Blog Archives
Unwritten Rules
An Educator’s Guide to Constructing Employable Identities combines research and practical workshops to help educators support graduates in developing professional identities, navigating workplace expectations, and shaping their working futures. What motivated you to write this book?
The book grew out of a gap I kept noticing between how employability is talked about and
how it is lived. Public conversation tends to centre on skills, competencies and labour-market outcomes. These matter, but they treat graduates as people carrying a toolkit into a workplace. In reality, people enter workplaces as identity negotiators. Who they become professionally is worked out with colleagues, managers, mentors and gatekeepers, in settings that have their own expectations about who belongs.
Through my research and teaching, I met many capable graduates who struggled, not because they lacked technical expertise, but because they were unsure who they were becoming in professional life. They were decoding unspoken norms, responding to how others saw them and weighing competing expectations, often with very unequal access to opportunity.
This led me to develop the Systemic Identity Negotiation Model (SINM), which treats employability as an ongoing negotiation between people, the social structures around them, and the futures open to them. The book translates that thinking into practical, workshop- based tools for educators. I wanted to move the conversation from “How do we teach students to get jobs?” to “How do we help students become professionals who can adapt, contribute and find meaning as work changes?” Employability is less a destination than an unfolding process of identity construction.
What does teaching systems capital look like when students can recognise unwritten rules but lack the power to influence them?
This matters because awareness alone does not create agency. Systems capital is often reduced to knowing how systems work, but understanding a workplace’s unwritten rules does little good if students conclude they are powerless to act on that understanding. The aim of teaching should not be to persuade students that systems are fair. It should be to help them navigate complexity strategically and ethically.
Unwritten rules are not fixed facts of nature. They are shared understandings, kept alive and occasionally changed through everyday interaction. So teaching systems capital means helping students see where influence is possible, where constraints are firm, and how change tends to happen gradually. A student may notice that networking opportunities are unequally distributed and be unable to redesign that system overnight. They can still learn to build professional relationships, join communities of practice, find mentors and create collective support with peers. In workshops, this might mean rehearsing and debriefing real workplace conversations, mapping where discretion exists in a given setting and developing shared strategies as a group.
Equally, adaptation should never be taught without reflection. Students need language to analyse power, recognise structural inequality and understand that career outcomes are not simply a reward for merit. In that sense, systems capital is both practical and emancipatory. It prepares learners not merely to fit into systems, but to understand them well enough to help reshape them when opportunities arise.
What insights do you hope educators gain from the facilitator reflections, and how might those insights change their approach to teaching employability?
I included them because employability education is not a neutral activity. Educators are participants in the very systems they help students navigate. How a facilitator responds when a student tries on a new professional identity can make certain futures feel possible or out of reach.
I hope readers come to see teaching employability as less about supplying answers and more about creating space for reflection, dialogue, and exploration. The reflections capture moments when participants challenged assumptions, understood concepts differently, or exposed tensions between institutional expectations and lived experience. Those moments are not interruptions to the teaching. They are where meaning is actually made.
A central insight is that employability cannot be reduced to a checklist of graduate attributes. Students arrive with different backgrounds, resources, aspirations and constraints, so the same activity will land differently for different groups. Once educators accept this, their practice shifts from transmission to facilitation. The question changes from “Have I delivered the employability content?” to “How are students making sense of their place in future work?” That puts students’ meaning-making at the centre.
The reflections also invite humility and reflexivity. Employability is a dynamic and contested idea, and educators need to stay open to questioning their own assumptions about success, professionalism and career development.
How should universities and employers assess professional growth in ways that recognise developing identities and address unequal access to career opportunities?
We need to move beyond assessment that looks only at outcomes and begin to recognise developmental trajectories. Conventional markers such as internships, leadership roles, networking success and job offers have value, but they hide big differences in access. Two students can reach the same outcome by very different routes, facing different obstacles and receiving different levels of support.
An identity-based approach asks, “How is this person developing as a professional, and with what support?” Beyond what students have achieved, we should look at how they reflect, adapt, learn, exercise agency and make sense of their evolving professional identities. In practice, that points to reflective portfolios, narrative accounts of learning, mentoring conversations and evidence of growth over time. These methods recognise that development is non-linear and shaped by context.
There is also a caution. Professional identities are not simply declared. They are recognised, or withheld, by others. Assessment is one of the places where that recognition is granted or denied, so who decides, and on what criteria, matters. Reflective methods can favour students who already know how to speak the language of professionalism. Institutions should make criteria explicit, draw on more than one assessor and perspective, and accept a range of legitimate ways of being professional.
