i love you, career coaching 🌱
(4 minute read)
Hi! Welcome to Our Best Work Weekly, a newsletter from Healthy Pour where you'll get weekly tips on creating a healthy workplace, becoming a more compassionate leader, and cultivating a regenerative relationship with work.
One of my favorite parts of my business is career coaching. I’ve been interested in it since my early days working on my counseling master’s degree, where I was especially curious about career decision-making processes and influences and wanted to work specifically with women in career change who had initially chosen careers they were socially conditioned into. At the time (and still), I was heavily influenced by the work of Linda Gottfredson and her Career Theory of Conscription and Compromise, which posits that we are influenced by the pressures of social norms and expectations of identity (think: gender, race, socio-economic status) starting very young, then we make compromises in our career choices that adhere and align with that socialization and perceived limitations.
It’s theories like Gottfredson’s that, I find, are often missing in a lot of career coaching practices. I mean, I could throw hands at a lot of career coaching paradigms (and probably a few coaches themselves) because they reinforce oppressive norms rather than challenging them. They focus too heavily on skills and categorization of careers, totally missing the person and funneling them into a career full of “shoulds” and, ultimately, dissatisfaction, unfulfillment, and burnout.
Career choices are deeply complex, with a wide array of conscious and subconscious influences (this idea is a significant theme in my dissertation), so it’s not enough to simply hand over the Strong Interest Inventory® (that heavily reinforces social norms) and tell someone to take out $150k in loans and go back to school and expect them to be satisfied. If we only see human beings as laborers to feed a capitalistic machine, this approach does that. Sadly, this is what we too often see.
In my career coaching, there are four pillars in my approach that I find set my work apart from the more normative career coaching crowd. First, I look at career holistically, working with my client to identify and process influential elements like what they watch on TV (my dissertation), what their parents did, what kinds of careers they were exposed to growing up, etc. Then, we break those elements out of “career categorization” and reorganize them into feelings and associations, like biases, assumptions, status, power, expectations, and identity. This gives us a gorgeous palette to work with as the client reshapes their idea of career.
Second, I approach career as social contribution rather than a labor drudge. Instead of “What do you want to be?” it’s “How would you like to contribute to your community?” This creates a foundational relationship with career rooted in community and interdependence rather than individualism. It also separates big identity from our work, leaving more space for other, likely more important identities like friend, partner, parent, sibling, or neighbor. This also gives us a canvas to be curious about problems the client wants to solve, centering a sense of meaning and purpose over title or career bucket. Protean and boundaryless careers (those careers that are steered by growth, learning, and personal development while not being limited to a single organization or even field) are a whole vibe. In other words, we approach career as a regenerative process instead of a draining activity, establishing boundaries and expectations around working roles and workplace environments.
Thirdly, and probably my favorite pillar, is that we focus on the life my client wants and how their career can play into that life instead of choosing a job and fitting “life” into it. This is where we look at values, dreams, goals, definitions of success, etc. I often ask, “What do you want your day to look like?” and “What would an ideal day look like 5 years from now?” It’s incredible how often people’s current careers make the life they want to be living very challenging to access—and I don’t mean financially; I mostly mean socially and spiritually. And we know that misalignments and deficits in those areas are major contributors to burnout and other workplace challenges.
On a more practical level, the fourth pillar approaches career changes as growth opportunities and skills amassment instead of abandonment. It can be so hard to “start over.” Still, if we approach that change as an exploration of self-concept and potential, it becomes a different, gentler, and more fulfilling process of discovery and blossoming.
So, if you’re looking to work with a career coach and this resonates with you, holler. But if it’s not me, a great question to ask your potential coach is:
In what ways does your approach challenge oppressive norms? In what ways does it reinforce them?
To be sure, even the most progressive and radical coaching paradigms will still reinforce norms to a degree because we work and live in a capitalist society; the question is how aware the practitioner is of those dynamics and how they address them.
If this appeals to you, I’m happy to share some career strategies and exercises in upcoming newsletters. Let me know your thoughts! And share this with a friend who might benefit!
coffee is for closers.
See you next Monday!
