Читать книгу Getting Unstuck - Timothy Butler - Страница 10

My understanding of what we experience when we are stuck, and how we can get ourselves unstuck, has evolved out of more than thirty years of work as a social scientist, psychotherapist, and career counselor. I have worked at Harvard Business School and with people from a variety of organizations, from small startups to Fortune 500 corporations, as well as with individual executives during times of career transition. Some people have come to me when they have been let go or told that termination is imminent; others seek my counsel because they lack a sense of accomplishment in an otherwise stable and lucrative job or because they want to find more rewarding work. Whether consciously or not, they all come looking for meaning. As a result, I have focused much of my research on the “meaning of meaning”—on how individuals find a path to life situations that are satisfying and sustainable.

I am also a teacher of other counselors and mentors. At Harvard, I direct a counseling and coaching program, and I travel around the world to train coaches and counselors at other universities.

In addition to my work on the Harvard Business School faculty as a writer and researcher, I direct a career development program designed to help MBA students develop a vision of their career. When they first set foot on campus, the vast majority of students, at Harvard and elsewhere, lack a clear idea of what they want do with their lives. In fact, many enroll in an MBA program as the first step in finding their future. These students, during two short years in school, must discover how they differ from every other member of the class and how that will help them make the most of the career ahead.

I approach my work with both executives and students with two different but complementary perspectives. First, I am researcher using large databases and sophisticated quantitative analyses to study the way in which personality structure is related to job choice and career satisfaction. My databases now have psychological testing information on more than 150,000 business professionals and MBA students. This research has led to a number of theoretical models and psychological tests that I use in my teaching, mentoring, and counseling.

But I am not just a social scientist; I am also a psychotherapist. My second perspective, then, is that of mentor for the many students and clients who have worked with me personally as they faced their own crises and impasses. It is from the chair in my counseling office that I have learned the most about how people come to a vision of what they want their lives to be and about how they make the bold choices to make that vision real.