Working with a Career Coach

Getting Maximum Benefit from the Coaching Experience

Make informed choices when deciding to work with a career coach so you can maximize the benefits and walk away with positive results that can last a lifetime.

The ultimate goal of career coaching is to help you evaluate and direct your goals, including providing insight into skills, work style, enhance your ability to overcome barriers and assist in translating your skills and experience into accomplishments that matter. You are embedded in a web of perceptions about yourself, your abilities and effectiveness.

How Coaching Can Help You Gain Insight

The essential tool for increasing self-awareness is feedback. Feedback can reveal your underlying style, beliefs patterns, preferences, and wants and needs. Feedback is also important to keep you on track with your goals. Most people’s self-esteem and sense of success are tied to satisfying others’ expectations. When this happens you often lose touch with what you value and want for yourself.

A coach can provide this type of honest and objective feedback assisting you in effectively articulating what you are looking for in your work life. This process then leads to identifying your niche and clarifying what makes you attractive to potential employers

How Coaching Can Clarify Your Goals

Identifying your goals means to reflect on what drives your decisions and actions. A coach can help you uncover your true passions and translate them into career goals. True reflection, however, requires you to make time for this process and for you be willing to put in the work and effort.

A coach can not tell you what to do but he or she can guide you to discover the path you are longing to be on by asking the right questions and providing you with the right tools and resources. Each person is different and each circumstance is unique, a good coach recognizes this and will tailor his or her approach accordingly.

How Coaching Can Help You Identify and Overcome Barriers

It is important to discuss roadblocks and challenges with your coach when you experience them. A coach can work with you to understand the issues and develop strategies for avoiding them in the future. Through effective coaching, you learn to internalize the ability to adapt and grow continuously by stepping back, identify your interests and choose actions that align with those interests, your values, and goals.

If career coaching is to have a positive impact, your active participation is essential and must be voluntary. Be open to accept feedback and be willing to test and revise your assumptions about your development needs. Lastly, be clear and realistic about your goals and set attainable timelines to achieve your goals