Journeys to Professional Excellence

Stories of Courage, Innovation, and Risk-Taking in the Lives of Noted Psychologists and Counselors

Frederic P. Bemak, Robert K. Conyne, Frederic P. Bemak, Robert K. Conyne

• Publisher: SAGE Publications, Inc
• Year: 2017
• Print ISBN: 9781506337142
• eBook ISBN: 9781506353470
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Education
• Subtopic: Counseling in Career Development

Journeys to Professional Excellence: Stories of Courage, Innovation, and Risk-Taking in the Lives of Noted Psychologists and Counselors edited by Frederic P. Bemak and Robert K. Conyne explores the professional journeys of well-known psychologists and counselors, examining factors that contributed to their successes and struggles in the field. Powerful narratives cover the challenges and joys related to ethnic identity; moving from poverty; finding significance; dealing with immigrant status; exploring public policy; challenging the status quo; experiencing serendipity and exploring one's way; moving into new professional roles; and taking risks. These stories will ignite passion in future psychologists and counselors by helping them reflect on the relationship between their own personal and professional identities.  

1 Courage, Innovation, and Risk-Taking in Professional Journeys

Robert K. Conyne

Frederic P. Bemak

Professional Journeys

We all are all living our lives with the richness of our experiences and personal journeys, sometimes by happenstance and sometimes with focused intentionality. This book is about life journeys and examines the “professional journeys” of notable psychologists, counselors, and academics. It describes each of their stories and the lessons we might learn from them to help illuminate our own journeys. One way to think of a professional journey is as “a work trek: a more-or-less focused wandering, full of highs and lows, ups and downs, as the Beatles said, ‘a long and winding road’ for many. But, if we are mindful, we can take away the obstructions to reflect and find the meaning that’s there; to locate some magic in the ordinary” (Conyne, 2014, p. 15).

Through the lessons that emerge from the first-person accounts of the professional journeys contained in this book, we hope to highlight aspects of courage, innovation, and risk-taking. We believe these behaviors will be needed ever more within academia and the helping professions as people and the larger society confront significant challenges to psychological well-being, such as poverty, injustice, racism, homophobia, sexism, oppression, discrimination, civil and religious conflict, and powerlessness.

Courage

We have asked well-known psychology and counseling professionals to describe their successful professional lives and discuss how courage, innovation, and risk-taking influenced their professional careers. Our goal is to provide you with inspiration and support to continue—or, perhaps, to begin—injecting your own careers with these elements. We also seek to encourage faculty, educators, and practitioners to infuse training programs and practice with clear attention to these domains.

Along with wisdom, courage is considered to be a universal virtue (Snyder & Lopez, 2007), prized across cultures around the globe. In fact, Winston Churchill is credited with stressing that “courage is rightly esteemed the first of human qualities . . . because it is the quality which guarantees all others” (Maxims, 1949).

Courage is a multidimensional construct. Within the Values in Action classification system in positive psychology (Peterson & Seligman, 2004), courage is identified as one of six key character domains. It is considered to embody those emotional strengths that emphasize accomplishing goals in spite of strong internal or external opposition. These strengths include bravery, where a person steps forward and defines his or her behavior based on convictions about what is right and just for everyone, even if this is seen as unpopular in the eyes of others. Persistence is part of having courage so that despite barriers and obstacles to impede courageous actions, individuals persevere for the good of others. Thus courage would include having emotional strength, personal integrity, and an enthusiasm and zest for life and life’s situations in order to speak the truth despite resistance and a lack of support by others.

The work examining courage has led to the classification of four broad types of courage (O’Byrne, Lopez, & Petersen, 2000). The first type is physical courage, which occurs when someone takes physical steps to help others in dangerous or perilous situations. This can be seen when someone rushes into a fire to save another person in a burning house, or intervenes with a group of bullies who are taunting and threatening an individual, or dives into shark-infested waters to rescue an individual who is being attacked by a shark. The second type of courage is classified as moral courage, which is shown when someone stands up for what is right and moral despite strong disapproval and the threat of rejection and social isolation. Moral courage does not necessarily involve physical courage, since it is an action that demonstrates and makes a statement about a moral position. For example, Rosa Parks, who refused to move from her seat on the bus, which made a statement that established a tone for the entire civil rights movement, and the man who stood in front of the column of tanks that were there to suppress the demonstrations in Tiananmen Square in China, are examples of individuals displaying moral courage. The third type of courage is classified as vital courage. Vital courage relates to perseverance when despite personal and sometimes immutable obstacles, one continues to act and promote actions and activities that help oneself and others reach their goals, which improves lives and life’s conditions. For example, Lauren Hill, who continued to play college basketball while terminally ill as she sought to draw attention and funding to prevent her disease from inflicting others in the future, and Magic Johnson, who publicly announced that he had contracted the HIV virus in order to promote treatment and research for HIV/AIDS, are illustrations of vital courage. The fourth type of courage is psychological courage, which is demonstrated when a person shows strength while confronting personal challenges, threats, destructive habits, or behavioral dysfunctions. Every day, untold numbers of people are buffeted by intense stressors, destructive relationships, unpredictable calamities, and consequences of their own negative behaviors. Coping with these difficult life events requires a psychological courage for which there is relatively little training available (Putnam, 1997).

