Is Executive Coaching for You?

If you have been working hard climbing the corporate ladder, but it seems that you are making little progress in your career, it may be time to consider executive coaching. Executive Coaching allows you to strengthen your leadership and interpersonal skills with real-time feedback. As you rise in the organization and take on increasing levels of management responsibility, your ability to work with and influence people becomes critical to your success. Executive Coaching is an effective way for you to sharpen your interpersonal skills, look at old problems in new ways, and re-energize your career so that you can lead your team to achieve their highest level of performance.

For more information on the benefits of executive coaching, check out the following Harvard Business School article, "What an Executive Coach Can Do for You".

Ten Years Carpooling Kids and No Skills for a Resume? Not so Fast . . .

During the summer, my friend Sheila told me, "I've been out of the
workforce for ten years so my software engineering skills are obsolete."

"I've spent 10 years carpooling kids to sports,organizing play dates, and raising money for the boosters. You do career development and coaching, "she said," What would you say to someone like me?"

Plenty.

Sheila, like many of our clients, has marketable skills she has developed over the past ten years even though she was outside the paid workforce. She just needs help identifying those skills.

When Sheila took over as fundraising chair for her school boosters club, it had a budget of $20,000.00. Over the course of three years, under Sheila's leadership, the boosters raised more than ten times that amount. Sheila, a software engineer, had never been involved in fundraising. It was during her time out of the paid workforce that she developed a very valuable and measurable skill - fundraising for a non-profit organization. And, she enjoyed it!

We suggested that Sheila add her fundraising experience to her resume in a section called "Development Work". We helped her brainstorm all the fundraising activities she has been involved in, the specific tasks she performed, and the amount of money she raised. With targeted help from us, she was able to articulate a list of development projects, her roles and responsibilities, and accomplishments.

Many people underestimate the skills they have acquired during their years outside the paid workforce. A career development professional can help them identify their marketable skills and craft an impressive resume that highlights their achievements.

En-Vision Your Way to Success!

There are many places we get blocked in our job search- not knowing where to start, needing a resume, or giving in to the belief that we don't have valuable skills to offer. These are three common "stuck points" that typically bring clients to their first career coaching meeting with us. While these challenges are real, they are not what's truly keeping people stuck. More often than not, it is the lack of a clear, focused, well-formed Vision of what job they want that is the primary reason our clients can't move forward in their search.

When you have a clear, exciting, focused Vision of the job you want, things begin to happen that you did not expect. Opportunities become apparent that were not there before, information to help you move forward seems to come out of nowhere, and people you did not realize could help you, reach out and make important connections.

One of our clients decided that he wanted to go back to school to get his Ph.D., and that afternoon, when the mail came, a brochure for a local college arrived, highlighting a Ph.D. program he was interested in.

Was this magic? Not really - just the power of our minds to discern information that is important to us.

During the course of our day we are bombarded with untold amounts of stimulus. It is the job of our brain to filter out information that is unimportant. Once we clearly define something as important, such as a Ph.D. program, our brain allows that information in.

This happens all the time. Have you ever decided that you wanted a certain kind of car? For example, you decide that you want a red jeep wrangler that you can drive onto the beach in the summer. Suddenly, or so it seems, you see red jeep wranglers everywhere - in the parking lot at the grocery store, driving down the highway, even on television. Advertisements for the jeep bombard you in the newspaper and on the internet.

So, how does this work in our job search? When we clearly focus on, define, and articulate what we truly want in our next job, our brain allows that information in, and we begin to see possibilities and opportunities everywhere, just like the red jeep. We get excited about the job search and we are able to do the hard work of writing a resume and networking. We are able to think about what we have to offer.

And, the first step in the process of creating a vision of your next job is to think about what skills, strengths and experiences you have, and what you really love to do. Then, write down a very specific, detailed description of your ideal job. Begin by asking yourself these questions:

What kinds of activities and tasks, when I am doing them, make me lose track of time?

What activities have kept me most energized?

What is the most satisfying part of any job for you?

When I imagine my ideal job, what am I doing, where am I doing it, and who am I doing it with?

A clearly defined Vision is like a magnet pulling you forward toward your goals. We help clients individually and in small groups think very specifically about what they really want in a next job. Once they can state their Vision, they can begin to move forward - and watch their possibilities expand!

Get "Unstuck" in your Job Search

We were recently asked to share our coaching expertise through a guest blog on new author, Joe Twelves' career explorations blog called Career Decisions Made Easy. Joe and his family have worked together to publish a unique resource called Conversations: Find Your Niche!


Read on to see what we had to say . . .

As career coaches who work with new college graduates, we see the same story over again.

You have been looking for a job with little success. It's incredibly frustrating, and even worse, your self-esteem has taken a hit and you begin to think, "Do I really have anything valuable to offer?"

We think you do. You have more skills and marketable experiences than you realize.

