Bringing Your Authentic Career Vision to Life
Career coaching frequently comes up in my practice as an integrative wellness coach, because career looms so large in many people’s lives. Honestly, if your work-life is out of balance, it’s hard to create harmony in the rest of your life.
Unfortunately, too many people treat their careers as matters of happenstance. So many settle for jobs and work-life circumstances that don’t align with their authentic selves, principles, passions, or purposes. Career is one of the last things in life that should be a left to chance. My approach to Integrative Career Coaching (ICC) focuses on making your career path a conscious choice and a product of design innovation. It only requires that you invest the time to discover who you are, who you really want to be, and how you truly wish to live.
Integrative Career Coaching Approach
Career development has historically been approached as if it were solely a cognitive matter solved by list making and analysis. But the cognitive aspect of career development is not the only one and, for many people, not the most important one. Choosing or changing your career direction is a deeply personal, existential matter—a vision quest of learning, growth, and change. ICC supports career development in five respects that are all important and interdependent, helping you align your thinking, feeling, visioning, learning, and acting to realize your authentic career vision.
Thinking
ICC supports your cognitive effectiveness in career development including your knowledge and understanding of career options and change processes, your problem-solving and decision-making abilities, and your capacities for reflective and strategic thinking.
Feeling
ICC involves enhancing your wellbeing, building self-confidence, reducing stress, improving motivation, and reducing anxiety and depression. These affective aspects of career development are frequently ignored; however, they’re vital to career transformation and self-efficacy.
Visioning
ICC helps reveal the purpose, principles, and passion that converge to form your life path. Using my background as a creative director and meditation teacher, I guide you through creative processes that help reveal and express your authentic career vision and identify the major psychological and spiritual principles that govern your life and growth.
Learning
ICC uses a skills-based framework to help you identify and acquire the knowledge, skills, and experience needed for the next phase of your journey. Such learning might include leadership development, strategic thinking, business acumen, communication skills, assertiveness, technology training, and time-management.
Acting
ICC helps you plan and execute the incremental steps to get from where you are to where you want to be—for instance, by improving your work performance, raising financial indicators, getting more interviews, attaining work placement, or being promoted. Ultimately, career transformation is a performance management task. We’ll apply clear milestones and valid metrics to keep you motivated.
Great Candidates for Integrative Career Coaching
ICC is a synergy of head, heart, vision, skill, and action in the service of career transformation. It works because it emphasizes a big-picture (macro) perspective as well as a fine-focused (micro) perspective. The macro perspective views your entire life history and frames your career as just one facet of your journey, which can be fulfilled through many possible paths. The micro perspective focuses on short-term, concrete, measurable goals—a “raising the bar” orientation. Using both perspectives helps you move forward confidently whether you’re:
- Formulating your initial career choice
- Launching your career
- Taking your career to a higher level
- Changing fields mid-career
- Approaching workplace reentry
- Leaving a career to buy or start your own business
- Divesting of a business to pursue a new career or life direction
- Countering ageist or discriminatory hiring practices
- Planning for retirement
Integrative Career Coaching Process
ICC is ultimately a journey of self-discovery and of profound personal growth and change. The process works because it’s tailored to your unique personality, worldview and developmental stage. It’s also highly pragmatic in that we use only what is helpful to you. There’s no such thing as a one-size-fits-all ICC approach.
As someone who has successfully navigated three career transformations, I’ve benefited greatly by ICC methods. If you’d like to discuss your authentic career vision, please call or email me to set up a complimentary 30-minute phone or web conference. You’ll come away envisioning your career in a whole new light.