04/01/2026

Sitting with Stuck-ness

By Jacqueline J. Peila-Shuster

Career professionals have the unique honor of working with people to navigate a world where career path stability is rare, occupational prospects are fluidly defined and less predictable, and job transitions are more frequent (Savickas et al., 2009). Clients often receive advice, ideas, and suggestions, but in turning to a career professional they are indicating (implicitly or explicitly) that advice-giving from others did not work. That begs the question of how do helping professionals need to be different than those with whom clients have already interacted? I propose that it means career practitioners must come alongside a client’s humanness and help them “still” themselves so they stop skipping among possible solutions. It means sitting with them in their stuck-ness so they can meaningfully work through it.

Active Listening and The Case of Taylor

Taylor is a 32-year-old marketing representative who identifies as non-binary and Mexican American. They indicate it has been harder and harder to go to work each day because there has been a lot of turnover and they do not believe the new employees in their department have come together as a team. They sigh and say, “I feel stuck. Should I just look for a new job?”

Being stuck is extraordinarily uncomfortable. Furthermore, it is something that not only clients, but also career professionals struggle with (and against). However, active listening skills are a gift to clients at these times. Active listening skills are the tools that help the career professional enter the client’s world and better understand their perspective, thus helping build a supportive and trusting working alliance. By better understanding the client’s world, through the client’s perspective, the practitioner gains empathy.

Chan (2025) provided a simple yet poignant distinction between sympathy and empathy. She suggested that sympathy is a feeling of deep concern for another and what they are going through, but one’s understanding is based on one’s own perspective. Empathy, though, is understanding another person’s thoughts, feelings, and perceptions from their point of view versus one’s own lived experiences. Career professionals must consistently self-reflect to see if they are coming from a place of empathy versus sympathy to more fully understand their clients and the career concerns they are facing.   

To enter a client’s world, one must intentionally utilize active listening skills in ways where one listens to hear versus listens to respond. In listening to Taylor, the career practitioner can embrace active listening skills suggested by O’Bryan (2022) in her article on “How to Practice Active Listening: 16 Examples & Techniques.” By being fully present, which includes not only attending to the client’s thoughts, beliefs, and feelings about their experience, but also listening to the client’s tone of voice and observing their facial expressions and nonverbal cues, the career practitioner can gain a deeper understanding of what lies beneath the client’s words. For example, the career practitioner might reflect back to Taylor, “You are concerned and sad that your team is not coalescing, and you are wondering if it’s worth the effort to keep trying.”  Active listeners are present and tuned into the client’s world and experiences, so they mirror back to clients a clearer picture of what they are feeling and thinking, thus enabling clients to better hear and understand themselves.  

Intellectual and Cultural Humility

While active listening skills are requisite for building empathy, these skills are used through the context of one’s own identities, cultures, and upbringings. Therefore, career practitioners must constantly check in with themselves to explore implicit biases and values. Active listening must be practiced through a way of being that involves both intellectual and cultural humility. According to the Midwest Alliance for Mindfulness (n.d.):

Intellectual humility is the ability to non-defensively accept the limits of our knowledge and recognize that some of our beliefs may be wrong. Cultural humility is an awareness of one's own cultural identity coupled with a willingness to learn about another's culture and see the world through their eyes. (para. 1)

To engage in cultural humility, Hook and colleagues (2013) suggested one must attend to interconnected intrapersonal and interpersonal components. Intrapersonally, career practitioners must acknowledge that their own cultural worldview inevitably limits their ability to fully understand others’ cultural backgrounds and experiences. Interpersonally, cultural humility requires career practitioners to adopt an attitude that is oriented toward others and conveys respect, humility, interest, and openness to their identities and lived experiences. Thus, cultural humility is not as much about what one “does” with clients but instead is about a way of “being with” clients, and this requires that intellectual humility be part of it.

While this may sound simple, it is important to remember how easy it is for career practitioners to not use active listening skills and to lose their stance of cultural humility, especially when the desire arises to “fix” things for clients. Unfortunately, because of a natural concern for client’s wellbeing and success, succumbing to the fixing reflex (Miller & Rollnick, 2023) can put career practitioners in a place where they become the advice-giver. In working with Taylor, this might sound like, “You should consider reaching out to your network.” With this statement, not only is the career practitioner not understanding that while Taylor may be dismayed about their current work situation, for now Taylor simply may need to voice and explore their emotions, beliefs, and values. Additionally, the career practitioner may be trying to move Taylor to action before they are ready for it, thus setting them up for failure, or the hop-on, hop-off cycle of ineffectual change.  Furthermore, care must be taken to not impose individualistic decision-making values onto Taylor without considering their cultural values and beliefs. Inadvertently centering interventions based on one’s own cultural identities rather than the client’s can contribute to and sustain oppression.

Inspiring Action and Meaningful Change

Using active listening skills from a place of intellectual and cultural humility requires intentionality and ongoing practice and self-reflection. Career practitioners must continuously and actively work to center their clients and their clients’ worldviews, sit with them in their stuck-ness, and come alongside them so they embrace their own power and their own solutions toward meaningful change. This way, rather than jumping from superficial solution to superficial solution, the “stuck-ness” can release its sticky hold so that meaningful change and action can transpire.

References

Chan, K. (2025, March 21). Sympathy vs. empathy: What’s the difference? Verywell Mind. https://www.verywellmind.com/sympathy-vs-empathy-whats-the-difference-7496474 

Hook, J. N., Davis, D. E., Owen, J., Worthington, E. L. Jr., & Utsey, S. O. (2013). Cultural humility: Measuring openness to culturally diverse clients. Journal of Counseling Psychology, 60, 353–366. https://doi.org/10.1037/a0032595 

Midwest Alliance for Mindfulness. (n.d.). Opening minds and hearts in the midwest: Cultivating cultural and intellectual humility through contemplative practices. https://mindfulness-alliance.org/opening-minds-and-hearts-in-the-midwest/ 

Miller, W. R., & Rollnick, S. (2023). Motivational interviewing: Helping people change and grow (4th ed.). Guilford Press.

O’Bryan, A. (2022, February 8). How to practice active listening: 16 examples & techniques. PositivePsychology.com. https://positivepsychology.com/active-listening-techniques/ 

Savickas, M. L., Nota, L., Rossier, J., Dauwalder, J.-P., Duarte, M. E., Guichard, J., Soresi, S., VanEsbroeck, R., & van Vianen, A. E. M. (2009). Life designing: A paradigm for career construction in the 21st century. Journal of Vocational Behavior, 75, 239–250. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.jvb.2009.04.004 

Jacqueline J. Peila-Shuster, Ph.D., LPC, NCC is an Associate Professor in the Counseling and Career Development graduate program at Colorado State University in Fort Collins, CO, USA, where she serves as the program chair as well as the career counseling specialization coordinator. She also serves as the co-chair of the Counselor Educator Academy for the National Career Development Association. Her areas of teaching and research interest include career counseling and development across the lifespan, counselor education, career construction, and life design. She can be reached at Jackie.Peila-Shuster@colostate.edu