Shadowing Practice: The Psychology of Career Decisions | Sharon Belden Castonguay | TEDxWesleyanU - Learn English Speaking with YouTube
C2
Rebekah Kelley Reviewer Recently, I was forced to assume an alternate identity.
161 sentences
If sentences are too short or too long, click Edit to adjust them.
1
Rebekah Kelley Reviewer Recently, I was forced to assume an alternate identity.
2
It started with this cane.
3
I suffered a knee injury,
4
and while I will soon have surgery and be able to walk normally again,
5
my orthopedist assures me that my running days are over.
6
Now, for those of you who only run when chased,
7
you may be thinking, what a stroke of luck!
8
Look, a doctor-sanctioned excuse not to work out.
9
But since taking up running after college,
10
it's become more than just a pastime for me,
11
but part of who I am.
12
Runner has become one of my identities,
13
and giving up that identity has turned out to be more painful than the injury itself.
14
Now, like everybody, I have a lot of identities.
15
I am a woman, a mother,
16
an American, a proud native of Rhode Island.
17
I've had a number of professional identities in my life.
18
Tour guide, camp counselor, school teacher,
19
graduate student in developmental psychology, podcast host, career counselor.
20
And it is through my career counseling practice that I've come to recognize how personal identities can affect and create professional identities.
21
I'm going to talk a little bit more about how and why this is so,
22
but first I'd like to address why it's important.
23
According to Gallup, 87% of employees worldwide are not engaged in their work.
24
There are a lot of people who study this phenomenon,
25
largely because it has a pretty substantial effect on the bottom line.
26
Now, the organizations and consultants that study this tend to look at the external factors for why people are not engaged.
27
Things like office culture or wages.
28
As a career counselor I'm more interested in internal reasons like
29
why someone chose a particular line of work in the first place.
30
And my field of career development has looked at this somewhat differently over time.
31
Of course throughout much of human history people didn't actually choose a line of work.
32
You basically did whatever your parents did and what you did for a living was prescribed by where you were from,
33
your gender, and your social class.
34
But during the first and second industrial revolutions,
35
as people started moving from the farms into the cities,
36
the world of work broadened.
37
And the very first career counseling office opened in 1908.
38
The Vocational Bureau was located in Boston's North End neighborhood
39
and served the local community free of charge to help them navigate this new world of work.
40
They interviewed them extensively about their backgrounds,
41
skills, and interests, and provided background about local employers.
42
Now obviously this wasn't a particularly widespread phenomenon,
43
but the military started to take an interest in their work.
44
They needed to figure out a way of putting workers placed
45
into jobs to help serve the war efforts during World War I and World War II.
46
And by the Second World War,
47
they had a lot of psychologists that they had hired to develop tests specifically for this purpose.
48
Some of these tests are actually still used today in various forms and it's possible that some of you have taken them,
49
maybe through a high school guidance counselor or through an employer.
50
Now by the time I started in the field of career counseling in the late 90s,
51
we were in the midst of the third industrial revolution, the digital age.
52
And the testing industry was still alive and well,
53
but by then a new paradigm had emerged that held
54
that what we really needed to be concerned about was our clients' passions.
55
Do what you're passionate about and you'll never work a day in your life, right?
56
I remember early on attending a professional development session with a
57
woman who was considered one of the biggest names in my field,
58
a very successful author.
59
She told the story of a client with whom she had worked who was really difficult simply
60
because she didn't have any clearly articulated passions.
61
Finally, one day in desperation,
62
the counselor said to her,
63
give me a sense of something you're interested in, anything at all.
64
The woman kind of shrugged somewhat sheepishly and said,
65
well, I've always been kind of interested in gorillas.
66
Triumphant, the counselor announced that she had gone on to work for a local zoo,
67
and voila, problem solved, passion wins.
68
Now at the time, I was working with business students who,
69
generally speaking, were not interested in gorillas.
