Career and Transition Coaching

MAPPING OUT YOUR NEXT CAREER TRANSITION

I often receive emails like the one below:

"I feel stuck in my career. I'm in my 40s and have been doing the same work for 12 years. It pays well, but I have no passion for it any more. The problem is, I don't have a clue as to what I else I could do. Can you help?"

Those kinds of stories always remind me of my own situation a number of years ago when I went through a similar mid-life career transition.

I had been in the same field for about 25 years. I loved it for most of that time, but toward the end I really got burned out. I came to understand that my heart was no longer into what I had been doing, and that for my own health and peace of mind, I really had to leave the field that I had devoted my whole adult life to learning and mastering.

As I came to grips with that sobering reality, I remember a scary question popping into my mind: "What should I do next?"

TRYING TO FIGURE IT OUT ON MY OWN

Intuitively, I knew I had to go through some type of introspection process to figure it all out, but since I didn't have a well-thought out plan, I started trying different things. I saw an industrial psychologist and took a battery of career tests. Out of that I learned what others who have similar personalities to me often do for a living, but none of what they did appealed to me.

I read several career books. They had some good advice in them and some interesting exercises, but ironically, the more I read, the less clear I became about the direction I should head out in, and the more overwhelmed I felt. I was learning a painful truth: figuring out a new career on your own can be a very difficult thing to do.

Months passed, my anxiety mounted, and I started feeling self-doubt. I understand now that people who are searching for a new career are often beset with such thoughts. We tend to associate much of our self-esteem with what we do for a living. But at the time, I wasn't aware of that and didn't have anybody helping me keep such thoughts under control.

Eventually, following my heart and with a little luck I found my calling. For me, it was the field of professional coaching, a perfect fit for who I am, what I value, and the skill sets I've accumulated in my life.

As I started coaching and saw so many others going through their own long and tortured career transitions, I knew there had to be a better way, one that was based on a plan that could be done in far less time with better results and less anguish.

THE 5-STEP CAREER PROCESS

I realized that I had learned a lot about the process of what is involved in going through a career transition, so I distilled the best of that, combined it with the best advice I could find from others, and blended it all into a coaching-based approach to career transition. What emerged is what I call my 5 Step Career Process.

In a nutshell, the process I came up with allows you to relatively quickly explore the five key steps needed to make a successful career transition. The process starts with helping you re-discover who you are and what you want to do, has reality checks built in throughout the process, and culminates with an action plan to launch you on your chosen career path.

I believe that several things make my 5 Step Career Process far more effective than trying to figure things out on your own.

1. First of all, it's a process, a plan, containing a time frame and specific steps you'll take under my guidance.
2. Second, the process is simpler, less frustrating, and less time-consuming than what you'll find in any career book. That's because the exercises I guide you through are customized to what you specifically need to know in order to figure out where you want to go.
3. The final difference is that I'm there with you as your personal coach, listening to you, answering your questions, offering feedback and encouragement, keeping you from getting discouraged, and helping you to explore the best path for you to take.

While nobody can guarantee you that they'll be able to take you by the hand and lead you to your calling in life, what I will tell you is that the 5-Step Career Process I use will greatly increase your odds of figuring out what you want to do, will build your self-confidence, and will help you develop a realistic plan to get you where you want to go.

You deserve to have a job, career and life that energize your passions. And now there's a process to help you get there!