Integrating Work, Family, and Community Through Holistic Life Planning.

This article provides a rationale and interdisciplinary framework for integrating work and other dimensions of life by (a) reviewing relevant changes in society and the career development and counseling profession, (b) describing one holistic career-planning model called Integrative Life Planning (ILP), based on 6 interactive critical life tasks, and (c) discussing questions and issues surrounding narrow versus broad approaches to life planning. ILP includes a strong emphasis on career counselors as advocates and change agents. It focuses on several kinds of wholeness, integrative thinking, democratic values, and helping clients make career decisions not only for self-satisfaction but also for the common good.

A key question as one era ends and another begins is the extent to which career counseling as a profession has matured enough to meet the needs of diverse human beings who are making life choices and decisions in a dynamic technological society. Most career professionals probably would agree that in the twentieth century, with the help of traditional theories of vocational choice and computer-assisted career guidance and counseling, career counseling made great advances in the process of helping people find jobs. Some professional counselors have broadened their practice to help clients examine work in relation to other life roles. However, it seems evident that most career counseling practices in our individualistic, democratic, information society still focus mainly on finding a job for self-satisfaction and less on using our talents for the common good.

Before writing this article, I reread Parsons's Choosing a Vocation (1909/1989). Writing in the context of his time, he reflected the realities of that period in introducing the idea of choosing a vocation as a simple matching process, acting on his humanitarian concern for immigrants in the new industrial society, and cataloging the stereotypic options for girls and women in a list of limited "industries open to women" at home and away from home. He also established the importance of individuals making their own decisions. Recalling that era makes one realize how much progress has been made in a century in advancing the profession of career counseling, attending to the needs of diverse populations, and improving the status of women. Although Parsons created the matching model of vocational choice, his protocol interview for gathering client data is quite holistic, including how to be a good and successful person and dimensions of life beyond work.

As I think about the context and status of the career counseling profession today, I sense two tensions: (a) a highly visible national focus on the development and use of information technology that reinforces traditional matching of people and jobs (or colleges) or creating resumes and (b) a growing but less visible attention to holistic human development, balance, and career development over the life span. On the one hand, driven by the soon to sunset School-to-Work Opportunities Act, youth are being urged to choose work early--by 11th grade, with less emphasis on developmental career guidance; on the other, many of their parents are being told that the occupation they chose early in life no longer needs them. Millions of dollars are being allocated to create the most advanced information systems, especially with the Internet, and to develop the educational and vocational infrastructure to deliver these systems. At the same time, their parents are beginning to ask why they gave 30 or 40 years of their lives to a job and neglected other parts of life, especially as they find themselves downsized and unable to find jobs of comparable status, pay, or security.

A difficult question is, what is happening to balance and holistic planning in this rush to technologize the career-planning process and again fit people into jobs? The purpose of this article is to provide a rationale and framework for integrating work and other dimensions of life (a) by reviewing relevant societal changes within and across cultures, (b) by describing one holistic conceptual model for broader life planning in this new century, and (c) by discussing questions and issues surrounding broader career and life planning. I make a case for a new worldview for career counselors and our clients based on global changes in work, family, and community, as well as changes in the counseling and career development professions. I believe it is also time for changes in public policy and legislation at state and federal levels to reflect that the development of human beings is as important as workforce development.

Societal Changes

Dramatic changes in work, the workplace, and work patterns point to a need for more integrative approaches to life and work. Changes in individuals, families, demographics, and organizations around the globe contribute to this need. Experts from fields such as sociology, organizational management, business, medicine, economics, women's studies, multiculturalism, futurism, adult development, and career development have described the changes and explored the potential impact on both individuals and organizations.

To understand the current context, it is important to review a few present and projected global changes. In describing "The End of Work," economist Rifkin (1995) presented convincing statistics from around the world--especially Europe, Japan, and North America--about how workers have been replaced by robots, automation, and restructuring. His conclusion was that societies must move to shorter workweeks so that the available work may be shared (presumably with more time for other parts of life). Although many societies today are moving toward capitalism, he predicted movement from a market economy to a postmarket society, with more time allocated to the nonprofit volunteer sector, where there is much work to be done, especially among marginalized people and communities.

Economist and futurist Henderson (1996) suggested that the world is losing in "global economic warfare" because society is not attending to human needs. She urged nations to find other cultural indicators of societal progress than the gross domestic product or gross national product, such as recognition of women's "caring work."

