What is career coaching for confidence?

My ultimate guide to working with a careers coach to build confidence.

Career coaching helps you reach your career goals more quickly than if you had been working by yourself. It is a process of acceleration and transformation, because a coach will keep you accountable to the process and offer you support, empathy and encouragement along the way. The coaching process involves many thought-provoking questions and activities that bring light to your career pathway. 

Everyone can benefit from career coaching:

•   If you are at the start of your career looking for direction, career coaching can help assess which direction you would be most suited for and where you would thrive. 

• If you are at a stage where you think: ‘I hate my job, but don’t know what else to do’, career coaching can create space to step back, reflect and change focus. 

• If you are entering a role with new responsibilities, then career coaching can help build confidence and create strategies for a successful transition. 

• If you are in a role that you love, but you are experiencing imposter syndrome then coaching can work through your beliefs and experience of what is and isn’t true to overcome this feeling. 

• If you are struggling with work-life balance or stress, coaching can help create the balance you are seeking. 

Career coaching is exploratory. It is a mirror, reflecting back to you what is being heard and helping you to reflect on what you can hear and see happening around you. Career coaching activities include using strategy frameworks, self-reflection questions on accomplishments and set-backs, personality tests, interest mapping and creative practices to explore the subconscious. 

Career coaching is a way to build confidence. This confidence may show up in many ways such as making informed decisions, having hard conversations, assertiveness, managing change, stepping out of your comfort zone or confidence in the process of shifting within careers. Confidence underpins everything you do in your career so it is essential to work on. 

To increase quantum change in your career it may be appropriate to explore all parts of life including your physical environment, financial security and money beliefs, health and wellbeing, family and friends, relationships, personal growth and fun. It is hard to separate these issues and they often overlap and influence each other so it is important to discuss if they are having an impact on your career or work-life balance. 

A career coach will hold you accountable for your actions but will not tell you off if you don't do them -  they are not your school teacher! To achieve powerful transformation you must be prepared to do the work and take responsibility to complete actions in order for you to find success. 

Career coaching is for people who are looking for change, open to new ways of thinking and willing to try new things to create the future they desire. There are group programmes or one to one coaching packages to help you on your journey. As an investment in yourself, it may seem like a large upfront cost but when broken down, the investment is most likely a couple of weeks’ salary.  In the grand scheme of things, it is a small cost to pay for greater job satisfaction and fulfilment in your day to day life. 

What happens in the coaching process?

• Your level of self-awareness increases as you are being asked powerful questions that  pull out your thoughts and make sense of them.  Some of these questions may be things you have avoided asking yourself for fear of the answer, but with a coach you can work towards a goal to help use these thoughts to guide you, not hinder you.

• You feel enlightened with this new level of self-awareness. It is clearing space in your thoughts for what is important to you at work, what you really want from a career and how you visualise success. A career coach can ask questions you hadn’t thought to ask yourself about this future and bring it even more to life for you. A career coach can turn big blue sky thinking into a hard action plan for  getting there.

• The future becomes more manageable with a clear action plan broken down into manageable steps. Your positivity and hopefulness will power you to take action. If actions don’t occur, this is equally as useful for us to talk through. It is great to understand what is holding you back and what your inner beliefs truly are.

• You start to overcome barriers which have been holding you back in the past. Things that have got in your way in the past may not be obvious to you until you start this thought clearing processDuring the coaching  process, you will start to create new thought processes which enable you to build your confidence and try new approaches.

• You start to build habits which serve you to be at your best more often, manage stress and overcome anxious thoughts. You stop self-sabotaging yourself and getting in your own way to success. There is a great process of letting go of thoughts and beliefs which don’t serve you anymore and replacing them with ones which will. 

• You become unstuck by creating career goals which are aligned to your values and passions and work towards fulfilling these values in your day to day. 
  

Depending on where you are in your career you will experience coaching differently.
If you are unhappy at work, you may discover a new direction for the next chapter of your  career.  If you are starting a new job, you might  use career coaching to embed into the new role with success. If you are going for a promotion, you could use coaching as an interview preparation process - to organise your  thoughts and  give yourself  the best opportunity for success. If you are feeling flat, coaching could help to re-energise you  and your approach to your  job. Alternatively, you could use career coaching as ongoing support for the job your are already doing, to help you think more strategically and creatively on a daily basis. 

That’s it for my guide to working with a career coach to build confidence. Now I’d love to hear from you. Where are you at in your career? Do you think career coaching could help you?  

If you could benefit from some free career coaching tools to help you build confidence, then sign up to my newsletter today to receive my free ebook: ‘Mindset Tools for Career Confidence’.

Lucy x