70
In fact, I found that the dirty little secret of most MBAs was
71
that they had gone back to school because they didn't like their first jobs out of college.
72
And they were looking for a socially acceptable way of hitting the restart button.
73
If I suggested to them that they should find their passion,
74
they would respond that they were tens of thousands of dollars in debt
75
and that while they were interested in finding a good professional fit,
76
they were primarily interested in generating a paycheck.
77
Now over the last 10
78
or 15 years there's actually been quite a bit of pushback around the idea of passion dictating career decisions.
79
And there's a couple of reasons for why this is.
80
One is that most people have no earthly idea what their passions are.
81
But another reason for this pushback comes from fear of the fourth Industrial Revolution.
82
What difference does it make if we're passionate about something if artificial intelligence is going to take away all the jobs?
83
Even those who embrace our robot overlords will admit that no one really knows what the jobs are going to be 20,
84
10, even five years down the So how do we help people navigate career decisions in this new world order?
85
One potential framework that has emerged from this conversation comes actually from the field of design.
86
The design thinking process holds that designers work with clients to really get to know them well,
87
understand their problems, help define them.
88
They work with them to brainstorm possible ideas and prototypes and then test out possible solutions.
89
Those who are proponents of applying design thinking to career decision making
90
holds that people who are working today will need to go through a lot of different iterations for the jobs
91
that they do.
92
They might have to try on many different selves and avoid prematurely foreclosing on any one area.
93
The problem with that is that most people don't have the self-awareness to do that well.
94
Most people don't take the time to figure out who they are before making a decision about what they want to be.
95
Now, if there's one thing that we have learned from the fields of behavioral economics
96
and psychology in recent years is that we as humans are not nearly as rational as we thought we were.
97
For example, we are predisposed to make bad financial decisions,
98
like spending too much money today and not saving enough for our future selves to enjoy retirement.
99
I suggest that we are just as irrational about making career decisions.
100
Let me give you an example.
101
A number of years ago,
102
I was working with a law student.
103
She came into my office very upset.
104
She had just received her grades for the year and realized
105
that she had done so poorly
106
that she was going to be locked out of the jobs
107
that would pay her the kind of salary that was going to be necessary to pay back her considerable law school loans.
108
As she sat there sobbing in my office,
109
she admitted that she simply did not like the study of law.
110
So I said to her,
111
well, what made you decide to go to law school?
112
Because I didn't want to go to medical school.
113
Ladies and gentlemen of the jury,
114
I submit to you that most people do not make career decisions rationally,
115
but rather based on deeply held,
116
often unconscious biases that they receive from their social surround.
117
They're highly influenced by their parents,
118
their peers, their local communities.
119
And they internalize a lot of these biases that they see around them,
120
and they tend to then follow others into things that they have done as well.
121
They also tend to internalize messages that they are receiving from their local and national cultures,
122
particularly around personal identities like gender,
123
race, religion, or socioeconomic status,
124
and will tend to either embrace or foreclose on options accordingly,
125
particularly if they anticipate barriers for success.
126
And let's acknowledge that a lot of people do face barriers to success,
127
particularly along the lines of gender,
128
race, religion, socioeconomic status, sexual orientation.
129
But this is exactly why I think self-awareness is so important.
130
Because not only can it help us not internalize these biases that are coming from culture,
131
but also help keep us from making false assumptions about others when it comes time for us to do the hiring.
132
What is tricky is that each of us,
133
as individuals, will internalize and make decisions about the hiring.
134
upon a lot of these unconscious as well as conscious personal identities at different times throughout our lives.
135
And this is going to be constantly in flux.
136
For those of you who are more quantitatively oriented,
137
allow me to present this as an equation.
138
With career identity being the sum of every possible identity you could have,
139
all influencing you in different ways in different periods of time,
140
a lot of it unconscious.
141
But I will admit this is not my favorite analogy.
