My life's work has been to assist Fordham students in developing, identifying, clarifying, synergizing, and presenting the wisdom and practice of the ancient liberal arts. The best careers are those that emerge from the depths of your experience and individuality, careers that reflect your strongest drives and aspirations. Careers that give you permission to be who you are, where you are going, and how do you get there.
You are participating in one of the most sacred stages of your lifelong journey. This is a time of great emotion for you. You need to embrace your fear, your anger, your sorrow, and your joy as you capture the power of your moment in time. You need to create a new career vision as you seek unique healing connections that reflect the interrelated and interdependent nature of the quantum world in which you live. As you think about your work and your careers in a twenty-first century way, your work related thoughts are your self-related thoughts.
In the 21st century quantum world of work where the transformation of information and 'big data' into knowledge, and eventually wisdom serve as challenges to you to become aware, appreciative, and accepting your unique experience. Career Services looks to sit at the intersection of academic learning and professional life, where every student's education is anchored in a 'core curriculum' that inspires and celebrates the liberal arts of listening, thinking, speaking, writing, reading, reflecting, measuring, calculating, estimating, and dreaming.
Below you will find a series of twelve questions about your academic undergraduate experience, these questions are designed for you to ask yourself first, and others later, as you participate in an ongoing conversation about the power and promise of your liberal arts education:
Twelve Curious Questions
- How do 'core courses' introduce students to a kind of thinking that inspires critical analysis, cognitive curiosity, and eloquent presentation?
- How does student participation in a core curriculum assist them in the construction of an academic framework that helps them develop intellectual passions, questions, and ideas and interests that will last them a lifetime?
- How does the core curriculum nurture a love of learning that can better prepare students for the uncertainties and ambiguities of a 21st century quantum economy?
- How does Fordham's core curriculum generate a spirit of inquiry that leads to questions about various ways of thinking and knowing demanded by diverse subjects and disciplines?
- How does the core curriculum foster educational experiences that lead to questions concerning meaning and values, and the nature and purpose of human action which includes an openness to questions of faith and the transcendent?
- How does the core experience evolve into a quest for wisdom through the practice of the liberal arts of listening, thinking, speaking, writing, reading, reflecting, measuring, calculating, estimating, and dreaming?
- How does the undergraduate experience bring together life inside and outside the classroom, merging the academic arenas of higher education with the transformative realities of an ever-changing world of work?
- Within a Jesuit University, where education is equal parts theory and practice, as well as, action and reflection, how can students successfully balance their careers through a lifelong pursuit for spiritual, cognitive, emotional, and physical well-being?
- How prepared are Fordham students to determine their professional paths, have they developed the qualitative and quantitative skills needed to make informed career decisions?
- How prepared are Fordham students to face the revolutionary reinvention of the world of work, where globalization, intergenerational demographics, and technological innovation serve as constant catalysts?
- How effectively do Fordham students realize the benefits of being located in the world's capital of business and finance, communications and the arts, science, scholarship and medicine, law, and international politics?
- How recognizable are Fordham students as individuals of competence, conscience, and commitment that live integrated, purposeful lives that bring together education and experience, and faith and reason?
A man found an eagle's egg and put it in a nest of a barnyard he. The eaglet hatched with the brood of chicks and grew up with them. All his life the eagle did what the barnyard chicks did, thinking he was a barnyard chicken. He scratched the earth for worms and insects. He clucked and cackled. And he would thrash his wings and fly a few feet into the air. Years pasted and the eagle grew very old. One day he saw a magnificent bird above him in a cloudless sky. It glided in graceful majesty among the powerful wind currents, with scarcely a beat of its strong golden wings. The old eagle looked up in awe. "Who's that ? he asked. "That's the eagle, the king of the birds," said his neighbor. "He belongs to the sky. We belong to the earth - we're chickens." So the eagle lived and died a chicken, for that's what he thought he was.
