What if you don’t know how to build your career?
A series of real-life coaching vignettes from
SeaChangers’ associates
Coaching conversation #3
In several coaching conversations recently, I have been struck by a pressure the client described. They felt they were supposed to know what sort of career or job they would like and, in not knowing, they were failing or falling short. Although this is not true for everyone, the evidence is that for many of us, we simply don’t know either what is possible or what we would like. This observation weighed heavily on my clients.
I find the term “circumstantial opportunism” describes how most of us manage our career. At any moment we have a set of circumstances we are in, our life situation, from which we are presented with opportunities for a next step. Although we can make efforts to create more opportunities, sooner or later, we need to select from the options open to us.
Once we do that it is as though a door opens, we go through it and are in a new set of circumstances which then prove to be more, or less congenial. After a while, things settle down and the process repeats.
When we look back after many years, we see the evolution of our career as a series of choices made from the opportunities presented to us in our then current circumstances. This is the reason few careers develop as planned. It is not a failing.
Considering that, what to do? Well, for each client that becomes the content of the coaching conversation.
Having worked at the highest level in the industry Simon is acutely aware the most powerful leaders are those that can access the inner resources necessary to achieve their personal and leadership potential. His coaching blends process and content to help them access and apply those resources, at all times balancing the needs of the individual with those of the organisation.