Various factors play into making career decisions and
managing its development. While goals,
interests and education play key roles in career development, it is strengths that are often untapped when
making career considerations. Qualitative strengths (character and cultivated
virtues) are perhaps a more accurate place for reflection when visioning one’s
self in a life-career whether vocational or avocational (gratifying work that contributes to human fullness and
fulfillment).
Parker Palmer encourages the search for authentic vocation that
“turn[s] inward and downward toward the hardest realities of our lives, rather
than outward and upward toward abstraction, idealization, and
exhortation." These inscapes are the stories of simple accomplishments
along the lifespan that reveal our innate resources and strengths that when
embraced have the greatest potential to reveal the deep gladness that meets
the world’s deep need.
Western modernity has taught us to focus on pathology,
weakness and deficiencies (quantitative aspects). While it
should and is intuitive with trained minds, it is strengths (traits, character and virtues) that when assumed and
developed yield genuine, intrinsic success and effectiveness.
By example meta-analyses shows that curiosity accounts for approximately 10% of the variance in
academic learning and performance and 36% of the variance in self-selected
career choices. Greater curiosity-related behaviors and cognitions are
consistently associated with greater learning, engagement, and performance in
academic settings and work organizations.[1]
A study reported that those who develop
more in justice reasoning report
more career fulfillment, continue their intellectual stimulation, are more
involved in their community, and are more socially conscious in young
adulthood.[2]
A powerful strength that can have
an immense impact on ones work is attention
or flow, “a state in which people are so
involved in an activity that nothing else seems to matter; the experience is so
enjoyable that people will continue to do it even at great cost, for the sheer
sake of doing it.”[3]
I myself have a followed serious questions derived from the
depth of personal formation and being that landed me in a seminary where I cultivated
various practices that highlighted strengths and virtues that now make up my
person in relationship to the customers I serve. I am not in a “ministry” in
the conventional sense, but facilitate challenging contexts with people with
complex needs in a community of care.
Today there are few decent models for reflecting on personal strengths.
You can try Virtues In Action, Institute on Character. VIA Survey of Character Strengths is a self-assessment that results
in a report that can be vital for creating a plan for charting or developing
a career, building on signature strengths and for reflecting on improved human functioning in all of life domains.
Gallup’s StrengthsFinder profile asks: What's the right career for me? What should
I consider doing now? What is my best fit? It supports movement for the vantage of strengths.
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[1] Christopher Peterson, Martin E. P.
Seligman, Character Strengths and Virtues:a Handbook and Classification. New York: Oxford University Press, 2004, 135.
[2] Rest, J., Deemer, D., Barnett, R.,
Spickemier, J., & Volker, J. (1986), “Life Experiences and Developmental Pathways.
In J. Rest, Moral Development: Advances
in Research and Theory (pp. 28-58). New York: Praeger.
[3] Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi, Flow: The Psychology of Optimal Experience.
Harper Perennial, 1990.
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