•Are his or her interests generally passive (e.g., shopping, watching television, reading, going to the movies) or active (playing an instrument, playing sports, writing)?
•What, if any, specialized skills is your emerging adult developing in his or her recreational life? How might these suggest opportunities in the job market?
•Are any of your emerging adult’s leisure interests purely self-directed or are they always led by others or by programs (e.g., computer games)?
•Does your emerging adult do anything creative? Do any genuine gifts or talents reveal themselves in his or her leisure pursuits?
•What technologies has your emerging adult mastered in his or her play and leisure activities?
•Is your emerging adult responsible for his or her own recreational life or does your emerging adult depend on others to provide structure? Does your emerging adult complain of boredom frequently?
•Is your emerging adult able to make decisive choices about what he or she likes and doesn’t like?
•Have your emerging adult’s interests evolved over time, becoming more focused, complex and age-appropriate? Did this occur naturally?
•Is your emerging adult motivated to get better at his or her “play” skills? Is he or she moving observably in that direction?
Two Contrasting Emerging Adults
Emerging adults today have been given the gift of an extended time frame for reaching key milestones (i.e., marriage, children, home ownership). This means they are in a potentially excellent position to make informed career decisions. In many cases, that is exactly what is happening. In other cases, paralysis reigns.
Let’s look at two emerging adults: Connor, an articulate twenty-nine-year-old man, takes pride in his accomplishments, including the way he navigated his non-traditional career path; Brenda, a twenty-nine-year-old woman, shows no apparent career direction despite a promising adolescence.
Connor’s Story
Connor grew up in comfort with loving parents. Small for his age and not much of an athlete, he scored points with his peers with his keen sense of humor. Connor didn’t excel in school, but he was seen as bright and inquisitive.
Connor could fix anything and, as a teen, repaired cars as a hobby. He was self-taught and enjoyed the challenge of rebuilding hopeless “clunkers.” He bought inexpensive cars, fixed them and sold them at a profit. Connor also taught himself how to play the guitar and achieved a modicum of success working as a substitute for established bands in the area.
As an emerging adult, Connor started studying at four different colleges, quitting each of them after a year. His interests seemed scattered, ranging from medicine to social work to the arts. His parents were concerned about him, wondering how he was going to earn enough money to afford the middle class lifestyle to which he was accustomed.
At twenty-six, Connor held a series of odd jobs such as seasonal work as a construction worker, all the while playing his guitar for gigs. Playing the guitar was a constant for Connor, providing him with a sense of accomplishment and joy. He also liked hanging out with his buddies in the music scene and occasionally dabbled with drugs and alcohol in that setting.
At age twenty-seven, he asked his parents for a four-hundred-dollar loan to execute a “business plan.” Connor had been at the beach making a leather belt for himself when a passerby asked if he could purchase it. Connor had two dollars’ worth of material invested in the belt and about five minutes of labor. He was delighted to make his first sale at a hefty profit, charging fifteen dollars for the belt.
Connor currently owns two leather stores and has plans to open two more. He loves his life. As a hobby he acquires the guitars of famous artists. He has given up playing in bands, due to the time constraints of his businesses. He is married and has no children. His future plans incorporate investing in real estate, including ownership of a mall.
Connor’s story is instructive in that many of his behaviors during his twenties can be viewed as random, irresponsible and self-defeating. At twenty-six, he could not articulate a vision for himself. However, we can see that there were clues in Connor’s play to suggest that Connor would develop career momentum, albeit in his own creative way.
Viewing Connor at play in his teens and twenties provides insight to understanding Connor as a professional man. Although he was not able to “stick” with college, he successfully completed many projects that involved goal-directed behavior of his own choosing. He showed good planning, responsibility and follow-through in his recreational activities. Many of his interests involved teaching himself the skills necessary to become financially viable, i.e., fixing cars and selling them at a profit, learning to play guitar professionally, making sellable leather belts.
Connor was able to enjoy and learn from his play experiences. In those contexts he was responsible to himself and to others. While pursuing his interests, many of which had a commercial angle to them, he became totally engaged in what he was doing. For example, as a guitarist, he never missed a gig and achieved local success. His guitar playing required countless hours of rigorous practice, which he embraced. He was also invested in making the bands that he played with as great as they could be.
Brenda’s Story
No one would have guessed that Brenda, an ebullient, gifted teenager, would spend her twenties drifting aimlessly. After graduating from a prestigious Ivy League school, Brenda floated from one low-paying job to another. She currently lives four hours away from her family and enjoys the bustle of a vibrant city. She has many friends, although she has been unable to develop an intimate romantic relationship. She assumes a fatalistic stance in regard to her love life.
Brenda enjoys reading and writing poetry, a hobby she avidly pursued while an undergraduate English major.
She states she wants to make a difference in people’s lives yet she rejects career-related suggestions, finding fault with each option offered by her parents, friends and professionals. She provides elaborate rationalizations why each recommendation won’t work. She is unable to identify a career choice that sustains her curiosity and interest. For the past eight years, her pattern has been to move from one temporary job to another, with no job apparently serving as a launching pad to the next one.
