Wednesday, November 6, 2013

week 9

            Last week’s activities were interesting and kept me engaged.  Although it was  easy for me to map out my interviewees high and low points, I was slightly surprised to see he did not have many lows with the exception of  death of his mother and father caused natural health related issues.  In turn, the passing of his parent’s changed his lifestyle in a positive way, all around helping him become more physically active and aware of his health.  Other situations in his life may have been viewed as low points for some people, but my interviewee took what he could from it and moved on, not allowing the low points to hold him down.
            I actually enjoyed the computer lab activity.  I think it may have been helpful to be partnered with someone from another program because we think differently but were able to collaborate to come to a conclusion.  Although our case was rather difficult, I was pleased with what my experience has enabled me to utilize in career development.  I felt that I was able to easily create a few feasible goals and interventions.  With this being said, I think it would be a good to include more goal writing activities for clients that we could apply down the road. 
            Brown (2007) discusses the importance of self-efficacy in chapter six.  I found this to be really “spot-on” because so much of what we do is effected by our beliefs about ourselves.  If someone does not believe they are capable of performing a task up to par, they will likely avoid that task if possible (Brown, 2007).  The way the text breaks down the measurement of self-efficacy is something I felt holds a lot of applicable value.  First, you must complete the task, then you must rate the difficulty and confidence you had while completing the task.  Finally, you must estimate your performance with a similar task.  I find it interesting that self-efficacy measures may be used as an ongoing project.  For example, can be used to track the beliefs about one’s own abilities with completing specific tasks.  With this, you could potentially watch the growth of a client and see if they are approaching a job ready state of mind. (And after completing this, I realized I did the wrong chapter because I have an older edition, so I will discuss my chapter 5 in the following paragraph.  Unfortunately, I briefly discussed chapter 5 in last weeks writing).

            Discussion about special needs is interesting in the fact that women, GLBT, military, and ethnic minorities fall into this category as well as other with disabilities both mentally and physically.  From reading the text, you can gain an understanding for why these groups are placed into the special needs category.  I think having multicultural counseling really put this into perspective for me because we were exposed to the statistics of males versus female salaries, leadership opportunities, and overall inequalities that have been pushed under the rug.  We also discussed the disadvantages of those who may be of a lower economic status and the challenges that you may be impeded with.  I think it is also important to note when working with a special needs client (more specifically, females, minorities, GLBT), how they may feel a sense of superiority coming from a successful counselor, especially those who are white males.  I know I am going slightly off topic from the text but just trying to tie in multicultural aspects to this as well. 

References

Brown, D. (2007).  Career information, career counseling, and career development  (9h ed.).  New York: Pearson Education, Inc.

No comments:

Post a Comment