A "big picture" aspect of the changing nature of work has been offered by Stark (1995), a Swedish business and economics professor. Like Henderson, Stark is critical of the absence of "caring work" (often women s work") from assessments of national progress. She makes a strong case for giving greater attention and status to "caring work," such as childcare, "kincare," and similar nurturing activities.

From Bridges's (1994) perspective, "the end of the job" or the "dejobbed society" lay ahead, with each of us becoming a vendor (selling oneself) or "portfolio person," learning how to live with uncertainty. Instead of fitting into a job description, he saw an uncertain world of contracts, consultants, and contingent workers in which each must become an entrepreneur, work on teams, and find work to do.

From an organization management perspective, Hall (1996) suggested that managers and employees need to start putting more emphasis on relationships in the workplace. He posited that the old career pattern-- moving up a ladder or career path--was dead, but that the new career, which he called the "Protean Career," was alive and well. It is in this direction that we must move--helping employees to change and adapt quickly, like the Greek god Proteus, to meet the needs of changing organizations and society.

Reflecting new theories of women's development, Hall and his associates (1996) drew directly from the psychological of "Self-in-Relation" (Jordan, Kaplan, Miller, Stiver, & Surrey, 1991; Miller, 1976). Hall projected that workers would need to learn skills of lifelong learning, teamwork, adaptability, valuing diversity, communication, and decision making. They would also need the "relational competencies" of self-reflection, active listening, empathy, self-disclosure, and collaboration to better understand themselves and others as they became self-directed, continuous learners in a dynamic and diverse workplace.

A number of demographic changes in the United States have also put pressure on the workplace to pay attention to human needs. These changes include an increasingly diverse population and workforce with multiple ethnicities and family types, an increasing number of working women still unevenly spread in career fields and earning less than their male counterparts, and the dominance of two-income wage earners wanting more balance in their lives. Many human resource initiatives are attempting to address some of these human needs through employee assistance, outplacement, coaching, work/life balance, and diversity management. Corporate attention to the needs of various employee groups for benefits such as childcare, kincare, care for aging parents, and care for self is growing. These changes are indicators of human needs and desires for more emphasis on relationships, balance, and a concern for community, not only jobs.

Changes Affecting Counseling and Career Development

In addition to technological advances, a number of changes have occurred over the last half-century that have had an impact on the counseling and career development professions:

* Dramatic influx of women into the workforce, triggered by World War II and the women's movement 

* Recognition of the connection of and need for balance in work and family

* Growth of multicultural counseling along with an increase of migrant, immigrant, and refugee populations

* Convergence of career development and adult development, especially with adult transitions

* Emergence of the broader concept of career and career development over the life span

* Emphasis on context and multiple identities and their impact on career development

* Increased recognition of the importance of spirituality in life and work

* Concern about violence in schools, workplaces, and communities

* Growing disparity between haves and have-nots

* Recognition of new ways of knowing in psychological and educational research

Of these, it is probably Super's (1951) theory that has affected our profession most dramatically. He challenged us to broaden our concept of career development almost 50 years ago with his definition of career development as a lifelong, continuous process of developing and implementing a self-concept and testing it against reality, with satisfaction to self and benefit to society. He later developed the life roles component of his theory, created the rainbow of life roles and stages (Super, 1980), and implemented it in the Work Importance Study (Super & Sverko, 1995).

Another area that has affected career psychology is the broadening of knowledge beyond the traditional empirical and quantitative ways of knowing and doing research. In the last decade, in particular, challenges to the reductionist way of knowing have appeared as more people seek spirituality, connectedness, and wholeness. The epistemological questions of what we know and how we know it have been explored through logical positivism for a long time. It is only recently that qualitative methods of research in psychology and career development are becoming more accepted as alternative ways to truth. Some postmodern psychologists have been extremely critical of the way scientific method and technology have dominated Western psychology and been transported across cultures. The traditional Newtonian mechanistic view of the universe has been criticized by physicists, such as Capra (1980, 1996), as well as by feminists and multiculturalists who see the world through different cultural lenses and challenge the linear, scientific, rational view as the only view of the world.