Courage provides a primary bulwark that supports and drives many other attitudes and actions. Two of the main characteristics that we see as an essential link with courage are innovation and risk-taking. Given the prominence of these two virtues, we asked the contributing authors in this book to consider these two additional domains in their life reviews. For example, many of us are familiar with the courageous, innovative, and risk-taking life of Jackie Robinson, who confronted and withstood incessant racist insults and attacks when he entered professional baseball as the first African American to ever play in the major leagues. Thus in 1947 (and beyond), when he steadfastly broke the “color line” in the major leagues, despite persistent bigotry and racism from teammates, fans, and the public, his courage opened up formerly closed opportunities in many other areas beyond professional baseball for African Americans and other oppressed minorities in the United States. It has been said, when comparing the legacy of Jackie with that of the iconic baseball star, Babe Ruth, that “Ruth changed the way baseball was played; Jackie Robinson changed the way Americans thought” (Swain, 2006). Closer to home, the ordinary work lives of psychologists, counselors, and university faculty members often contain instances of inestimable courage. These professionals assist clients and students (or take action directly themselves) to challenge oppressive administrators and institutions that stifle creativity and good work, confront substance abuse, take on discrimination, find creative ways to continue the daily struggle of supporting and caring for a partner with depression, and far more. In many ways, we see courage as an umbrella term that covers and serves to motivate other related and important expressions of human thought and output.

Why are we according courage such a prominent place within the work of psychologists and counseling professionals? As we touched on earlier, it is important to realize that courage contributes substantially to the ability of people to more effectively cope on a daily basis with life’s never-ending stressors and demands and enhance the quality of life for oneself and others. Seeing one’s way through the desiderata of life, with ongoing challenges connected with managing work, relationships, finances, family, and life’s demands, takes what might be called “ordinary courage.” From the world of therapy, more particularly, it takes courage to do the right thing ethically in difficult situations or, with reference to prevention and social justice in mental health, to “swim upstream” against the strong tides of conventional practices. It requires courage to take on new professional roles, such as moving from what may have become a comfortable faculty role to a new one, such as a dean. It takes courage to become a client who challenges one’s own ineffective or damaging attitudes and behaviors and who takes the risk to change.

Moreover, we hold biases that connect with courage. Dire life conditions, such as poverty or oppression, are lived by far too many people across the world and need desperately to be changed for the better, and there are civil conflicts and wars causing millions of people to flee their homes throughout the globe. Psychologists and counselors can make more significant contributions to help people in these types of situations than we are making at present. In order to become more effective in promoting needed change, practitioners and faculty must become increasingly aware of what we value, assertively act on those values, become engaged in innovative and creative practice and training, be willing to take appropriate risks, and—yes—be motivated by courage to challenge the status quo and challenge people and systems that may be blocking the growth and development of all people. We salute all those in psychology and counseling, both the “famous” (such as Viktor Frankl, who found meaning through his concentration camp experience and went on to develop the system of logotherapy), and those practitioners who have not achieved fame or glory but who stand courageously day after day with clients or students experiencing the incessant challenges of life and who challenge systems that create barriers for their client’s growth and development. Courage as a psychologist, counselor, or faculty member requires more than just “doing one’s job”; it necessitates going “above and beyond,” with an aim for the improvement of psychological, social, and ecological health.

Courage, Innovation, and Risk-Taking: The Pathway to Personal and Systems Change

Helping others through counseling and psychotherapy is a good and noble thing, indeed. It brings relief and benefit to clients every day. Yet, dominant psychology and counseling practice and training models tend to place practitioners in responsive, if not passive, modes. Conyne (1987) labeled this traditional orientation the “counseling services paradigm,” defining the focus on three dimensions that include targeting individuals one at a time, tackling already existing problems for remedial interventions, and delivering direct services face-to-face.

Certainly, courage, innovation, and risk-taking are involved when the traditional counseling services paradigm is invoked. It is satisfying and rewarding but not easy work. Listening and responding to clients who may present complex and high-risk situations, such as being abused, depressed, or suicidal, requires practitioners to possess not only expertise but also strength and courage. However, it is our contention—and bias—that it also is necessary for psychologists and counseling professionals to supplement this traditional way of working by seeking to influence changes in the conditions and systems that bring clients to their offices in the first place, that is, to exert a preventive effect that advocat...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Contents
• Acknowledgments
• 1 Courage, Innovation, and Risk-Taking in Professional Journeys
• 2 The Road to MatteringChallenging the Status Quo, Promoting Wellness and Fairness
• 3 Peace to Our Ghosts
• 4 Taking the Scenic RouteA Professional Journey
• 5 Travels With a Contrarian Person, Psychologist, ActivistBecoming “Radicalized” by Injustice, Violence, and Stasis
• 6 Journey to the West
• 7 Journey to Advance EquityA Never-Ending Road
• 8 Prepared Serendipity Mixed With Naïve but Eager Curiosity
• 9 My Journey as a Chinese Immigrant Counseling Psychologist
• 10 Public Policy’s Highly Personalized Nature
• 11 Buscando Mi Propio CaminoA Journey of Professional Identity and Honesty
• 12 A Journey From a Single-Wide Trailer to the White House
• 13 My Professional Journey
• 14 Common Themes of Courage, Innovation, and Risk-Taking
• About the Editors
• About the Contributors