The Meandering Path

Welcome to our first ever CA101 video presentation! In early April, I organized a panel discussion at Bates College called "The Meandering Path" in which psychology professors (including yours truly) discussed the routes they took through their 20s. The main point of the evening was that even when people end up in the same profession, the roads they take to get there vary greatly. In addition, although you can't always see where you're heading as you're trudging through your 20s, as long as you continue forward motion, you do end up somewhere. And, if you introspect and are authentic and intentional, that somewhere is often wonderful.

The panel was taped and is now available on YouTube:

[youtube http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=XCyF3Pno4zg?list=PLOJKldfabwv2f8jf5zP0Y6It4P4zBS7E8&w=560&h=315]

On the videos (five connected clips that run about 55 minutes in total), I provide a short introduction, then each faculty member - and our department's terrific support staff member, Brian Pfohl, who did the YouTube uploading - talks for about 5 to 10 minutes about their path, followed by brief concluding remarks from me.

If you decide to skip around, I highly recommend watching Professor Michael Sargent's segment in particular (it starts at 4:30 into the Fourth Video). And if you aren't yet bored with hearing about my path, you can see my segment starting at 5:55 on the Third Video.

I'd love your feedback after you watch it - what was helpful? What was less so? What do you wish we had discussed? I'm already mentally planning next year's panel, so your thoughts would be invaluable!

Sense of Control and Career: Too Much Gloom Spells Doom

It's that time of year when graduating college students shift into career victimization mode. "I'll never get a job. Nothing I do will ever matter. I might as well go curl up in a ball and watch endless reruns of The Walking Dead while gorging on Cap'n Crunch."

During my ten years of teaching, I've heard variations of this statement every single year. Simply alter the TV show du jour.

Do young people feel more out of control during a down economy? Slightly. But you'd be amazed at how consistent the "I'm totally sunk" sentiments are.

That's because the comments are about a way of viewing the world. They're not about reality.

You can't control the job market, you can't control whether interviews result in offers, you can't control how many pounds you gain from the Cap'n Crunch, but you can control your thoughts about career. Even when you receive so few responses to job applications that you check your resume to make sure the contact info is listed right. (I've done that.)

Feeling In Control...or Out of It

The key question to answer is this:  do you generally feel like your efforts matter, or do you feel like a victim of circumstance?

Actually, it may be better to ask your friends this question. They're the ones who hear you talk. Ad nauseum. They know whether you generally act like you're in control (called an internal locus of control) or generally think life is out to get you (an external locus of control). In common parlance, whether you're a whiner.

Perception of control is much more important than actual control. The economy is screwing all young workers over. No arguing there. But some of my seniors believe they're in charge of the job search process all the same. They say things like, "I need to send out more applications. And I'm gonna start using the alumni network. And maybe I'll start volunteering at that clinic I'd love to work in."

This Isn't Optimism

Before we get too far, let's clear up a common misconception:  having a sense of control isn't the same as being optimistic.

Which I think is a good thing.

I don't know about you but I find perpetually optimistic people to be grating. I mean, 53% of recent college graduates are out of work or underemployed. To be like, "oh, this is delightful, you all have so much more free time!" would be absolutely ridiculous. (Although I must admit to toeing that line in my post "Why the Bad Economy May be Good News for Millennials" Sorry about that.)

Sense of control and optimism are related, yes, but they aren't the same. So feel free to increase your sense of control without worrying that you'll lose your cynical street cred. You can be the person who says, "The job market totally sucks. Yet there are things I can do to work toward a satisfying career. After I'm done bashing the pick of Gwyneth Paltrow as world's most beautiful woman."

Why Sense of Control Matters

This isn't some "positive thinking" infomercial. Sense of control has been found by psychologists to be key to career outcomes. College students who have an internal locus of control are more decisive about their careers, have higher career aspirations, and have less career choice anxiety than people with external loci. They're everything we Career Avoiders dream of being.

And in middle age, people who have a strong sense of control are more satisfied with their jobs and have better job performance than those who feel out of control. Not bad for just a difference in outlook.

Are You Stuck With a Certain Sense of Control?

The good news is that your sense of control is not part of your personality. It's completely changeable.

The bad news is that it takes a good deal of intention and effort to make the change.

But we're in it together, aren't we? So next time we''ll talk through some strategies for changing your sense of career control. Because gosh knows the economy ain't changing any time soon. Might as well change ourselves instead.

I want to know:  how in control of your career do you feel? Be honest!

Source:

Duffy, R. D. (2010). Sense of control and career adaptability among college students. Journal of Career Assessment, 18, 420-430.

This dog looks the way some of my graduating seniors feel. (Photo credit: Ruben Bos)

I'm not asking you to become this guy. (Photo credit: hynkle)

Career Choice Overload

A number of years ago, a junior student I'll call Caroline came into my office for an advising meeting. She'd already declared a psych major - otherwise she wouldn't be stuck with me - but it soon became clear that she had a million interests besides her major. Which isn't bad. It's just...overwhelming.

"I like psych, but I don't know if I'm gonna do psych. You know, in my life. Because there are so many other things," Caroline said. "Like I love rhetoric. And anthropology is amazing. And even economics fascinates me. And then there are those shows, those ones about crime scene people, they really get me. Maybe I'd like to do something like that. Or maybe be a marine biologist. That's always seemed fun, too."

Oh. My. God. Caroline may have been a poster child for a liberal arts education, but she was also a billboard for not having much hope of finding a path once her collegiate bubble burst. Not that I'm judging. I, my dear students, was just like Caroline. Perhaps still am.

How can we be reasonably expected to choose one career after a lifetime of being told "you can do anything you want"? It's tyrannical. It's ridiculous. It's...well, rude.

It's also necessary.

So let's get over kvetching about it and get on to a solution, shall we?