Reinforcing changes that affect human development, British sociologist Giddens (1991) described local and global factors that affect self-identity as individuals make life choices and engage in life planning. He characterized the world as one of chaos, running out of control, in contrast to the beginning of the last century when Western societies believed that, as they learned more about themselves and the world, they would learn to control those forces. Three important trends in the current "risk society" are globalization, "detraditionalization" (i.e., the changing of traditions and customs around the world), and the concept of social reflexivity. The latter examines how societal transformations influence an individual's view of self in new contexts. From a more holistic constructivist view, they learn to use information to construct their own lives. Giddens believed this reflexivity would help people write their own biographies, tell their stories, and live with uncertainty.

These views are not unlike those of recent counseling theorists and psychologists who see career as story and career counseling as a means to help clients not only tell their stories but reconstruct their stories as they would like them to be (Cochran, 1997; Jepsen, 1995; Savickas, 1997). Peavy (1998) used transformations in contemporary social life and personal stories as a context for counseling. He introduced "sociodynamic counseling" as a twenty-first century approach to vocational counseling, challenging the overpsychologizing of this field in the past and urging counselors to draw more heavily from sociology and other disciplines in a contextualized and constructivist view.

These are only a few among many global, cross-disciplinary, and professional career development changes over the last half-century that lead to new ways of viewing human beings, society, and career development. I describe one such paradigm in this article.

Integrative Life Planning

Over the past 10 years, I have developed a concept called Integrative Life Planning (ILP; Hansen, 1997). It takes into account the many changes already cited and represents a holistic approach to life and career planning. For years, career professionals have functioned in a fragmented world, with knowledge broken down into little boxes and disciplines. Although trait-and-factor and person-to-environment-fit approaches to career counseling will always exist and are appropriate, especially when clients are in job search or work adjustment, ILP moves beyond the linear process of choosing a vocation to a more holistic view of the world--seeing work in relation to other life roles, or work within a life.

Integrative is the opposite of separated or fragmented. It suggests connectedness and wholeness, a growing theme across cultures. To integrate has many meanings; for example, to make whole by bringing different parts together. It may also be applied to individuals, as knowledge, skills, and attitudes are integrated within one person. It may also mean to remove legal and social barriers, a mission of the larger society, and certainly one that should be a part of career counseling. ILP includes the multiple dimensions of lives (body, mind, spirit), life roles (love, learning, labor, leisure, and citizenship), cultures (individualistic and communal), gender (self-sufficiency and connectedness for both women and men), communities (global and local), ways of thinking (rational and intuitive), ways of knowing (qualitative and quantitative; Hansen, 1997), and linking personal and career isues (Subich, 1993).

Values and Assumptions of ILP

ILP suggests that, in the future, career counseling needs to focus more on counselors as change agents and advocates--helping clients to achieve more holistic lives and to be agents for positive change in society through the choices and decisions they make. It assumes that individuals should consider the consequences of those decisions for human beings and for the environment. ILP links individual and organizational change, noting that personal transitions often emerge from organizational changes.

I have used the metaphor of quilts and quilters to communicate the themes of connectedness and wholeness that ILP represents. ILP is like a quilt for many reasons. On one level, it represents the global world or context in which dramatic changes are affecting persons, families, communities, nations, and even the planet. On another level, it represents the career world and, on still another level, the pieces or patches of our own personal experiences and stories, or the stories of our clients.

The integrative approach to career and life planning that I describe only briefly here (but is articulated elsewhere) is an expression of values, as is any theory, program, curriculum, or innovation. The changes and metaphors just described create the context for ILP and lead to the following values and assumptions:

1. Dramatic changes around the world and at home require us to see the "big picture"; to broaden our thought and practice about how we work with employees, students, and clients; and to help them understand the changes as well.

2. We need to help our clients develop skills in integrative thinking as contrasted with linear thinking, to understand the importance of holistic thinking as different from reductionist thinking.

3. Being aware of and prioritizing the critical life tasks or major themes in one's own life and own culture are essential parts of human development.

4. New kinds of self-knowledge and societal knowledge are critical to understanding the contexts and themes of a changing society and of individuals in it.

5. Recognition of the need for change and the commitment to change are essential to the ILP process; change can occur at many levels, and out of personal change will come social change.