Universities and employers also share a responsibility to confront structural inequality. Assessment should not just reward those who have inherited advantageous social and cultural capital. It should value growth, learning agility and the ability to navigate complexity in differing circumstances. Employers can help through transparent progression criteria, fair access to mentoring and sponsorship, and attention to how workplace norms define who
“fits”.
Ultimately, the most meaningful measure of professional growth is not whether someone has become an “ideal worker”. It is whether they are becoming reflective professionals who can keep learning, contributing, and renegotiating their identities across unpredictable careers.
Author Links: GoodReads | Amazon
The book offers practical workshops designed to develop learners’ professional identities, encouraging them to reflect on their past, present, and future identities while providing educators with the tools to support their learners’ employability trajectories. These workshops not only boost learners’ employability but also provide educators with opportunities to reflect on their own practices. The book concludes with strategic recommendations for tertiary institutions, employers, learners, and facilitators.
This indispensable resource is designed for educators in higher and further education who are keen to enhance graduate employability within their institutions.
The Disciplined Executive: The Athlete’s Approach to Leadership — How to Lead with Clarity, Courage, and Competitive Edge
Jani Hirvonen’s The Disciplined Executive presents leadership as a craft developed through deliberate practice, honest reflection, and consistent responsibility. Drawing on his experience in elite Taekwondo, endurance sports, corporate leadership, and nonprofit service, Hirvonen gives athletic preparation a clear application to professional life. Meetings, decisions, and difficult conversations become opportunities to train judgment and strengthen relationships. His central principle is concise: “Leadership is a muscle. It grows with practice.” The comparison gives the book a coherent identity, connecting individual habits with the conditions that help teams perform. It’s a useful perspective for readers who want to approach their development with greater intention and a realistic sense of the work involved.
The book’s strongest contribution is its connection between demanding standards and attentive, supportive leadership. Hirvonen treats listening, emotional intelligence, recognition, and trust as essential parts of effective execution. His statement, “The leader exists to serve the team,” captures the responsibility that runs through these discussions. Delegation becomes an investment in someone’s judgment; feedback becomes a continuing exchange that requires visible follow-through. These ideas give the book a humane understanding of performance, grounded in the daily experience of working with others. The attention to volunteer leadership is especially valuable, since it brings motivation, shared purpose, and earned commitment into sharper focus. Across these settings, Hirvonen makes a persuasive case that a leader’s influence grows through the capability and confidence of other people.
Its twenty-five chapters follow a dependable pattern of personal reflection, examples, frameworks, and actions organized around weekly, monthly, and ongoing practice. That structure makes the material easy to revisit when a particular responsibility needs attention. Exercises involving commitments, meeting participation, priorities, and career conversations provide concrete starting points, while the frameworks give readers language for discussing their habits with colleagues. Hirvonen also draws on established leadership and behavioral literature, bringing familiar concepts into his approach to training. The repeated emphasis on consistency, humility, and accountability creates some overlap between chapters, and the prose occasionally explains a principle several times before moving forward. That repetition suits the book’s emphasis on rehearsal, though readers may find it most productive to work through selected exercises gradually and return to the relevant chapters as their responsibilities change.
Hirvonen’s personal voice gives the guidance much of its credibility. He writes openly about the effort required to listen well, manage ego, and maintain composure, presenting development as a continuing obligation throughout a career. His treatment of recovery and pacing also adds substance to the athletic comparison: sustainable performance depends on protecting attention and energy alongside building strength. The Disciplined Executive will be especially useful to emerging managers, experienced leaders reviewing their routines, and people responsible for developing future leaders. Its value lies in the connection it builds between principles and observable behavior. Readers willing to apply its exercises will find a structured basis for evaluating how they lead, how their teams experience that leadership, and which daily practices deserve more care.
Pages: 397 | ASIN: B0HJFMV12B
Talk Human to Me
Steven Asifo’s Talk Human to Me takes on a familiar workplace frustration: you’ve spotted a real problem, explained it carefully, and watched everyone carry on with their day. Asifo, a cybersecurity leader and stand-up comic, treats that gap between a good recommendation and actual follow-through as a central part of security work. His argument is that influence grows when you understand someone’s pressures and make the next step clear. The book brings together personal experience, communication advice, and short exercises, all delivered in a voice that sounds like a colleague talking through what he’s learned. It’s direct, energetic, and easy to settle into.
