Career coaching usually starts with topics related to professional change in one way or another- making sense of the current career situation, building a personal professional brand, growing in the current company, upgrading and developing professional skills, undertaking change.
However, career development can hardly be “mechanically” separated from personal development. Therefore, career coaching often goes beyond formal frameworks and is useful in a much wider range of topics.
Here are a few of the most “surprise” areas that my clients and I work on in the context of career coaching.
Work-life balance
Work-life balance is much more than successful time management and distribution of responsibilities. Especially with the new formats of remote and hybrid work models, maintaining a balance is proving to be a real challenge for many. A career coach can help you reassess and reframe the relationship between your work and personal roles without disrupting your own sense of well-being.
Setting healthy boundaries
Setting boundaries is a key part for good experience and feeling in harmony at the workplace. Often, when we love our work and put our soul into it, it is difficult to set boundaries and protect ourselves from the intentional or unintentional misuse of our time and energy and even burnout. Career coaching can help you reframe boundaries so that they work well for you. It can help you prepare and handle difficult conversations that aim to “negotiate” and set healthy and sustainable work patterns for yourself.
Internal work
No matter how many external practices for personal development we try to implement, only a change that comes from within and in resonance with who we are really works. In career coaching there is room to discover and develop new attitudes and practices related to our inner world. Thanks to them, we can achieve greater clarity about what is important and applicable for ourselves, develop greater empathy for ourselves and others, increase our emotional intelligence, improve our decision-making, discover new ways to nurture our creativity and productivity, enhance our work performance and personal relationships.
Limiting beliefs and behaviors
Our personal experiences, mindset and behaviors can sometimes become saboteurs of our good life experience and limit us in various subtle and hidden ways. We experience a feeling of “stuckness”, anxiety and a lack of momentum, but we can’t figure out for ourselves where it comes from and how to deal with it. Career coaching can be the key to uncovering and understanding these limiting beliefs and behaviors, and help us introduce new, better patterns for ourselves.
Communication skills
Good communication skills are key to being successful and effective in any personal and professional role, even those that don’t seem to require a high level of verbal communication. They have a major impact on how we present ourselves to others, how we establish collaborative team relationships, how we ask for and negotiate support in the workplace, how we set up boundaries, how we grow in our careers and how we help others.
Career coaching can help you become aware and understand your personal communication style as well as shed light on the areas where you need to work and help you improve your interpersonal skills.