Adopt a New Mantra

"I'll have eleven jobs in my lifetime. I'll have eleven jobs in my lifetime."  Every time choice overload threatens to paralyze you, this is what to tell yourself. You are not choosing one job or career forever. You are simply choosing your NEXT move. You can go ahead and pursue a different interest in the future. Think of it as serial monogamy. Career style.

Get the Options Down in Black and White

Often I'll ask students experiencing career choice overload, "So have you done any work trying to figure out what you really want?" The common answer:  "Oh sure. I think about it all the time." Terrific. I think about going to Italy all the time and guess what, it hasn't gotten me there.

It's highly clarifying to get information out on a blank page. This is why experts say that to budget effectively you have to write out a budget. Um, yes, not rocket science here. Options feel like an overwhelming jumble in our heads. When we lay them all out in front of us, they look more manageable. Even if there's 50 of them.

Compile your list over the course of weeks. Every time a new idea pops into your head, add it to your list (best make the thing portable, then!). Write down specific careers, umbrella topical areas, anything that you think is related to what you might want to do. When you start recycling ideas that are already on the list, you're done.

Categorize Your Choices

Now take your handy-dandy list of interests and potential careers and put them into categories. Studies show that categories decrease choice overload. In psych-speak "categories make it easier to navigate the choice set and decrease the cognitive burden of making a choice," wrote researchers Scheibehenne and colleagues.

Many items on your list will relate to one another. For instance, say you wrote down the over-arching field of entymology. You also wrote down later on your list that you particularly like stink bugs. Ta da! This is really one choice, not two. (Lest you mock this option, specializing in stink bugs may very well get you on NPR).

Save The List. Permanently.

This is a tip I picked up from my fiction writing days:  it's much easier to cut material if you know you'll always have it saved somewhere. So before you go deleting any options, save the original list somewhere you can access it again in the future. Chances are you never will look at it again (the fiction passages that were so bad I cut them from my awful fiction wholes? not needed), but you'll feel reassured knowing it's not gone forever.

Pick a Heuristic, Any Heuristic

When's the last time someone implored you to do that? I tell you, we offer first time experiences at CA101. Good stuff here. Good stuff.

A heuristic is simply a rule of thumb we use to make decisions and solve problems. They simplify information so that we don't become paralyzed. It makes sense then that in their detailed analysis of 50 studies on choice overload, psychologists Scheibehenne and colleagues found that using heuristics helped people avoid choice overload.

Here are four heuristics they point to as useful options. Take your pick! Or mix and match!

• Elimination-by-Aspects Strategy:  Quickly screen out any options or categories that don't seem attractive. The more you allow yourself to rely on your "gut" instead of logic here, the better.
• Satisficing Heuristic:  "Choose the first option that exceeds [your] aspiration level." In other words, pick what's "good enough" - don't try to find "perfect." Some of us have personalities that do this better than others (we others are called maximizers), but even us perfection seekers can train ourselves to use the satisficing heuristic.
• Consideration-Set Model:  Consider how much work you'd have to put into each option (e.g., do you have to go back to school?) and how much benefit (emotional, financial, liturgical) you'd receive from each. Which will give you the most bang for your buck?
• Go With the Default:  Probably the simplest heuristic there is. Simply pick the option from the list that feels most obvious. For instance, you already have a degree in english. Pursuing a job as an editor probably makes more sense than retraining to becoming a physician's assistant.

Give Yourself Plenty of Time

This whole process takes time. So don't try to do it, say, two weeks before applications are due to a graduate program you're considering. Studies show that the more time pressured we feel, the more choice overload and subsequent regret we experience.

Summing Up

So there you have it:  the steps to overcoming choice overload. Sounds so simple, doesn't it? <sigh> Alright, not so much. But you have to do it. Otherwise we'll end up like poor Caroline, who bounced from one unsatisfying superficial job to the next, never willing to "settle" or to "rule out options" and hence never able to dig into anything. When she checked in with me five years after graduating, asking for another round of letters of reference to graduate schools in a wholly different field than she'd applied in the previous two years, she said, "I'm just so afraid I'll miss out on something. Like, if I do go with teaching, then what about my passion for finance. Do I just give that up?"

Well, yes, Caroline, you do. For now. Just for now. And then you go and find some great hobbies to indulge your many interests in the meantime.

Related Posts:

Awash in Choices

How to Create Your "Life Goal"

Time, Time Everywhere, and Not a Second to Use

Source:

Scheibehenne, B., Greifeneder, R., & Todd, P M. (2010). Can There Ever be Too Many Options? A Meta-Analytic Review of Choice Overload.. Journal of Consumer Research, 37, 409-425.

Pulled in too many conflicting directions? (Photo credit: shirokazan)

Why We Hate Networking for Jobs: Confessions of a Networking Convert

Networking for jobs. When I mention the phrase to my Bates students, their noses wrinkle, their lips grow taut, and the tip of a tongue sometimes protrudes ever so slightly from their mouths. Disgust. That's what they're demonstrating. Pure disgust.

I get it. I used to be an active member of United Anti-Networking Individualists. It's a faith that effectively thwarts the creation of a fulfilling career, given that over 80% of jobs are unadvertised. My fellow worshipers and I were left with the plum jobs that everyone knows about.

The thing is, I joined the dark side. I now - gasp - proselytize for job networking.

Yes, it's true. As part of my mission, I offer you the top reasons we hate networking for jobs. And why we're completely wrong. Based on psychological science, no less.

1. I Don't Want to Bug People

Let's pause for a second and consider what happens when you contact someone with a networking request. You're essentially saying to that person, hey, you're in a great position in life and I'd like to emulate you, or at least get closer to emulating you, and I was wondering if I might ask you to talk about yourself for fifteen minutes or so, and share some of the awesome contacts that I'm envious you have made? Ah, yes, I see why this is "bugging people." Not!

Number one:  People love to talk about themselves. That's the cardinal rule of human psychology.