The strongest part of the book is how consistently it connects communication to the practical conditions of someone else’s working day. Deadlines, limited resources, uncertainty, and competing priorities all shape whether a security request gets anywhere. Asifo encourages readers to listen for those conditions, build messages around them, and invite people to help shape the solution. He also gives readers concrete ways to check their work: trim a message to its essential meaning, see whether someone can explain it back, and make the requested decision obvious. These exercises give the book a useful rhythm. You can read a chapter, open an email or presentation you’re working on, and try something immediately. That makes the advice feel manageable, especially for readers who’ve been told to improve their communication without much guidance about how.
Asifo’s comedy background gives the book a unique personality. He pays close attention to timing, audience, and the difference between getting a reaction and earning someone’s engagement. His discussion of humor is especially thoughtful about trust, including the importance of reading the moment and choosing jokes that bring people into the conversation. He’s also willing to examine his own missteps, which gives the advice credibility and keeps the tone approachable. The book does lean heavily on recurring phrases and familiar lessons, so its pace can feel repetitive once you’ve grasped the central idea. Its evidence comes mainly from Asifo’s experience, and some broad claims about fear, training, and behavior would benefit from more support. Still, the workplace detail makes his observations easy to recognize and gives readers plenty to think through against their own experience.
I recommend Talk Human to Me to cybersecurity professionals whose success depends on cooperation across teams: analysts, security program managers, people working in governance, risk, and compliance, and technical specialists who regularly present to business leaders. It should also appeal to managers helping those professionals develop, particularly when technically sound work keeps stalling at the point of adoption. Readers who enjoy an informal voice, personal stories, and exercises tied to real tasks will probably get the most from it. There’s useful material here for quieter readers, too, since Asifo treats communication as a skill you can practice through everyday choices. The book’s lasting value is the attention it asks you to give the person receiving your message. It leaves you with practical ways to make that person’s next decision easier.
Pages: 108 | ASIN: B0HM5NHP3H
Literary Titan Gold Book Award: Nonfiction
The Literary Titan Book Award recognizes outstanding nonfiction books that demonstrate exceptional quality in writing, research, and presentation. This award is dedicated to authors who excel in creating informative, enlightening, and engaging works that offer valuable insights. Recipients of this award are commended for their ability to transform complex topics into accessible and compelling narratives that captivate readers and enhance our understanding.
Award Recipients
Visit the Literary Titan Book Awards page to see award information.
Knowledge, Experience, Intuition
In The Two Oceans, you combine your memoir, philosophy, finance, and business knowledge to explore balance, resilience, money, work, relationships, and how to find meaning in everyday experience. How did the metaphor of the two oceans, the inner world and the external world, develop?
The metaphor developed from needing a book title that could encapsulate its wide breadth of contents. At one point, the book’s title was going to be Whales Outside Our Windows, the name of one of its chapters. However, it seemed to me that title puts the focus on the external world.
I arrived at the conclusion that what we can control – the aspects within ourselves – and what we cannot control – the factors outside of us – were equal halves in my manuscript. Consequently, both are important to recognize, understand, and navigate. From there, I made the connection to what would be the book’s eventual title and central metaphor.
The Two Oceans concept then guided the shape and structure of my book project, including the inspirations I pulled from. I hope that this collection of essays and short stories translates as a cohesive body of work to its readers.
Zen Buddhism, Stoicism, Taoism, Jungian psychology, and existentialism all appear throughout the book. Why was it important to connect philosophy to ordinary experiences rather than discuss it primarily in abstract terms?
This book started as a project with the intention to document some of my experiences in entrepreneurship, personal finance, and human society. At the same time, I sought to reflect on my emotions, thoughts, and ideas at this stage of life. Journaling allowed me to do both, while the study of various philosophical traditions helped me metabolize all these real-life events.
I didn’t set out to write a book about different philosophies; it just became its logical, natural, and organic progression. As I was writing, I continued this exploration, inspiration, and research into them.
I feel like making these stories grounded in present times and rooted in practical applications contextualizes these ancient and historic philosophies, making them more specific, relatable, and accessible in the process.
All of us begin to search for answers, meaning, or coherence at some point in our lives. I looked towards the named philosophies for my own edification. My intention with this book was to write it in a conversational or storytelling manner, like an old friend sitting across from you sharing a hot cup of tea.
You write about money and time as finite resources. How has that perspective influenced your own decision-making?
The perspective that everything in life is temporary or ephemeral has hopefully taught me to live in the present in moderation and with greater appreciation. Thus, I try to make decisions with greater awareness and intention.
Progress is not a straight line, and I am nowhere near being enlightened. Sometimes, I still catch myself falling back on old habits, making the same mistakes, repeating bad patterns, or experiencing dark gray skies. I continuously remind myself of these teachings through the importance of having ritual, routine, and rhythm.
