Kropotkinskaya is working with a coach as her retirement approaches. She’s finding it extremely useful. The sessions are, as noted above, Socratic, and are about values, expectations, desires, more than “how to.” Knowing where you want to go rather than how to get is a big part of it and K is enjoying it a lot and learning about herself as well. But coaches and approaches different widely
I’ve worked with a life coach.
A few years ago one of my wife’s friends was training to be one and needed some pro bono clients as part of her training. I found it to be a helpful and positive experience.
I agree with the general description of the process as Socratic, and largely about a self-defined exploration of goals and values. Those goals could be personal or career or other. The techniques my coach used are certainly not rocket science, but they are effective, and I still use some of them today.
In my personal case (and, I think a lot of people who seek coaching), the issues we seek help with are things that we feel “stuck” on, either because we know that we want to change something but aren’t really sure what to change or how, or because we’re paralyzed focusing on downsides (every change has some trade offs). Coaching can be helpful both to talk through what you actually want and to determine which values are important to you.
Define a goal. Talk about what it would mean to you personally to achieve it. Talk about how others would recognize it. Talk about the steps to get there, and the timeline, and what it looks like to be on a path to the goal. Whatever the long-term goal is, make shorter goals. In one year I will X. In six months I will Y. By next week I will Z. Today I will run out of letters.
Measure progress. This really can be as simple as taking 10 minutes a week to think about what’s important to you to accomplish in the next week, then reflecting on how you did with the things you wanted to accomplish last week. And also thinking about how well the goals you set last week made you feel, and updating your understanding of your values based on that.
When I wasn’t sure what to do, the coach would often ask me to consider what I would say to someone who approached me with a similar dilemma, or what I thought someone whose opinion I valued would tell me to do if I asked them. This sort of felt silly at the time, but it’s really effective! I often described the coaching sessions as being an hour-long process where she coaxed me into saying aloud the answers I kind of already knew.
A lot of the value of a life coach is the social commitment to keep you on track. Like a personal trainer or a (good) manager at work. It’s not like I don’t know how to make a plan to accomplish something, or to do 20 pushups, or to accomplish a particular task that’s maybe not the thing I most want to do. But having a meeting on the calendar with a person who is going to specifically ask me what the plan for the week is, and how the last week went, and how it makes me think differently about the 1-year plan (or do a few more pushups or finish that feature) is a powerful motivator.
This is really helpful, thanks!
I don’t really have any “goals”. So I think even the Bill Belichick of life coaches wouldn’t be helpful at this point. Like what sort of “goals” do people have? Stuff like climbing Everest or driving a motorcycle cross country?
Without your prompting or request? That’s just creepy. Was he a peer or superior at work?
I’ve got about as much career experience (time spent doing forgettable projects for meaningless reasons using consumable skills) under my belt as you. My goals are simply to get to retirement doing whatever it takes for the maximum amount of $ I can get with competence as my essential guiding principle. That’s my Mt. Everest.
It was creepy! Total stranger, just some guy a friend of mine had met.
So, I ran into my friend at a coffee place, sat down with him, and this guy joined us. He started quizzing us about our personality types, and my friend almost immediately left. Didn’t bother Gary Guru; he just switched his focus to me.
When he started pulling handouts out of his briefcase with pie charts and graphs, I “got a text” that meant I had to get the car home.
My friend moved away, but I recently met him for some trout fishing. I mentioned Guru Guy, with a sneer in my voice… that my friend totally missed, because he immediately started telling me how great the guy is and how if he hadn’t moved away he’d be using him “as a life resource.”
I changed the subject, but I almost said “You really do take everyone at face value, don’t you?”
I could probably use all sorts of career / life coaching. I just think very few coaches are qualified to really do anything useful. I feel like I need someone with Bagger Vance levels of mystical insight with Alter the Butler knowledge of my background and psyche.
Or maybe just some Chance the Gardner wisdom, eh?
I had to look that up. That reference is a bit before my time.
I’ve been thinking about this. Because “stuck” and “paralyzed focusing on downsides” certainly describes my situation. With regards to career mostly. Although my marriage isn’t sweeting the deal.
But how would a career coach even fix any of that? Like for all their talk, none of these “coaches” know shit in any real sense of “you got this job/didn’t get that job because XYZ”.
I wonder about that too. But sometimes, maybe, all that knowledge isn’t as specialized as we think? I’m not an expert by any means, but sometimes when I hear someone talking about their struggles I feel like I can see where they’re going wrong, even without any extrinsic evidence. Maybe people who know more can do that same thing in more subtle situations?
