Therefore, keep an open mind about the sources of an individual’s
vocational interests, abilities, and attitudes.Make no assumptions about
either the person’s malleability or lack of malleability, about roots
in nature or nurture. Counselors can look for patterns in how an
individual seeks, avoids, and experiences different environments,
and they can experiment and theorize. But they can never clearly
distinguish the genetic from the cultural in any person’s career be-
havior. Only the individual involved is directly privy to the signals
of the inner compass, so only the individual can decide in which
direction it points. Counselors can, however, be the midwives to
self-insight. They can help counselees distinguish the internal and
external forces propelling them, the ways in which one force be-
comes transmuted into the other (the internal externalized and the
external internalized), and, finally, how our temperament affects our
ability to develop and use self-knowledge.
Likewise, make no assumptions about the sources of group differ-
ences in interests, abilities, and attitudes. They too have both genetic
and nongenetic components, in all likelihood, so group disparities
are no guide to the sources of difference among individuals or to
how a particular individual should be counseled.
Case Studies
K, a seventeen-year-old male Japanese-Chinese-American high
school graduate, and E, a twenty-year-old female college sopho-
more, are at different stages of career development. (Their cases are
discussed in Chapter Two.) This can be seen by applying the five-
step diagnostic scheme described earlier. E has named a reasonably
coherent set of options (Step 1) for which she seems to have ade-
quate interest and ability (Step 2) but is not clearly satisfied with
them (Step 3). K has named a motley set of options that has little
consistent relation to his assessed interests and abilities. Both E and
K, however, may have unnecessarily restricted their alternatives,
although for different reasons. Both are still struggling to move fur-
ther from the non-optimal birth niches that they are unable to fully
accept (E) or reject (K), perhaps owing to close family ties.
138 CAREER CHOICE AND DEVELOPMENT