Constructing a life that works: part 2, an approach to practice.

The 1st article (C. Campbell & M. Ungar, 2004) of this 2-part exploration of postmodern approaches to family therapy and narrative approaches to career counseling explored the differences between traditional trait and factor counseling models and postmodern approaches using life narratives and social constructionism. In this 2nd article, the authors discuss 7 aspects of their practice as postmodern career counselors that ask clients to (a) know what you want, (b) know what you have, (c) know what you hear, (d) know what constrains you, (e) map your preferred story, (f) grow into your story, and (g) grow out of your story. Several case studies demonstrate the applicability of these theories to practice.

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In Part 1 (Campbell & Ungar, 2004) of these two articles, we examined the differences between trait and factor models of career counseling and postmodern approaches. Our goal has been to outline a social constructionist approach that focuses on life narratives and constructions of identity. A social constructionist approach emphasizes that the way individuals experience their world depends on how they construct meaning for events in their lives through the language available to them to describe their experiences. Both the theoretical and applied aspects of these two articles grow out of our experiences in both the career and vocational counseling and marriage and family therapy fields. In the first article, we examined the differences between traditional trait and factor models of career counseling and postmodern approaches that use life narratives and social constructionism. As career counselors and marriage and family therapists, our approach to career development brings together the extensive literature on postmodernism in the field of family therapy with emerging narrative approaches to career counseling. Our purpose in this second article is to discuss in detail practical applications of our approach to postmodern career counseling. In the field of career counseling, translating postmodern theory into practice has been challenging. In this article, we hope to provide a practical application of material that at times can seem overly theoretical and abstract.

Specifically, we discuss a model that focuses on helping clients to articulate their preferred futures rather than answering the question that is traditionally explored in career counseling: "Who am I?" This question assumes that the self exists as an essential aspect of the individual, which can be revealed through the exploration of interests, skills, aptitudes, values, and personal styles. A fundamentally different question that a postmodern approach seeks to explore is, "What is my preferred future?" This question focuses attention on the evolving story line the client tells about him- or herself and what he or she sees as the next chapter in the story.

This attention to narrative has been discussed by others in the career development field as well. Mark Savickas (1993) noted that a career can be viewed as a story and that career counseling can be "conceptualized as a process of storying and restorying a client's vocational experience" (p. 213). Similarly, Larry Cochran (1997) characterized a career decision as the adoption of a role in a narrative, and Vance Peavy (1996) viewed a person's self-identity as an issue of life storying. According to Peavy, the problems that clients present to career counselors are primarily related to stories that have gone astray.

It is these stories, or narratives, that give an illusion of a fixed personhood. There is no essential self to be discovered--just a story that is revealed and negotiated with others. The self does not have a trait base but rather a narrative base. One's sense of "who one is" is best understood through the stories one tells (Peavy, 1996). From a postmodern perspective, the scaffolding of individuals' preferred futures is formed by the stories they and others tell about their past and present. As Cochran (1997) wrote,

     Construction of a narrative of the future is an attempt to weave
     together, in a whole composition, the person's most fundamental
     motives, outstanding strengths, and salient interests and values.
     The central desires aroused in the past are to be fulfilled in the
     future. (p. 84)

Consistent with this postmodern perspective, the traits and factors that clients perceive they have are viewed as the building blocks of their preferred futures. Although they are still important information the client may want to know, traits and factors are decentered from the conversation in a postmodern approach to career counseling in favor of the client's own indigenous way of understanding what he or she wants. Clients are encouraged to weave whatever insight is gained from discussions of traits and factors into their dominant story line. However, it is this story line that is emphasized, not its component parts. As with Lego blocks, many different futures can be constructed from the same pieces. An inventory of traits and factors may contribute to the construction of vastly different stories. Alternately, a preferred future can be broken into its component parts as long as the emphasis remains on the cohesive whole. A client who is caught in the "death grip" of certainty that there is only one preferred occupation can be encouraged to see his or her choice as embedded inside a much larger and more diverse narrative. This provides the flexibility to consider different options.

As Mary Catherine Bateson (2000) explained,

       The deepest hopes are expressed metaphorically in ways that only
       time can decode: "I want to be a fireman" turns out to mean, "I
       want to be brave and strong and dependable like my dad." Or
       sometimes, "in ways that my dad failed to be." (p. 136)

Counseling may accomplish more quickly what time will eventually decode. In the process of coconstructing one's story, lost experiences are remembered and other experiences are either amplified or muted. In practice, story lines and preferred futures shift to accommodate one another as past and present life events are experienced in new ways.

