#033 Assessments are not prophecies
Or, how an assessment is a guide for possibilities, not an indicator of who you really are.
When I first learned about the Myers-Brigg Type Indicator, I was absolutely obsessed with it. Every person I met, I inquired what their type was, then cross-checked and referenced it for compatibility to my own. It was like the excitement of using astrology, back when I used to practice as a witch—dabbling in prognostication that I thought made me sound cool, sophisticated (to my teenage brain) and enlightened compared to the noobs who knew nothing about the impact the movements of the stars had on our fortunes and futures.
All things could be discerned from this gnostic knowledge, and if I had the key, at least insofar as I believed and understood was the path to true knowledge, then I could undo any anxieties I might have had about the future, discern it more accurately, and make better choices.
Well, that’s a solid bit of bosh.
All clinicians in my program were required to take a course that discussed how assessments are designed, used, and interpreted. This gives us the ability to understand criteria, determine (hopefully) validity based on statistical measures being used, and understand the shortcomings and strengths of the measures that we utilize in client diagnosis and interactions.
Suffice to say, I learned about how the MBTI works, it’s history, and a host of other measures that I’m allowed to conduct and interpret (LCP-level counselors do not do neurological tests or IQ tests, but we learn about them anyway for the purpose of interpreting and explaining results to clients).
One of my favorite types of counseling to do is career counseling, for multiple reasons:
It’s short-term, and usually geared around what is called solution-focused counseling, at least, in the way that it was taught to me.
Because it is short-term, clients usually have a narrower focus to discern what they want, where they are getting stuck, and develop a greater internal locus of control than I may see in other client populations.
Helping people to find value, meaningful work, and solve their own problems is a delight, because clients can work out what they want to do, where they want to go, and create an actionable plan because the goal is already defined: I want a job/career.
I have noticed that clients who do not have a well-developed sense of self—and sometimes a poor opinion of themselves in the form of low self-esteem can appear this way—often struggle to define what they want in terms of preference, whether that is a job, a career, and interests.
As can often be the case, clients will come in and have a vague notion of what they want but pin the responsibility of discernment on the therapist, as though we were some sage swami with life’s answers, an oracle that will reveal your inner truth to you after only peering at you for a few moments through the incense drifting around a shrouded, darkened room with upbeat platitudes and motivational posters, plush cushions and pillows scattered artfully around the seating area.
Nope.
Some of us are more humble than others, but we’re pretty human, and we don’t have magic wands, as much as I wish my job came with one.
Case study:
A recent client stated that they wanted a different job; they worked in entertainment sales and had tried applying for other jobs in other fields, without success.
When I asked them what their aspirations were, they stated they just wanted to be able to clock in and out, come home, relax, watch a movie, do their hobby, and that was it. They didn’t know if they wanted a career, promotions, or attainment of some kind. What they did want was to be paid in the $70k range from their $60k job.
Outside of the individual hobby, they had no other activities or interests, which is fine, however, that makes it difficult to start a deeper conversation about fields they might consider going into.
Someone who enjoys gardening, for example, might consider landscape architecture, landscape design, master gardener, horticulturist, botanist, park ranger, etc. Without an interest, it makes it difficult to shake the client loose, so to speak, from patterns of thinking and get them to think outside of the box. Some people cannot see a career in a given hobby, which is alright—not every interest or passion becomes “a career”. “What Color is Your Parachute”1 gave an excellent example of a man who turned his hobby of teaching a particular type of card game to senior citizens at a local community center into a small business, so much so that he gathered enough clients to quit his job and this became his main source of income.
The client listed above stated that they had chosen a degree in business because they thought it would help them get a job and get hired, but didn’t have any other interests that they got excited about. They had no interests from childhood, no hobbies outside of knitting, and couldn’t recall being interest in much except music when they were in highschool.
This is where assessments come in handy.
For clients who get stuck, I will often recommend some version of a career interest test—usually free, unless they have requested a specific test that I don’t have a good, well-created free-version to send them.
Regularly I will use the ONET Interest Profiler2, maintained by the US Department of Labor. The test is based on the Strong Interest Inventory (SII), with some other metrics by the US DL that they use in their metrics.
Recently, a second client came in who reported that they had had a period of difficulty finding a job for the last decade, suffering several layoffs, and recently quitting a job that had proven to have too great a workload — a research position — with regularly shifting goalposts, that made it difficult to keep up. Due to the long years of struggle to find gainful employment and especially after being laid off at least three times, the client reported they felt quite hopeless, and requested the SII to “tell me what I should do, and what will be a good fit for me”.
As the title of this piece suggests, assessments are not prophecies, and should not be used as an indicator of what you “should do”.
The magic pill fallacy
There’s probably an actual technical, defined term for this, but the belief is as follows:
This therapy, technique, drug, toy, food, workout routine, etc. is the thing that if you do it, will solve your problems, define your life, fix all the things. And for only four easy payments of $59.99 it can be yours! Act now!
Treatments and therapy often get treated this way. Recently, I had a conversation with my physical therapist about this topic.
“When do does maintenance end and I get better?” she relayed to me from other clients.
Well, better is a relative term based on the general level of functioning and improvement(s) made over time. Life is continually about maintenance. The PT gives you exercises to accomplish to strengthen your muscles or correct something, that with enough sustained repetition, as with any snowball effect, will build on itself to create greater strength. If you’ve had a serious injury or some kind of sickness, the truth is that sometimes (often) things do not return to the way they once were.
