The challenge is almost universal.
Whether you’re a corporate ladder-climber, a burgeoning entrepreneur, or a small business owner, you’ve worked incredibly hard to get where you are. And oftentimes, the moment you have some sense of stability, you lock in place.
Perhaps you find yourself in an entry level position in the industry you’ve always dreamed of working in. Or you just celebrated the moment your startup began to break even. All of these moments of victory are so worth celebrating! You certainly don’t want to barrel through them without allowing yourself gratitude for the present moment.
But if you’ve gotten this far with sheer determination without a strategy for your ultimate goals, you can easily find ourselves adrift in the limbo of “what next?”
In Moments Like These, a Career Coach is Invaluable
First off, an accredited career coach will start by understanding who you are, and what makes you unique. Then they’ll help you understand how these qualities coalesce into a powerful and desirable package.
Next, they’ll assist you in uncovering what your goals of actualization look like. Your uniqueness will naturally inform the uniqueness of your goals. No two people will have exactly the same “destination of purpose” nor will they ever take the same route to get there. This is why it is so essential to utilize the personalized guidance of a career coach.
With a vision of where you’d like to go in your career, or how you’d like to see your business grow, your coach’s experience comes into full focus as they help you create a step by step strategy with achievable benchmarks. This allows you to relax and enjoy your achievements as they arise, while also not becoming paralyzed in a holding pattern.
Avoiding Burnout
These are some of the most frequently experienced negative career patterns.
Someone is blindly addicted to a generalized definition of career success like recognition or money. They go into auto-pilot, workaholic mode, only to eventually gain those things but without any of the fulfillment they’d hoped for. They didn’t enjoy the journey and the destination isn’t what it was cracked up to be.
Someone studies and trains incredibly hard to cultivate a powerful skill set. They secure a position or elevate their business to the “first plateau” level of their visualized goal. But without a step by step strategy to keep them on course, they become overwhelmed with everyday tasks and think, “If I change anything, I might lose what I have right now!”
Both of these scenarios result in their own special kind of burn out.
I’m sure you're familiar with the phrase, “Knowing is half the battle.” As described above, your career coach will get you over this midpoint hurdle of knowing what you want and how to get there.
The second half of the journey is possibly even more important.
Accountability and Achievement
Your career coach will make sure that your goals don’t continually get placed on the back burner or circumvented into directions that take you off course and away from your deeper purpose.
The reality for most people is that time is incredibly precious. And they don’t have the bandwidth to strategize toward their ultimate goals, other than the ever-present goal of “Just Stay Afloat.” This is truly why a career coach is the secret ingredient many successful and self-actualized individuals utilize in their times of stagnation.
A powerful team can accomplish so much more than one over-scheduled individual. And let’s face it, when we are exhausted, we don’t tend to make for the best accountability partner for ourselves.
This is really where the added beauty of working with a career coach comes in. They can:
Assist you in developing a more efficient workflow pattern
Help you cultivate tools to better manage stress
Support you as you learn to derive joy from the process of your journey
In essence, your coach helps you create a strategic, sustainable, and proactive framework for how you approach your career. And even more importantly, they teach you the skills to savor it as it unfolds.
Guest post by Kristie Santana
Kristie Santana is a life coach, educator, and coaching advocate. Her work over her 15-year career includes founding the National Coach Academy and, more recently, being a founding member of Life Coach Path, a New York City based organization that serves to educate and inspire hopeful coaches to pursue their passions and start thriving coaching practices.
Photo credit: GR Stocks on Unsplash