Seven Aspects of Life/Work Design

In our work as career counselors, we engage clients in the process of working through the seven aspects of life/work design from a postmodern perspective (see Table 1). Each aspect may be implemented in what Cochran (1997) referred to as an episode. The design work is sequenced differently depending on the client. It is important to start where the client is and with what he or she is motivated to do. For example, clients may present with restraints, external pressures, limiting beliefs, or confusion about their preferred futures. Depending on how clients present, the counselor may start with the most appropriate of the seven aspects of life/work design discussed in the remainder of this section.

Know What You Want

As the first step in our approach, we encourage clients to know what they want. The long-term goals clients identify for themselves during counseling are the way they express their preferred futures. The role of the counselor is to facilitate a discussion of the social discourse that influences a client's perceptions of his or her preferred future, not necessarily in an effort to change it, but to better understand it and the forces that constrain or support its achievement.

It is important to encourage clients to aspire to these goals with a sense of positive uncertainty. Any story about a preferred future may be realized by traveling multiple paths. The postindustrial world and individual identity stories are far too indeterminate to have people lock into one particular way of performing their narrative. For example, a client of the second author stated that she wanted to leave her job as a chief executive officer of a large school board and become a veterinarian. As her goal was decoded, it became apparent that she wanted to provide more tangible help to others and recalled how satisfying it had been as a child to care for the animals on her family's farm. The process of decoding allowed her to understand that this primary motivation might also be realized through her present occupation (by getting more direct contact with the children in the schools she supervised) even as she considered a career change. In this woman's case, her decision was further complicated by the status and financial success her present position brought her. As a veterinarian, she would lose 60% of her salary and, at least in her community, much of her status. When counseling ended, she was in the process of applying for admission to a veterinarian school but also was considering ways to modify her current job according to her preferred future (e.g., by taking a sabbatical year and teaching overseas).

As this example illustrates, the question of preferred futures is more complicated than it first appears because it intertwines tightly with the social discourse in which individuals live. Thus, what an individual says he or she wants is socially constructed. Preferred futures, because they are influenced by the social discourses in which people participate, are not all created equal. They are vetted through perceptions that exist within discourses that are more or less privileged. By this we mean that discourses are invested with differing amounts of power depending on the status of those who subscribe to the worldview expressed through the discourse. Typically, choices that relate to paid employment and overall life design are far more susceptible to the influences of the dominant social discourse than those pertaining to leisure activities. A male client who expresses a strong interest in artistic activities may find tolerance if not support from parents for pursuing painting as a hobby but open opposition to his pursuing it as a full-time paid occupation. Similarly, a young first-generation Chinese Canadian woman who excels in computer science but dislikes computing as a career may be burdened by her parents' expectations that she get an education that guarantees her economic success, something they themselves had to fight hard to achieve. In both these examples, it is clear that occupations bring with them different constructions of privilege. Choosing an overall life design is a matter of coconstruction. The dominant social discourse may or may not support one's life goals. For example, the young woman (and increasingly, the young man) who refuses a promotion to raise a family may risk losing future opportunities for advancement. Counterintuitively, individuals must first have the words to describe a way of living or working before they can convince others, and themselves, that their choices have value (see Campbell & Ungar, 2004). Counselors add to an individual's lexicon of life descriptions or add legitimacy to less privileged self-descriptions.

In summary, we recommend that clients (a) explore their dominant story lines and preferred futures, (b) develop flexible goals that reflect positive uncertainty, (c) explore creative ways of integrating seemingly multiple and conflicting discourses, and (d) develop a contingency plan of alternate paths to express their preferred futures.

Know What You Have

The second aspect of our approach to postmodern career counseling is to explore the many resources, both internal and external, that clients bring to the quest for their preferred futures. Internal resources include skills, personality styles, beliefs, and characteristics like self-esteem and self-confidence. External resources include family, friends, and institutional supports; structural advantages such as access to education, jobs, and financial means; and broader cultural narratives that place value on individuals' choices. Clients are asked, "What internal and external resources do you have that will help you move toward your preferred future?"

Unlike a trait and factor approach, in which skills and personal styles are assessed to determine the goodness of fit with particular occupations, a narrative approach sees the skills and characteristics of individuals as resources from which to build a powerful personal story. The difference is more than semantic. The postmodern career counselor works from the assumption that one's future is not determined by one's skill set, but instead that individuals may choose any future and, for that matter, any set of skills whether one presently has them or not.

