What will I get out of career coaching?

“I’m pretty sure I could benefit from this, but tell me, what will I get out of career coaching?”

This is another excellent question with a multitude of responses, but leading the pack at No. 1 is this: Exactly what you put into it.

Coaching is not magic — although the results often feel that way. It’s hard work. If you’re not ready to work to your own benefit, you’re not ready for coaching.

Your coach is there to help and support you on every conceivable front, but the bottom line is this — you must do the work to reap the benefit. I tell my clients I can help them figure out what to put on their resumes, identify their skills and talents, overcome fear, reduce anxiety and much more, but when it comes down to it, you have got to do the interview. Not me.

That’s where we start, with self-discipline and desire. The other benefits of career coaching accrue from there:

• Analyze your current career situation. What do you like and what do you hate about your present job? About your industry?
• Determine your requirements. Is there a dollar amount you must earn? Do you have to work outside? Do you prefer working from home?
• Discover your potential. I spoke to a man the other day who crawls through air-conditioning ducts for a living, and it’s becoming a real issue for him physically. Drilling down, we uncovered that he’d really love to be a performer.
• Identify existing skills and talents. Many of these are transferable across industries, and a coach can help you see that.
• Develop new skills. Career coaching can help you determine what skills you need to work on in order to get to where you want to go.
• Help you overcome career fear. This may be the biggest benefit of career coaching. Making a big move is scary, no question about it. Your coach is there to talk you off the ledge and help you see your fear in a more realistic light. I ask clients to imagine the very worst thing that could happen — and then ask them how likely that bad thing is to happen.
• Overcome hurdles. Honestly, most of the hurdles are in your own head. You’ve internalized a whole laundry list of shoulds and shouldn’ts and musts and have-tos, many of them “gifted” to you as a child by the well-meaning adults in your life. One of my favorite questions is “And how’s that working out for you?”
• Develop strategies to achieve your career goals. This piece is vital. So many people come to career coaching after years and years in a certain job or industry and have absolutely not the first clue as what to do next. Many of them don’t even have a resume, or at least one that’s been touched in the last 10 years.
• Accelerate your job search. Drawing out your own wisdom and experience, your career coach can help you speed up your job search by helping you focus.
• Gain confidence, insight, encouragement and inspiration. Your coach is your cheerleader, there to tell you yes, you are good enough; yes, you do have the intelligence to do new and different things; yes, you do deserve to be happy — yes, you can do this, and I’m with you all the way.
• Permission to like yourself. Does this sound stupid? Believe me, there are many people who, when they look in the mirror, only see the “bad” things. Your coach will help you figure out how real those perceived negatives are, and help you find ways to change the things that are holding you back.
• Take control of your career. Frankly, it’s not just about taking control of your career, but taking control of your life, too. This allows you to make decisions from a place of personal power, not being at the mercy of others.
• Develop a road map. All this other stuff is great, but coaching is about moving forward. Career coaching will help you come up with a plan to get you where you want to be, using SMART goals.
• Create options. I love this one. If the option isn’t there, create it!
• Examine roadblocks. Are they really roadblocks, or is there a way over or around them?
• Accountability. You set the pace. You outline the tasks you want to accomplish within a certain period of time. Your coach is there to keep you on track and on time. And while sometimes life intervenes and we can’t accomplish what we said we wanted to, serial procrastination calls for a re-examination of goals, objectives and key results. Furthermore, through the use of corporate business software such as Profit, tracking OKRs has never been easier. There really are no excuses not to see progress in action!

So what do you think? Do any of these benefits of career coaching ring your chimes? I’d love to hear from you!