‘Career intuitive’ Sue Frederick uses ‘the gift’ to steer people to jobs
by Chris Bynum, for The Times-Picayune
November 2009
Sue Frederick sees dream jobs. (And, yes, she sees dead people, too.)
The New Orleans native is a career intuitive. A career clairvoyant. Now residing in Boulder, Colo., Frederick credits her birthplace for “nurturing” her psychic abilities as a child.
“In the haunted alleys of the French Quarter, almost everybody gives respect to the ‘unseen’ world in some form or another — whether it’s through voodoo, Catholicism, psychics, vampires or Mardi Gras,” she writes in her book “I See Your Dream Job: A Career Intuitive Shows You How to Discover What You Were Put on Earth to Do” (St. Martin’s, $19.99).
“I was born in New Orleans to a French Cajun mother who came from a long line of women with ‘the gift.’ I inherited a double dose of telepathy, clairvoyance, and precognition,” says Frederick, who was nevertheless encouraged by her mother to “fit in, be strong, and have a conventional life.” Frederick’s formative years were influenced by “normal” girls like Gidget and Hayley Mills and regimented by a Catholic upbringing.
“The idea of convent life was strangely comforting — until seventh grade, when I saw the Beatles perform on “The Ed Sullivan Show.” From then on my future was clear — I would marry Paul McCartney,” she writes.
Instead she married fellow mountaineer Paul Frederick. He would die in his mid-30s of cancer two years after they married in 1978. Shortly after her husband’s death, Frederick would lose a childhood friend to leukemia and her father to lung cancer. All three passings were lasting spiritual experiences for the woman who would choose such conventional careers as health writer and career counselor.
It would be decades before Frederick’s intuitive gifts would finally “come out of the closet.” She had begun her profession as a career counselor in the 1970s, when the book “What Color is Your Parachute” first was the blueprint for career planning. Frederick’s second husband would encourage her to put “career intuitive” on her Web site in 2002. But it was a New York Times story in 2008 that got Frederick’s intuition working overtime with a growing influx of private clients, many from Wall Street. The growing number of layoffs, buy-outs and bankrupt companies created even more clients many from New Orleans.
In fact, it was a session with one of her New Orleans clients that connected Frederick’s ability as a medium to her profession as a career counselor. A vision Frederick had earlier that morning of a man standing by her bed turned out to be the deceased husband of her new client, who would describe him in her first session with Frederick. After her husband’s death, the client had lost sight of her own mission in life. Frederick said the man’s spirit simply wanted to impart to his wife that an afterlife existed and that her mission on Earth could be enriched by that knowledge.
“This unusual technique of career counseling wasn’t something that I was immediately comfortable with. I had spent years trying to prove I was realistic and practical and could fit into the conventional world, yet here I was seeing dead people and getting career guidance from them,” Frederick writes.
The stories that Frederick, 58, now tells might have raised more eyebrows had she revealed them at the age of 28. But with mainstream exposure of psychic talents on television, Frederick is more relaxed about her unorthodox approach to career counseling.
“When you lose your job, and you’re 43, you’ve been around the block a few times. You’re more open to saying, ‘I’ll try a career intuitive.'” Frederick says.
Frederick’s book not only offers instruction on how to use numerology to delve into one’s own talents and interests, but also how to tap into one’s intuition and how to use practical steps to a career path clouded by the loss of a loved one, the termination of a job or confusion about sense of direction.
As to whether or not psychic abilities are guaranteed to help others find a dream job, Frederick doesn’t make promises.
“I can tell you what I see you doing. But everything is about free will. Time and space all happen at once, and free will determines the future you choose,” says Frederick, who wrote the book so “people could figure out how to tap into their own inner guidance system.
Everyone is capable of reading their own path.”