Donald Super and Prioritizing Your Life Roles

The Career Peer - Donald Super and Prioritizing Your Life Roles

17 minutes, 25 seconds

SPEAKERS

Ryan Brown, Steve Weingarden

Steve Weingarden  00:02

Ah, the constant wonder of what am I doing? Is my career right for me? And how do I know? Are you just saying, geh? Well, we are here The Career Peer. That's Ryan Brown and me, Steve Weingarden. And this is where we share a closer look at career measures, and help you think about how to reflect on your own career. What do you want to be when you grow up? We want you to think bigger about that question. And for episode two, we're looking at the work of Donald Super but before we dive into that work by Super, we want to remind you to visit us at TheCareerPeer.com where you can find all sorts of other novelties related to this episode, and The Career Peer podcast in general. So we want you to enjoy all of that. But Ryan, why don't you get us started on Super's work?

Ryan Brown  00:45

Yeah, thanks, Steve. So... really excited about this conversation today. Because Super takes a very holistic approach. So Super created the life career model, which encompasses five different stages of your life. There's growth, exploration, establishment, maintenance, and decline. And different patterns, and different roles are kind of occurring simultaneously, when you're going through those stages. But it's incredibly applicable to life and your career. So excited to see how we fit it in to help you with your career development challenges.

Steve Weingarden  01:20

Yeah, this is a neat one, because it's a developmental theory, much like Maslow's theory was developmental. And by developmental theory, what I mean is what someone would or should be, it's about the individual, the individual is really important in this theory. And in that sense, the suggested ages that are attached to the stages Ryan mentioned, are also individualized. So Super talked about this later on, and kind of felt that folks were taking the ages, he lists for each career stage a little bit too, literally. And so as an example, when you have a career crisis, you may be back to the exploration stage. And that's something that you want to come back to, or we want to come back to, time and time again, on this podcast. You and I are twenty years apart in age Ryan. And we're gonna have different career experiences based on that age difference. So for me, the the solidity of the ages was a flaw in this theory. But if you view it as an example of how these stages and roles come together, in a more often than not format, I think I feel a lot better about the realism and the usefulness of the theory. And you can start to better understand concepts such as late bloomers, but there's a lot more to this there than just the stages.

Ryan Brown  02:28

There is. It's actually really funny that you bring up the hard-defined ages, because when I was prepping for this episode, I think there was an actual number associated with each one of them. And for growth, I put birth to somewhere in your teens instead of, actually, I think it was supposed to be fourteen. Exploration was your teens to sometime in your twenties is what I wrote down. And I think it's probably like a hard 29 in the actual model. So even as I was prepping for this, I couldn't fit it into those defined ages, because I think everybody moves through different stages at their own pace. And that's not necessarily a bad thing. Everybody has different experiences and Super's model actually even goes to show that there are external forces that play into how you progress in some of the pressures. So socioeconomic status and how that plays into some of your different roles.

Steve Weingarden  03:20

Yeah, I think you hit on something important there: occupational choice as a process, not as an event. And so the focus is on the social context, and the personal needs of the individuals. And another quote by Super, "It's more important to have a good path and several alternative goals than to have a good goal." That's Super on counseling others. My question for you is, things change over time, there are decision points in this model. And one of the things that comes up is what you wanted to be when you were younger, may not be what you end up being or what you ultimately want to be. It's not the would or the should that we were talking about. So my question to you, Ryan, is this, what did you want to be when you grew up, when you were younger?

Ryan Brown  04:02

When I was younger, I think the first thing I wanted to be when I grew up was an X-Men from the Marvel Comics. But that didn't necessarily work out. No superpowers. But as I got a little bit older, I naturally just loved sports. So I wanted to be a pro football player. And then that has since evolved into, you know, I think in college, I started out as a pre-med student, and ultimately ended up falling in love with psychology. And I think all things played out exactly how they should have and looking back on it, and I'm so happy that they played out exactly how they did. Wouldn't change a thing. But yeah, roles are constantly shifting and what you're going for, I think it's always kind of moving and you have to adjust as you're moving through those different stages. And as you're getting new, external factors that are coming into play. It's a little bit different for each one of your life roles. What about you? What did you want to be, Steve?

Steve Weingarden  04:57

Well, first of all, I gotta comment on your X-Men note there. Because we're not going this deep today, but there is more to this theory. For example, under the exploration stage, there is fantasy, tentative and realistic. And I think when we talk about X-Men, you're probably in the fantasy stage of exploration when you were doing that. What I wanted to be growing up was, I think, a baseball player, a Major League Baseball player. And I think my fantasy of that was a little bit messed up too, not just because of, you know, talent level and things like that. But if I'm remembering correctly, I pictured myself like having a briefcase. That's... I'm not sure how that fits in, I guess maybe in the future, Major League pitchers will have briefcases or maybe a few do now, but I think back when I was fantasizing about that, that wasn't the case. And you know, different things happened, situational determinants that take you off that path. And there's a lot of roles that Super talked about in his life career rainbow. He saw this work/family almost conflict occurring. And I know you want to talk a little bit about that, Ryan.

