- Has emerged from the disciplines of economics, mathematics, biology, and physics.
- Offers a different way of understanding the complexity and uncertainty of human development in general and career development specifically.
The concept of Attraction:
Pryor and Bright (2011) defined attraction as a process used by individuals to organize a coherent self and then maintain and sustain it when change occurs.
- Point Attractor: Pattern of behavior often is focused on choosing the best occupation based on a match between their personalities, abilities, and interests.
- An extreme may be seen as having tunnel vision, exclusive preoccupation, overconfidence in decision making, etc.
- Pendulum Attractor: Describes swings in behavior, this pattern of behavior engages in dichotomous either-or thinking and may hold a rigid belief.
- Sometimes clients in this thinking will rarely be able to genertae win-win scebarios.
- Torus Attractor: Describes as routine, habitual, and predicatable thinking and behavior.
- Individuals who use this pattern try to control theor lives by organizing and classifying people and things.
- Strange Attractor: (Open systems thinking) Recognizes the possibility of change being non-linear in the sense that a small difference may result in every major reconfiguration of the systen.
- Promotes the ability for individuals to adopt and grow.
- Chaos and Spirituality: Importance of integrating spirituality into conceptualizations of career development. There are 5 dimensions.
- Connection: How we interconnect with the human community, the world, and the universe.
- Purpose: Focuses on humans' sense of meaning, purpose, and significance.
- Transcendence: The idea that there is a greater power beyond our understanding.
- Harmony: Attention to how everything fits together into a whole.
- Calling: Idea that individuals often perceive that what they are doing with their lives is a result of being called.
- Chaos theorists have observed that change can occur in systems either gradually or very quickly. The effect of change is to reconfigure the system.
- When change occurs, it is called a phase shift because the system will have changed from its original configuration.
- Shiftwork describes the work of career counselors helping clients deal with these phase shifts or changes in life. There are ll phase shifts page 46.
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