My Story -
A Journey of Hope
(path in Shuswap Lake Provincial Park, BC)
My work reflects the intertwining of my personal and professional lives throughout my life/career journey, a journey of hope.
My own journey to a better life/career story began and has been guided by the possibility of hope. Professionally I have sought to present career through the lens of hope to a wide diversity of people whatever their life/career journey has been. Hopelessness is no respecter of persons and I have seen it at work in the lives of many I have encountered no matter their background: men or women, young or old, different cultural or faith backgrounds, socio-economic level, educational level, urban or rural or remote, etc. I’m grateful that I have been given the opportunity of being a voice for hope.
A Common Story
I’ve had the rare privilege of working at a national and international level in the field of life/career. I’m often perceived as being very confident in the way I teach and speak. The reality is that I often struggle with my introversion and my “LOSER” voice.
The most common response I receive after sharing some of my personal story during my presentations is “I’ve had a very similar life/journey/story to yours.” The very fact that I know that I am not alone with these types of struggles has been a major encouragement to me and those I interact with. So many of us are on a journey seeking a better story.
I share my story with its ups and downs because the intertwining of my personal and professional lives is crucial to understanding what I do and why I do it in the way I do.
My First Story
As a child, I faced many challenges that informed my first story. Although at the time I did not see or understand that I and my family struggled with dysfunctionality, I have become more and more aware of the effects of that dysfunctionality upon myself.
Some of my challenges included racism (I am a Metis), family dysfunction, poverty, visual impairment, learning disabilities, speech difficulties, low self-esteem, and extreme introversion.
School became a place of embarrassment for me because I was different, especially in the area of the language arts. One of my formative embarrassment experiences occurred in grade 4. The teacher discovered that I didn’t know how to spell my name. Her solution was to have me stand in front of the class at the blackboard and keep writing until I spelled my name correctly. Unfortunately, after an hour in the class and a detention after school, I still wasn’t successful. Eventually I was sent home with a note to my mother asking what was wrong with me that I couldn’t spell my own name in grade 4. I learned not just that I was different but that something was “wrong” with me. This misguided pronouncement became central to my inner story. Rather than helping me discover why I had such difficulties with the language arts, the teacher in effect punished me because I couldn’t do what others could.
I kept going to school because my mother saw education as the way out of the family dysfunctionality; she believed it was the way to a better life. Unfortunately, as I continued to go through school, I became more and more convinced that there was something wrong with me and that I was just stupid. By the time I graduated from grade 12, most of my self-talk revolved around some form of telling myself that I was an embarrassment because of all my difficulties.
I saw my Mom as someone who sacrificed so much for us kids; she did the best she could with what she had. As a result, I wanted to please my Mom, so I kept going to school and after graduation I applied to the University of British Columbia to study mathematics, the only thing I seemed to be able to do. After my entrance exams, they said that I was functionally illiterate, but because I did well in math, they let me in. Though I struggled with my arts courses, I was able to do the math and sciences. I even received academic scholarships which helped pay for my schooling. But I still struggled in my heart and mind, for I still perceived myself to be stupid. My self-talk still revolved around this very negative view of myself and I became quite crippled by low self-esteem, shyness, and extreme introversion.
Starting a Journey of Hope
This came to a head between my third and fourth years of university. The inconsistency between my crippling low-esteem and constant self-depreciating self-talk and my seeming ability to make it in university resulted in a very deep personal crisis. I was absolutely confused as to why I was not happy and satisfied now that I was fulfilling the dream of getting an education. I went through a profound spiritual experience based on the concept of hope and I decided that I no longer wanted the rest of my life to be controlled by the problems of my childhood. I began what has become a lifelong journey of re-examining and changing my own self perceptions and my life. With much doubt and fear, I entered the next phase of my life journey.
I graduated in 1971 with a BA in Science and started work as a statistician. I married the love of my life in 1972 and we decided to return to school for further training in the Bible. I almost didn’t go when I learned that I would need to take 4 years of English. Again, entrance exams showed that I struggled with basic literacy. But I decided that I would start from scratch and do my best to learn. I committed myself to learning how to learn. To make a long story short, four years later when I finished this program, I was hired to be on faculty at this college. One of the subjects I was hired to teach was English grammar and later I became the head of the English department. I went on to teach ancient koine Greek and to become the chair of the languages department.
Obviously, I was not as stupid as I thought. My difficulties in language arts were made worse by my life circumstances, my learning disabilities, my own self-perceptions and attitudes, and the inability of my earlier teachers to find ways to help me through them. I often wonder what my journey would have looked like if that grade 4 teacher had taken the time to teach me how to spell my name instead of just telling me to do it and humiliating me because I didn’t know how.
Following Hope in New Directions
During the 1980s while working on a master’s degree in the New Testament and Greek, I became increasing interested in the topic of applying truth to life. I found that many, including myself, found it difficult to apply the truth that they knew to their own lives. I started shifting my focus from not just teaching people information but to helping they figure out how to actually work it into their lives.