They can’t. We can only make the best of the situation we have and control for the things we can, to improve outcomes for later.
Assessments are quite a lot like this.
An assessment can be designed for many reasons, generally to determine some underlying element of the person taking the assessment. The ONET, featured above, covers careers based on interests you have for tasks or activities you may like:
wood working
teaching
working with spreadsheets
work with animals
manage people, store, etc.
act in a play
None of these are definitive of who you are. They aren’t values that you hold or believe in that enable you to navigate the world, stay true to whatever moral principles you’ve selected for yourself, or define the “you” that exists. And yet we often treat assessments of all flavors and types as prognostication tools—tests that can be flawed because their designers are human and imperfect, and trust that these tools will reveal some deeper truth about ourselves, what we want, and what we should do.
We use these tools as proxy parents, oracles, guides, mentors—to affirm whatever it is we believe about ourselves—positive or negative, as a form of confirmation bias—or give it the vast power to determine our decisions for career, love, life, choices.
Client 1 was a quiet, unassuming young person, who, very likely, had not been challenged often, or ever, to consider who they are and what they really want out of life. With a muddled view of, or without a deep sense of self and what is important to you, it can be difficult to determine what is important, what do I like as much as what do I dislike.
There is an important caveat to Client 2, which they revealed in the intake forms and I purposely left out till this point: the individual had been diagnosed with Bipolar II (no manic episodes reported). This piece is critically important to understanding not only the difficulty the person had experienced—including several major depressive episodes that hindered certain elements of their life—but where the feelings of hopelessness, despair, and sadness were coming from. This person felt like a failure even though they logically knew that they had nothing to do with the layoffs that sent them packing from semi-decent jobs. For them, the test is a last effort to figure out where they belong and what they should do—second-guessing many of their career and life choices.
But a test/assessment can only reveal so much, based on your energy and ability to focus that day, as well as other life elements that are coming into play: a divorce, a breakup, as sick family member, some jerk on the highway who cut you off, sleeping past your alarm by just enough time to frantically set you on edge and rush haphazardly through everything, setting you careening from one activity to the next.
Assessments are useful measures for helping you to consider your options, but they aren’t determinants for all of your life’s successes and failures. Developing an internal locus of control—that sense of agency that you have the ability to impact your life and make changes, despite difficult challenges—is one of the key, integral aspects to counseling. When you feel that you do have some sense of control in some way over what is happening in your life, your outcomes will be better because you have a growth/survival mindset, and are not giving agency away to external forces that have neither intelligence nor some greater plan to stray you from your course.
We often give assessments and tests too much power and authority to inform us of our worth, and the question of what should I do is a moral one. The truth is, to determine this, we need to go into the proverbial desert, a period of struggle, suffering, and ultimately change, to know ourselves as we really are—both our strengths and our flaws, the things we hide from ourselves. Sometimes, a mentor or spiritual advisor, as one might find in Catholicism that my Catholic peeps may be familiar with, can help facilitate this, however, the purpose of that process is grow more deeply with God.
For those who don’t follow that religious bent, we can borrow vocation as more of an understanding for what should I do.
Exercises for discernment:
Below are some helpful questions, including the document I use with clients to help them discern what is important to them. This can be a useful endeavor when helping a client figure out what they want to do and where to go in life.
If you completed the above document, consider these things:
What were your most important values?
How did you come to choose these values?
If you inherited these values, where did they come from? Who gave them to you?
Do you like or dislike these values? Why?
How do these items dictate the way you conduct your affairs?
How have you honored these values?
How have you betrayed or been untrue to them?
In what ways do these values help you determine what you do (for work) and how you work? If you don’t utilize them at work, where do they impact your life?
Articles on Career:
Books
Other activities
Consider a person from history, man or woman, whom you admire or has piqued your interest. Do more than just a Wikipedia read—go and read a biography and research the person. Try: Saints, philosophers, humanitarians, inventors, scientists, statesmen, entrepreneurs, explorers, recovering addicts and alcoholics. There are many great men and women, of humble and mean origin, who have overcome.
What do you admire about the person?
What challenges did they encounter in their life, and how did they overcome them?
How did the challenges influence their decisions and inspire them to overcome and/or pursue their goals?
Consider interviewing a person in your family or workplace, a friend of a friend, who has pivoted careers or overcome great disadvantages. Ask them the same battery of three questions above and spark a conversation.
Now, what can you learn from this and how can you apply it to your own life?
How to Break Free From Dopamine Culture, by
Why is it So Hard to Know if You’re Helping? by
Conflicting Truths About Therapists, by
General Housekeeping
For those of us celebrating the Easter Triduum, I wish you all a happy Holy Saturday, that your Good Friday was reflective and peaceful, and a joyous Easter Octave and Season. Today we mark the time until Christ rises from the tomb and conquers death, revealing his promise of resurrection and redemption. Christ is Risen.
For my non-Christian, non-practicing readers, have a happy, restful, and good weekend. We’ll see you in two weeks after the total solar eclipse.
The prologue, chapter 1 and 2 are now live on
.Till next time.
Pax Christi 🕊️
Rachael Varca is a pre-licensed therapist and writer of more than fifteen years experience. She writes at The Practical Therapist and Inking Out Loud, a collection of essays, poems, and home of the serialized novel, Heart of Stone.
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What Color is Your Parachute? — https://parachutebook.com/
O*NET Interest Profiler, U.S. Department of Labor,
The article on the floor looks like a green version of a Schmoo; an object in Lil' Abner comic books. Probably before your time.