The Critical Tasks of ILP

ILP identifies six themes or critical life tasks facing individuals and cultures in the new millennium. They are tasks recurring in the counseling and career development literature (and reported in the media), triggered by social changes, researched by investigators in multiple disciplines, and emerging through reports of people's lived experience in several cultures. The themes are also a part of my professional and personal experience through 35 years of working in the counseling and career development field. They are especially a reflection of my concern for democratic values of individual freedom, dignity, and respect; equal opportunity; social and economic justice; and development of human potentials. Although ILP is based primarily on U.S. culture, several of the tasks described in the following seem to cut across some cultures.

1. Finding work that needs doing in changing global contexts. Task 1 relates strongly to the global changes described earlier in this article that point to "work that needs doing." This idea is quite different from traditional matching approaches to career planning. It suggests creativity and entrepreneurship in finding solutions to the many human challenges and work to be done both locally and globally. I have identified 10 kinds of work that seem most important to me: preserving the environment, constructive use of technology, understanding changes in the workplace and families, accepting changing gender roles, understanding and celebrating diversity, reducing violence, reducing poverty and hunger, advocating for human rights, discovering new ways of knowing, and exploring spirituality and purpose. Most of these are not part of mainstream career planning yet they are very much related to how we live our lives, individually and in the community.

2. Weaving our lives into a meaningful whole. Because the field of career planning has focused so heavily on the work or occupational role, we often have ignored other roles and other parts of human development, for example, the social, intellectual, physical, spiritual, and emotional. Life Task 2 focuses on these and on the gender role system, the differential socialization of women and men for various life roles, and the unique influences on and barriers to the life planning of each. It draws from the concepts of agency and communion and suggests that both men and women need to integrate self-sufficiency and connectedness into their lives.

3. Connecting family and work (negotiating roles and relationships). Critical Task 3 addresses the changing patterns in work and family (all kinds of families) that do not fit old norms. With increasing two-earner families, single parent families, gay and lesbian families, single adults without children, and delayed marriages and parenting, new questions of roles and relationships arise. Dilemmas emerge as people move beyond their ascribed provider and nurturer roles, often resulting in conflict and stress. ILP emphasizes the need for men and women to share nurturer and provider roles in equal partnerships, defined as occurring when

each partner 1) treats the other with dignity and respect; 2) demonstrates flexibility in negotiating roles and goals; and 3) enables the other to choose and enact roles and responsibilities congruent with the individual's talents and potentials and the couple's mutual goals for work, die relationship, the family, and society. (Hansen, 1997, P. 20)

Readiness to deal with this task varies greatly across cultures.

4. Valuing pluralism and inclusivity. Effective interpersonal skills have always been important to people on and off the job. A task of career counselors is to help clients understand and adapt to the growing diversity in the United States (and other cultures) as they seek and create more humane workplaces, whether in business, government, school, university, or agency.

Critical Task 4 calls for an informed awareness of all kinds of difference, variously called "multiple dimensions of identity" or "contextual factors" (e.g., race, ethnicity, gender, age, disability, belief, sexual orientation, language, regionality) and including sociopolitical and historical realities. Goals of this task are to help career counselors gain an understanding of what it means to value diversity, to be aware of economic and social barriers to educational--occupational opportunity, to examine their own biases and attitudes, to help clients also develop a more inclusive worldview, and to better understand what to do when one "enter s the world of the 'Other'" (Moreno, 1996). It also addresses gender factors in multicultural career counseling.

5. Managing personal transitions and organizational change. Critical Task 5 links the transitions and decisions people make in their own lives with changes and decisions made by organizations. It describes models for making transitions, especially Schlossberg's (1994) popularized version of her model for human adaptation to transition. Indeed, transition counseling, along with gerontological counseling, may be the fastest growing counseling area in the United States in the twenty-first century.

Making decisions is another important part of this task. Gelatt (1989) suggested that the old rational, logical, linear models of decision making are insufficient for the new millennium and offered a new model called "Positive Uncertainty." He defined it as "a personal plan for making decisions about the future when you don't know what it will be" and "a flexible, ambidextrous approach to managing change using both your rational and intuitive mind" (Gelatt, 1989, p. 254). His unique approach helps people become more conscious of risk taking and prepared for the uncertainty, instability, ambiguity, and complexity that may face them in the new century. Gelatt's rational-intuitive model seems to resonate with many of the traditional age and adult college students in my classes.