In 1989, after teaching college for 13 years, I left. I loved teaching Greek, but I became increasingly convinced that I should be doing something much more practical in the way of helping people (including myself) do things that they thought they could not do. Finding ways to show people how they can actually do things was crucial to this. Since then, I have given myself to the practical outworking of creating hope through equipping.
When I left college teaching, I had no clear idea what I was to do. I began to explore several areas such as information brokerage, human resources, and technical writing. It was Dr. Norm Amundson who generously opened the door into the career counselling field for me in 1989, after hearing what I was doing to try to find the next step in my life. It has been a special privilege to have had Norm as my friend, mentor, and business partner.
Bringing Hope
to the Life/Career Journey
Through Norm, I was hired for a project called New Canadian Job Link and was tasked to research, write, pilot, evaluate, and write about a new vocational counselling approach for new Canadians. Over 2 years, I worked with 250 immigrants through self-assessment to actual work placement.
After this project, I worked in different forms of career counselling and in the mid 90s, I partnered with Norm Amundson in starting Ergon Communications. Along with Norm, I was involved in developing career programs, working on career projects, writing and self-publishing books and workbooks, training life/career practitioners, and facilitating workshops with clients and students.
In the early 2000s with the development of Guiding Circles, I started working extensively in Indigenous contexts. As mine, their life journeys didn’t fit the usual career counselling approaches that had been developed for mainstream people. I struggled with how to bring them hope in a way that was accessible to them on their life/career journeys.
Though Guiding Circles was initially directed toward Indigenous peoples, it soon became clear that the underlying approach had a much broader application. I was frequently being asked to apply Guiding Circles to others who had diverse life/career journeys: people living with mental, physical, or other disabilities; seniors; immigrants; youth; inmates to name just a few. I found that it applied even to those I worked with from mainstream backgrounds.
It became clear to me that I was no longer just training Guiding Circles workbooks but was in fact training an approach centred upon making life/career counselling increasingly accessible by engaging people in an hope-filled engagement process. In 2010, I co-authored Hope-Filled Engagement: New possibilities in life/career counselling to set forth what I had been doing in the training, as well as to give a deeper understanding of the approach. Since then I have continually developed and expanded this approach in many different ways.
Award
In 2012 I received the Stu Conger Award for Leadership in Career Development and Career Counselling. This award is presented by the Canadian Career Development Foundation and is in celebration of “visionary leadership, exemplary achievement and inspired dedication to the advancement of excellence in career development in Canada”. This award was quite an unexpected shock to me. It helped me answer my own self-doubts about the value of what I was doing.
A Humbling Journey
I have spent considerable time reviewing all the research, writing, presentations, teaching and training I’ve worked on for almost 50 years. This review has given me a fresh perspective on my own life/career journey, on what I have experienced and learned over the years.
Though I still find writing an uphill battle, I’ve been involved in the authoring along with Norm Amundson many different workbooks and books that have been used across Canada and internationally.
I am humbled by the fact that though I started out as a young person whose first story was one of embarrassment and withdrawal, I have had the unique privilege to present across Canada and internationally. In Canada, I travelled from coast to coast to coast, visiting over 70 different communities, delivering over 250 workshops, 68 conference sessions, and 12 keynotes. Internationally I’ve visited over 60 communities across Australia, New Zealand, and Europe, delivering over 160 workshops, 23 conference sessions, and 9 keynotes. I’ve had the privilege of working in diverse situations with dozens of Indigenous groups, government organizations, schools, universities and colleges, and private organizations across Canada and internationally.
A Lifelong Search for a Better Story
As I reviewed these decades of thoughts and work, I realized that my focus on hope needed to expand further: from job to career to life to story. I have found that one of the biggest hinderances to people finding a meaningful experience of life was the inner voices in their head and the resulting inner story they told themselves. Though their lives may really vary, one constant seems to be their experience of life, their hopefulness or hopelessness on their life/career journey, is inexorably affected by their inner story for better or worse. Someone may be in incredibly challenging circumstances yet find within themselves a story that keeps them going. Others may have it all but collapse under the influence of an inner story that is hopeless.
I realize that often the success I have had in assisting people to find practical hope has often revolved not just around the career advice I gave but also in helping them find an alternative voice, a better story, a story that is hope-filled. Without that, they may know all they need to know, have all they need to act, but still be stuck because they just don’t believe their possibilities.
In the light of this, I’m currently working on a new book with the working title A Better Story. My hope is to equip people to craft a better story for their life/career journey by sharing my own story, explaining the importance of story, setting forth some steps to take in crafting a better story, and providing a better story toolkit that will include many practical tools that can help them along the way.
As I mentioned earlier, my work has been an intertwining of my personal and professional journey. I am certainly not perfect in this. I have not fully arrived at a perfect story. But I’m continually seeking to cultivate a better story. By God’s grace, I’m striving to find hope and cultivate a story in which I choose to say “no” to all those stories in my head that cry so loudly that I am still the frightened illiterate child, teen, and young adult of my early years. A story in which by God's grace I choose to see myself not as a loser or a perfect person, far from it, but one who can try to do my best. A story in which I can act out of who I really am rather than out of fear.
This is the heart of my work, the heart of my hope for all those I work with.