The reality is that it is very hard to maintain a high level of energy, enthusiasm and optimism during a lengthy job search. You feel stuck and don't know what to do to move forward. At this point, job seekers turn to us to help them jumpstart their motivation and learn new ways to approach the job search.

When we coach a client, the first step is to "Start With Your Strengths" - the process of identifying a list of all your strengths, experiences, and skills that you have developed over the course of your life (paid or unpaid) that can then be crafted into a compelling resume.

When individuals get "stuck" in their job search, they tend to focus on the negative - skills they don’t have, work experience they don’t possess, and even personality traits they were not born with. Their thoughts are peppered with "If only" statements. "If only I had learned a second language. . . then I would have a job." "If only I had five years experience in marketing . . . then I would have a job." "If only I was more outgoing . . . then I would have a job." Focusing on the negative keeps you stuck. Focusing on all the skills, strengths and experiences that you DO have accomplishes two things: 1) it creates forward momentum in a positive direction towards your goal; and 2) it provides a wealth of new content for your resume. When you "Start With Your Strengths", you feel re-energized AND your resume becomes stronger.

So, How do you begin to examine your strengths?

First, and this is very important, enlist the aid of an empowering partner to help you with this step. An empowering partner is someone in your corner, who will enthusiastically help you achieve your goal. It can be good friend, a trusted mentor, or a career coach like us. An empowering partner will make sure that you uncover ALL the skills, strengths and experiences that you possess. Let us illustrate the importance of working with an empowering partner with an example from one of our coaching sessions:

Karen (Career Coach) Tell me four things that you've done in the last four years that you've found really rewarding.

Lila (new grad job seeker) One thing I did that I really loved was my summer job as a camp counselor at a science camp.

Karen: Great! What skills did you learn or use as a camp counselor?

Lila: I really can't think of too many that apply to the job market - I basically organized the kids and made sure they got to their different activities.

Karen: Really? That’s all? So, when you took the kids to their activities, you didn't participate at all?

Lila: Well, actually, I designed some of the activities and helped the kids during the activities.

Karen: Can you give me a specific example?

Lila: We had a lot of thunderstorms that summer and the kids got really fascinated with weather. So, I got some money from the camp director and we built this weather station. It was so cool. We could track wind speed, wind direction, air pressure, rainfall, and temperature. I made up these weather games that compared our data with other science camps around the state and the kids really got into it. By the end of the summer, I showed all the counselors how to use it with their kids.

Karen: Ok - so not only did you get funding for an operational weather lab, you cooperatively designed and built the lab with your students, you designed science curriculum, you taught the curriculum to your students, AND you trained other educators in the curriculum you designed. All of those skills are important to put on your resume. And, as you can see, those are a lot more skills than simply making sure kids got to their different activities!

An empowering partner will challenge you to think deeper and clearer about the skills and experiences that you have. It is just the beginning to thinking about your job search is new positive way. It will jumpstart your energy and motivation and help you get “unstuck”!

Success Story: Coaching Turns Career Impasse into Fruitful Job Search

The impact comes from positive psychology, the science behind living a more fulfilling life. It’s the key ingredient in our 6-step coaching process that helped Maureen move forward in her career. Positive psychology focuses on harnessing the power of one's strengths, and challenging negative self-limiting thinking, to keep you moving forward toward a goal.

Maureen was a smart, motivated, and mature 24 year old who landed a dream job, right out of college, as an event coordinator at a well known nonprofit. Two years later, feeling stuck and needing to move on, she lacked direction and confidence. Maureen had difficulty considering her career options because of a negative belief she had developed that she wasn’t good at certain aspects of her job. We wondered if this was really true, or had something caused her to believe this. We learned that a year into her job, Maureen lost her mentor. She continued to organize and coordinate large scale volunteer events, but without supervision or real guidance. Because she did such a good job, she was given more and more responsibility. Although she was outwardly successful, she felt overwhelmed by the magnitude of the job, and lost confidence. We helped Maureen to see that she may actually be very competent at this job, but was currently in a situation where her responsibilities outweighed her training. Maureen became hopeful that she could have a successful career in nonprofit event management if she could change her situation.

Through our process, we helped Maureen shift her thinking about her abilities so she could see her strengths and the very real marketable skills she had developed. Maureen realized that she wanted to continue in the nonprofit sector because it was meaningful to her, that she had a very high skill set for someone of her age and experience level, but she clearly needed a mentor to keep learning and growing in a professional capacity. Finding a strong, supportive mentor became a top priority in Maureen’s job search, above and beyond the organization or job description. With the sharpening of her focus, she found exactly the right job in a very short period of time. And, two years later, she is still working successfully and growing in that job.

The way we think about our experience, abilities and potential matters more than most people believe. Negative thinking is the number one thing that holds us back and is often times reflected in the jobs we seek, on our resumes and even during interviews. We help individuals like Maureen shift their self-limiting thinking and identify and highlight their strongest abilities and skills so that they can begin to move forward in meaningful ways.