Number two: People love to be praised and to feel like they're doing well on the social hierarchy. The second rule of human psychology.

So, "bugging people"? Uh, not so much.

2. I Want To Be Self-Sufficient

Ah, yes. The Western ideal run amock. I can do it myself! That's what you think, right? Then why do humans fall apart when they're socially excluded, suffering from depression and sometimes resorting to extreme aggression? Psychologists Baumeister and Leary claim that our "need to belong" drives much human behavior. In other words, we need one another to survive, both physically and psychologically. You're going against your basic nature if you assert otherwise. When you're in need (and when you're out of work, you are in need) that's the time to go with your evolutionary instincts, not fight against them. 

3. I Have the Wrong Personality For Networking

OK, you're onto something here. Psychologists Wolff and Kim found that people who are extraverted and high in openness to experience are more likely to network for jobs than people with introverted, closed personalities. That said, personality does not dictate all of our behavior. We may have to go "against type" in order to network, but we're required to go against type everyday for a variety of reasons.

I mean, for a true introvert, holding a spontaneous conversation can be excruciating. But introverts manage to do this all the time (thankfully). You're not being asked to change who you are in order to begin networking for jobs; just to channel a different way of relating to the world. And only for a short while. Besides, if you are an introvert looking for a career, you're probably drawn to career paths that other introverts love. Meaning you get to network with other introverts. That's hella comforting (speaking from my introverted self).

4. I Don't Have a Network

Oh wow, you're a hermetic isolate who lives in a cave? I always wanted to meet someone like you (it's very hard to do, seeing as how people like you never emerge from your dwellings). What, you're not? You actually live in the real world? Then, hate to break it to you, you have a network. A network isn't some fancy-schmancy secret club of Ivy League graduates who sit around drinking scotch while their chauffeurs polish the Mercedes. A network is just people. Plain ol' people. If you ever talk to anybody, then you have a network. Period.

But wait, I feel my psychic skills abuzzing; your rebuttal is ringing in my ears:

5. No One In My Network Knows Anything About My Field

This may be true. Maybe your network is full of people with careers you detest, or with backgrounds you'd rather not admit. But who's in their network? And in those people's networks?

Here's a tale from my anti-networking days:  I attended a career seminar at Cornell, back when I was plotting my great escape from grad school. To prove the power of networking, the career counselor made us each pair up with a random person in the room and see if we couldn't comb their network for someone related to what we wanted to do (and they ours). My partner got an immediate bingo from me; my dad worked in his prospective field. I, on the other hand, came up with peanuts from him. Peanuts.

There, I thought, proof that networking is a joke.

The counselor then went around the room, making everyone announce the connections they'd made. And they all had made connections. Except for me. (LOSER!)

When I professed my failure, the counselor kept hounding my partner and I, refusing to let the subject drop. You really have nothing to offer her? You can't get anything from him? Nope, we said, nothing.

As the seminar concluded, I went over to my partner and offered my email address, so that he could get in touch with my dad. As I handed it to him, I noticed a word on his Izod shirt (this clothing choice alone offers insight into why we had nothing in common). "Falmouth," I said, reading the word on his shirt. "As in Maine?"

"My Grandma lives there. Has her whole life."

"That's where I'm planning to move in a few months. To Falmouth, or nearby. And I don't know a single soul there."

The career counselor leaped over, like a possessed little jackal. "A-ha! I told you! Networking works!"

I glared at her, desperate to cling to my ideology. But as I talked to the grandma on the phone the next day, getting tips on where to live and where not to; the local publications in which to search for jobs; and the contact info of her niece who worked in social services, I couldn't help but question my anti-networking faith. Could networking be this powerful? And this easy? But still:

6. I Hate Using People

Here's the biggie, especially for you Millennials. Although you've come of age in the era of social networking, you're loathe to "use" those networks for personal gain. They're about self-expression and connection, right? Not about the trading of favors.

First, re-read Point #1 above.

Then stop and consider how you feel when you have a service you can offer to someone else. In the case of networking for jobs, it may be information about a certain career path, a connection to someone at your company, or the link to a friend or relative working in a particular industry. We humans are altruistic beings at heart, so when we give, we experience enhanced psychological well-being and decreased feelings of stress. We also earn social support from our actions.

As writer Elizabeth Scott says, "When people make altruistic personal sacrifices, they end up reaping what they sow in the form of favors from others. These individuals earn the reputation as altruistic people and end up receiving favors from others who they may not have even directly helped."

So, in essence, when you're asking others to help you, you're giving them the opportunity to experience more well-being, less stress, and the likelihood of returned favors in their future. Oh yes, this sounds like "using" somebody alright. Whatever you say.

Final Thoughts

Chances are I haven't made you a convert to networking for jobs just yet. It takes time. I know. But when you decide you're ready to fail Career Avoidance 101, a great start is to accept networking into your life.

I'm not only a Nutty for Networking  member. I'm its President.

So what did I miss? What deters you from networking for jobs?

Sources:

Baumeister, R. F., & Leary, M. R. (1995). The need to belong: Desire for interpersonal attachments as a fundamental human motivation. Psychological Bulletin, 117, 497-529.

Twenge, J. M., Baumeister, R. F., Tice, D. M., & Stucke, T. S. (2001). If you can't join them, beat them: Effects of social exclusion on aggressive behavior. Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, 81, 1058-1069.

Wolff, H., & Kim, S. (2012). The relationship between networking behaviors and the Big Five personality dimensions. Career Development International, 77, 43-66.

Ooo, there's a balloon at the call center! That makes this job much more appealing. (Photo credit: Walt Jabsco)

Think people will react like this when you contact them? (Photo credit: Cayusa)

You live here? (Photo credit: Aesum)

None of your friends knows anything useful? Bummer... (Photo credit: Meer)

Do Childhood Dreams Matter?