What a client perceives as his or her resources is highly dependent on the way he or she is valued within the dominant discourse. For example, the first author worked with a client who had been a sales representative for a large office furniture supplier for 14 years and reported in the intake interview that she did not have the sales skills (an internal resource) necessary to be successful in that business. As the conversation unfolded, however, she told stories of the loyal client base she had built up over the years by focusing on meeting clients' needs rather than pursuing a quick sale through aggressive sales tactics. In the company for which she had worked, aggressive sales tactics were valued over her softer approach. As she and her counselor reflected on her and her customers' definition of an effective salesperson, the volume was turned up on the story that her approach to sales was at least as effective, if not more effective, than that of others in the company. On further reflection, she knew of other sales-people who were successful using a style of sales similar to her own, and it was these others who became the audience to whom she turned for self-affirmation. Through the process of career counseling, her story about her skills changed from, "I have no sales skills" to "I prefer not to use aggressive sales tactics" and "I would like to use my soft sales skills in an organization that values them."

Barbara Sher (1979) made the compelling argument, "Never take the long road if you can find a shorter one that will get you to the same place" (p. 115). The question that clients should be asked is, "What skills and experiences do you have that would move you as quickly as possible toward your preferred future?" Through the use of standardized instruments like the Myers-Briggs Type Indicator or popular tools like True Colors, clients may better assess the wide spectrum of resources they have. Similarly, detailed assessments of the client's external resources--aspects of his or her environment that support new stories in development--can be under-taken to add detail to the description of a client's life. Tools like occupational research, ecomaps (Hartman, 1979), career genograms (Okishi, 1987), the analysis of force fields (Lewin, 1951), and community asset mapping (McKnight & Kretzman, 1993) can help people understand the socioeconomic structures in which they operate. This use of standardized and nonstandardized instruments and exercises can complement narrative approaches to career counseling, but only when the focus remains on the contribution they make to the storying of a preferred future.

Know What You Hear

Postmodern counseling emphasizes the exploration of the voices, both internal and external, that influence career decisions. Internal voices include beliefs and a self-concept that encompasses one's sense of self-confidence, self-esteem, and self-efficacy. External voices--those of family, friends, and the broader community--convey the values of the dominant culture. For example, the notion that two professionals can marry and have children without making sacrifices in their careers or their home life depends on a powerful social construction that expects women to become "supermoms" (Douglas, 1999). Alternately, when couples opt for more equitable relationships, both parents can be left feeling that they are shortchanging both their work and their home lives (Bolton, 2000).

The power behind the voices that most influence these discourses is not shared equally. As Thorngren and Feit (2001) explained of their work:

     Inherent in this approach is the acknowledgment that some people
     wield more power than others and are, thus, more influential in the
     creation of what is accepted as reality. When applied to career
     development or counseling, a social constructionist perspective
     would explore the relative amount of power individuals have in
     making career choices. The cultural, social, political, and
     economic contexts that surround career choices would also be key
     components of counseling from this stance. (p. 292)

Ungar (2001) recommended that, in the process of working with clients to coconstruct stories, counselors be particularly attentive to the relative power each person's voice has. Even historical facts may be remembered differently depending on the discourse in which memories are recounted or kept current. What individuals remember is constructed from their experiences filtered through the interpretations they adopt from others.

The counselor may ask questions that have clients reflect on their interpretations of past and present experiences by asking whose viewpoint was most influential and if the client or anyone else remembers past experiences any differently than what he or she has been told or thinks he or she remembers. The school board chief executive officer introduced earlier had forgotten that she had taken her senior management position as a way of meeting her father's expectations that she would become financially successful. This voice had been privileged above all others at the time she was deciding whether to pursue several promotions. In counseling, this woman heard her own voice, which valued direct and meaningful contact with others, speak more clearly. To this voice the counselor added others' interpretations of the value of being a veterinarian or classroom teacher and the possible freedom, meaning, and mobility that these career choices provided. Together, client and counselor also explored the gender-based bias that valued senior management positions (more stereotypically the domain of men) over the frontline positions in organizations such as schools that are more often held by women. It is an important element of this approach that clients become more aware of the multiple influences on their career development--past, present, and future. Like Erin Martz (2001), who advocated that counselors encourage clients to envision possible selves that they may become, postmodern techniques that look at the power of different voices in people's lives help clients identify alternate self-stories and the voices that support them. Clients may imagine multiple visions of themselves and their futures. Counseling deconstructs these competing discourses by asking, "Who would and would not see you in this new way?" and "What social, economic, and political forces support this new possible self?" The fact that an individual's realities can be changed by giving power to muted voices has many implications for the career development field. From a postmodern perspective, occupational identities are created rather than discovered. They are created through our conversations and other forms of reciprocal interaction with the world rather than being immutable and latent truths that are revealed.