Another paradoxical approach to decision making, called "Planned Happenstance," involves creating and transforming unplanned or chance events into career opportunities. It encourages acting on curiosity and offers five skills to create chance: curiosity, persistence, optimism, flexibility, and risk taking (Mitchell, Levin, & Krumboltz, 1999).

This task also emphasizes social change and the importance of people being change agents in their personal, family, and organizational lives. Regarding change, sociologist Palmer (1992) observed that people have to have a compelling vision for change and understand how change really happens. He thinks people can bring about change by closing the gap between our inner spirit and outer conflict. His four stages for change include (a) deciding to stop living "divided lives" (be congruent), (b) forming groups for mutual support, (c) learning to translate private problems into public issues, and (d) creating alternative rewards to sustain your vision.

6. Exploring spirituality, purpose, and meaning. Critical Task 6 deals with ultimate meanings in life and links spirituality with meaning and purpose. Although a considerable body of literature has emerged on spirituality and counseling, only in the last decade has spirituality become more widely associated with career and life planning.

Spirituality often is defined as a higher power outside of oneself or "the core of the person--the center from which meaning, self, and life understanding are generated, a sense of the interrelatedness of all of life" (Hansen, 1997, p. 189). One of the goals of this task is to help clients define what they mean by spirituality and explore its connection with their search for purpose and meaning in life. Increasingly, the counseling profession is recognizing that counselors and career professionals need to help clients understand the "connections between spirit and work" (Bloch & Richmond, 1997).

Spirituality has not been central in career counseling, vocational psychology, or counselor preparation programs. It is incongruent with the kind of knowledge valued in quantitative psychology. Spirituality is not logical, objective, or linear. However, it is gaining ground as respected journals such as The Counseling Psychologist increasingly publish articles using scholarly qualitative research methods.

Fox (1994), a theologian, reflected the spiritual theme of ILP when he said:

Life and livelihood ought not to be separated but to flow from the same source, which is the spirit ... Spirit means life, and both life and livelihood are about living in depth, living with meaning, purpose, joy, and a sense of contributing to the greater community. (p. 1)

His vision of the work role is "where mind, heart, and health come together in a harmony of life experiences that celebrate the whole person" (p. 2).

Critical Task 6 also encourages examination of material values and the place of money in work and life. Many of the 20-to-30 age generation are refusing to give their whole life to their job and are seeking more balance in life. Much literature also exists on the trend of moving away from materialism--toward voluntary simplicity, moving from the fast lane to the middle lane, "downshifting," and redefining success.

Applications

The tasks or themes of ILP have existed a long time, but I have tried to put them together in a way that makes sense out of complexity and change as we anticipate how our profession can be transformed in the twenty-first century. An appropriate question for career counselors who might wish to incorporate the ILP concept into their work with students and clients is this: How can I continuously use internal and external critical life tasks to develop a meaningful holistic career pattern, including both self-fulfillment and betterment of society?

ILP is comprehensive, interdisciplinary, inclusive, holistic, and integrative. It is concerned about the holistic development of the individual but also about community improvement and the goals of a democratic society. The six life tasks are interactive. Three focus more on individual development--weaving our lives into a meaningful whole; diversity and inclusivity; and spirituality, meaning, and purpose. The other three--finding work that needs doing in local and global contexts, connecting work and family, and managing transitions and organizational change--are more external or contextual. Nonetheless, all are connected to one another around the development of the human being in a changing society. For example, understanding the interrelationship of life roles, especially family and work, and valuing diversity and inclusivity are major tasks of living, learning, and working in a global society. Helping individuals, partners, and families explore how the various parts and priorities of their lives fit toge ther is an important goal, as is creating awareness of the changing contexts that affect our life choices and decisions as we move into a new era.

ILP suggests multiple strategies for counselors and career specialists to use with clients to achieve individual, personal, and social change. It is a systems approach, yet so comprehensive that few could try to integrate it all at once. Career counselors (and their clients) are asked to identify the tasks most important to them or their organization at a given time and to work with them. Over time, all can be addressed (or new ones added), but it is likely that certain tasks will be more important to some individuals in different cultures. It moves beyond traditional matching of individuals and jobs to a holistic life-planning process that includes greater emphasis on a democratic, communitarian, global worldview.