If you're in need of a life lesson, an Adam Sandler movie can provide it. Parenting? Excruciating but rewarding. Growing up? You're never too old to make progress. True love? Transcends sex, memory and bad singing.

When it comes to the complex issue of career choice, the Sand Man comes through once again. Mr. Deeds is, in essence, one big career manifesto. Granted, one sprinkled with disconcerting attempts at humor about a man's dead, blackened foot, but what career manifesto isn't?

In the final climactic scene - spoiler alert! (does that term even apply to Adam Sandler movies?) - Sandler's character convinces a room of stockholders to reject a corporate sale by rousing their memories of their childhood dream jobs. Some of which are downright unpleasant. All the same, the message is clear:  follow your childhood dreams; they hold your truth.

The question is, do they really?

After all, there are a million reasons why your childhood dream jobs are impractical and out of date. For instance, I dreamed of being a fashion designer when I was little, and spent countless hours sketching designs and sewing old clothes together to make haute couture. (My greatest masterpiece? An old pink t-shirt with a neon green scarf protruding from its center and half of a ruffly orange skirt sewn to the bottom. I mean, really, Versace, call me.) The thing is, I'm the least fashionable person you'll ever meet. (I just discarded my last top from high school. Despite its hodgepodge of geometric shapes and Teen Spirit caked into the pits, I still insisted on taking it to Goodwill because it was a perfectly good shirt.) Point is, I would've stunk as a fashion designer. So does that mean my childhood dream is totally invalid?

Well, if we're looking to avoid a fulfilling career, then yes, we should convince ourselves that childhood dreams are nothing more than the unrealistic spit-up of an underdeveloped mind.

But if we're in the career search to actually find some greater truth (read: living up to our fullest potentials), then maybe Mr. Deeds can teach us a thing or two.

When we look beyond their manifest content, childhood dream jobs may be ripe with lessons. In fact, they may be the best clues to the genetic career inclinations we discussed in the last lecture. Before parents and society and teachers began to tell us what we should be, or what we needed to be concerned about (money! status! a McMansion!) - in other words, before our genetic propensities were covered up with a ton of confusing voices - we had our dreams of being a firefighter, an astronaut, an ornithologist (I was weird). Childhood dreams are, if you will, the bread crumbs leading us to our genetic home. And thus to the unique and distinctive work we should be doing in this world.

The actual job itself is, for the most part, meaningless. It may give you a clue or two to your interests, but if that were completely true, we'd all love dinosaur bones way down deep inside. And I so don't.

What I find more valuable is to consider what our childhood dreams can tell us about the more nuanced aspects of career, the facets that tend to stay constant throughout our lives, even as we undergo our three to five career changes. Especially when we consider the answers when considering our full range of childhood dream jobs.

• How much cognitive complexity do I prefer to handle (or even need to have)? In other words, is The Walking Dead about my limit of complexity for the day?
• What types of work do I like to engage in? Work involving discovery or creation or logic or radical subversion?
• Do I like to use my motor skills? Am I good at using them? If so, do I prefer gross motor or fine motor activity? (Put another way, would I be better at kicking down doors or picking locks?)
• What level of physical activity do I like to have in my day? Do I prefer to be confused for the chair in which I sit, or do I enjoy offending people from the scent of the sweat I work up throughout any given day?
• What type of people do I prefer to be around?* Those who are artistic or entrepreneurial or conventional or pruddish?
• What sort of work environment do I like?* An office? A lab? A setting with children present? A maximum security facility?
• Do I prefer to work alone or to engage in teamwork? (Read: can I stand others, and can they stand me?)
• Is there a certain geographic setting that I prefer? A big city, a rural setting, a remote site, somewhere abroad, a secret bunker underground?
• Are there certain work conditions I'd prefer?* Do I want certain times of year off? Do I want to work at odd hours, or  conventional 9 to 5 hours? Do I like to have someone who gives structure to my day (read: a boss), or do I like to create structure for myself? Do I like to wear clothes while working?

Of course our childhood selves didn't consider most - if any - of these questions when we were "picking" a dream career. (Although even that is debatable; my two-year-old contemplates the "wearing clothes" question on a daily basis, to which she answers a resounding no. Yup, we're in big trouble.) Regardless of conscious consideration, I'd make the claim that we naturally gravitated to jobs that matched our innate propensities on many of these dimensions. Perhaps not all, but many.

So when people scoff and say that childhood careers are meaningless to the adult job search, they are, in some ways, correct. The what doesn't matter. At all. Nobody would want me designing their clothes.

But the why, that may matter. Perhaps more than we allow ourselves to realize.

What do you think:  Do you believe that childhood dreams have importance for our career search, or are they simply the impractical spewings of an immature brain?

*Items derived from What Color is Your Parachute? by Dick Bolles.

The career guru himself. (Photo credit: Wikipedia)

Is Your Career In Your Genes?

“I have absolutely no idea what I want to be.” If I had an angry employee for every time I heard a student say that, I’d be Marissa Mayer. The thing is, I’m not buying it. OK, sure, you don’t know exactly how to use your talents and interests to create a career that affords more than a steady diet of Taco Bell. I get that. But don’t tell me you have no clue what your abilities and tendencies are. You've known them since you were a little kid. They're right there in your genes.

We often hear dramatic tales of identical twins reared apart who discover one another and realize they've been living parallel lives. Like the pair of New Jersey volunteer firefighters who both used to work for lawn companies before earning their livings selling fire-related equipment. In reality, cases like this are rare; identical twins don't usually share the exact same careers, regardless of whether they were raised apart or together.

That said, career choice does seem to be "in our genes," at least to some extent. Researchers estimate that genetics explain about one-third of our variability in career choice. And while identical twins raised separately don't usually have the same job, they do tend to pick jobs that are similar in:

• —  Complexity levels
• —  Motor skills
• —  Physical demands

In addition, about half of our variation in interests is due to genes. In other words, why do you detest Justin Bieber while your friend loves him? It's about half genetically determined. And half good taste.