Ryan Brown  06:00

Maybe you were going to be a baseball player that was also his own agent. And that's where the baseball, that's where the briefcase came into play. You had the business savviness even back then. Who knows?

Steve Weingarden  06:11

I needed your career counseling back then to put it all together. That's, that's the value of a career counselor.

Ryan Brown  06:16

Yeah, so we've touched a lot on those five stages, the growth, exploration, establishment, maintenance, and then decline. And those are really like the overarching. So if you think of a rainbow, that's the big giant arc that's going through that that makes the whole rainbow but inside of the rainbow, are individual colors, right. And so Super's model has different life roles for each different color. Those different roles are child, student, leisurette -- which is actually a word that a lot of researchers say Super invented -- it definitely plays off of the leisure, but he needed to make it more fit into the model; citizen, worker, parent, spouse, and homemaker. So as you're moving through those different roles, and you're also moving through your different life stages, that's ultimately the career rainbow... is the progression through those different things in sequence of that all.

Steve Weingarden  07:14

I think this is one of the things that that people can take away from this, and do with the life career rainbow. This was written a long time ago, but I think it's still relevant. He saw the value is teaching the concept of this life career piece, including the notions of life stages, life space, lifestyle, and helping folks see the interactive nature of the variety of roles that constitute a career. And then it's back to Maslow in some sense. And he may have meant this term a little bit different. But this idea of self actualizing, and how it can be achieved in varying combinations of life roles. So if you make a mistake and end up down a path that you weren't expecting, it's not over, there's a chance to change that path. It's just different, it's a different arc. And, you know, this is how you can analyze your career to date, how you project your career into the future. So I really like this.

Ryan Brown  08:03

No, I think you bring up a good point, when I think of this, and I'm more of a career standpoint, instead of the life, I definitely can call out where I've been in different stages of my career based off the model. The essence of the model, most certainly holds true. So yeah, when I thought of this, and how it fits into career and helping somebody, I actually thought about work life balance, if you were to map out the roles that you're playing, and like what proportion is worth taking up, I can personally tell you, there are weeks that work, it's probably 50% of the pie chart here have these eight or nine different roles, if I were to map out my percentage of time allotted, that's probably not the best work balance. So if you map out the roles, in terms of your time spent, you can make some serious adjustments, it can quickly show you exactly where you're spending all your time and help you strike a little bit more balance.

Steve Weingarden  08:56

Yeah, and I think we got to be careful with that word balance, though. So I don't know that it's automatically bad in that, and I've seen the pie chart, I think you're thinking of where, here's how much you want to want devoted to this. Here's how much you want devoted this other role. And I get that, but I think again, it comes back to the individual. And that balance is gonna vary per individual. And I think that ties into self concept, which is a big part of this theory. How do you picture who you are and who you want to be?

Ryan Brown  09:21

How do you see this playing out and executive coaching?

Steve Weingarden  09:24

You need to make time for the family, much like you were mentioning, or as you're transitioning into a new role, making sure that you've talked it over with your family, that you've considered what the implications of that role are. And I know that something that, you know, CEOs, for example, do. The prior CEO might take out a new CEO and their significant other and talk about what this is gonna mean, going forward. There's also that question of an executive isn't done. It's not like... Most of us, if we have a career that fits with our abilities, our interests and our personality, we don't necessarily  retire. We don't necessarily spend a lot of time on what's the decline stage. So you might reinvigorate that stage somehow, or do something new, just as Super did. Super spent the second half of his career doing something new and different, but it was still in the career field. But there's not necessarily a decline stage. And so executives, I think, also have more that they might do going forward in their development. Let me ask you a question, Ryan. When you think about yourself, do you think about yourself in a singular role at a time? Or do you think about these in combination?

Ryan Brown  10:37

Until recently, I thought of it as one thing, but I've definitely taken a more holistic approach, right? So like, how many different components are going to this project that I'm working on? What are the different roles? And then which of those roles am I ultimately going to be responsible for? It's inevitable with every single project? So yeah, I would say my perspective has changed very recently, probably in the last month or so. What about you?