Know What Constrains You

Constraints often appear as clients converse about what they want, have, and hear. In postmodern counseling, constraints are understood as life-limiting stories. Constraints may be either inside or outside the client. Inner constraints are typically regarded as residing within an individual, unknowable to others until the individual chooses to share them. Examples of these internal constraints are low self-esteem and fear of failure. Cognitive therapists often refer to such constraints as irrational thoughts, cognitive distortions, or what Sher (1979) called emotional problems. Outside constraints are those that are external to an individual and are obvious to others. Examples of outside constraints are a lack of credentials, experience, or money. These types of constraints are typically viewed as being objectively real. Sher referred to these as strategic problems that can be resolved through creative problem solving.

From a postmodern perspective, this dualism is artificial and may blind clients to the degree to which internal constraints are socially constructed and external realities are experienced through the prism of the dominant narrative they tell about themselves. For example, Patrick, the engineer discussed in Part 1 (Campbell & Ungar, 2004) of this series, was administered the Strong Interest Inventory. The results showed an aversion to risk taking. Far from a fixed internal trait, this aversion can be viewed as part of the story he had constructed through his experiences with others. His parents, who had grown up during the Depression, valued the security that came from being a professional. Giving up a secure position as an engineer to take premedical courses, without being certain he would be admitted to medical school, required constructing an alternate story for himself that was more powerful than the one adopted from his parents. In Harold's case, the retiree also discussed in Part 1 (Campbell & Ungar, 2004), the external reality of retirement could have been experienced in any number of ways. What he viewed as being unemployed, and therefore without purpose, might be viewed by others as a well-deserved opportunity for leisure. Forced to retire by his employer and convinced that if he was not paid for his work his contribution was worthless, Harold was participating in a powerful and oppressive social dialogue that he accepted unquestioningly. This had left him with only his old story that equated personal value with paid employment and no options but to find more salaried work.

The emphasis in narrative family therapy is on restorying the constraints that are keeping people from living their preferred futures. People challenge constraints by building on experiences that fall outside the problem-saturated dominant story lines constructed by them and others. Often, the client's experience of telling a counselor his or her story offers an opportunity to re-author these personal narratives by providing the client with a different experience of his or her world and a different language with which to describe personal experiences. Shagufta, the third case example that began Part 1 (Campbell & Ungar, 2004), came to understand that her experience of being forced to do as her father told her to do could be termed sexism; Patrick adopted the language of passion instead of security; and Harold expanded his definition of work to include unpaid contributions to his community. Brott (2001) noted that through the process of narrative therapy, clients often experience themselves in new ways. Traditional approaches gather information, whereas narrative therapy generates a different experience.

Map Your Preferred Story

Once goals have been clearly stated, the challenge for clients and counselors is to map a path toward achieving them. Clients need to develop a story that tells them how they are going to get from where they are to their preferred future. This story provides a road map. Krieshok and his colleagues (Krieshok, Hastings, Ebberwein, Wettersten, & Owen, 1999) explained this approach as follows:

     Clinical experience suggests that patients who are able to tell a
     story about their futures, specifically the details of their living
     arrangements, sobriety maintenance, social support, and work lives,
     tend to be more effective in bringing those plans to fruition.
     Envisioning the particular steps along the way to a goal makes goal
     attainment more likely, whereas simply envisioning successful
     completion of the goal does not make it more likely. (pp. 205-206)

Mapping a path involves developing both an action plan and the prerequisite skills needed for implementation. Important in this process is giving permission to clients to change or even completely abandon goals based on a deeper understanding of what is involved in working toward those goals. It may become apparent as clients develop their maps, however, that the price they will pay to achieve their goal is too high, requiring too much personal sacrifice or effort (Magnusson, 1992).

This caveat aside, Sher (1979) outlined a very practical approach to developing the road map. She recommended that clients work backwards from their goals to identify all the steps involved. For each step, clients are asked to consider, "Can I do this tomorrow?" If the answer is no, the question then becomes, "What will I have to do first?" A flowchart is developed that completely bridges the gap between the present moment and the goal.