Finally, whether a person decides to engage in tasks that are entrepreneurial, artistic or conventional also seems to be largely determined by our biological makeup.

This suggests that if we want to have a fulfilling career, we should follow our inner yearnings. In fact, about 30% of our job satisfaction itself is attributable to genes. Twin researcher and author of the blog Twofold, Nancy Segal, explains these findings by saying, "People in general may better understand their level of job satisfaction in terms of how well their abilities and opportunities coincide.” In other words, if you use your innate abilities in your occupation, you're likely to have greater job satisfaction.

Even more of a head scratcher is the finding that our tendency to switch jobs and careers may also be partly genetic. According to twin research, about 36% of job change tendencies and 26% of career change tendencies are due to what's inside us. In other words, if you're a job hopper, it might not be your jobs that are the issue. It may be you. (There's a tidy fact to keep from the rents...)

I think it makes sense that career choice may be partly genetic, from an evolutionary perspective. Our species is most likely to survive and flourish if we have individuals suited for the many tasks survival requires. If everyone is great at self-promotion but lacks the problem-solving skills to investigate whether a dead battery is in a broken flashlight, we're in big trouble. I mean, what would we do with a society full of The Situations running around? It's no wonder our genes are varied, causing some of us to be inclined to create companies while others of us are content to be worker bees.

So modern society, with its push toward high status, high income careers - "Be a doctor! Be a lawyer! Be an insanely overpaid bank executive!" - is undermining the natural order of things. For our species to thrive, we should each be what we're meant to be. Lo and behold, Civil Rights advocate Benjamin Mays - who I profiled in a previous post - was actually speaking like a geneticist and evolutionary psychologist when he said, "Every man and woman is born into the world to do something unique and something distinctive and if he or she does not do it, it will never be done."

Of course "genes are not destiny" and there's a whole lot of room for environmental influences on our career choices. There's also no "career gene," of course; like all complex traits, career-related characteristics are polygenic. That said, during the career search, it can't hurt to pause to consider the interests, skill sets, and inclinations that are as much a part of you as your hair color and height. Who knows, you might just glance at your designer genes and get Lucky.

What do you think:  can you identify some interests, abilities and desires that have been present since you were young? Do you believe these are a part of your genetic makeup?

Good Read:

Born Together—Reared Apart: The Landmark Minnesota Twin Study by Nancy L. Segal Harvard University Press, Cambridge, MA, 2012.

Sources:

Betsworth, D. G., Bouchard, T. J. Jr., Cooper, C. R., Grotevant, H. D., Hansen, J. C, Scarr, S., & Weinberg, R. A. (1994). Genetic and environmental influences on vocational interests assessed using adoptive and biological families and twins reared apart and together. Journal of Vocational Behavior, 44, 263-278.

Moloney, D. P., Bouchard, T. J., Jr., & Segal, N. L. (1991). A genetic and environmental analysis of the vocational interests of monozygotic and dizygotic twins reared apart. Journal of Vocational Behavior, 39, 76-109.

Segal, N. L. (1999). Twin Studies Show...The Career of Dreams May Be the Career of Your Genes. Psychology Today, 54-70.

Mirror image...in career choice too? (Photo credit: Wikipedia)

Self-Focus as a Selfless Act

We all know the common characterization of Millennials:  as self-centered, self-absorbed, narcissistic little twerps who don't bother to look up from social media long enough to gaze beyond their navels. Overlooking for a moment the gross generalizations being made here - and the evidence that such assumptions are untrue - I say:  if you guys do manage to be self-focused in your twenties, more power to you. And more power to society.

Seriously.

I think the most selfless thing you can do during your twenties is look inward to find your authentic self. You see, my favorite quotation in all the world, the one that encapsulates my life's philosophy, is this one:

I believe this quotation with all of my heart (and in a future post I'll lay out my science-based rationale for believing in it).

At the core of Mays' sentiment is the assertion that one must first find their "unique and distinctive thing" in order to then be able to fulfill it. His statement "born into this world" also implies that the "unique and distinctive thing" is WITHIN us, not without. It's as internal as our personality, our preference for pet puppies over pet tarantulas, our feeling that Snooki is more than a tad bit sketchy.  In other words, the only way to find the "unique and distinctive thing" is to look inward, navel gaze, and be a little, well, self-absorbed.

Not forever. No. We're not talking some Peter Pan-ish suspended childhood here. We're talking doing the work of self-reflection - the hard, uncomfortable work that, when done well, triggers an identity crisis - at a time when it is developmentally appropriate. And guess what? In our contemporary Industrialized society, the developmentally appropriate time is now:  in your twenties.

Was the world really better when the age of first marriage and first child were wildly lower? Did people (especially women...) in those generations have the time and space to find their "unique and distinctive thing"? I'd argue - as a mother who knows how one's sense of self can become, shall we say, removed from consciousness while parenting a young child - that much important work may have been left undone. Why else would Oprah have an entire network? There's a big Confusion & Crisis market in a generation that never got to stop and think.

If I personally hadn't had my twenties to figure out my All I Want To Be Statement before jumping into parenthood, my life may be taking a very different trajectory today. For instance, I wouldn't do the sort of advising and teaching I do now, taking Mays' quotation implicitly into consideration at every turn. Or, say, writing this blog. (Which, if you're real students who love snow days and instances of professorial illness, you may see as a decidedly hopeful possibility.)

I can see some of you raising your hands:  yes, good point, many people in contemporary society don't get the luxury to be self-focused in their twenties. Very true. But the way I see it, you can either lament this fact and feel guilty, or you can use this cognizance to make you grateful for the opportunity you have and give you the determination to make the most of it.