Steve Weingarden  11:02

I think when you're thinking about your career, the idea of thinking about a single role at a time isn't necessarily beneficial, because it comes back to what we were talking about earlier, where there's different roles, and some of those are going to be more important at a given time in your life than other roles. And there might be three or four that are all prioritized. And that's a tough situation. It's stressful, if they take up a lot of time. I think there's real value to thinking about it in combination. And I do worry about sometimes telling people just focus in on one role, depending on how that's meant,

Ryan Brown  11:35

Yeah. Gotta take all different kinds of things in perspective, and working from home in this current COVID environment has really shown a lot of people the different roles that they're playing. I do not have a child, but I have a lot of coworkers that do. And when we all had to move to a work at home model, there is a lot of questions on: Are people going to accomplish what they need to parenting and workwise? Everybody's at the same... work or at school at the same time. And even going down to internet. Like, is there enough internet to go around for schooling and work? So yeah, the different roles have been pushed together, I guess we'll call it in a little bit of this current environment. We'll see what the future has in store. I think a lot of organizations need to take this into account for what is their future of work? What do their future job roles look like? And how does it integrate the life aspect to it?

Steve Weingarden  12:32

Any final thoughts on Super before we move on?

Ryan Brown  12:35

I think it's a great model I you know, it was created in the 80s. Still -- a lot of the concepts stand true today. And yeah, map out your different roles and figure out where you're at. And figure out where you want to be. And you can use this life rainbow, highly effectively, I think. What about you?

Steve Weingarden  12:54

You and I are on the exact same page there. I was gonna say, map out your roles and do it on an annual basis, if not more frequently. I think there's real value in that self reflection and seeing how it all fits together. I think it ends up making you feel a little bit better about yourself that, "Oh, I am doing all this stuff, even if I'm not accomplishing a lot in this role. Look at all this other stuff I'm getting done. And what I've done is I've prioritized this and I just didn't realize it."  Big value there. Super's model, Super's work, add it to your career plan. Let's move on to Career Changes. Okay, Career Changes is where we get to share about someone who you may have heard of before because of something they did in their career. And what we're gonna do is talk about what their career path was, or almost was. So it's almost like we're playing a game of alternate history. And Ryan, who do we have today? And what can you tell us about him?

Ryan Brown  13:49

We are covering Jeff Bezos, the founder of Amazon. So... Jeff Bezos had a very interesting career path. Started out at McDonald's, working fast food. Ended up going and starting out college as an aspirational physicist. So that was originally what his plan was. Moved in... and ultimately ended up with an engineering type of degree. Had a lot of job offers, right out of college, for engineering types of roles. And I think he probably took one of them, but ultimately ended up being the Product Manager for at Bankers Trust. And then turned into Amazon. So Steve, did I miss any in there?

Steve Weingarden  14:30

No, but I think there's a great quote about him on that McDonald's job. What he said was, "Every Saturday morning, I would scramble several hundred eggs, a complete blast." So he really enjoyed that. And then I think he said something really interesting. You mentioned him being an aspirational physicist, and I'm glad you clarified it was aspirational. So this is something where it goes back to this idea of exploration of careers and realizing, hey, this isn't the way I want to go. You can change it up, whether it's an education or trying out a career, wherever it is. What he realized when he was at Princeton, interested in becoming a physicist, he said: I would be a mediocre physicist at best. He didn't want to be in that situation. I think that's a really interesting point. We're talking about famous people's career path. But that doesn't necessarily mean we're not saying, Hey, Bezos made the optimal choice possible. Now, it sure looks that way, if you're measuring it from a financial standpoint, for example, but it's just interesting to watch how the career paths change here.

Ryan Brown  15:25

Definitely. Whenever you're changing careers, I always think of, how did somebody jump from one job to the other? Like, what did that job interview look like? And so transferable skills is a huge thing to me. I brought it up in Episode One, I'm gonna keep bringing up in different episodes. Some transferable skills to help him probably navigate through different roles in his career could be general business acumen, right? Starting out in some kind of an engineering role at probably a bigger company. Being at Bankers Trust... you need to know all that type of business acumen and how to handle yourself in certain situations. And that probably came in handy big time when he was founding Amazon. What transferable skills do you think Bezos would have hyped up there in job interviews? Potentially?

Steve Weingarden  16:10

Yeah, I don't know if he would have hyped him up or not. But the thing that I think he gained from some of his past career path was this mathematical modeling. And he was really an early adopter of that in applying it within that Amazon model.

Ryan Brown  16:23

All of us are so grateful for Bezos changing his career because all of our stuff just shows up at your door nowadays, which is hyper convenient.

Steve Weingarden  16:31

Just goes to show you that career paths are not always singular or straight. Jeff Bezos today, your career path may yet take another direction. Sounds like I was talking to Jeff Bezos there and I guess his career path may take another direction but the point was, your career path may take another direction. There you have it. Hey, we want to thank you for listening, assuming that you did listen. Hopefully, we were able to provide a new reflection for your career, get you thinking a little bit differently about it and getting psyched up about it. As a reminder, check out The Career Pair podcast at TheCareerPeer.com. Always happy to build a relationship and make new friends. And consider leaving us a review wherever you are listening. We especially like reviews and lists on Podchaser, so help us out there. Be well be humane, be meaningful in your work and causes. Bye.

Ryan Brown  17:18

Thanks for listening.