5 Early Warning Signs: You Might Be A TOP Career Coach
If you experience any of these symptoms, call us right away: You might be a great career coach.
You’ve had a variety of jobs that just didn’t feel like “you.” And you probably feel a little sheepish about it, like you have failed somehow. Welcome to the club! The more boxes you’ve tried to fit into, the greater your insights into where someone else might find their happy place.
You have a certain disdain for The Establishment. Corporate malcontents aren’t always career coaches in disguise, but we certainly shouldn’t rule it out! The beauty of coaching versus, say, corporate recruiting or HR, is that you work for the job seeker, not the Machine. If you are someone who eye-rolls their way through staff meetings because no one’s even trying to cut through the red tape and Get It Done? Hey, so are we.
You’re insightful and curious. Good career coaches can both listen to others, and see through them a little when necessary. Your job-seeker probably came to you because they’re feeling blocked and don’t know why, or because they don’t know what’s really right for them. If you genuinely love figuring out what makes someone else tick, great. If you can mix that with a combination of empathy and “tough love” to help them get past their various fears and defense mechanisms, you’re potentially 24K in this line of work.
You’re open to your own self-growth. Much of what we coach is through our own life experiences. As we grow in our own self-development, the more tools and capacity we have to helping others.
You sincerely love the feeling of helping others. Possibly the single biggest thing that unites people who are good at career coaching is that they feel best when they are being of service to other people. That’s not everyone, and by the way, it doesn’t need to be: it isn’t a value judgment. People have varied traits, and thank goodness they do! If everyone were a career coach we’d have no journalists, performers, salespeople or hardware architects. If you’re a person whose source of gratification is service to others, you’ll find you might have the kind of personality to thrive in career coaching.
Side effects experienced by our career coaches might include: extreme happiness, constant giddiness that they are doing what makes them feel great, occasional freaking out that it can’t be this great and something bad is going to happen, tremendous relief to be part of a cohort that supports them, thankfulness to have their own business coach, and a general sense of freedom. If these persist… great!