Why I Began This Blog: The Creative Class Sparked a Blazing Bonfire

When I was in private practice as a career counselor, I frequently gave talks to the public about creativity. Although I spoke in a different place to a different audience each time, the exact same thing happened afterward. Can you guess?

An adult from the audience would approach me. After a quick thank you, she identified herself as a parent or grandparent and began to tell me, not about herself or her work, and certainly not about the pearls of wisdom I had just shared in my presentation, but about the talent in her child or grandchild.

I get it. A parent and a step-grandparent myself, I'm right there with you when you express your concern for your kids and their futures. I want the best for my child and grandchildren—and for yours too. That's one reason I began this blog.

In retrospect, during those impromptu conversations after my talks, I was gathering tinder—small, seemingly lightweight stuff for starting a fire. I didn't put a match to the tinder until years later, when I was revising my career book, The Career Guide for Creative and Unconventional People. In the process of doing library research for my third edition, I read Richard Florida's book, The Rise of the Creative Class, in which he claimed that prosperity is created by the Three T's—Technology, Tolerance, and Talent—coming together in the nexus of place, as they did in the 1970's in what became the Silicon Valley.

Florida's ideas burned inside me with a small but steady flame, something like a pilot light. Inspired by his vision of creativity as an economic force for good, I wondered for some time what I could do as a creativity expert and writer to extend his message. Eventually, my answer came: While I knew next to nothing about exploiting technology or fostering tolerance, I could share volumes about mentoring talent.

For starters, my work as a counselor was about helping people flourish via a relationship. After all, a counselor is a mentor, someone who uses their interpersonal skills to benefit another. Moreover, I was trained as a counseling psychologist, that sort of psychologist most focused on client strengths. As the poster child for what not to do with my own career, I had quite naturally developed an avid interest in counseling psychology's vocational track and had therefore acquired a significant academic background regarding career choice, knowledge that remains stacked within me, like a woodpile.

I had also learned about developing talent from thirty-two years of experience across the entire spectrum of educational settings, from Kindergarten to post doc. In New Orleans, Seattle, and Pittsburgh, I counseled thousands of clients with both personal and career concerns and also taught single students in my private office as well as classrooms of twenty-five and lecture halls of 250. One of my community colleges was ninety-eight percent white; one of the universities, ninety-eight percent black. At the end of my career I became a school psychologist in Ft Collins, evaluating gifted as well as disabled learners and serving students both directly and indirectly, by consulting with their teachers and parents.

In short, I've been in the trenches, where it was easy to observe the diverse dismaying disconnects between students and learning, between one educational institution and another, and between education and employment in the United States. Many aspects of our educational system disturb me, and now that I'm retired, I'm in a position to communicate what I believe to be a simpler but superior strategy.

Since I think like a psychologist, my strategy is based on psychological concepts. Please understand: for me, psychology does not mean abnormality. Mental illness does not interest me much. On the other hand, nerdy psychological topics like the factor analytic structure of intelligence or vocational interests? Those are fascinating! In fact, I find them so interesting that I've collected a banker's box of ideas, enough fuel to keep a talent mentoring fire burning for a decade.

One of the books on my shelf is The Flight of the Creative Class, Richard Florida's sequel. In it, he wrote: "Today, for perhaps the first time in human history, we have the opportunity to align economic and human development. Indeed, our future economic prosperity turns on making the most of each and every human being's talents and energies."

Now that's a goal I can get behind. I invite you to join me in building an online community of parents, grandparents, and teachers. I'll share what I know, and I hope to learn what you believe and what's worked for you in mentoring your son or granddaughter or student. Let's build a blazing bonfire, mentoring talent so that the generations that follow can derive career direction and job security, along with greater wealth and contentment, from developing their signature strengths.

Parents Beware: What You Don't Know about Career Planning Can Hurt You. Even Worse, It Can Hurt Your Child.

Too many of my son's high school friends—nice, athletic young men from good, supportive families—started college right after high school but quickly got into trouble, dropped out, and spent the next several years recovering their forward momentum. It was painful to watch and must have been terribly damaging to their self-esteem, not to mention needlessly expensive for their families.

My heart ached for those young men, but I knew they were far from alone. One-third of freshmen in the United States leave college before their sophomore year. Almost fifty percent of college students never graduate. Too many parents are left holding the bill for an aborted "must-have" education, having spent tens of thousands of dollars only to find their children back home, licking their wounds in the basement, less directed than when they graduated from high school.

How did a glittering cultural promise become such a devastating personal punishment?

Part of the problem is that everyone in high school is focused on getting into college. The assumption seems to be that it's the act of going to college itself that provides direction, as though career planning happens by virtue of admission to a four-year liberal arts college.

Except no, it doesn't.

As Career Vision points out, going to college is not the same as planning a career. Colleges, in my experience, are happy to take your money, offer another class as the solution to virtually every problem, and leave the career planning entirely up to your student.

And guess who your student asks for help?

You.

Of all influences, parents have the strongest on their child's career decisions. Expect your child to turn to you instead of to a qualified career development professional, especially early in life, when supposedly short-term career decisions can have far-reaching consequences.

But realistically, how are you supposed to know where he or she should go to school or what to major in? There are around 3,000 common occupations in the world of work, plus another 10,000 less common—and that doesn't count emerging fields. As former Secretary of Education Richard Riley said, "We are currently preparing students for jobs that don't exist yet, using technology that hasn't been invented, in order to solve problems we don't even know are problems."

The workplace is changing so fast that educational policies can't keep up, creating a gaping mismatch between education and employment. "Employers across the globe are struggling to find enough people with the right set of skills for the posts they have available, even as millions of people remain unemployed." You don't want your student to become today's version of a buggy-whip maker in a spanking new automobile economy, especially not after you've paid $150,000 for the privilege.

What's a parent to do?

Read my blog.

My solution for finding direction and connecting education to employment rests on something possessed by every student: Strengths. By that term I mean many things, but especially their unique psychological assets, including Abilities, Interests, and Motivators (AIM). More about that soon. For now, please take my word for it: Your child's strengths and talents translate into her competitive advantage in the workforce.

Because of my background as a vocational psychologist, I was able to assist my son in his transition from high school to college. Making choices based on his strengths, he sailed through college in four years, despite having ADHD and a part-time job. He graduated with the major he'd chosen before entering the university and accepted the best of three job offers in his senior year. Now 25, he is preparing to specialize in an exciting new field that I did not even know existed when he was in high school.

I will share my knowledge in this blog, as a complimentary form of social capital. You'll learn how to identify your student's strengths and use them to guide his or her search for the best-fitting education and employment. Your mentoring can decrease your child's stress and enhance self-worth and salary, all while benefiting the larger world. Check back on the 3rd and 18th of each month for another post about how to identify talent and help connect it to education and workforce opportunities—even for opportunities that don't yet exist.