Brenda has sought the help of a career counselor and a therapist, to no avail. Some of her temporary jobs have led to more permanent offers; however, she has rejected all of them. From time to time she struggles with anxiety, which she associates with her inability to establish a work identity. She worries that she is disappointing her parents and feels a sense of shame.
Brenda’s family is successful vocationally. They are ambitious and enjoy competing against themselves and others. Her mother and father hold prestigious positions. Her two older brothers are launched professionally and each is satisfied in his career. Brenda feels she is falling short of her promise, but she can’t seem to “get it together” and develop a career for herself.
What obstacles are getting in the way of Brenda being able to find a career in line with her abilities? What steps might be taken to provide her with a greater degree of meaning and gratification? With the brief history you have read, what are your thoughts? What would you do if Brenda were your daughter? How would you try to support her?
Brenda seems stuck in a pattern that limits her ability to explore and actualize a career identity. She is inundated with career possibilities but immobilized by fears that she will either be disappointed or disappointing to her family. This is an all-too-common version of “analysis paralysis” that is shared by many emerging adults. Her anxiety increases and she becomes paralyzed by information overload and fears of inadequacy. She then avoids the “soul searching” work of defining her values, needs, abilities and interests independent of her family. These feelings keep her in a stuck position. It is important to note that high levels of anxiety typically go hand-in-hand with avoidance behavior.
A Model for Looking at Career Indecision
A car
eer indecision model proposed by Purdue University vocational experts Kevin R. Kelly and Wei-Chien Lee provides a lens for trying to understand Brenda.12 It also helps us develop theories about why she might be stuck at this point in her life.
Before we look at the model, it is important to remember that it is based on work with undergraduate students who had not yet “really” embarked on a career quest. It is also important to remember that college students are a relatively homogenous and privileged group that does not represent the full range of racial and ethnic groups across the economic spectrum. Also, the results are based on self-reports. Participants may have overstated or minimized their career-related difficulties in an attempt to present themselves in a more appealing light. Still, I think it has value.
Career indecision, according to Kelly and Lee, might be due to one or more of these causes (which I have adapted for our purposes):13
•Lack of self-understanding (identity confusion). Using Brenda as an example, she may simply not know herself very well. She may lack understanding about her own strengths, traits and skills and how these relate to the career world. She may not have done sufficient reflective work to understand her own likes/dislikes and the types of pursuits that are likely to lead to personal success and satisfaction. She doesn’t yet know “who she is.”
•Lack of career information. Brenda may lack good information about the job market and the career options available to her. She has not engaged in sufficient exploration and is operating out of full or partial ignorance. Because of this, odds are that she is limiting her choices or misreading possible options.
•Trait indecisiveness. This refers to a general character trait in which Brenda may be routinely having trouble making decisions. Usually trait indecisiveness can be observed in many other areas of the person’s life.
•Choice anxiety. This term refers to a difficulty in making choices due to an overload of options. To understand choice anxiety, think about the paralysis that sometimes occurs when trying to select a soft drink brand at a well-stocked supermarket or when trying to select a television program from among three hundred cable television offerings. That is what the career market can look like to emerging adults today, more specifically to Brenda. It is often easier to make a choice when the options are fewer and stand in starker contrast.
Option overload can cause chronic indecision. Brenda is a perfectionist in her approach to her career, an approach that exacerbates her chronic indecision. A non-adaptive cycle ensues whereby Brenda spends many hours on the Internet researching career possibilities in the hopes of finding the “perfect” career. She becomes overwhelmed and despondent, then resumes her search on the Internet in the hope of finding clarity, a strategy that results in increasing information overload and anxiety. In a study my colleague Ilana Lehmann and I conducted, we found that the amount of time spent on the Internet is associated with perfectionism and career indecision among emerging adults.14
•Disagreement with significant others. Often emerging adults are strongly affected, either consciously or unconsciously, by the preferences of important people in their lives. Brenda may want the approval of her parents, siblings and peers. A gap between what she really wants for herself and what others want for her may be a source of indecision. Brenda may be reluctant to discuss this openly due to the very fear of disapproval that may be causing the indecision.
If there is a “career-indecisive” emerging adult in your life, it would be helpful to look at him or her in light of Kelly and Lee’s models. Which of these factors seem to apply? By identifying the sources of indecision, it becomes much easier to offer support and intervention. We will talk more about this later.
It is important to remember that indecisive individuals may fit more than one, perhaps all, of these categories. Behavior is usually determined by many causes and simple categorization rarely works.
Brenda and the Model
Brenda’s story is a good example of multiple causes. She seems to have perfectionistic strivings along with high expectations. She wants to make a significant difference in the world. At the same time, her lofty goals paralyze her. She becomes fearful that she will not succeed and that she will bring shame to herself and her family. It may be that by not making a decision, Brenda thinks she is keeping her options open.