Thus begins Anthony de Mello S.J.'s spiritual classic, Awareness: The Perils and Opportunities of Reality, this is his call to waking people up to the reality of their greatness. At the heart of Father de Mello's spiritual message is awareness, an awareness that challenges you to wake up to every aspect of your lives, challenge yourself from an attitude of openness, not from an attitude of stubbornness. Father de Mello recalls the powerful challenging words of the Buddha when he said: "Monks and scholars must not accept my words out of respect, but must analyze them the way a goldsmith analyzes gold - by cutting, scraping, melting." When you do that, you're listening, you've moved closer toward awakening.
Over the next four years, your career awareness and your career development will be a spiritual journey that begins with an understanding of your self and the choices you make. In a very real sense, your career decisions will serve as a manifestation of your attempts to make sense out of your life experiences. Your career experiences will emerge and be integrated by your continual participation in life in and outside the classroom.
As you explore and describe how to narrate your career story,[ first to your self, then to others] awareness needs to be at the epicenter of your approach. Stories that are best told through the perceptive prism of your values, interests, aptitudes, skills, and abilities. Our mission at Career Services is to assist Fordham students in telling your stories filling the space that exists between your performance and the description of your performance. In other words, our work involves encouraging you to enhance and expand your career awareness, preparation, and presentation.
In his writings, presentations, and retreats Father DeMello captures the essence of being alive, and connects you to your innermost being and reality as you discover'bliss' in your every moment: "There's only one reason why you're not experiencing what in India we call Anand - bliss, bliss. There's only one reason why you're not experiencing bliss at this present moment, and it's because your thinking or focusing on what you don't have. But right now you have everything you need to be in bliss."
What keeps you from this ever present 'bliss' are your illusions about yourselves and life itself. What you need to do is to drop something, to lose something - your greed, your ambitions, your cravings. You don't need to add something in order to find bliss. What you need to do is to stop identifying with society's labels and seek through the wisdom of your experience a path defined by awareness.
Virginia Satir is a legendary pioneer in the art and awareness of family therapy. Her understanding, skill, and humor earned her the warm respect of people all over the world. She worked at helping people feel more connected to their personal resources and rhythms. Her philosophy was centered in her belief that every human being is a miracle fully capable of continued growth and change and understanding.
Virginia Satir's celebration of awareness were alive in her Five Freedoms, a philosophy richly vested in the belief that every person can learn and grow:
- The freedom to see and hear what is here instead of what should be, was, and/or will be.
- The freedom to say what one feels and thinks instead of what one should.
- The freedom to feel what one feels instead of what one ought to feel.
- The freedom to ask for what one wants instead of waiting for permission.
- The freedom to take risks in one's behalf instead of wanting only to be secure.
Satir's goal of therapy was to enhance individuals' potential for becoming more fully evolved as human beings. In her family therapy practice her goal and art was to integrate the needs of each family member for independent growth within the integrity of the family system. Virginia's goal as a therapist was to enable the family to gain new hope and to help reawaken old dreams or develop new ones.
Virginia Satir was a master of awareness as she lived a life that understood the importance of the spiritual dimensions of the human experience. She also understood that people do not pay attention to the treasure that they and need help finding it. Sometimes these treasures are deeply buried and hard to access and you need a strong belief in your uniqueness in order to tap into your richness. Satir had a keen understanding of the presence and power of this life force:
"As I have been evolving, I have had experiences which tell me that their exists something which could be called the life force or universal mind. I know that there are many dimensions in this force that are powerful shapers in human behavior. It seems a little to me like the presence of electricity. It has always been there, yet it waited for someone to identify it, then learn ways to use it for beneficial purposes."
"Jesuit education unfolds against the backdrop of what Jesuits call cura personalis - a care for the individual person and are for the whole person. Within this context of reverential love and concern, students are challenged. Challenged, they awaken to their real potential. Awakened, they are transformed. Transformed they are empowered. Empowered, they emerge from the experience on campus as recognizable Jesuit graduates: they are men and women of competence, conscience, compassion, and commitment to the cause of the human family."
President Joseph J. McShane S.J.
Inaugural Address October 2003
Father McShane knows that at the heart of your awakening and transformation is what you find in your studies and the care that you receive from your teachers. You learn with your hearts and minds that life is a gift filled with meaning and value that needs to be both cherished and protected.
