#236 How Families Eliminate the Best Career Fits Too Soon Transcript

THIS IS AN AUTOMATED TRANSCRIPT… PLEASE FORGIVE THE TYPOS & GRAMMAR! xo-Lisa.

Lisa Marker-Robbins  00:00

How do we support instead of a linear path? How do we start thinking in terms of an ecosystem, and how can you change the conversations that you’re having with your young person in your home or in your school? How can you start asking the right questions so we’re not eliminating possibilities too early? So instead of asking, “What should my child, my student that I’m working with do? let’s teach and demonstrate to them career ecosystem thinking, and that requires one of the key components of good conversations that I always teach: getting curious. I find that many of you are thinking about career exploration, like grocery shopping. Bear with me for a second. You walk into the store, over to the right aisle, you move to the right section, and then you choose the brand of the item that you like best. Take off the shelf. I see families in this critical window of career planning treating the process and making confident choices as if the paths are neat, tidy, and linear. Just like my trip yesterday to Kroger, where I live here in Cincinnati. Some of these paths are that linear, but here’s the deal: most of them aren’t, and parents they tell me that often they have their spidey parenting sense, this undercurrent feeling that something’s off, even when they can’t put their finger on it because they don’t have a lot of experience in this area, and at this point they usually see like one of two things happening in this journey, they just pause. They go, “Okay, time’s going to fix us. It’ll all come together later, because the linear path didn’t fit. Or they keep going down that linear path, accidentally along the way, eliminating some of the very best career fits before your young person ever has an opportunity to explore them. Hi, I’m Lisa Marker Robbins, and this is College and Career Clarity. What we do here is we support families who are in this critical stage, preparing to launch their young person into a thriving adulthood with career confidence as a key component. It doesn’t work unless they have a career. They’re not going to be outside of your home. So if you’re on this journey, you’re a parent, or maybe you work with kids. Welcome. So what we’re going to do today is let’s start with this grocery store analogy. Here’s the deal: this belief that the path is linear, it does work for some jobs, teachers, engineers, nurses, accountants, a plumber, a welder. If you’re looking at the trades, because we welcome all paths in our community, a radiological technician. See, these are jobs where the majors or the training programs sound like the name of the job, the traditional way of thinking isn’t dead. It’s just it doesn’t work for all paths, and when you expect it to, because I find a lot of families do, then you hit a roadblock. Really, now last week on episode 235 we talked about how to shift up your lens that you’re looking at when you’re thinking about jobs. So if you miss that, bear with me a little bit, and then go back and listen to how to switch up your lens so that you’re thinking about this in a different way. And so what we were really talking about is through that lens. We talked about job families. So there are 23 job families that the U.S. Department of Labor recognizes, and these are boxes, individual boxes with individual job or career titles in them. Okay, what they aren’t is an overlapping ecosystem, and the reality is, even though these boxes thinking about careers that way is a great way to start. The reality is most of these jobs are much more like I don’t know. I think about my 20-eight-year-old Trent who was Lego obsessed growing up, and he wouldn’t follow the instructions. He would intuitively start looking at different pieces and figuring out how they can fit together to create what he wanted to create, what he was looking for. This is really different than the grocery store where we walk and we pull that item off of the shelf. Now, why do we do this? We do it because when we can’t make sense of the world around us. It is human nature, normal for you, for me, to try to make sense of what we’re facing, and to avoid ambiguity.

Lisa Marker-Robbins  04:50

All of us have varying degrees of I don’t know that we can varying degrees that we can hold on to ambiguity. Most people have, or and I. This by being master certified in the Berkman, we would rather have things be a bit more linear, avoid the ambiguity, so we can get decisive and chart a path forward. That’s how humans are wired. I know this from my master training in the Berkman. This gets reinforced by society. School trains us this way. Education, it’s linear. Even some of the classes that we take in junior high, high school, onto college, linear math, global languages, even science to a degree, but real world careers, most of them are not linear. So the first one of the big mistakes we make is trying to put our kids into a box on a linear path. Entertain it. Start there. Start with job families. Go back. Listen to episode 235 But I’ll use my own daughter Sydney as an example. She’s almost 25 She’ll be 25 right after this episode comes out. When we started her career development, her career thinking, her career design back in early high school. We were thinking about things that really lit her up. I saw her, you know, going over when she was in high school. She’d go over to the junior high and she would help with the special educators, and she loved those kids. Right? I watched her entertain ideas about maybe being a teacher or being a therapist. When we ran her Berkman, her job match list showed that those were top matches. However, when we’re building that self awareness, we have to layer on other things too: academic aptitudes, values, and things like that. For Sydney, there were things about being a traditional linear path teacher or traditional linear path therapist that didn’t align with the values of the life that she was trying to design intentionally. So what did we do? We dug deeper. We leaned into the fact of what came up for us? Relationship builder, helper yet ruthlessly competitive, process thinking, sales where she’s landed now wasn’t an early obvious fit, and had when we been thinking linearly, sales was not on the first page of her Berkman, so we had to think outside the box, merging ideas and then validating them. Now I tell people in our launch career clarity community all the time: a lot of these jobs. This is how I I put it up. So we’ve got the 23 job families. Most people are going to pursue overlapping ideas where your job might have a foot in one job family and another foot in another. So we’re we’re merging here. I’ll give you a good example: school counselor. This is the intersection of the education job family and the community and social service job family. A foot in each, not the traditional teacher, not the traditional therapist. I’ll give you another one, keeping with the school theme: a school-based speech language pathologist. You’ve got education job match high. You’ve got healthcare possibly moderate or high, and community service. We don’t have three feet, but we’re going to spread ourselves around them. Now, if you’re hearing this, you’re like, okay, what are these job families that you didn’t listen to me last time on episode 235? Yes, go back to it. But you can do a shortcut and go download our job match list, which will demonstrate for you the 23 job families that jobs on linear paths get encapsulated into. Go to flourishcoachingco.com. forward slash jobs, and we’ll get you that. Okay, and we’re gonna keep going, but you can go over there and get it because this list will become valuable for you as you build the way that we’re thinking about this. The list isn’t going to give you all the answers, but it funnels. This is what we do with our job list. We funnel from the world tells you it can be anything. We debunked that myth earlier this year, so we funnel it down to what fits you. But then, by these overlapping possibilities among the job families, we go back out and we expand a little bit more on the possibilities that you should be entertaining. See what the danger is for kids, for young people in this bracket of age 15 to 20-five that we’re supporting.