One of my exes wanted to be a life coach. She tried really hard at it but by the time of our break up she had yet to book a client. She wanted to focus on helping women, especially single moms, find themselves. She would have been great at it but her targeted clientele are pretty much broke and can’t afford a life coach. That’s a bit of a digression but I did learn a bit about the industry.
You really want a career coach which is a directed thing rather than a life coach which is kind of hippie dippie. What they have in common though is they keep you accountable. You make concrete goals for the week and they help you keep on track. You work together on what those goals will be and how to do them. They aren’t going to tell you what to do, they’ll help you figure out what to do.
And thinking about it, that might not be what you really need.
The coach doesn’t fix it. No one can fix your problems but you. The coach provides an environment and a routine in which you think seriously and deeply about what you want and how to get it, and accountability to another person to actually do it.
Perhaps you just need to talk to a therapist. It might help you help yourself in sorting things out by talking through stuff with someone who can just listen and prompt you to find the answers you need.
A dispassionate but calm guidance might be all that you need. A half dozen sessions might be enough to get you back on track.
Yeah, I tried therapy a couple of years ago when I lost that job. Also a couple of different career coaches and a psychiatrist to test for ADHD (which has always been “suspected” but “inconclusive”). I was feeling very angry, depressed, and anxious constantly. I don’t know if any of it was all that helpful.
After a few sessions, I was kind of like “so what is the point of all this”? I didn’t feel like she did anything like provide any sort of meaningful insight or “prompt” me to find or do anything.
Might be worth it to try again with someone who uses a different method.
Ultimately what “got me back on track” was just finding a job and being good at it.
Really all I “want” is to not have to think about this shit all the time. Jobs and career and such. At least not beyond the day to day work. Basically just go to work, spend the day busy doing whatever it is I’m supposed to be doing. Enough downtime where I can actually prep for meetings, read through the latest on our products, etc. Maybe even have some time to get lunch with colleagues.
I can get into a whole bunch of theories on my various issues and frustrations. Might take more than a half-dozen sessions.
A friend of mine is a really stand-up guy who for years had a solid reputation in our community of friends as someone who gives great advice. Eventually he quit his job as an appraisement photographer or something to become a life coach, turning his advice-giving talents into a career.
Some years back, at a point when I was feeling super low morale about the state of teaching in my state, he suggested I work with him. It wasn’t clear to me if he was offering pro-bono or would charge, but he said he was interested in working with more teachers, so we sat down for an hourlong initial consult.
It didn’t work for me. Over the course of the meeting, it became clear that the focus of life-coaching would be on making an individual change, an “objective” evaluation of my individual circumstances and a decision about what I should do for my individual career path. But I’m much more of a “fight the power” dude. I’m much less interested in figuring out how I can fix things for myself individually, and much more interested in figuring out how I can organize with other folks to change the system that’s messing things up for everyone. And it just didn’t seem that life coaching even recognized that as a possibility. Since then I’ve gotten much more involved in union work, which is much more in my wheelhouse.
I can definitely see how life coaching might work for folks who need to make that sort of individual decision, and no shade at all on folks for whom it works. But it wasn’t for me.
I get it. In my experience, no amount of therapy is going to be of much help until you’ve settled yourself into a new job. So don’t waste a lot of time and money on coaches and therapists who can’t help you land a new gig. You’re right to focus on that, frustrating as it may be when things don’t seem to be working out.
Eh. Don’t dredge up issues you don’t want to deal with and that ultimately don’t matter all that much when it comes to achieving your objectives. So what if your mom & dad didn’t hug you enough when you were little.
Some things can stay unresolved because it’s too late to fix them and as long as you’re okay with letting sleeping dogs lie.
I was thinking more along the lines of figuring out issues or behaviors or skills/knowledge gaps that might currently be impacting my career.
Like I don’t really get how jobs or careers work the way they do. I do in a vague sense that better schools generally correlate to better companies and better jobs which leads to better companies and jobs. Or if you have some specific skill set a company is desperate for. But I haven’t quite figured out how people get jobs at companies and manage to successfully navigate the often contradictory bullshit and politics so they can stay there for some length of time. I certainly have no idea what sort of job I want to do next, other than I’d like it to not be managing the delivery of custom tech projects over which I have little control over the budget, staff or other levers I need to make it successful.
And of course, we aren’t even yet talking about the general frustrations of job hunting in this day and age.
I would imagine a lot of people feel this way, otherwise there wouldn’t be such a big market for “career coaches” offering advice on “jump starting your career using our career accelerant!”
At the risk of coming off somewhat glib; Have you considered the possibility that you’re looking for love in all the wrong places? Based on your previous posts about work, you’ve been at this for a good number of years. Twenty or so, right? You strike me as being smart enough that if there is a key hard skill you missed along the way, you’d have probably figured it out by now. So that isn’t it.