BLACK FOREST GUIDANCE
CAREER CONSULTANCY FOR CREATIVE, INTELLECTUAL AND SPIRITUAL TYPES
DR. FRANKLIN T. WHITE
A SHORT STORY: CHAPTER ONE
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When I was an undergrad at Oxford, I couldn’t imagine anything more fulfilling than spending my life doing academic research and writing books.
I made significant sacrifices to attain that dream, scraping by on half of minimum wage for 15 years. By the time I completed my PhD, I was 33 and penniless. Then I found that nobody would give me a job.
Despite my Oxford education and my PhD, I couldn’t convince anyone that my skills and expertise were actually worth something.
I had vision and I had talent, but I couldn’t make any headway with manifesting my vision. I didn’t know how to move forwards within the system.
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A SHORT STORY: CHAPTER TWO
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The first step on the journey from vision to reality was separating my desires from my preconceived image of a particular career.
In the process, I discovered a new, additional source of fulfillment: giving people guidance on how to triumph over their obstacles and manifest their visions.
Which led directly to my decision to offer my services as a Career Consultant.
A SHORT STORY: CHAPTER THREE
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I have the industry standard qualification: 3 years of training leading to a Diploma in Career Guidance.
But I also have something that most Career Counsellors don’t. I have a Doctorate in Anthropology, specializing in Well-Being.
I’ve made original contributions to human knowledge on what constitutes well-being, how it relates to fulfillment, and what practices help.
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A SHORT STORY: CHAPTER FOUR
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You’ve identified your talents, your values, and your vision.
You’ve seen signs that there is something out of balance in the world: something that needs righting.
And you’ve perceived something in the air. An indication that there is something specific that can be done. Something, in fact, that you yourself are uniquely able to do. You’ve felt the call to action.
Perhaps you gave it a go, but found unexpected obstacles. You have vision and you have talent, but you can’t make headway with manifesting your vision. You don’t know how to move forwards within the system.
Remember this:
You are the product of 3 billion years of evolution. We are all participators in a wild intelligence, always growing, always developing towards some extraordinary pinnacle of potential. Just like eagles, fir trees, and river basins, we each have a best version of ourselves, and an unceasing impulse to manifest it.
Learn how to talk with the forest.
Let the forest reveal the path.
Online Consultations
on how to identify
Talent and Vision
how to construct
Personal Brand and Narrative
and how to achieve
Fulfillment
in work and life
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Techniques taught include:
Contemplation, Visualization, Affirmation, Dream Interpretation, Shamanic Trance, Body Awareness, Free Movement, and more.
I offer career guidance using expertise that I learnt and was examined on for my BA, MRes and PhD in Anthropology, and using counselling skills that I was trained in and assessed on for my Diploma in Career Guidance.
Guidance is an ongoing discussion based relationship which provides a structure designed to help you to figure out your deepest needs and desires, as well as the best way for you to attain those goals.
I give ideas for goals which might be good for you to work towards, alongside ideas for strategy and techniques which might be effective for attaining those goals.
TESTIMONIALS
Letting Go: The Other Half of Rewilding
Letting Go is a guide to how we can bring about a decent state of affairs both in our own lives and on the level of communities and ecosystems, by adopting personal practices that revolve around taking our cues directly from the planet. There are a lot of books on the state of global affairs already out there. But almost all of them take a top-down approach, looking through the lenses of politics and economics, and floating ideas within those frameworks. Practically none of them is informed by the qualitative study of human beings: anthropology. Everyone agrees that the world is in a mess; and rewilding – stepping back and giving other species the space to be themselves – has become a fairly mainstream idea. Yet there is a side to it that is talked about much less: the potential in rewilding ourselves. Letting Go does two things. It presents an ecological mechanism for how the planet as a whole may cue certain behaviours in individual organisms. And, based on such behaviours, it presents twelve practices that are simultaneously conducive to personal, social, and ecological well-being. The theme that links them is the need to let go of our notions of what we are. Only by letting go of what we think we are, and what we think we need, can we open ourselves up to being what the planet needs us to be.
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Finding Where We Stand: Handling Life through the Hero’s Journey
Finding Where We Stand is a guide to bringing about fulfillment in our individual lives by taking inspiration from stories. Specifically, the central theme is the hero’s journey: the archetypal structure found in myths and fairy tales. Presenting three practices, Finding Where We Stand demonstrates the benefits of training ourselves to interpret the occurrences which life throws at us through the lens of this kind of narrative. This is not the first book to suggest this, but it is the first book to identify and spell out the logic underlying such narratives. With this understanding in hand, we see how we can not only use existing stories, but systematically construct and refine such narratives ourselves, and use them to help ourselves make fruitful life choices.
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Foraging for Truth: The Problem with Science and the Need for Anthropology
Foraging for Truth is about the real-world consequences of different methods of investigating the world. Part One presents the argument that science, which to a large degree we are accustomed to thinking of as the judge of reality, actually has certain problems built into it. The focus is on problems of environmental ethics: the idea that, by definition, to do science is to do harm to the planet. Using the insights of anthropology, Foraging for Truth shows three ways in which habitual use of the scientific method shapes our sensory perception and our cognition in particular ways, and thus indirectly but necessarily brings about adverse repercussions in the world. Taking this as a jumping-off point, Part Two lays out the foundation stones of another way of knowing, another way of engaging with the beings and things of the world, that avoids the pitfalls of science. This is a method that, in several variants, has been in use by anthropologists since the 1980s. It is a way of knowing that flows from basic principles of ethics – and turns out to bear an unexpected resemblance to foraging.