Need career advice? First, look within
Professional career coaches and counselors, including me, have liabilities. Some of our shortcomings:
Pros are unlikely to understand you and your workplace as well as you do. So their advice may be offbase. Yet clients often follow their advice anyway, because they're paying and they figure, "Well, he's the expert." Many pros claim that they merely facilitate your own thinking, but often, consciously or unconsciously, they push you toward their preferred solution.
Coaching and especially counseling can be disempowering, making you feel you need a crutch to solve your problems.
Of course, there's the cost. Many career coaches charge $200 for a weekly half-hour session and make you prepay for three months' worth. That's about $2,500. And they usually press for you to keep seeing them beyond the initial set of visits.
Self-coaching has none of those liabilities. Plus, if you try self-coaching first and it doesn't solve your problem, you can always turn to a pro.
Steps to self-coaching
Here's how to self-coach. Let's say you're contemplating changing careers. Try these steps:
1. Write down what makes you unhappy about your current job.
2. Consider whether those problems can be fixed without changing careers. If so, how? Jot down your musings. For example, what could you change in your current job to make it more appealing? What if you stayed in your same career but changed bosses or places of employment? What are the pros and cons of those options? The act of writing out your thoughts will help generate even better ideas.
3. If your written musings persuade you to at least consider a new career, scan the lists of careers in the Occupational Outlook Handbook or my book Cool Careers for Dummies. Or check out my quick takes on 37 popular careers.
4. Write the pros and cons of two or more careers that intrigue you. Don't have enough information about the career to do that? Google that career, or find a book about it on Amazon.com. Among Amazon's 3 million titles, there's sure to be a good insider's take on dozens of careers. Beyond that, talk to a few people in the field you're interested in to gather personal impressions.
5. Over the next days, reread and expand on your notes. Or perhaps jot down some things that happened at work, good and bad.
6. Now reread everything you've written one more time, and write one or two goals you'd like to pursue whether it's change your career, your attitude, your boss, your skill set, whatever.
7. List the baby steps you need to take to accomplish the goals you set in step six. One might be to ask employers about who provides the best training in your field.
8. Every day, rate yourself on your progress toward your goals. Perhaps do it in chart form, so you can see your trend. If you're not making much progress, consider joining or starting a support group.
Self-coaching toward advancement
Here's how you might self-coach if you want to advance in your current career or company.
1. Answer this question, in writing: In what ways are you qualified and not qualified for the job to which you'd like to be promoted?
2. Write down the things you must do to make yourself eminently promotable. Do you need to build on your strengths? Fix a shortcoming? Re-adjust your current job description to hide your weaknesses? Suck up to certain people?
3. Create a to-do list based on No. 2.
4. Every night, after work, rate yourself based on how much progress you've made on your to-do list. If you aren't making progress, consider a support group like those listed at www.shersuccessteams.com.
Now, take the money you would have spent on a professional coach, and treat yourself to something.
Next, I'll teach you another alternative to hiring a counselor or coach: co-coaching, in which you and a friend or colleague agree to coach each other.
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