Lisa Marker-Robbins  09:30

When they don’t immediately see themselves in a box of a job list that has an obvious path that they can take action on, they automatically will assume I just haven’t found the right career yet. They think about this too literally, and they prematurely are eliminating options, possibilities because they’re rejecting a box or a title because of the path or assumption. That they are making without understanding the work, and these job titles-they’re often very misleading. But the work inside the title actually could be exactly right. So what they’re really missing is ecosystem thinking, and that’s really what we’re talking about today. How do we support instead of a linear path. How do we start thinking in terms of an ecosystem, and how can you change the conversations that you’re having with your young person in your home or in your school? How can you start asking the right questions so we’re not eliminating possibilities too early? So instead of asking, “What should my child, my student that I’m working with, do? Let’s teach and demonstrate to them career, career ecosystem thinking, and that requires one of the key components of good conversations that I always teach: getting curious. So when something doesn’t fit, instead of putting it on the shelf or throwing it in the trash. Have a conversation that’s curious first. Here are the questions that I want you to ask. Literally, write these down if you have a young person that you need to have a conversation with. What, even though overall it doesn’t seem like a fit, there’s got to be some part. If you were to take at least one part. Just start there. Was there something in it that seemed like it could be energizing? What were the parts? If you’re dismissing something that felt draining, right? So energizing, draining. What personal values of yours does this satisfy? If they’re not clear on their values yet, this is a great time to lean into that as well. What environment seemed to fit? So what we’re doing is we’re actually kind of creating a pros and cons list, right? A T chart. What fits? What doesn’t fit? You can still ultimately dismiss that box holistically, but let’s retain the pieces that fit so we can begin to build an ecosystem. Let me give you an example of something I talked about way back on episode 59 of the podcast, just the beginning of year two of the podcast, and and this was about forensic accounting. So I I have kids often that accounting the job list the job box that it fits in is a high match for them, and they also have wiring that says they should be up and active that they like variety right, and I will have students go not sitting at a desk doing math all the time and they dismiss it. That episode that I just tagged you back to, episode 59 it was really accounting doesn’t have to be boring, and so one of the things that emerged is when we when we do this ecosystem thinking about something like forensic accounting and and where places that that can lead is if the math fits and the problem solving and the looking for patterns fits, but the at the desk, the rote or routine pieces don’t. Now let’s hang on to what fits, and let’s look at your other job families, your values, what you know, and begin to merge. See over time. When you do this, you’re going to have patterns that will come together that will ultimately, not in a linear way, to a confident career, early decision, and future decisions. I’ve seen confidence develop in the patterns over time when you support more than 4000 families over 16 years. What you find is patterns that are undeniable, and this is one of those. How you can start to change your thinking from linear to ecosystem to create a better outcome. So let’s recap your three-step process that exists inside my career confidence framework. So back to episode 230-five on changing your lens. Change your lens from career clusters-that’s how schools a lot of times teach this-that are aimed at educational pathways over to job families, which is rooted in what work is satisfying? Then even if you start literally, because really you should, because that’s how we think, right?

Lisa Marker-Robbins  14:28

Challenge that thinking and begin to expand the job fam to a job family ecosystem of thinking that leads with curiosity, hanging on to the things that work, reject the the pieces, not the whole box of what doesn’t work. And then next week, I have a guest from the University of Virginia coming to discuss career design, which will likely challenge some of your other assumptions. And for those of you with a college bound team, it’s going to help support your college list creation. And if you even have a kid that’s already in college, it’s going to support their journey. Now, if today’s conversation made you realize that you’ve been thinking about careers a little too narrowly, I’m going to encourage you to download that sample job match list. It’s the same one we use inside Launch Career Clarity, and it’s rooted in the Berkman method and in the U.S. Department of Labor’s job families. You’ll see exactly how we start to help families, students expand their possibilities before they begin narrowing them prematurely. And if you want some support to walk alongside your family through this entire process from self-awareness to exploration to validation, that’s exactly what we do inside our launch career clarity course and community. You can learn more at flourishcoachingco.com forward slash course. Okay, my friends, I’ll be back next week with the University of Virginia. I’m really excited to to have this conversation around career design. Have a great week.