Integrating Work and Life: Issues and Questions

A number of issues surround the ideas presented in ILP. Students in my classes and participants in workshops have been helpful in raising thoughtful questions about the model in particular but also about the concept of integrating work and the rest of life. In a fragmented and work-oriented society, it is not surprising that some may have difficulty identifying with this inclusive and complex concept. To reiterate, it is assumed that the tools of trait-and-factor or person-to-environment vocational counseling will continue to be useful, especially for clients in a job search or work adjustment stage; integrative approaches are viewed as complementary, not replacing traditional approaches. However, if integrative thinking about life planning is going to be more central in people's lives in the new millennium, several questions need to be addressed.

1. Can you integrate too much, or where do you draw the line? As pointed out earlier, I believe society is moving slowly from strictly a reductionist or agentic framework to include a holistic view that is cooperative, subjective, nurturing, intuitive, and integrative. The movement toward integrative thinking has emanated from several disciplines, from physics to medicine, with alternative forms of healing appearing even in universities.

Many people seek wholeness, and the six critical life tasks of ILP, if understood and addressed by career counselors, can provide a worldview that will also be useful to clients as they think about their lives and life plans. Prioritizing the tasks and focusing on certain ones at a given time or life stage can make ILP more useful and manageable. Workshops and classes, or other forms of outreach, may be more viable means for delivering the program than individual counseling.

2. How do you communicate to younger people the importance of incorporating all parts of life into a whole? The concept of integrative and holistic thinking and planning has to be woven into school career development and career guidance and parent education programs from prekindergarten through Grade 16. Unfortunately, it is not there at present, and with the current focus on occupational information through school-to-work and computer technology, the emphasis is on finding a job rather than developing a life. The National Career Development Guidelines (National Occupational Information Coordinating Committee, 1997) make a modest attempt toward wholeness through such competencies as "Understands work and other life roles" and "Understands the changing roles of women and men," but they are still overwhelmingly directed toward finding or choosing a job. Service learning holds promise as one strategy for helping youth develop skills, broader life perspectives, and concern for the larger community. Perhaps some of the expanded career development programs of the 1970s and 1980s need to be updated and implemented by teachers, counselors, and parents in developmental guidance programs. Counselors-in-training also need to be exposed to integrative counseling philosophy and strategies.

3. How do you bring incorporation of all parts of life into counseling with older persons? The task may be easier with older persons, because they are at a stage in life when many of them begin to ponder the big questions of spirituality, meaning, and purpose, questions that include connectedness and wholeness. They may also be at a place where they have made a transition out of formal work and are seeking new activities and finding time to examine parts of their lives that may have been neglected in a work-focused life course. With extended life expectancy, depending on their health and financial status, more older persons may want to develop other talents or new careers through "Later Life Planning."

4. How do you address spirituality with clients who are not in touch with this part of their lives? There is, of course, a danger of introducing spirituality in schools, with some confusing the term with religion. Defined in terms of finding meaning and purpose in life, spirituality is not threatening; it may be approached with adolescents, but counselors will have to determine which students (and families) are or are not ready to explore this area. Increasingly, college students, young adults, and older adults are seeking to answer questions of meaning as they make life choices and decisions. For many ethnically diverse students especially, spirituality is central to their lives. As society becomes more technological, automated, and isolated, the search for meaning and connectedness may become more central.

5. How do you help students become more conscious of their own socialization to gender roles, cultural norms, and the mechanized society? The short answer to this is education, education, education. Unfortunately, educational institutions at every level are modeled on the old fragmented structures of knowledge and organizations. Although there is some movement in both education and work toward more integrated structures and interdisciplinary programs, progress is slow. One of the answers to this question in the last 25 years has been systematic interventions in schools and colleges to educate students about stereotyping, socialization, and cultural sensitivity. Training programs in diversity in corporations and equity programs in schools and colleges have become very common.

6. Does ILP apply across cultures, and is it "culturally valid"? One thought this question raises for me in the twenty-first century is whether different cultures need to start vocational guidance with matching models and later evolve toward more holistic approaches or create their own indigenous models. Experiences conducting workshops and seminars with participants in several cultures convince me that there is no single answer to this question. Each culture needs to identify those tasks most important for its context and cultural values and determine where it is on a continuum of change.

