Overview

In an age of organizational restructuring and career uncertainty, with upward mobility becoming less and less attainable, how do people find meaning and fulfilment in their work? This book addresses this critical question, offering valuable, concrete suggestions to career development professionals working with clients who long to infuse their work with values.

Featuring the insights of leading counsellors and career development practitioners, educators, psychologists, clergy, and management experts, the eleven chapters in Connections Between Spirit and Work in Career Development explain how money, age, gender, and spirituality affect job satisfaction.

The authors examine changes that enhance the sense of wholeness in a career, offering illuminating examples showing how people have achieved the goal of balancing work, family life, relationships, and spiritual practice. Responding to the rapidly changing terrain of contemporary work life, this volume presents an extraordinary range of tools and options for career development professionals in their work with their clients.

Introduction

Deborah P. Bloch
University of San Francisco
IN 1933, JUNG’S Modern Man in Search of a Soul was first published
in English. In it, Jung describes what he calls “the general neurosis of our
time.” “About a third of my cases,” he writes, “are suffering from no clinically
definable neurosis, but from the senselessness and emptiness of their lives.” He
continues, “It is difficult to treat patients of this particular kind by rational methods,
because they are in the main socially well-adapted individuals of considerable
ability, to whom normalization means nothing. . . . The ordinary expression
for this situation is: ‘I am stuck’” (Jung, 1931/1933, p. 61).
In contrast, poet Donald Hall (1993) describes in Life Work his “best day.”
“The best day begins with waking early—I check the clock: damn! it’s only 3:00
a.m.—because I want so much to get out of bed and start working. Usually
something particular beckons so joyously—like a poem that I have good hope
for, that seems to go well. Will it look as happy today as it looked yesterday?”
Almost agonizing over the delay, he exquisitely paints his impatience to get out
of bed, the coffee making, the details of the morning until he finishes breakfast
reading the paper. And then, he writes,
As I approach the end of the Globe saving the sports section until last, I feel workexcitement
building, job-pressure mounting—until I need resist it no more but sit at
the desk and open the folder that holds the day’s beginning, its desire and its hope.
Then I lose myself. In the best part of the best day, absorbedness occupies me from
footsole to skulltop. (p. 41)
What is this sense of “absorbedness”? How do some people find it while others
feel “stuck” in meaningless lives? The vivid contrast between feeling stuck and
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being absorbed by work is presented by Philip Levine (1991) in the title poem
of the collection What Work Is. The narrator begins:
We stand in the rain in a long line
waiting at Ford Highland Park. For work.
You know what work is—if you’re
old enough to read this you know what
work is, although you may not do it.
Forget you. This is about waiting,
Then, as he shifts from one foot to another, he thinks about his brother, at
home sleeping after his “miserable night shift at Cadillac,” work the brother does
so that he may study German, to sing Wagner. Overcome by love, the narrator
asks himself why he has never expressed his love to his brother:
not because you’re too young or too dumb,
not because you’re jealous or even mean
or incapable of crying in
the presence of another man, no
just because you don’t know what work is.
(pp. 18–19)1
Work, in the beginning of the poem, is hard, unrewarding labor. Embittered,
the worker challenges the reader. “Forget you,” he says. This poem is about me,
about my waiting, about my doing and waiting to do. We all know, he says, in
this same tone, how dampening (like the rain) to the spirit work is. But then he
thinks of his brother’s devotion to an art and its craft, the learning of German,
and suddenly recognizes another kind of work that he does not understand. This
second kind of work is perhaps the kind that produces what Hall has called
absorbedness.
Jung (1931/1933) suggests that the need to find meaning in life occurs somewhere
around age forty, after the task of finding one’s place in the work world.
He suggests that this spiritual search is associated with a feminization of the man
and briefly sketches the idea that women become more associated with manly
traits in this same beginning middle age. It certainly remains unclear as to
whether or not women and men experience the same set of tasks and challenges
in their life-careers. However, many women writing about women have expressed
the same longings for meaning in work to which Jung alludes for men.
Heilbrun (1988) has repeatedly written about the change in women’s power
and needs at this same middle period of the forties to fifties. “We must recognize
what the past suggests: women are well beyond youth when they begin, often
viii Introduction
unconsciously, to create another story. Not even then do they recognize it as
another story. Usually they believe that the obvious reasons for what they are
doing are the only ones; only in hindsight, or through a biographer’s imaginative
eyes, can the concealed story be surmised” (pp. 109–110). Lindbergh
(1955/1978) also writes about the growing pains of middle age in a woman’s life:
“One might be free for growth of mind, heart, and talent; free at last for spiritual
growth; free of the clamping sunrise shell” (p. 88).
Indirectly, through the writers selected, this introduction begins to raise the
questions of the book: First, how does one find meaning in work? The answers
suggested in this initial exploration seem associated with what some might call
spirituality, what others would identify as a sense of harmony between the internal
and external realities, with a sense of preoccupation rather than occupation,
with immersion in work. Second, questions of age have been raised. Do writers
conclude that people seek meaning in their lives in their later years because that
is when they, the writers, are coming to grips with this issue, or are there identifiable
stages of career where meaning has different definitions? And there are gender-
related questions: How is women’s quest the same as or different from men’s?
In this book, Connections Between Spirit and Work in Career Development, the
chapter authors present their answers to the questions raised in this introduction
and at the same time raise other questions salient to the overarching considerations
of spirituality and work. All of the chapters are based upon strong theoretical
bases and each draws conclusions that have implications for application,
both by individuals and by the professionals helping them in their quest for
meaning through career development. However, the chapters differ in their
emphasis. The first six chapters lean more toward theory, whereas the remaining
