The 2010 Leona Tyler Address: From the Homogeneous Hills of North Dakota to My Kaleidoscopic World Today

Abstract

This article focuses on life career perspectives within the field of counseling psychology. The first goal is to promote reflection and discussion of counseling psychologists’ planning and decision making as it pertains to their career journey; the second goal is to promote additional discussion around implicit and explicit cultural perspectives in scholars’ research paradigms in counseling psychology. To address both goals, the author centers this article around four interrelated stories in his own career path: (a) finding passion and meaning in his research, (b) broadening his worldview, (c) the power of relationships in his adult life, and (d) growing and stretching into new professional roles. In addition, the author discusses two parallel streams: (a) the evolution of his career as well as (b) defining moments, early life experiences, serendipitous events, worldviews, decisions, and people who greatly affected the course of his career. One’s career journey is typically affected by a wide range of factors. The author concludes that given the wide range of factors that can affect individuals’ careers, including happenstance, it is virtually impossible to accurately predict one’s career journey very far into the future. Given the continued rapid expansion of the global village, there will be more demands for more forward-looking counseling psychologists to meet the increasingly complex societal needs of the future. The author believes that the inclusion of the cultural context will become increasingly important in all of the work of counseling psychologists in the coming decades and thus particularly important as scholars train the next generation of counseling psychologists.