At a seminar in Sweden in 1996 (Swedish Career Counselors Professional Development Seminar, Goteborg, Sweden, June), a difference of opinion was expressed about where Sweden was in relation to the critical task of negotiating roles and relationships of women and men (i.e., how far ahead of other countries Sweden is in the equal status of men and women). There was strong agreement, however, on the life task of learning to deal with difference, a life task that has become more important with the influx into Sweden of many immigrants. A conference of the Career Development Association of the Philippines (Philippines National Career Development Association Conference, Manila, Philippines, November), which in 1996 selected ILP as its theme, reported a great deal of congruence between ILP and the Philippine values for family, wholeness, and spirituality.

How appropriate is it to transplant culturally based models to another culture? Can individualistic models be adapted to collectivist cultures? Leaders of change in each country need to look at the cultural gaps, biases, and blind spots, as Leong (1999) suggested, as well as the potentials, in deciding if ILP or other holistic models are appropriate to apply across cultures at a given time. The state of the economy, political structures, and cultural values certainly have an influence on such decisions. It is likely that holistic approaches to life planning will be more attractive in times of a thriving economy and low unemployment (such as at the end of the 1990s in the United States) and in developed more than developing nations. However, counselors from a range of cultures, including South Africa, Sweden, Japan, Romania, Venezuela, Jamaica, Kuwait, and Portugal, have applied aspects of ILP in their work.

7. What are the forces for and against using more holistic approaches to career and life development? Many of the forces for incorporating integrative thinking and life planning into career development have been alluded to earlier in this article, but a few more comments are in order. Among the forces against using an integrative approach are lack of money, time, and training. Parsonian counseling is much simpler and easier to teach and use, whereas holistic approaches, by their very nature, are complex and evolve over the life span. Matching models may be used as the most appropriate first steps with clients in poverty and on welfare, yet achieving wholeness should not be reserved for the economically privileged. Counselors generally have not been trained in the use of integrative models because the models have not yet found their way into many counselor preparation programs. A legitimate question is can a society afford to help its members develop holistically?

These are all good questions but not easy to answer, and the answers are not complete. At the beginning of the new century, it is appropriate for career counselors who see themselves as change agents to remember the words of Arthur O'Shaughnessy, who in his life wrote one poem sometimes called "Shakers and Movers." The last line is "Each age is a dream that is dying, or one that is coming to birth" (1955, pp. 976-977).

There will be dreams that die with the old century and new dreams that emerge with the new contexts, challenges, cultures, conflicts, and changes. Career counseling and guidance can move with the changes to make a greater difference in people's lives by helping them connect the parts of their own lives and connect with others in community for the common good.

Epilogue 

To conclude, ILP is strongly grounded in democratic values and a concern for social justice. Perhaps this is one characteristic that distinguishes it from other holistic career planning models. The work of Freire and his conscientizacao (consciousness raising) is relevant to ILP. Freire stressed the importance of "learning to perceive social, political, and economic contradictions and to take action against oppressive elements of reality" (quoted in Ivey, Ivey, & Simek-Morgan, 1993, p. 9). He also emphasized the process of developing critical consciousness, stating that "one of the purposes of education [and I would add, career counseling] is to liberate people to awareness of themselves in social context" (p. 94). Perhaps more important, he sees liberation as a process of people "reflecting upon their world in order to transform it" (p. 94).

To return to the quilt metaphor, in this article I have tried to put the pieces of the ILP quilt together in a way that is helpful and meaningful to career counselors who are entrusted with the humbling and significant task of helping people of all ages make choices and decisions in their lives--putting their own life quilts together. One thing seems certain: More and more people are wanting, as the ancient Greeks urged, to "see things steadily and see them whole," to have a sense of wholeness in their own lives and in the larger community.

As counselors and career professionals, we are also quilters in the lives of our children, clients, students, and employees, helping them to design the roles and goals of their lives and to see how the pieces fit together. We are quilters in our organizations and institutions, as we work to make them more humane places. Finally, we are quilters on the planet, seeking to connect with each other, to make the world a better place, and to shape our lives and communities for the common good. These seem to be important tasks for career development in the new millennium.

L. Sunny Hansen is a professor in the Department of Educational Psychology and a director of the BORN FREE Center, both at the University of Minnesota, Minneapolis. Portions of this article are adapted from L. Sunny Hansen (1997), Integrative Life Planning, San Francisco: Jossey-Bass. Used with permission. Correspondence regarding this article should be sent to L. Sunny Hansen, Counseling and Student Personnel Psychology, Department of Educational Psychology, 238 Burton Hall, 178 Pillsbury Drive, Minneapolis, MN 55455 (e-mail: [e-mail]).

