Tomorrow starts a new day in helping. The Human Experience Specialist Certification Course opens its doors. Let me remind you why this might seriously interest you.
As in the Sufi tale of the Blind Men and the Elephant, each current helping profession takes one aspect of human reality—one feature of the elephant, its trunk, its tail, its hide—and acts as if that is the crux of the matter and the whole of the matter.
An HES steps back and endeavors to see the elephant. What is actually going on? What is this person experiencing? What does this person want and need? What might help? By not reducing matters to diagnoses or goals, an HES opens the door to a client’s full reality.
Picture a thirty-five-year-old woman who is struggling to write her second novel, who is in a relationship that is “okay” but not really satisfying, who is thinking about having children, who experiences sadness, social anxiety, and performance anxiety, who is having trouble keeping meaning afloat, who is estranged from her former best friend, and who wants to lose weight and exercise more. This is what a human life looks like.
The HES listens, asks clarifying questions, and wonders aloud as to where the two of them should focus. She finds a place to focus without losing sight of her client’s other threads and entanglements, and by the end of the session has likely proposed a small life experiment for the client to try. Maybe that life experiment has to do with the novel, maybe with the estranged friend, maybe with an existential task like creating a menu of life purposes. That’s how a session might go.
Anyone facing a challenge can benefit from working with an HES. This is especially true for someone facing multiple challenges, because that person is looking for someone who can hold that sort of complexity and not reduce life to one goal or one label. The challenges might include job dissatisfaction, relationship issues, existential malaise, impending retirement, creative blockage, or just about anything under the sun that human beings must contend with.
Let’s look down the road. I can see HESs in private practice working with clients, HESs in institutional roles, and HES-trained coaches, therapists, clergy, social workers and other helpers using HES principles and practices to humanize and deepen what they do. I can see HESs working in public policy, healthcare, community work, organizational HR and team building, educational settings, and more. There really are no limits.
Why become an HES? Because I think it meets you where you have always wanted to be. If you’re curious about human nature and what makes human beings tick, if you have a genuine desire to help, then all the extant models are unlikely to have quite satisfied you. I think the HES model matches what you’ve been after.