And this isn't some insignificant opportunity. Let's consider who stated my beloved quotation. Benjamin E. Mays, the once-President of Morehouse College, knew of what he spoke. Mays' most famous student certainly sorted out his "unique and distinctive thing" and how our nation - and our world - would've been different had this student left his work undone. You see, it was Mays who introduced Gandhi and other key philosophies to none other than Martin Luther King, Jr.

In an odd twist, Mays also happens to be an alumnus of the very college where I teach. I fell in love with his quotation while miserably floundering through grad school. Then I stumbled on my job at Bates College and, years later, put it together that Mays was a Bates alum. (Apparently I can be painfully slow-on-the-uptake:  I often walked past the residential building named after Mays on my way to my car. Uh...what was I saying about twenties navel-gazing?)

All in all, don't apologize for your natural tendencies to introspect, to "find yourself," to figure out what the hell you're doing with your life. This is your time to do it. Your family, your community, and perhaps even the entire world, will be better for it. Being self-focused now is the most selfless thing you can do for later.

Have you found your "unique and distinctive thing"? Or at least have some semblance of a clue about what it might be?

Why Interviews Rock

An anxious senior recently needed my infamous interview pep talk. I offer this up gleefully because I happen to love interviews. I’d go on an interview every day if I could (especially if I didn’t need the resulting job …). Here’s why:

1. You get to talk about yourself non-stop for a half an hour or more. Do you realize how rare this is? Try doing it with a friend and see how quickly they stop returning your texts. You can only get away with non-reciprocal self-talk with therapists and interviewers. You might even say that interviews = free therapy. Gorge on it, people!
2. You have an excuse to buy a snazzy new outfit. Or at the very least you get to pull a dapper outfit out of the back of your closet and iron it. Alright, that doesn’t sound too exciting. But in any event, you get to pick out

   

   attire you rarely if ever wear, which you should do, by the way, at least, say, two hours before the interview. Or else you could end up in a mall bathroom, ripping off tags and squeezing yourself into ill-fitting clothes while a cleaning lady asks you through the stall door if you’re all right. Not that that’s happened to me. And moving on.

3. You have the opportunity to give your best Office Space impression. Take your pick of lines. My fave:  when the interviewer asks you what you did at a previous job, pull a Tom Smykowski. “Well look, I already told you! I deal with the goddamn customers so the engineers don't have to! I have people skills! I am good at dealing with people! Can't you understand that? What the hell is wrong with you people?”
4. You don’t ever have to see these people again if you don’t want to. This reason alone makes interviews the bomb. If the interviewer(s) weird you out – they don’t look you in the eye; or they ask you strange personal questions like how much time a day, on average, you spend in the bathroom; or they confess their plot to steal all of the stamps from a local post office – you get to walk out of there and never go back. Period.
5. If you screw up, you never have to see these people again. The flipside of Reason #4:  the interviewers might decide that you weird them out. This might seem like a real downer, especially if you're losing out on your dream position, but take heart – at least you don’t have to face the people you screwed up in front of ever again. Unlike, say, facing your parents, who you’ve done all sorts of wacko things in front of (try to deny it, but you were a toddler once.)
6. You can use ridiculous fifty-cent words and no one will laugh at you. In fact, they’ll not only not laugh, they’ll nod thoughtfully and scribble little notes. Just try getting that reaction from your friends.
7. For a phone interview, you get to gum on a pencil! It's true: one way to enunciate during phone interviews is to talk with a pencil in your mouth for about ten minutes in advance. You’ll look and sound like a real doofus, but when else since teething have you had the excuse to chew on things? Just be sure to take the pencil out before the phone rings. Not that I’ve done that, either…
8. You can refer to your past positions using inflated, self-important language. For instance, you were a Courtesy Clerk, not the bagging boy at the local supermarket. Or an Ice Cream Artist, not a scooper of ice cream that caked the inner lengths of your arms such that you could never quite scrub the veneer off and that gave you a strange muscle where no muscle should grow.
9. You have a socially acceptable reason to throw snide looks at someone. That tool sitting in the lobby who’s up next for the interview? Yup, that’s the guy to give the snide look to. He’ll return it in kind. You’ll both know it’s nothing personal. When else is this kind of thing OK? (Note:  Just make sure the interviewer isn’t still watching. Again, not spoken from experience…)
10. You get to talk about yourself non-stop for a half hour or more. This reason is simply too good to go on the list only once. Eat it up. Talk about yourself ad nauseum. Just be sure to do so in two to three minutes chunks. Or else the interviewers will either fall asleep or kick your butt out of there. Which, I suppose, may be possible if you take any of my advice above.

So now you know why I usually leave the nit-gritty job search stuff to the career coaching pros. But I do hope this Top Ten list reminds you to stay loose and relaxed when you’re about to have an interview. The more tense you are, the less likely it is to work out. And by “work out” I don’t necessarily mean “get the job.” I mean, get the job that suits you. Because believe me (this time from experience!), you don’t want to be somewhere where they fell in love with a fake version of you. The real you will hate you for it. So chill, enjoy and just be you. And then let the outcome fall where it may.

Next time, back to the big picture career avoidance hoopla. We’ll be diving into the deep-end, students:  fears, in all their stripes and colors. Come prepared.

See Reason #3 (Photo credit: Wikipedia)

How to Avoid Work

There really isn't anything new under the sun. Long before "Career Avoidance 101" became a class - 64 years before, in fact - there was the book How to Avoid Work by William J. Reilly. The site Brain Pickings does a great job discussing Reilly's 1949 book; hop on over there and give the article a read.

Here's my favorite quotation from How to Avoid Work:

"There is only one way in this world to achieve true happiness, and that is to express yourself with all your skill and enthusiasm in a career that appeals to you more than any other. In such a career, you feel a sense of purpose, a sense of achievement. You feel you are making a contribution. It is not work."

