|
|
Ready or Not, Here Life Comes - Book Summary
By Dr. Mel Levine
Dr. Mel Levine's latest book (released in January 2005) is called Ready or Not, Here Life Comes. It focuses on the way in which we need to go about preparing kids for the real world of work and career success. The following are some excerpts from Dr. Levine's new book.
I doubt if any mother, father, or teacher ever actually posed the question to me "what will he be like when he's in his 20's?" But I know they never stopped thinking about it and may have wondered and worried mostly in silence. As a pediatrician who for more than 30 years has treated children and adolescents struggling with their own brain wiring, I myself have come to realize that the core issue for any developing child is who is he turning into and, more specifically, what he will be like when he grows up.
I have accompanied countless kids on journeys through their school years. And I have been able to witness their varied outcomes. I have gotten to meet them and learn from them as they progressed toward and into young adult life. Now I find myself preoccupied with how and why different kids turn out so differently. I'm especially concerned with those who don't turn out so well and what we could have done differently for them as children and adolescents.
In recent years I have been stunned by the plight of far too many individuals who seem unprepared for the crossover from education to work. There are convincing reasons to believe that a swirl of factors unique to our contemporary culture and embedded in our educational practices are harming children. In particular, these forces are stunting mental growth and leaving developing minds unready to launch themselves into productive and fulfilling adult lives.
I decided to write Ready or Not, Here Life Comes so that I could join others in exploring the various forms and manifestations of what I call work life unreadiness, a condition affecting many individuals in and around their 20's who come to feel abandoned and anguished. They start to question their own self-worth, and they are prone to some awful mistakes in their choice of career or in the ways they perform as novices on the job. Work-life unreadiness may have its onset right after high school, in college, while out hunting for employment or during the startup phases of a job or a career.
The length of the startup period varies conspicuously - from just a few years to a decade or more of uncertainty and justified anguish. Some emerging adults take longer to start up a stable work life than do others. Some never stop starting; they can't move ahead toward a career repeated false starts or else they keep changing course because they have no course. They start up and stall out! Others feel stymied in their work choices, while some of their friends effortlessly and expediently move into job roles that fit them as snugly as their favorite athletic socks.
We are in the midst of an epidemic of work-life unreadiness because an alarming proliferation of emerging adults are unable to find a good fit between their minds and their career directions. Like sea birds mired in an oil spill, these fledgling men and women are grounded, unable to take flight toward a suitable career. Either they are crippled before having a chance to beat their wings or they have tumbled downward in the early stages of their trajectories. Because they are not finding their way, they may feel as if they are going nowhere and have nowhere to go.
I have listened to the laments and noticed the moistened eyelids of promising young people who at age 18, 20, 21, or 29 have no idea what they want to make of their work-lives. Some may be too accustomed to having their activities explicitly spelled out and scheduled for them and as a result are having trouble making their own significant decisions. Others may have known what goals they wanted to pursue but then their occupational pot of gold lost all its allure; the romance of big business, engine repair, law or academic life turned out not to be as advertised. It was no fun. Or it was repetitious ("boring"). Or it entailed handling heaps of minutiae and menial tasks - grunt work. Perhaps their careers entail too much delay at gratification, a process our kids are not accustomed to enduring. And maybe their work calls for far too much playing up to people that they do not particularly like or respect. As one person we interviewed put it, "I do not think you can be prepared for the transition. No one can tell you what it is like to get up at 8 everyday and go to work everyday to scratch out a living so you can have 48 hours on the weekend to do what you like, when you've had 21 years of doing what you want!" Any earlier idealism has given way to disillusionment.
Some anxious junior staffers may have chosen their particular roads for all the wrong reasons. Some embarked upon a career odyssey without fully understanding what that journey was destined to be about. No one told them what dental school or dental practice truly entailed or if it was explained to them perhaps they were not ready to hear it. Other young adults find themselves bound to an occupation from which they'd like to bail out, but feel chained to their entry positions, perhaps the pay is good or it would be too hard and risky to backtrack, or no other available slots look any better. Finally, there are those unqualified for the peculiar rigors and aches of their grown up work. It may be that they have underlying learning differences, so their current abilities have failed to match their present interests; you're in for some trouble if whatever you like to do most you do poorly. Some people have strengths they're not interested in exploiting and interests that bring out all their weaknesses.
