Career Coaching - How Can it Help?
We spend over 80,000 hours at work across our lifetime. If we’re not fulfilled at work that can have a huge impact on our overall happiness and wellbeing. Career coaching can help you find clarity, confidence and make change across several areas. Here we explore managing change, improving performance and finding purpose.
Managing change – different ways of working and redundancy
Change happens all the time. Now though we are experiencing extraordinary levels of change due to the COVID 19 epidemic and the impact on the economy. More people are now working from home, people might be on furlough, and people might have been made redundant or are facing redundancy.
So much of this is out of our control and it can be difficult to see a way forward. By working with a career coach, it enables you look at where you are now and where you want to be, then creating an effective plan to get there. Your career coach will help you break down the plan into manageable milestones, so it doesn’t feel like the challenge is too big. Coaching is about empowering you to make the change that you want.
Key change challenges career coaching can help with:
Changing working practices – how to build resilience, how to create boundaries and be adaptable to change, how to balance competing demands on your time, how to organise your time, how to communicate effectively working remotely.
Redundancy – how to manage the emotional side of redundancy, how to re-frame redundancy as an opportunity, re-building confidence, improving your CV, developing your personal brand, optimising your LinkedIn profile, interview preparation and creating a positive impact quickly when you start a new role.
Improving your performance – improving your income and happiness
Many people find themselves doing a job or following a career path without truly creating a plan that will bring them financial wealth and personal growth. Working with a career coach can help you look at what your skills, strengths and personality preferences are and help illuminate these so that you can improve your performance and get the pay you deserve for doing work that you enjoy.
Like any professional sportsperson working with a coach is essential if you want to build not just performance, but your motivation and your commitment to getting results. A career coach will help you do just the same.
Key performance challenges career coaching can help you with:
Identifying strengths and areas to develop – communication skills, building relationships, strategic thinking, decision making, developing emotional intelligence, managing, or leading teams.
Building self-awareness and personal growth through using a personality profile tool such as DISC.
Managing imposter syndrome – building courage and confidence.
Building a successful career plan – developing your external network, finding a mentor, learning new skills, alignment with your personal life.
Finding purpose in your work – making a difference
We each have different definitions of what success means for us and we are all motivated by different things. Quite often our jobs and careers might sound good on paper, but we feel that something is missing. In our heart we don’t feel fulfilled. We might have a desire to feel more than ‘fine’.
Often if our driving values aren’t being met at work, we might feel conflicted, uncomfortable and this might spill over in to being overwhelmed and irritable. This can then have an impact on our personal lives.
Key purpose challenges career coaching can help you with:
Understanding what motivates you, what values drive you and what values drain you – how to identify work activities and a work environment that aligns with your needs.
Building a plan to find a job, career, organisation, or way of working where your purpose can be fulfilled.
If it’s not possible now to make changes to find a job you love due to current circumstances, helping you to find love in the job you are doing now.
In summary career coaching is about empowering you to find clarity on what you want, helping you identify the tools and build confidence to do it, and making the change happen by developing an effective plan that you’re totally committed to.
Lynsey Kitching
Career and Leadership Coach
Lynsey Kitching is a Career & Leadership Coaching working with individuals and businesses to help more people be fulfilled at work. Lynsey provides support through Solihull Well Being Clinic and is a volunteer employability coach for The Shaw Trust.
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