Change is Exciting... Really!

Change is exciting—at least it is for me right now! If you’ve come within twenty feet of me recently you will have heard me going on and on about the big changes happening at Centerpoint. If you haven’t been around of late, then please read on so I can fill you in too!

The catalyst for kicking these changes into gear occurred last July at the Global Conference of the National Career Development Association (NCDA). I had several opportunities to share Centerpoint’s Cycles of Change approach with both career practitioners and counselor educators, i.e., professors who teach career development to graduate students who want to be career counselors.

The response was overwhelming; not only did they all see the usefulness of Centerpoint’s approach, they also saw how different it was from what others were doing and how beautifully it filled the gaps for what was needed. One really well-respected counselor educator told me that he believed that Centerpoint and what we are doing was the future of career development! Wow! He also recommended that we think about developing our practice into theory. That way it can be taught to others and help even more people.

This was all a bit surprising to all of us at Centerpoint because we have never thought of our work as cutting edge. All we did was bring a myriad of ideas together to develop different and creative ways of assisting people to embrace life’s changes and uncover their passions and purpose in life. That’s what was needed to assist our individual and organizational clients more effectively. We never knew we were creating a new approach to career development; we just wanted to be useful!

Holy cow! I always knew that Seattle was a place where new and innovative ideas were born; I never thought that Centerpoint would be one of them!

There are a number of strands that are naturally coming together for Centerpoint at this time:

• Theorizing Centerpoint’s approach and work.
• Disseminating those theories to the counselor educator community.
• Writing and publishing the book for the general population.
• Training career counselors worldwide on Centerpoint’s holistic approach to life and career development (Cycles of Change, Passion Search, and Exploring Options).
• Continuing our work with individuals and organizations, and finding ways to let more people know about how Centerpoint can be of help.

In order to accomplish all of this, many changes are needed, as you can imagine. We need to shake up the status quo quite a bit in order to take the next steps. Albert Einstein once said “The definition of insanity is doing the same thing over and over again and expecting different results.” At Centerpoint we can’t expect to make our huge leaps without making some major changes first.

Since this is getting to be longer than a blog entry really should be :-) I’d like to mention the many areas that are being revisited at Centerpoint in order to make room for our new growth:

• Internal Structure (We have a great, new Executive Director and Front Office staff!)
• Marketing
• Strategic Planning
• Board Development
• Funding

Stay tuned for additional blogs that will address each of these areas. Also, please consider how you may be able to and want to help. The more supportive hands we have helping this process move forward, the better. There’s a Japanese proverb that I really love: “None of us is as smart as all of us.” It will take the entire Centerpoint community to make these changes. If you spent the time reading this, that includes you too! And I find that all really exciting!