It is essential from a postmodern perspective to start performing one's preferred future, because it is through the performance that new narratives are created (Bakhtin, 1986; Irving & Young, 2002). This successive movement toward a goal makes it more likely that chance events will occur that further propel one forward into one's preferred future (see Mitchell, Levin, & Krumboltz, 1999).

Grow Into Your Story

With the momentum started, clients are now in a position to perform their new stories more widely, expanding their audience. These new audiences will help clients construct new stories about themselves and, through the confidence others express in them, pursue different plot lines. For Patrick, it was not enough to think about taking more risks in life; he had to perform in front of others a new identity as someone who takes risks before he would be ready to change careers. In Patrick's case, he and his counselor (the first author) talked about his experience traveling in Asia after graduating and how much he continued to enjoy travel opportunities provided through his job. Counseling focused on aspects of risk present during his travels, helping Patrick to see himself as a risk taker and, more important, to identify people (such as the people he had traveled with through Asia and with whom he still corresponded) who also saw him that way. Counselors play a crucial role helping clients to grow into roles in their new stories, frequently by revisiting similar past experiences that have been muted in clients' lives. These new self-constructions are seen as stories that one grows into over time, and clients are encouraged to look back and mine old stories for supportive experiences. Patrick's new old story (Hewson, 1991) was that he had been a risk taker all along but that this story had been silenced through participation in a social discourse that valued security. The unclaimed story about himself needed the advantage of being performed again to be heard. This new old story redefined his relationship with risk as he began to see that a life without risk was also one that became stale. His old story was not discarded altogether, but a more balanced story emerged. Taken "one story at a time," clients proceed through each point on their map.

These steps, although thought of sequentially, are approached with positive uncertainty and an openness to chance events that present themselves as goals are pursued. Parts of these new performances will likely be familiar, and others will be novel experiences that compel clients to challenge old stories about what they can and cannot achieve. New experiences bring with them access to new audiences that, in turn, provide different descriptions of the world that clients may feel comfortable adopting or alternatively may reject as too unfamiliar. Although Patrick would accept a redescription of himself as a traveler who took risks, he was not yet ready and may never be willing to risk his family's financial stability to go back to school. He was, however, anxious to seek more adventurous opportunities as an engineer and was willing to take the risks associated with looking for more stimulating work.

As should now be evident, our narrative approach emphasizes the need to develop the social supports that reinforce people's story development. It is important that individuals place themselves among others who will participate with them in authoring a new story while challenging those who maintain old and limiting stories (Ungar, 2001). For example, Harold's attendance at a local volunteer fair gave him the opportunity to meet other retired professionals who expressed how much their unpaid contributions were valued by their communities. Social supports help clients identify strengths, facilitators, and assets to overcome weaknesses, barriers, and perceived deficits that constrain story development. Most important, new audiences generalize the counseling experience to the "real" world of the client and reduce reliance on the counselor to make change happen.

Follow-up counseling sessions with clients like Patrick are held only episodically to reinforce story development, revisit (and possibly change) goals, and provide another audience (the counselor) to help people add detail to the descriptions of their preferred futures as those futures evolve. Not unlike other career counseling, within this approach counselors monitor progress, provide specific feedback and encouragement, and are available when further consultation is needed (Magnusson, 1992).

Grow Out of Your Story

Life/work design assumes that people and their external environments are constantly evolving, making it inevitable that a life/work design that made sense at one time will not make sense at another (Hujer, 1993). Clients are encouraged to be wary of what Richmond (1996) referred to as golden handcuffs, job security that causes people to stay in unfulfilling positions. Clients may inadvertently become stuck with new stories. Our lives are meant to be constructed and then "renovated" as time goes on. Good counseling helps clients develop the skills necessary to continually grow in and out of stories.

This way of approaching career development promotes the idea of self-disruption (Percy, 2000). Typically, people require an external crisis such as a job loss, divorce, or serious illness before they will consider alternative life designs. This approach encourages clients to continue to explore their environments as they pursue changes to career and life design. Blustein (1997) defined an exploratory attitude as "an open and non-rigid way of relating to the world such that one is able to approach the vast number of new situations and changes they face in a way that encourages growth and further self-definition" (p. 270). He suggests that counselors should help clients to develop this exploratory attitude. Similarly, McAdams (1993) made the point that personal myths, the life narratives that guide individuals, evolve slowly, punctuated by periods of great change.