So tell me, what are YOU doing to avoid work? And - my puritanical roots force me to ask - is that actually a worthwhile goal? Or is work - true, hard, not-making-you-so-happy work - valuable?

Time, Time Everywhere, and Not a Second to Use

“I’m too busy” may be the most ubiquitous excuse in existence. Even if you’re not so arrogant and self-important to say such a thing, chances are you’ve appealed to its cousins “I’m not sure if I can,” “I’ll see if it works out,” and plain old “If I have the time.” Why The "I'm Too Busy Excuse" Works So Well

Nowhere does the “I’m too busy” excuse get more play than in Career Avoidance. It’s an effective excuse for two reasons:

1. Because you truly believe it. There really is no time to spare in your life. I bought Do What You Are early in my college career. That fat book moved from dorm room to dorm room to grad school apartment to adult apartment without being cracked more than an inch. It’s not that I didn’t want to read its personality-based career recipes, it’s that I simply didn’t have the time to do it. Alas, what’s a girl to do? Our recent class poll backs this up. 36% of you are too busy working dead-end jobs to focus on the Career Search. Burgers need to be flipped, people. Shirts have to be folded. Cubicles need to be occupied. There’s no time for this “big thinking” stuff.
2. It's hard for others to combat. Even if you manage to have some time in your day, who actually knows it? Does anyone follow you every second of every day, keeping tabs on your every move? (If you answered yes, either call the cops on that stalker or find your mom a hobby. Stat.) In other words, “I’m too busy” is a convincing, bullet-proof excuse to use against intrusive parents; freaky, overinvolved uncles; and way-too-eager professors (not that I know any of the latter...).

Cling fast to the “I’m too busy” excuse, valiant Career Avoiders. Cling fast. It’s one of the goodies.

Just hope you don’t run into someone – some evil, sinister someone – who tries to wrench the “I’m Too Busy” excuse away from you by, say, making the following claims:

Your Leisure Activities Are Telling

In our poll, 36% of you said you turn to YouTube to procrastinate the Career Search. Little did you know that this activity can actually shed light on your future career, if you let it.

The old advice career advice said to figure out your interests, pay attention to what section of a library or bookstore you’re drawn to. Thing is, no one goes there anymore (well, except old people; at the bookstore last week the gray-haired lady sitting next to me was snoring her way through Forever, Erma. Please refrain from commenting on what my bookstore presence - and the instant recognition of her book's cover - mean for my age.)

Instead of going to the bookstore, these days we go online. So mount a virtual camera on your shoulder and keep tabs on what you’re doing. What do you most like to watch on YouTube? What do you most desire to read on blogs? What books and activities fill your Kindle or iPad? It doesn’t take “time,” per se, to keep track of this. It just takes a shifting of attention.

You might argue that much of what you do is solely for “entertainment.” True, true. But I, for instance, don’t think a Truman documentary is entertaining in the least. My husband, on the other hand, would strongly beg to differ. In fact, he has begged to differ for the past three nights. (I used the opportunity to catch up on my sleep...) Is it any wonder he ended up becoming a social studies teacher? Albeit not until he was in his thirties...

Your Leisure Activities Can Actually Help You

If you’re keeping track of the poll results so far, you know there are still some class members unaccounted for. Pop quiz:  what percentage is missing? Oh wait, this isn’t a math class. Thankfully. You’d be screwed if you had me teaching you that.

27% of you procrastinate by Facebook stalking, a time-honored tradition indeed. You probably think you’re wasting time on Facebook, don’t you? What if I told you that you may actually be getting closer to your dream career and happiness by being on there? Seriously.

Research shows that we're more our “true selves” when we’re interacting on social media than when we’re talking with people face to face. In other words, we put on less of a show than in the real world. Studies also show that the more we get in touch with our true selves on a regular basis, the more meaningful our lives feel (which, as we’ve discussed, is one of the two lasting forms of happiness).

In addition, we're more satisfied at work when we're being true to ourselves.

That said, if you are putting on a show on Facebook or Twitter or Site-Too-Hip-For-Thirtysomethings-To-Know-About, the activity isn’t helping you. The pure act of stalking isn’t, either; you have to be actively contributing and getting in touch with you - not Lena Dunham or Robert Pattinson's abs or your grade school crush - in order to reap the benefits.

You Don’t Need “Time” to Solve Problems

In essence, the Career Search is one big problem to solve. You have to take all the disparate, often conflicting information about your interests and your true self – info gleaned from the previous activities – and figure out what it means for a career.

In the last post I briefly mentioned that incubation can be key to problem solving. If you step back from a problem rather than focus on it, you're more likely to reach a solution. Sleeping may be especially helpful (I am indeed giving you an excuse to lay around more).

For this approach to work, you have to seed the unconscious with the problem you want to solve (such as – shameless plug ahead - by reading Career Avoidance 101’s daily Facebook posts or Tweets). This takes little to no time. You do need the passage of time to get to your "flash of insight," but you don’t need chunks of time.

To incubate, Einstein turned to music, developmental psychologist Piaget walked, and physicist Helmholz went on a "slow ascent of wooded hills on a sunny day" (poetic much?). You go on YouTube and Facebook stalk and sit at your dead end job. In other words, you can tell your parents that you're simply "Being like Einstein."

The Decision-Making Process Isn’t As Strategic As You Think

After you’ve determined your interests, gotten in touch with you and used those pieces to solve the career problem, you’ll probably be left with a general, resonating vision for your life (some might call it an, I don’t know, “All I Want to Be” statement…). But how do you translate that into a specific career?

Here’s where you engage your decision-making skills. You need to decide between the various career options that would satisfactorily meet your life goal. Sounds time-consuming, doesn’t it? Actually, it doesn’t have to be, and it's perhaps even better when it’s not.