Experience lives at the epicenter of a Jesuit education, where students are encouraged to embrace the world with a restless curiosity, which values the importance that experience play in the life of the heart and mind. As a Jesuit university, Fordham believes that education is equal parts action and reflection, theory and practice, where students are challenged to balance their subjective experience with the ever-changing objective realities of the world around them. Students are encourages to balance their careers through a lifelong pursuit for spiritual, cognitive, emotional, and physical well-being.
Jesuit education is focused on the kind of thinking and feeling that inspires critical analysis, cognitive curiosity, and eloquent presentation. An educational approach that brings together academic learning and professional life where every student's experience is celebrated in the convergence of ideas and practices from a wide-range of social and physical sciences. Jesuit education seeks to construct an academic framework which allows students to develop intellectual passions, probing questions, and personal interests that will last them a lifetime.
Fordham students are reminded that the wisdom in the core curriculum that they study is in search of a difference that leads to a diversity of thought, time, and place. The core is designed to create new intellectual vistas and new ways of 'knowing' within the academic disciplines, as well as, the many connections that exist between and among the disciplines.
Jesuit education creates a learning context designed to nurture a love of learning that better prepares students for the uncertainties and ambiguities that their futures hold. As students enhance and expand their academic horizons they identify, analyze, synthesize, and bring together the wisdom and practice of the ancient arts of listening, thinking, speaking, writing, reading, reflecting, measuring, calculating, estimating, and dreaming.
The heart and genesis of Jesuit education finds its place in The Spiritual Exercises of Saint Ignatius Loyola, that describes his personal journey toward personal and spiritual awareness. Ignatius took note not only of what he learned, he also recorded the reflective practices that led him to those insights. He distilled the most effective of these practices into what might be called the first self-awareness book. Self-awareness not by reading how someone else achieved it but through focused reflection on one's own experience.
The Exercises were designed to help individuals choose or confirm a life direction. Loyola called them Spiritual Exercises for a reason - they were to be done, not rules to be read or studied: "For as just as taking a walk, traveling on foot, and running are physical exercises, so is the name of spiritual exercises given to any means of preparation and disposing our soul to rid itself of all its disordered affections."
Ironically, a former Jesuit, Chris Lowney provides Fordham students with a twenty-first view and application of Ignatius' wisdom in his 2003 text, Heroic Leadership: Best Practices from a 450-Year-Old Company that Changed the World. Lowney believes that Jesuit education's enduring success rests upon four core leadership principles: Self-Awareness, Ingenuity, Love, and Heroism. These four unique values serve as both form and function of a life-long journey into the essence of leadership in the 21st century:
- Self-Awareness: Leaders thrive by understanding who they are and what they value, by becoming aware of unhealthy blind spots or weaknesses that can derail them, and by cultivating the habit of continuous self-reflection and learning.
- Ingenuity: Leaders make themselves and others comfortable in a changing world. They eagerly explore new ideas, approaches,and cultures rather than shrink defensively from what lurks around life's next corner.
- Love: Leaders face the world with a confident, healthy sense of themselves as endowed with talent, dignity, and potential to lead. They find exactly these same attributes in others and passionately commit to honoring and unlocking the potential they find in themselves and in others. They create environments bound and energized by loyalty, affection, and mutual support.
- Heroism: Leaders imagine an inspiring future and strive to shape it rather than passively watching the future happen around them. Heroes extract gold from the opportunities at hand rather than waiting for the golden opportunities to be hand to them.
Jesuit education brings together the elements of a leader's life as you figure out what you are good at, what you stand for, and what you want in life. When you selected Fordham you accepted the challenge to lead, a leader that understands that her or his values and style of work must form an integrated, self-reinforcing whole. Your work and life values of self-awareness, ingenuity, love, and heroism reinforce one another in a virtuous circle: better self-awareness made for greater ingenuity. Ingenuity driven Jesuits embraced change, and they would have drifted aimlessly without anchoring self-awareness.
Chris Lowney's vision of Jesuit leadership examines leadership from four leadership distinctions:
- We're all leaders, and we're leading all the time.
- Leadership springs from within.
- Leadership is not an act. It is a way of living.
- We never complete the task of becoming a leader. It's an ongoing process.
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