Each of our decisions has consequences, both on ourselves and the people around us. Since there is no catch-all solution to every decision, the best we can do is make sound judgments informed by knowledge, experience, intuition, or a combination of these. It is about being purposeful and balancing perspectives, so we have a life without regret and a future with plenty of consideration.
What practices from the book can readers begin applying to their own lives without needing extensive knowledge of philosophy or finance?
First, cultivate personal virtues in our everyday lives, which are within our power — wisdom, courage, justice, temperance, resourcefulness, resilience, etc.
Take the opportunity to be a better version of yourself. It will pay great dividends.
Second, start simple and small, learn from your mistakes, and course-correct when necessary. Ask others, find resources, gain experience. The best time is now, and every journey starts with a single step.
Take the risk by putting yourself out of your comfort zone once in a while. If you are in a rut, try new or different things.
Third, individuation through introspection. Don’t be a stranger to your own self. Find out what works and doesn’t work for you. Stick to a plan that works, knowing that emotions and setbacks, though not optional, are momentary and impermanent.
Take the time to sit with yourself, look inside, and identify what would truly give you purpose or personal fulfillment, knowing that it is not the same for everyone, and everyone has their own journey to take.
Author Links: GoodReads | Website | Amazon
In The Two Oceans, the author draws on his lived experience to recount tales of empathy, kindness, suffering, resourcefulness, contentment, and happiness, reflecting on them through the lens of philosophical principles. These tenets are intended to guide us toward integrating the two halves of ourselves — the conscious Self and the unconscious Shadow.
This collection of twenty-five short stories explores philosophies such as Zen, Stoicism, and Jungian psychology, and proffers practical applications of their central concepts such as detachment, impermanence, resilience, virtue, response, individuation, and introspection. These simple lessons can be useful tools in both vast, equally turbulent oceans, helping us cross unfathomable depths as we sail through life’s treacherous waters, and guiding us safely back to shore.
Literary Titan Gold Book Award: Nonfiction
The Literary Titan Book Award recognizes outstanding nonfiction books that demonstrate exceptional quality in writing, research, and presentation. This award is dedicated to authors who excel in creating informative, enlightening, and engaging works that offer valuable insights. Recipients of this award are commended for their ability to transform complex topics into accessible and compelling narratives that captivate readers and enhance our understanding.
Award Recipients
The Bear and Cat Chronicles by Kris Neely
Visit the Literary Titan Book Awards page to see award information.
The Two Oceans: A Personal Account of Life, Finance and Business Philosophies
Martin Tiongson’s The Two Oceans: A Personal Account of Life, Finance and Business Philosophies is a hybrid of memoir, personal essay, financial reflection, and philosophical inquiry. Organized into five parts, “The Present,” “Finance,” “The Person,” “Business,” and “The World,” the book moves between outward experience and inward interpretation. That structure reflects the image introduced in the prologue, where two whales come to represent “the inside and the outside, consciousness and the unconscious, push and pull, yin and yang, and temperance.” Tiongson draws material from an unusually broad range of experiences: fostering an elderly cat, enduring a disastrous trip to Florida, whale watching in Mexico, navigating investments and taxes, pursuing business opportunities, facing rejection in a job search, dealing with insurance, volunteering, and observing the changing seasons of the Pacific Northwest. These episodes function as more than recollections. Each becomes a point of departure for considering how a person might approach uncertainty, money, work, relationships, adversity, and time.
The book’s defining quality is Tiongson’s habit of connecting ordinary experience to larger systems of thought. Zen Buddhism, Stoicism, Taoism, Jungian psychology, existentialism, and other traditions recur throughout the essays, giving the collection a consistent intellectual framework despite its varied subject matter. A cup of tea becomes an exercise in presence, a difficult vacation becomes a lesson in distinguishing what can and can’t be controlled, and a failed business acquisition becomes an examination of detachment, negotiation, and judgment. The chapter on gray whales offers one of the clearest expressions of the book’s central metaphor. Reflecting on the barnacles carried by the animals, Tiongson writes, “The whales are outside our windows, but there exists a sea within us, with all that it contains.” That sentence captures the book’s method particularly well. The external world supplies its stories, while the internal world gives those stories their significance. Tiongson’s descriptive passages about animals, landscapes, weather, cities, and changing seasons also give the philosophical material a physical setting, allowing abstract ideas to remain tied to lived experience.
