For over three decades, it has been a professional honor, and a personal privilege to have thousands of Fordham students share their life stories with me. Stories that include their anxieties, fears, frustrations, talents, accomplishments, and joys as they seek to discover, balance, and integrate their experiences into their unique career narratives. Fordham Futures is an outcome oriented approach to career awareness and education that reflects a holistic way of looking at and understanding your career growth and development.
Fordham Futures is a healing approach that encourages students to search for a balance between their internal experience and the external realities of the world around them. Career Services counselors challenge Fordham students to create an effective relationship with the sources and power of your uniqueness. Students' careers are always greater than the sum of your experiences, and you need to allow your awareness the opportunity to guide your creative intelligence. In the chaotic realities of our 21st century idea, concept, knowledge economy, the most employable individuals are those people who can move easily from one function to another, continually integrating diverse disciplines and perspectives.
Below you will find a series of principles designed to assist you in Balancing and Integrating your abilities to describe and understand your unique career experience:
* Life is formed by what we do with what happens to us - you operate out of your internal template and not out of your sensory experience. Fordham Futures' career counselors encourage you to expand and elaborate your existing internal map to provide you with new possibilities and opportunities.
* Everyone is doing the best they can with what they have - accepting this belief requires an openness to ideas, concepts, and opportunities that may be beyond the realm of your previous experiences. Patience, awareness, and understanding serve as valued allies as you accept your limitations as potential opportunities, and your perceptions as cognitive possibilities.
* You are defined by your thoughts and actions - you need to be flexible enough to invent a new theory and unique approaches for yourself and others. You need to use your memory to retrieve resources rather than explanations. You need to solve problems in new ways that speak directly to who you are.
* Respect all messages - all of your senses are operating all of the time, and to maintain a healthy perspective, you need to delete, distort, and generalize the incoming information to make sense of your experience. You need to attend to your verbal and non-verbal activities, that are more attuned to the subtle elements of communication: voice, tone, gestures, expressions, breathing, and imagery.
* Teach choice - always expands your frame of reference to include behaviors, thoughts, and feelings that previously may not have been available to you. As you expand your horizons, more choices are made available to you. Spend your time teaching choices and connections, continually enhancing and expanding.
* Answers are found in the questions - all the resources that you need lie within your personal history. You can access these resources through the telling of common stories about your growth and development. These personal and professional tales capture personal meaning and significance for you as you celebrate your unique experience.
* Meet people at their model of the world - the true meaning of your communication is the response it elicits. You need to adapt your senses and experiences in an effort to develop rapport and empathy with others.
* Flexibility as a controlling resource - in a 21st century economy vested in uncertainty and ambiguity, you need to build flexibility into your work. Because the individual with the most flexibility or choice will most likely be the controlling element, you need an evolving approach to the people you engage and encounter.
* People can not not communicate - when you are not communicating verbally you are still communicating non-verbally. You always have internal responses, you search across your internal experience in an attempt to find meaning for the incoming words,
sounds, images, or representations.
* If it's hard work, reduce it down - in an idea, concept, knowledge economy you need to break information down into smaller components in order to effectively connect the various moving parts of your career. In an age of 'big data', analytics, and algorithms you need to manage complex tasks one step at a time, as you treat component pieces effectively.
* Outcomes are determined at a psychological level - you need to utilize cognitive feedback and imagery as you communicate on a psychological level. Additionally, you can use personal stories, metaphors, and direct and indirect suggestions to gain rapport and retrieve resources, as you connect those resources to your experience. You live in a time when all your communications both social and psychological are transmitted and received on multiple levels.
Adapted from: Dr. Milton Erickson's Principles of Therapeutic Intervention & Balance
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