Is career development coaching worth the investment of your time and money?
Many forms of coaching, including corporate and life coaching as well as coaching in the careers domain, have become popular in recent times.
But does career coaching really achieve worthwhile results?
This career development article asks the question:
Does career development coaching deliver significant results for its participants and is it justified as one of the most popular career development tools?
What is Career Development Coaching?
Exactly what is career development?
A good definition of career development is the creation and implementation of action steps towards a predetermined career goal.
And a definition of career development coaching is simply the enlisting of professional help to achieve these goals. A coach is someone who can give correction without causing resentment
– John Wooden-
Often participants involved in this type of professional career development coaching, create a one to the five-year career development plan, to help them achieve these goals.
Coaching is currently one of the most widely used career development tools.
Central to the success of it is a career coachability to help a person extract the absolute maximum potential from within themselves and apply to the world of work.
Coaching needs to be delivered by someone who can see your potential, believes fervently in your potential, and is willing to go the extra mile to see that potential fully realized.
An ability to clearly and passionately see what a person could become further down the road is what all good career coaches invariably possess.
Career Development Coaching’s Primary Purpose:
It’s Not About What Peak You Reach, Rather What Peak You Could Have Reached
John Wooden, one of the most inspiring coaches I know says:
Don’t measure yourself by what you have accomplished, but by what you could have accomplished.
It’s about ensuring that every ounce of potential that is within you is indeed realized.
And of course, that potential will differ from person to person.
What you should accomplish in your career and indeed life, has nothing to do with what someone else may accomplish.
For this reason, career coaching isn’t about [or at least it shouldn’t be about] becoming better than somebody else, or even necessarily reaching a certain high place in your career.
The litmus test is: Have you become the best you can be in your career with the gifts and abilities you have.
The competition should only ever be with ourselves in that sense.
Achieving our maximum potential is more important than any external measurement of success.
And great career development coaches recognize this distinction.
Somebody who reaches a certain high pinnacle in their career might well have underachieved compared to someone who didn’t reach that same hight but did utilize their full potential.
Will I Benefit from Career Coaching
Significant benefits can be realized by a participant in career coaching, but it is critical that the right coach is enlisted. Don’t let what you can’t do interfere with what you can do
— John Wooden
In selecting a career coach, be sure to find someone in whom you feel an unfettered belief and commitment to you oozing from them.
The “I believe in you” energy that flows from a career coach will be instrumental in your success.
This is possibly the most important issue you should take away from this career development article.
Another essential aspect of career coaching is the coach’s ability to help you discover your inborn job skills and then assist you in detecting where you most want to use them.
A career coach will help you work out what you can do really well and throw out what you can’t do.
[Some people have difficulty throwing out the things they can’t do]
In the words of Arthur Miller:
You can’t be anything you want to be
Once you know where you want to go, the job of a career development coach is to launch you into it.
Knowing what to do is only half the battle, launching you to do it is often the difficult part. Half of life is luck; the other half is discipline – and that’s the important half, for without discipline you wouldn’t know what to do with luck.
–Carl Zuckmeyer
A further benefit of career coaching is the way a skilled coach asks questions that result in you gaining insight from your own answers.
This type of skillful questioning is at the heart of uncovering what you are truly good at.
The net result is that you will begin to understand a lot better.
You will become more creative, more productive with better ideas about where your career and indeed your life could be as a result of the greater self-awareness you have.
Is Career Coaching Worth The Investment?
The benefits of career development coaching outlined above suggest that it is worth the cost to you both financially and in time commitment.
One of the great benefits of enlisting a career coach is that you will gravitate to work that more closely aligns with your inborn job skills.
Doing work which is closely aligned to your natural giftings results in your sense of self-worth skyrocketing.
Show me someone who has a tremendous sense of self-worth and confidence in their own innate abilities [but not an over-inflated ego] and is using them, and I will show you someone who contributes greatly to the world.
An ambitious young boy asked a seasoned and successful old man what the key was to his success.
Old Man: The key to success young man, is to make the right decisions.
Boy: How do I learn how to make the right decisions?
Old Man: Make plenty of wrong ones! Career development coaching usually results in you doing more with your career.
When you do more, you make more mistakes.
But the person who makes more mistakes learns more than those who don’t make mistakes, often because they aren’t doing that much.
This career development article posed the question:
“Does career development coaching produce significant results for the participant?
Career development coaching will produce significant results on the proviso that participants spend time in finding the right coach and the career coach possesses the attributes outlined above.
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