The finance and business sections add another dimension by making the book practical as well as contemplative. Tiongson discusses savings accounts, certificates of deposit, Treasuries, index funds, risk levels, private investments, bookkeeping, budgeting, fraud prevention, grants, and business acquisition with the perspective of someone describing his own working methods. His recurring concern is disciplined stewardship of finite resources, particularly money and time. The chapters on entrepreneurship are similarly grounded in experience, including negotiations over the “Sugar and Salt” business, the mechanics of pursuing government grants, and lessons carried forward from years in small business. One of the book’s most concise statements, “Resourcefulness can, in fact, be our greatest resource,” develops into a discussion of preparation, adaptability, self-investment, and purposeful effort. This combination of concrete procedure and reflective interpretation gives the book much of its character. Financial planning, business decisions, emotional regulation, and philosophical inquiry are treated as related practices that depend on patience, attention, and the ability to respond thoughtfully to changing circumstances.
The Two Oceans is a record of a person attempting to make coherent meaning from experience while remaining attentive to the practical demands of everyday life. Its episodic form suits that purpose because the book develops through accumulation: cats, whales, birds, businesses, bank accounts, friendships, disappointments, journeys, storms, and routines gradually become parts of the same meditation on impermanence and balance. Tiongson explains in the afterword that the project grew from twenty-five stories written over twenty-five weeks, drawing on journaling, recent experiences, financial knowledge, and his study of philosophy. He later discovered connections among subjects that had initially seemed unrelated, particularly the ways different philosophical traditions addressed questions such as human suffering. That history is visible in the finished work. The Two Oceans reads as a personal philosophy assembled from observation and practice. Its strongest passages invite readers to notice how much meaning can reside in experiences that might otherwise pass without examination, and its enduring subject is the continuing effort to balance the world around us with the world within.
Page: 231 | ASIN : B0GY49CPBZ
A New True to Me
J. David Lewis’s A New True to Me: The Foundation for How I Got Here is a memoir built around a deceptively simple question: How do we really know the story of our own lives? Lewis begins with memories of family, childhood, work, school, church, and rural East Tennessee, then keeps testing those memories against letters, financial records, yearbooks, genealogical research, old photographs, and other evidence. What makes the book especially interesting is that he doesn’t quietly repair the places where memory fails him. He often lets readers see the original belief, the evidence that challenged it, and the revised understanding that followed. That process becomes the meaning of the title. What is “true to me” today may become a “new true to me” tomorrow when better information arrives. The result feels less like a polished account delivered from a distance and more like sitting beside someone while he works through the evidence of his own life.
The book’s construction metaphor gives that exploration a useful shape. Lewis moves from the “construction site” of ancestry and childhood to the “foundation” of school, religion, education, and banking, then to the “subfloor” of the decisions that eventually made him his own person. Along the way, Claiborne County, Tennessee, becomes almost a character itself. Family farms, TVA development, a small-town bank, churches, schools, racial integration, class differences, and the long shadow of regional history all help explain the world that formed him. Lewis is particularly compelling when inherited stories run into uncomfortable facts. He examines an ancestor’s slave ownership, his own privilege, the pain of growing up with undiagnosed dyslexia, and childhood religious experiences he eventually recognizes as traumatic. He doesn’t treat discovery as a victory lap. Again and again, he returns to his parents’ lessons about doing the best one knows how to do, then taking responsibility for what needs to be straightened out.
That willingness to examine responsibility becomes even more powerful when the book reaches Lewis’s professional life. His family’s bank initially represents heritage, security, status, and a path laid out for him long before he was old enough to choose it. Later, an independent audit forces him to confront practices he had accepted as normal, including undisclosed compensation and questionable benefits, and he doesn’t spare himself when describing his complicity. His departure from the bank leads through unemployment, family conflict, divorce, the collapse of the Butcher banking empire, FDIC work, another ethical confrontation, and finally financial planning. These chapters give the memoir much of its momentum because Lewis’s larger question becomes concrete: What happens when the life you thought you were supposed to live no longer matches the person looking back from the mirror? By the time he founds Resource Advisory Services and embraces the early fee-only fiduciary movement, his career has become an answer to that question, built around transparency, client interests, and the belief that there’s more to money than money.
Lewis isn’t simply looking backward to preserve memories. He’s using writing to interrogate them, and that makes the reader start doing the same thing. Old stories that once seemed settled become provisional. Success becomes less about status and more about alignment between values and action. Education becomes the ability to reconsider what you believe. Faith becomes something that can live alongside questions. Even the book’s final declaration, that the whole story is “TRUE TO ME” as of a specific date, carries the possibility that another truth may still be waiting. That openness gives A New True to Me its unusual warmth and staying power. A New True to Me turns memoir into a living audit of memory and conscience, showing how a life changes when we’re brave enough to revise the stories we’ve always told about ourselves.
Pages: 353 | ASIN : B0H96QWS77
