Blog 4

       I found this week’s journal reading very interesting. I was able to look at my own career development journey and apply this type of counseling to it. I really feel like I went through a lot of indecision and I feel like my indecision wasn’t just undecided or decided. I feel like I definitely fell onto the continuum. There were times during my journey where I thought I was coming close to a decision and then I would think about it some more and realize that I still was not positive. I really liked the idea of indecision being on a continuous scale. I think too often in our world we see things as black and white, but we forget that there is a whole bunch of grey area in there as well. I also feel that in the future when we will be working with clients it is very important to remember that they are on a scale of indecision and they don’t have to be completely decided or undecided. I think that if we let them know it is okay to be somewhere in the middle then that will help to lower the stressfulness of their journey.

            Next, I really found the process of constructivist counseling to be very intriguing. I like how you work with the client to find out what their life theme is. Finding out what the client’s life theme is I feel really helps to open their eyes to an area of careers that will best fit into what their life is based around. What I wondered when reading this though was how do you get people to tell their life story if they do not feel like talking about their life. I just imagine that some people who come in for career counseling only want to talk about careers and therefore do not want to open up about their past. I think it will be crucial to discuss with the client how important life narratives aid in discovering a career that will best fit with them. In the case study it was really neat to see the whole constructivist counseling put to work. It helped to solidify the steps that were laid out in the earlier section. I really liked how they had the girl identify with fictional characters. I thought this really helped to tie in with her life theme. I think this constructivist theme really helps people to figure out what their indecision is all about, sometimes we are too caught up in our life that we need an outside eye to help us see through the mess, and I think that this constructivist counseling does just that.

Savickas, M.L. (1995) Constructivist counseling for career indecision. The Career Development   Quarterly, 43(4), 363-373.