We’re taught that the best way to make decisions involves reason and strategy and ridiculously long pro and con lists. In reality, that’s not how people do it. People tend to make decisions – even huge decisions, like about what course of cancer treatment they should pursue – based largely on "intuition" or "gut feelings." There’s no weighing of evidence, no systematic elimination, no creation of compulsive spreadsheets. Instead we humans throw our fates to the stars and go with our guts. We silly humans!

Or are we?

It’s not such a stupid approach, it turns out. The gut feeling isn’t some flimmy-flammy, semi-mystical, call a 1-800-psychic number type of thing. It’s actually based on our subconscious picking up lots of subtle – and often important - cues that our overly rational, conscious mind overlooks. The subconscious adds these cues up and, voila, the gut feeling!

So What To Make of the "I'm Too Busy" Excuse?

When we consider these attacks on the “I’m too busy” excuse, it seems the evil someone who presented them pretty much mucked up all hope of using this defense.

Don’t lose faith, though. The process of job searching – a far different process from looking for a career, or, ideally, for looking for something even bigger than career – does take time. Literal, physical chunks of minutes type of time. You have to create a resume, find job openings, send out application packets, go on interviews. There’s no way getting around how much time that takes.

And so, even if you happen to run into someone who pokes holes in your “I’m too busy” excuse for avoiding the big-thinking portion of Career Search (wherever would you meet such a person, anyway?), you can still use the excuse when the pedal meets the metal and you have to find an actual job.

Which is fitting, I suppose, since that’s all you’ll be finding – plain, old, punch-the-clock, end-up-in-a-stupor-from-boredom jobs - if you don’t give the Career Search a good go. Fair enough!

Time always gets in our way...or does it? (Photo credit: ToniVCand over-eager professors.)

Job, Career, or...Something Else?

Before we get to the Great Time Excuse - and our poll results (last chance to weigh in!) - we should go back a few steps and discuss terminology. (This is when my Psych 101 students start hurling dagger vision at me but hang in there, this is important). Here's what I mean when I talk about the following:

• Job: The thing you drag your butt to everyday, mainly because you'll get a paycheck to show for it. You may like the company of your co-workers and there might be small pleasures afforded by the job tasks themselves, but by and large, you didn't envision this being your life when your grade school teacher asked you, "What do you want to be when you grow up?" (Your answer:  A Part-Time Impact Team Member at Abercrombie & Fitch? I think not. [Seriously, that's what they're called.])
• Career: A series of jobs in the same field or specialization area, ideally with an increase in rank, status and pay over time. You may invest more of yourself in a career than a job, but there's still a sense of disconnect between your SELF and what you do. In other words, career is a glorified job. At least in my terminology.

So where does that leave us? Nowhere I want to be. There has to be something more. And there is. I just have no idea what to call it.

In The Art of Happiness at Work, the Dalai Lama distinguishes between job, career and calling. His definitions aren't too different from my own. He says job is something you do for money, a career is something you do for status, and a calling is something you would do even if you never got paid.

That sounds great to me. But I find the term "calling" to be problematic in our modern, secular society. I think it scares too many people off from fighting the good fight, from searching for something more in their lives. To be called you need to have a belief in some higher power that's doing the calling now don't you? While I personally hold that belief, most 20somethings I encounter seem not to, which is perfectly valid. (Although I can't reconcile these personal observations with reports that 84% of 20somethings do in fact believe in God or a universal spirit. Go figure.)

I find the vaunted tome of job seekers, What Color is Your Parachute?, problematic for the same reason. In fact, the author, Dick Bolles, was a clergyman, so language like "calling" is sprinkled throughout the text. There's nothing wrong with this - many people may even be inspired by this wording - but I believe a large chunk of our population is being ostracized by our choice of terminology.

So what do you we call the "Something Else?" (Or SE, if you will. Which I hope you won't.)

Do we call it our "North Star?" No, too Oprah.

Out "highest desire?" Too dramatic.

Our "inner essence being revealed through action?" Oh hell no.

Here's what I throw on the table:  calling it our "'All I Want to Be...' Statement." Sheesh, that's way too long. Overlooking that issue for a moment, this proposal does encompass the essence of what I mean by the "something else." I got this idea while reading  Making Ideas Happen:  Overcoming the Obstacles Between Vision & Reality. The author, Scott Belsky, includes a photo of the office walls of John Maeda, President of the Rhode Island School of Design. Amongst a million other little notes, Maeda has posted a big sign to himself that says, "All I want to be is someone who creates truly meaningful things."

Ah, isn't that beautiful? (Wait that's not very tongue-in-cheek of me. How about "What kind of crap is that?! Ridiculous!")

After seeing that, I took to drafting my own "All I Want to Be..." statement, whose current incarnation is something along the lines of "All I want to be is someone who facilitates meaningful experiences for myself and others."

Regardless of what your "All I Want to Be..." statement contains, THAT is the essence of the "Something Else" for which I hope we all strive. It transcends work, reaching instead into our relationships, our hobbies, our reading choices, even our miniscule momentary interactions with a "Part-Time Impact Team Member" while buying a pair of pants that we hope will distract us from our crappy J-O-B.

But boy is my notion of "Something Else" huge. Overwhelmingly huge. Good reason to run and make excuses about why we can't ever seek it out. Don't worry, I'll be providing plenty such excuses in future lessons.

Before we wrap up, let's pause to consider one great irony:  my website is misnamed. Strategically so, of course; if we can't put a mutually agreed-upon term on the "Something Else," I certainly couldn't name a website after it. Besides, we're all trained to plan for a career. That's the goal after high school and college and grad school:  the damn career. Which is, on so many levels, wrong to the extreme. But there it is:  we are frightened of the career search when really we should be frightened of something much, much larger (and, indeed, much worthier of searching for).

But back to excuses! The time excuse is next. In the meantime, why don't you try your hand at labeling the "Something Else?" I clearly suck at it. Give me your best.

The Art of Happiness at Work