Making perspectives flexible by introducing new career metaphors
Metaphors express a certain vision on career that can get the attention, but at the same
time inhibit the vision’s complexity and restrict the exploration process. This is why,
starting from the multiple metaphor technique (Morgan, 1986), the authors suggest using
several career metaphors. This way the counselling process leads to a more complex and
realistic career perspective. The more flexible our vision is, the more career metaphors we
will have, opening up multiple options (Amundson, 1997). Perspectives resulting from
multiple metaphors can be complementary facets of a career, or be integrated in a
complex and more realistic image of one.
Developing multiple metaphors is a second level strategy (following the exploration of
the initial metaphor) that requests clients to consider a way of conceptualising their career
form another perspective (e.g. from other people’s point of view, which allows exploring
their relationship with the others). Counsellors may propose a list of metaphors from
which clients will pick one suited to them, or they may ask clients to propose other
metaphors.
Target population
Adolescents
Expressing the metaphors we operate with is not only done through words, but also
images. The access to our representations, through words, does not always allow seizing
many details in real time. Alternative exploring modalities:
a. drawing (Amundson, 1998). Through drawings we express both elements
hard to phrase, such as the emotional component of a metaphor, and the
relation between the elements of a metaphor;
b. photography (Mignot, 2000, 2004). It is held that an important tool in
identifying the metaphors counselees operates with is photographing the
significant elements in their life.In counselling adolescents or people starting out in life, one of the most important stages
is discovering their values and principles, as well as their expectations from a career.
Expressing them verbally calls for rigid or stereotyped metaphors in some cases. There
are many desirable values in society that adolescents mention first, and are often merely
statements.
In order to investigate the values and expectations of a person more deeply, images can
also be used. The photographs taken by someone and those they relate to are a