What IS Good Career Coaching?
What IS Good Career Coaching?
As someone who has been coaching for 13 years, who is a coach, who herself has two coaches. Who supervises and is a clinical supervisor of other practitioners – here’s what I seek in a coach:
First and foremost I seek ‘connection’. I seek to be in-relationship with someone I trust. I want to work with someone who will own their mistakes, and who will dare to own their brilliance. A human who really sees me, will affirm my progress, celebrate my wins with me. A coach who is courageous enough to call out my BS and challenge my assumptions.
What I do NOT seek is someone who is an echo-chamber and will collude with me.
What IS Good Career Coaching?
What I also seek is Transformational coaching as opposed to Transactional work. That means I need someone who will command me to own my possibilities, and summons’s me to behave accordingly. Coaching tools and metrics have a place, however, I am not simply a series of problems to be solved. I an living, loving organism that need to move beyond the beliefs she integrated in the past and who needs a place to do the work to alchemise her wounds, taking the gifts therein, out into the world to be used.
“someone who will command me to own my possibilities, and summons’s me to behave accordingly.”
I seek an Experienced coach not someone of just out of school. This doesn’t mean they are not just out of ‘baby coach school’. What it does mean is that they have Lived experience of a multitude of sectors and healing in their own lives. Thus they will have the ability to hold whatever I bring them. Not solve ‘it’ but to be able to sit with it and allow it the space for me to do my work and to it heal of its own accord.
— Niche means very little to me. Those coaches who have only worked within one niche are likely to be too narrow for me.
I want to be supported by a coach who has walked a fair few paths in this life. A coach who gets that the same word means a multitude of things to different people. And also gets that conversely, the same behaviour or technique can have a multitude of different names cross-sector. I need a coach who is able to translate.
And lastly I seek a coach who knows how to love. One who can keep up with me but simultaneous can sit in the dark with me, alongside me, with love, whilst I work it out
What do you seek in a coach?
I’d love to know