far, been hidden, about your most important values.

So it’s about making it possible to determine the steps from ‘where I am now’ to ‘that is the career I may want to be in’. Remember career development is an evolving thing which we are not necessarily immediately ‘cut out for’, but rather ‘grow into’. And information about yourself and potential careers makes those ‘steps’ possible. And in the process remember that your master key to this is: ‘be yourself – nobody else qualifies’.

Pathways Counselling is this year broadening into the exciting area of careers counselling. Who can benefit? Anyone who is either in a state of change, or ready for a state of change. This can be about contemplating leaving school, it can be about moving town, it can be about children leaving home, it can be about a relationship breakup or a significant accident or illness, it can also be about the possibility of job loss now or in the future – or it can be about taking heed of those stirrings within that indicate it’s time to think about what else life may offer.

Karen Buckland