In all these instances, years of schooling and parenting have entirely missed that elusive target, work life readiness. Our graduates may well lack the practical skills, the habits, the behaviors, the real world insights, and the frames of mind pivotal for career startup. Their parents and teachers have unwittingly let them down. Adulthood has ambushed them; its demands have taken them by surprise. Nevertheless, time won't stand still: ready or not, here life comes!
Every parent and all educators want to believe they are preparing kids for the real world. But since that real world keeps changing, it should be obvious that teaching and parenting must keep pace and respond to the new demands that lie ahead as children grow toward the startup of their work lives. But are they keeping pace? I don't think so. It is time to set in motion a system through which we can prevent the devastation of work-life unreadiness. Through a combined campaign conducted by parents and schools, we can meet this challenge. We can see to it that the growth processes flourish as a child ascends the school years.
The 12 vital growth processes can be divided into four general areas, conveniently remembered as the four "I's": Inner Direction, Interpretation, Instrumentation, and Interaction. Each of these themes contains three of the growth processes. In this book I focus on fostering these processes in an age range that spans 11 to 19, although some readers may perceive implications for the teaching and rearing of even younger children. The areas of needed growth are summarized as follows.
Inner direction: The cogent adage "know thyself" deserves to hog the spotlight when it comes to work-life readiness. Inner Direction refers to an individual's insight into himself or herself. Often, unready startup grownups harbor unrealistic or highly distorted senses of who they are and what they can do. They may have false perceptions of their strengths, weaknesses and personal values. They may have never developed specific aims and aspirations or they may have fallen short in sparking the self-motivation and drive needed to move to achieve their goals. One lofty challenge then for parents and teachers is to help kids know themselves and to teach them to become goal setters and show them how to strategically reach short and long-term aims.
Interpretation: If Inner Direction enables children to understand themselves and where they are headed, Interpretation, the second "I," is about getting to know the outside world, acquiring insights into the conditions in which they live and the phenomena that surround them. School doesn't always provide for that. There are too many students who memorize their way through their classes without understanding enough of what they are learning. We fail to teach kids how to understand. Young children often recite the Pledge of Allegiance without understanding a good portion of the vocabulary it contains. Students' comprehension needs to extend to ideas, issues, expectations, and processes. They need to get proficient at on the job learning, interpreting new knowledge and integrating what can be gathered from day to day experience. To learn from experience they have to be good at interpreting that experience! Ultimately, accurate interpretation brings with it good judgment and decision making, along with the ability to evaluate critically opportunities, issues, products, and even people.
Instrumentation: The third of the four I's refers to the creation of a working tool kit, the skills fostering high quality thinking and productivity. These include the right kinds of organizational skills, the capacity to harness and allocate one's mental energy, brainstorming power, creativity, and the ability to handle perplexing dilemmas.
Interaction: The final set of growth processes takes aim at interpersonal skills. The invaluable growth process of communication gets included as it enables an individual to use words and construct sentences that convey personal thoughts accurately, convince others of a point of view, and cement relationships. Alliance formation is a second interaction growth process, supporting the cultivation and maintenance of solid work life relationships. And, finally, interaction includes sophisticated political behavior in sensing or knowing what it will take to make the grade and win the approval of individuals who could have a significant influence on one's future success and happiness. These are the important people including those with whom or for whom you work, the power brokers who, whether you know it or not, ultimately will be casting ballots either for or against you.
No one achieves a perfect score when it comes to the growth processes; we all lag in some areas. But young adults unready for a career startup are likely to be seriously deficient or else harbor a cluster of underdeveloped growth processes. Their growth may have been stunted somehow and at some point. Or else the processes have never been germinated in the first place, perhaps as a result of a shortcoming in their own brain wiring or in their family or school experience.
Much can be done to avert the tragic plight of those who are unready to launch a meaningful career. Parents, schools, and policy makers need to join forces to ensure that our kids are getting ready to work!
 Read a Book Excerpt
|
|
|