Career counseling that produces sustainable change over time encourages adaptability, helping clients to plan and prepare for events such as parenthood, grandparenthood, and retirement as components of their overall life/work design. According to Schlossberg (1984), providing this anticipatory socialization to new roles can transform what could potentially be a crisis into a relatively minor event. As emphasized throughout this approach, changes in one role (e.g., parent, daughter, employee) may require adjustments in others. These adjustments can demand that individuals find novel ways to live out their stories with a different balance to their multiple roles.

Conclusion

As individuals in a postindustrial society, their careers--past, present, and future--are analogous to the stories that they invent rather than discover. They unfold in response to both the constantly changing circumstances of life and the opportunities their environments present. From experiences with the perceived world and through relationships with others, individuals construct stories that become their internal career. These internal careers are the stories that bring coherence to the divergent aspects of their life and work, creating a fit between the story they tell about their world and what they perceive as their values, interests, skills, and personal style. A narrative approach assists clients to put into action these internal careers in the form of a preferred future and a construction of the past that supports it.

Although a career may seem to be fixed, an understanding of one's internal career emphasizes that what one does as one's work is ever-evolving, depending on the story told about it. In discussions with Harold, the retiree, revisiting his past career choices revealed that, although initially he said he had only worked because he had to support his family, it quickly became apparent that there was another story about how and why he had made his career choices. He had found recognition, a sense of community, and a sense of control over both people and the physical means of production. Restorying these silenced aspects of his past expanded for Harold his understanding of his internal career and the options available to continue that career through volunteer activities.

This is similar to what Cochran (1997) meant when he said that making a career decision is more like composing a meaningful story. When using the approach outlined throughout these two articles to create the compositions Cochran described, there are three important considerations that underpin all aspects of the work. First, our approach, like the theory on which it is based, is not linear. Although we have presented seven distinct steps to the counseling process, it is not necessary to implement them in any particular order. Each is only an outline of the areas on which a client may choose to focus as he or she engages in a process of planning for the future. Second, the approach we outlined can be implemented at different levels of intensity depending on the needs and wants of the client. For example, although the term interests is commonly used in the career development literature, Chang (2000) used the broader term passion, implying a much deeper and more emotionally invested exploration of what clients are interested in doing with their lives. Third, a client's preferred future is the touchstone of a postmodern approach to career counseling. As in work by narrative family therapists, a client's preferred future and the meaning that preferred future has is the focus of much of the work that is done. Everything that is discussed is anchored to this purpose. Therefore, counselors need to ask, "In what ways do clients' perceptions of internal resources and self-talk help or hinder their achieving preferred futures?" "What is the impact of external voices and resources on achieving those futures?" and "What constrains clients from moving forward?"

Building on more recent work in the career development field (see Hansen, 1997; Miller-Tiedemann, 1988; Super, 1990), a postmodern approach to career counseling seeks an understanding of how all aspects of peoples' lives are part of their careers. Roles other than paid employment can equally provide the major vehicles with which individuals construct meaning for themselves. A postmodern approach to career counseling further expands the holistic way to achieve a fit between career choices and the indeterminacy inherent in a postindustrial world.

TABLE 1 A Postmodern Approach to Career Counseling

Aspects of Life/Work                          Process

1. Know what you want        * coconstruct stories about needs, values/
                               life purpose, and interests/passions
                             * look for experiences in the environment
                               that allow client to live preferred
                               future
                             * tease out the meaning behind preferred
                               future
                             * set goals
2. Know what you have        * identify internal and external resources
                               that will aid in goal attainment
3. Know what you hear        * identify internal and external voices
                               that support a client's preferred future
                             * identify internal and external voices the
                               client wants to amplify or turn down
4. Know what constrains you  * identify the stories that constrain a
                               client from his or her preferred future
                             * reauthor new stories and new old stories
                               that are more expansive
5. Map your preferred story  * develop a map that takes the client from
                               the present to his or her preferred
                               future
6. Grow into your story      * perform one story at a time
                             * perform new story and new old story in
                               front of a supportive audience
7. Grow out of your story    * assume preferred future will evolve over
                               time
                             * keep exploring opportunities in the
                               environment
                             * anticipate and plan for major life
                               transitions

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Cathy Campbell, Career and Transition Services, Nova Scotia Community College; Michael Ungar, Maritime School of Social Work, Dalhousie University. Correspondence concerning this article should be addressed to Cathy Campbell, Career and Transition Services, Nova Scotia Community College, 6960 Mumford Road, Halifax, Nova Scotia, Canada B3L 4P1 (e-mail: [e-mail]).