Using the model just presented, Brenda’s indecision seems to be a combination of identity confusion, choice anxiety and perhaps parental disagreement about the way Brenda is managing her career. It is important to remember that Brenda’s parents continue to support her financially. This may contribute to her feeling that she is not “in charge” of her own life and therefore doesn’t have authority to make a decision. It is also important to consider that Brenda’s anxiety is not only limited to choice anxiety; she has more generalized fears about her future.
Targeted counseling would be helpful for Brenda. She needs a better understanding of her dysfunctional and repetitive patterns. It seems important to get a sense from Brenda about what was helpful and what was not helpful in terms of her previous counseling experiences. A realistic assessment of her strengths and weaknesses, her overall talents and the skill sets she can build on is vitally needed. Brenda seems intent on keeping her options open. However, she needs to understand that by not making a decision, she is making a decision that may well close off options. Her pattern of Internet use also needs to be examined in order to determine if and how it keeps Brenda in a stuck place. Daniel Feldman, a leading expert on career development issues, explains the problem in this way:
As individuals pass into their early- and mid-twenties, the effort to keep future options open can impede career progress as much as facilitate it. Since every career decision can potentially close more doors than it opens new ones, young adults may become too reluctant to commit to any one course of action for fear that some future course of action may be more attractive. Thus, like in the stock market, it is important to young adults to understand as much about when to exercise their options as when to accumulate them.15
An effective counselor could help Brenda see that while closing off options does involve a degree of loss, there are gains including, perhaps, an increased sense of purpose. Effective therapy would focus on helping Brenda develop her own internal standards, which would assist in her working through the sense of shame she feels so acutely.
Family counseling might also be helpful in this case to deal with Brenda’s longstanding dependency on her parents, including financial support. This support is likely contributing to her stuck position. Although Brenda says she enjoys the support of her family, that very support likely leaves her feeling unable to meet either their expectations or her own. Developing a stronger sense of self appears to be a primary goal for Brenda.
A lack of career information may be at play here too. Perhaps Brenda is not seeing all of her options. For example, one possible scenario might include channeling her interest in poetry by teaching the subject as a volunteer to a community of adults or children. Or, if her skills are strong enough, teaching a course at a community college. Brenda needs to engage in an honest appraisal of her skills, talents, values and goals while considering how these can interface with the marketplace. Career counseling might be of great benefit in this regard.
Choice Anxiety and Choice Selection
Before we revisit the five-part model, the idea of choice anxiety merits closer attention. While choice anxiety is not a new phenomenon, it certainly seems to be a signature issue for our era. From cable television to big box superstores to the Internet, never before have so many choices been offered to so many.16 Universities and vocational schools offer an unprecedented number of career training options. Career websites feature a mind-numbing smorgasbord of job specializations. It is not surprising that career choice is becoming harder, not easier, for many emerging adults. Dan Ariely, a behavioral economist and author of Predictably Irrational: The Hidden Forces that Shape Our Decisions, provides important insights about choice s
election. He asks, “What is it about options that are so difficult for us? Why do we feel compelled to keep as many doors open as possible, even at greater expense? Why can’t we simply commit ourselves?”17 Ariely and his colleague from Yale University, Jiwoong Shin, designed fascinating computer simulation games to answer these questions.
Using clever experimental designs, they demonstrated that under certain conditions of choice, people behave in ways that are not in their best interests. Participants (students at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology) were presented with three doors on a computer screen. Clicking on any of the doors opened that door. Once within each “room” the participant could collect various sums of money, one click at a time. Each room contained a different total sum of money. The player could switch rooms at any time, looking for a bigger money pool, but it cost a click to switch rooms. A set number of clicks was allotted per game. The goal of the game was to find the room with the biggest payoff and earn as much money as possible.
Ariely wanted to know, What do people do when their options begin to close down? Do they let the options go or do they try to keep them open, even to the point of sacrificing guaranteed payoffs? So Ariely added this twist to the game. After twelve clicks, any of the three doors, if left unvisited, disappeared. What did the players do? They skipped from one door to another in a way that was both stressful and uneconomical. Each switch of doors cost a click, for which no money was earned. In a frantic effort to keep doors from shutting, these participants made less money than the ones who stayed in any one of the three rooms throughout the experiment.
In another version of the game, participants were told that a door would disappear if not visited within twelve clicks. However, clicking on the space where the door had formerly been brought the door back without any penalties. Results were intriguing. Even when participants knew that there would be no cost associated with making a vanished door reappear, they wasted clicks trying to prevent doors from disappearing. Ariely argues that people’s desire to avoid the immediate pain of watching an option disappear can outweigh the gain they would get from just letting it close. As Ariely says in John Tierney’s New York Times article “The Advantage of Closing a Few Doors”: “Closing a door on an option is experienced as a loss, and people are willing to pay a price to avoid the emotion of loss.” Tierney goes on to state, “In the experiment, the price was easy to measure in lost cash. In life, the costs are less obvious—wasted time, missed opportunities.”18
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