five have a stronger orientation toward application.
Each of the first six chapters explores the broad questions of the meaning of
work through a different set of filters. In the first chapter, “The Spirit in Career
Counseling: Fostering Self-Completion Through Work,” Mark L. Savickas uses
the filters of psychology and career development theory. He explores the relationships
of spirit, character, and self-completion and describes the use of narrative
in meaning making for the counselor and client. The second chapter,
“Creating One’s Personal Meaning Throughout the Cycles of Life: Its Development
in Career, Psychosocial, and Faith Realms” by Beverly E. Eanes, continues
the use of the theoretical filter of the behavioral sciences. She reviews and compares
the life cycle stages of Erikson, the career development stages of Super, and
the stages of faith developed by Fowler. The third chapter moves in a different
Introduction ix
direction. In “Work as Worth: Money or Meaning,” Michael Demkovich turns to
philosophy. He uses two lenses—the social-economic and the moral-ethical—to
illuminate the answers to the questions of self, work, and society. David V.
Tiedeman and Anna Miller-Tiedeman, in Chapters 4 and 5, draw upon systems
theory and quantum mechanics as their theoretical filters. In “Ready, Set, Grow:
An Allegoric Induction into Quantum Careering,” Tiedeman engages in an imaginary
conversation with Winnie-the-Pooh and friends to discuss the implications
of the new scientific paradigms, particularly complexity and complementarity,
for understanding human behavior. In “The Lifecareer® Process Theory:
A Healthier Choice,” Miller-Tiedeman describes the systems theory–based
approach to understanding career and then links this understanding to wholeness
and health. The final theoretical filter, that of Christian theology, is presented
by Harvey L. Huntley, Jr., in the sixth chapter, “How Does ‘God-Talk’ Speak
to the Workplace?: An Essay on the Theology of Work.” After describing the
traditional and contemporary theological approaches to meaning in the postmodern
workplace, Huntley develops the idea of meaning as a dynamic experience
that includes paid and unpaid work, leisure, and worship in balance both
for individual spirituality and for the common good.
Part Two explores more specific applications to finding the connections
between spirit and career. Marian Stoltz-Loike, in Chapter 7, deals with “Creating
Personal and Spiritual Balance: Another Dimension in Career Development.”
After a concise review of the literature on work-family concerns, she presents a
model for balancing life through work, relationships, and spiritual practice. In
“Vocation as Calling: Affirmative Response or ‘Wrong Number,’” Chapter 8,
Carole A. Rayburn defines vocation broadly and then examines the barriers to
following a vocation and the benefits of doing so. She stresses the transcendent
nature of calling, first that it is not limited to any particular work and further that
it is not limited by the sexual or racial stereotyping imposed by societal or institutional
rules or roles. Chapter 9, by Deborah P. Bloch, “Spirituality, Intentionality,
and Career Success: The Quest for Meaning,” defines meaning as vocation
or harmony and describes two ways of achieving it: the use of meditation, visualization,
poetry, and other art forms; and the practice of intentionality (the
movement of matter by the mind) to bring about changes. The latter includes a
discussion of the relationship of intentionality to current work in subatomic
physics. Lee J. Richmond, in Chapter 10, “Spirituality and Career Assessment:
Metaphors and Measurement,” discusses traditional career assessment instruments
and instruments that are designed for spiritual assessment. In both cases,
x Introduction
she examines the usefulness of the instruments in helping individuals find meaning
in their work. The chapter stresses the uses of assessment instruments to connect
the experiential, the intuitive, and the spiritual. In Chapter 11, “Inspiriting
the Workplace: Developing a Values-Based Management System,” Samuel M.
Natale and Joanne C. Neher provide a series of steps that can be taken by organizations—
at individual and corporate levels—to bring about a workplace based
on values. They stress the need for a systems approach that incorporates affective,
behavioral, and cognitive components to move the culture from one based
on good as equated with purchasing power to one of spirituality. In the Epilogue,
Lee J. Richmond tries to connect all the foregoing chapters.
As the authors presented their ideas about connections between spirit and
work, many drew upon religious writings and experiences that held personal
meaning for them. In reviewing the chapters, we noted that these writings and
experiences drew most heavily from the Judeo-Christian tradition. In no way do
we mean to suggest that connections between spirit and work are associated only
with the religions mentioned or indeed with any religion. We appreciate the
openness of the chapter authors and hope that all readers will be able to make
the connections between spirit and work that are meaningful to them.
In any edited work, the order of the chapters is based on a mental model held
by the editors. In planning and implementing this book, we saw a rationale for
the order of chapters, a flow from one to the next. However, recurring themes
among the chapters could very well have suggested other orders of presentation.
Themes that arise in several or many of the chapters center on meaningfulness
through the relationship of the self to others, through the relinquishing of selfabsorption
or egocentricity, through balance, through contributions to or identification
with community, through change and process, and through prayer or
stillness. All of the chapters deal with current issues and recognize the perils of
the contemporary workplace with its volatile economics. Other connections
among chapters occur in the wide range of literature cited, from the Bible and
other sacred texts to psychology, philosophy, economics, and poetry to systems
theory and quantum mechanics. The reader is encouraged to find the many links
that exist among these separately authored works.
Finally, at the conclusion of the poem “Among School Children,” William B.
Yeats (1928/1962, p. 166) sings to us about the beauty of labor. He compares
labor to dancing, cautioning us not to bruise our bodies for the sake of our souls,
nor to seek “blear-eyed wisdom” by burning the proverbial “midnight oil.” He speaks
of the joy of harmony and wholeness in life and work; comparing the dancer to the
Introduction xi
chestnut tree in which the leaves, the flowers, and the root are all inseparable parts.
And then he addresses the essence of connectedness as he asks the critical question:
“O body swayed to music, O brightening glance, How can we know the dancer from
the dance?” Let us hope that this book is offered and received not with “blear-eyed
wisdom” but in the spirit of the dancer, each dancing a career to his or her personal
melody of meaning.

