Chaos Theory

• Emerged from economics, mathematics, biology, and physics
• Emphasizes wholeness and change
• Attraction - process used by individuals to organize a coherent self and then maintain and sustain it when change occurs
• Point Attractor: individuals focus on choosing the best occupation based on a match between their personalities, abilities, and interests
• Tunnel vision
• Pendulum Attractor: swings in behavior
• Likely to engage in either-or thinking
• Torus Attractor: Routine, habitual, and predictable thinking and behavior
• Try to control their lives by organizing and classifying people and things
• Like consistency and routine
• Strange Attractor: Go towards change and new things
• Promotes ability to grow
• Spirituality
• Connection: How we are interconnected with the human community, world, and the universe
• Purpose: Human's sense of meaning, purpose, and significance
• Transcendence: Idea that there is a greater power beyond our understanding
•  Harmony: How everything fits together into an intelligible whole
• Calling: Idea that individuals often perceive that what they are doing with their lives is a result of being called
• Shiftwork
• Change is as a result of a phase shift

Constructivism

• 1990s and first two decades of 21st century
• Individuals construct their own realities - there is no absolute
• Constructivism: Describes how individuals construct their own ideas about themselves, others, and their worlds as they try to make sense out of their real-life experiences
• Knowledge is constructed by people (and does not reflect actual reality)
• Social Constructivism: Interpretations about how the social world is constructed by social processes and relational practices
• How social or external processes shape the career development of individuals (rather than how individuals shape their career development based on how they view themselves, others, and their worlds)
• Individuals construct their life using both internal (self) and external (social) processes
• Requires counselor to enter into the psychosocial sphere of a person's career system
• Help clients tell their story in their own language
• Relationship between client and counselor is very important
• Clients construct their worlds and can therefore deconstruct and reconstruct their assumptions and perceptions