142
I tend to think of all of those individual variables,
143
all of those identities coming together as not an equation but as a script,
144
a deeply personal life and career narrative that tells the story of who we are and guides our decisions.
145
This is why in the fourth industrial revolution,
146
we cannot program computers to make career decisions for us.
147
A script is deeply personal,
148
but we also must learn not to just follow it to the letter.
149
We must learn to understand it and question it.
150
Your script is iterative.
151
And like any writing process,
152
it's likely to be messy.
153
I urge you to embrace that messiness.
154
Own your story and don't let others write it for you.
155
And know that this process has always been messy.
156
If one of my identities is former runner,
157
another of my identities is liberal arts college graduate,
158
and as such I cannot end a presentation without including a quote from a dead white guy.
159
So I offer you this from Cicero to underscore that throughout time,
160
this is the most difficult problem in the world.
161
Thank you very much.
Download App
AI scoring for every sentence you speak
TRENDING
Popular
Context & Background
In her TEDx talk, Sharon Belden Castonguay explores the intricate relationship between personal identities and career choices. She emphasizes the profound effects that one's background, interests, and experiences have on professional paths. While many factors, such as office culture and wages, are often discussed in relation to job engagement, Castonguay focuses on the internal motivations and identities that influence career decisions. This insightful perspective sheds light on the importance of understanding oneself in order to navigate the evolving world of work, especially in the context of modern career counseling.
Top 5 Phrases for Daily Communication
- "What a stroke of luck!" - A phrase expressing surprise or relief at a fortunate situation.
- "More than just a pastime." - Indicates that an activity has significant personal importance beyond mere enjoyment.
- "Part of who I am." - Expresses that an interest or activity is deeply intertwined with personal identity.
- "Professional identities." - Refers to the various roles and responsibilities an individual assumes in their career.
- "Engaged in their work." - Describes a state of being involved and committed to one's job or career.
Step-by-step Shadowing Guide
To truly benefit from the concepts discussed in this video, consider implementing a shadowing practice to improve your English pronunciation and communication skills. Here’s a step-by-step guide to effectively shadow the content from Sharon's talk:
- Choose a Suitable Clip: Start with a short segment of the video that resonates with you. Select moments where Castonguay speaks clearly and expresses key ideas.
- Focus on Shadow Speech: Listen to the clip multiple times without repeating. Pay attention to her intonation, stress, and rhythm to understand the flow of English speech.
- Practice Shadowing: Play the video and try to speak along with Castonguay, mimicking her pronunciation and pace. Don't worry if you can't keep up at first; just focus on getting comfortable with the sounds.
- Record Yourself: Use a recording device to capture your voice while shadowing. This will help you analyze your pronunciation and identify areas for improvement.
- Review and Refine: Listen to your recording and compare it with the original speech. Spot the differences in pronunciation and intonation, and practice those segments again to refine your skills.
By consistently engaging in this shadowing site method, you’ll not only improve English pronunciation but also build confidence in speaking. Use the phrases collected to enhance your daily communication and incorporate them into your conversations. The goal of shadow speak is to make English a natural part of your identity, just as running was for Castonguay. Remember, every step you take in practicing will bring you closer to fluency.
What is the Shadowing Technique?
Shadowing is a science-backed language learning technique originally developed for professional interpreter training and popularized by polyglot Dr. Alexander Arguelles. The method is simple but powerful: you listen to native English audio and immediately repeat it out loud — like a shadow following the speaker with just a 1–2 second delay. Unlike passive listening or grammar drills, shadowing forces your brain and mouth muscles to simultaneously process and reproduce real speech patterns. Research shows it significantly improves pronunciation accuracy, intonation, rhythm, connected speech, listening comprehension, and speaking fluency — making it one of the most effective methods for IELTS Speaking preparation and real-world English communication.
☕ Buy us a coffee
ShadowingEnglish remains 100% free thanks to your support. Server and AI costs are high — your coffee keeps us going! 🙏