Bringing My Selves to Work: A Revisionist History of an Academic Career

Abstract

In this essay, I revisit a choice I made early in my career to develop and segment different facets of myself: my work as a professor of organizational behavior and my deep interest in the theory and practice of counselling psychology and psychotherapy. While these may appear relatively compatible, I experienced them as very different worlds and lived in them quite separately, afraid my engagement in one might infect or disrupt that in the other. Despite such efforts to keep my worlds apart, however, I found myself inadvertently integrating them—in my research, my teaching, and to some extent in my emerging clinical practice. Yet I held back from fully owning or sharing my growing commitment to counselling psychology. In this revisionist reflection, I consider some of the consequences of this set of choices and what might have been different had I made others.