Table of Contents

Introduction
Deborah P Bloch

Part One - Theory: The Meaning of Work

Chapter One
The Spirit in Career Counseling: Fostering Self-Completion Through Work
Mark L Savickas

Chapter Two
Creating One's Personal Meaning Throughout the Cycles of Life: Its Development in Career, Psychological, and Faith Realms
Beverly E Eanes

Chapter Three
Work as Worth: Money or Meaning
Michael Demkovich

Chapter Four
Ready, Set, Grow: An Allegoric Induction into Quantum Careering
David V Tiedeman

Chapter Five
The Lifecareer® Process Theory: A Healthier Choice
Anna Miller-Tiedeman

Chapter Six
How Does 'God-Talk' Speak to the Workplace?: An Essay on the Theology of Work
Harvey L Huntley Jr

Part Two - Applications: Connecting Spirit and Career

Chapter Seven
Creating Personal and Spiritual Balance: Another Dimension in Career Development
Marian Stoltz-Loike

Chapter Eight
Vocation as Calling: Affirmative Response or 'Wrong Number'
Carole A Rayburn

Chapter Nine
Spirituality, Intentionality, and Career Success: The Quest for Meaning
Deborah P Bloch

Chapter Ten
Spirituality and Career Assessment: Metaphors and Measurement
Lee J Richmond

Chapter Eleven
Inspiriting the Workplace: Developing a Values-Based
Management System
Samuel M Natale and Joanne C Neher

Epilogue
Lee J Richmond

Contributors

Index