References

Bloch, D. P., & Richmond, L. J. (Eds.). (1997). Connections between spirit and work in career development. Palo Alto, CA: Consulting Psychologists Press.

Bridges, W. (1994). Job shift: How to prosper in a workplace without jobs. Reading, MA: Addison-Wesley.

Capra, F. (1980). The turning point. New York: Simon & Schuster.

Capra, F. (1996). The web of life. New York: Simon & Schuster.

Cochran, L. (1997). Career counseling: A narrative approach. Thousand Oaks, CA: Sage.

Fox, M. (1994). The reinvention of work: A new vision of livelihood for our time. San Francisco: Harper.

Gelatt, H. B. (1989). Positive uncertainty: A new decision-making framework for counseling. Journal of Counseling Psychology, 36, 252-256.

Giddens, A. (1991). Modernity and self-identify. Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press. Hall, D. T. (Ed.), & Associates. (1996). The career is dead--Long live the career: A relational approach to careers. San Francisco: Jossey-Bass.

Hansen, L. S. (1997). Integrative life planning: Critical tasks for career development and changing life patterns. San Francisco: Jossey-Bass.

Henderson, H. (1996). Building a win-win world. San Francisco: Berrett-Koehler.

Ivey, A. E., Ivey, M. B., & Simek-Morgan, L. (1993). Counseling and psychotherapy: A multicultural perspective (3rd ed.). Boston: Allyn & Bacon.

Jepsen, D. (1995, June). Career as story: A narrative approach to career counseling. Presentation at the National Career Development Association Conference, San Francisco, CA.

Jordan, J. V., Kaplan, A. G., Miller, J. B., Stiver, I. P., & Surrey, J. L. (1991). Women's growth in connection: Writings from the Stone Center. New York: Guilford Press.

Leong, F. T. L. (1999, July 3). Challenges for career counseling in Asia: Variations in cultural accommodation. Presentation at the National Career Development Association Convention, Portland, OR.

Miller, J. B. (1976). Toward a new psychology of women. Boston: Beacon Press.

Mitchell, K. E., Levin, A. S., & Krumboltz, J. D. (1999). Planned happenstance: Constructing unexpected career opportunities. Journal of Counseling & Development, 77, 115-124.

Moreno, J. (1996, February). On entering the world of the other. Paper presented at Diversity Dialogues, BORN FREE Center, University of Minnesota, Minneapolis.

National Occupational Information Coordinating Committee. (1997). National career development guidelines. Washington, DC: Author.

O'Shaughnessy, A. (1955). Ode. In L. Untermeyer (Ed.), A treasury of great poems, English and American (pp. 976-977). New York: Simon & Schuster.

Palmer, P. J. (1992, March/April). Divided no more: A movement approach to educational reform. Change, 10-17.

Parsons, F. (1989). Choosing a vocation. Garrett Park, MD: Garrett Park Press. (Original work published 1909)

Peavy, R. V. (1998). SocioDynamic counselling: A constructivist perspective. Victoria, Canada: Trafford Publishing.

Rifkin, J. (1995). The end of work: Technology, jobs, and your future. New York: Putnam.

Savickas, M. L. (1997). The spirit in career counseling: Fostering self-completion through work. In D. P. Bloch & L. J. Richmond (Eds.), Connections between spirit and work in career development (pp. 3-25), Palo Alto, CA: Black/Davies.

Schlossberg, N. K. (1994). Overwhelmed: Coping with life's ups and downs. San Francisco: New Lexington Press.

Stark, A. (1995, August). Women in a postindustrial society. Paper presented at the Sixteenth Congress of the International Association for Educational-Vocational Guidance, Stockholm, Sweden.

Subich, L. M. (1993). How personal is career counseling? The Career Development Quarterly, 42, 129-131.

Super, D. E. (1951). Vocational adjustment: Implementing a self-concept. Occupations, 88-92.

Super, D. E. (1980). A life-span, life-space approach to career development. Journal of Vocational Behavior, 16, 282-298.

Super, D. E., & Sverko, B. (Eds.). (1995). Life roles, values, and careers. San Francisco: Jossey-Bass.