How Career Coaching Gets It Wrong

Career coaching can be a game-changer.

It often begins with identifying your strengths.

Popular methods of identifying strengths

The 'What Color Is Your Parachute' method suggests making three lists:

1. Note down the times when you felt unbeatable. The activities that you wished you could do forever. This is what you love.

2. List your achievements. The accolades, the applause, or simply the times when people sought your help. These are your strengths.

3. Merge the two lists. What shows up on both? These are the things you both love and are good at.

The Ikigai process is another approach that has gained popularity in recent years. It adds two more elements:

• What does the world need? Which of the things you love and are good at are needed?

• What will people pay for? If you're building a career, it has to be doing something that earns money.

Your ikigai, your purpose in the world, is the intersection of love, skill, need, and marketability.

What these methods miss

Those methods are excellent, as far as they go.

But here's a different perspective.

If you're seeking a new career, it's likely because you found your previous one unsatisfying. Even if you were proficient at it. Even if there were aspects you loved.

Perhaps you should be exploring skills you could acquire, rather than relying on existing ones.

A different approach

I like to start with your values.

Identify 5-7 core values that define you. If your career aligns with these, you'll find happiness and fulfillment. If it doesn't, no amount of success in that career will bring you satisfaction.

Don't spend your life in pursuits that only breed discontent. 

If your current career doesn’t align with your values, find one that does. It doesn’t matter if you don’t have the skills for it … yet. You can learn new skills.

You’re never going to replace your values. You might develop them, or refine them, as you accumulate more life experience. But your core values are called that for a reason. They are core to who you are as a person. That won’t change.

Remember, a career that aligns with your values is not just a job, it's a calling.

Top 3 Blocks Dissolved This Week

1. Needing to suffer - resolved past life survivor’s guilt

2. Health issues - resolved “you are careless about your body”

3. Lack of presence - resolved “not wanting to be here”

I considered Steve Jobs’ famous quote, “The only way to do great work is to love what you do. If you haven't found it yet, keep looking. Don't settle.” But it seemed too on-the-nose with the main article. So, instead, I went with this quote from Nelson Mandela.

This goes back to echo the original question I posed in the title of this week’s newsletter. Do you just want a career? Or do you want a calling?

If you have a calling, it can consume you. You can give everything you have to it.

But you will be far greater than you ever would have been simply with a career.

You have untapped and maybe even unknown capacities for greatness within you. They’re tied to your values. If you are authentically who you are, who you were born to be, you can achieve an amazing life.

Don’t settle for less.

To your greatness!

Jennifer Dunne, Caribbean Compassion Coaching