How I Went From Feeling Adrift to Defining my Professional Journey
3 Methods I Learned in Career Coaching
It wasn’t until I started working from home that I realized I lacked a career plan with formal goals. A coach helped me rethink my professional development by focusing on personal growth.
Working from home has many perks. No commute, no rush hour, no filter coffee but peace and quiet instead. Sounds too good to be true? That’s because it is. One of the biggest challenges of working from home is the dissolution of previously defined boundaries. As Business Insider notes: “The threshold for being constantly available or working overtime is even lower. After all, the boundaries between work and private life easily threaten to merge when people work and live in the same rooms.”
That perfectly mirrors my experience. When working from home became the new normal, I had trouble logging off. Once all events got canceled, vacations delayed, and gyms closed, it seemed no longer possible to pursue my private projects. Meanwhile, work began to pile up and I felt like a hamster, caught in the wheel of overtime. I increasingly asked myself why I was actually working this hard and what in the hell had made me choose this job in the first place.
Despite all the effort, I was not satisfied at the end of the day. My remaining energy lasted at most for a shallow Netflix series, and even at that, I fell asleep after 30 minutes. It felt like my life was slipping through my fingers, leaving me to drift disoriented through everyday life.
Despite hard work, I couldn’t shake the feeling of floating haphazardly through the world.
By chance, I ran into a coach who offered to talk to me. Trapped within my own four walls for weeks, ambling between desk, fridge, and couch all day and night with a laptop by my side, I was excited to escape my overflowing inbox and signed up for a few sessions. And so it happened that I found tranquility in a time of turmoil.
Most importantly, I discovered methods to help me feel less adrift and more focused on my personal goals. Here are three techniques I used to figure out the next destination on my professional journey.
Reframe your questions.
When asked why I booked a session, I had a hard time describing my reasoning. Rotating around my issues with the overload of inquiries, I eventually shrugged my shoulders and stammered something about clarity. Clarity how? No idea! All I knew was that I did not like it the way it was. It wasn’t until my coach reframed the problem that lifted the curtain on my befuddled mind.
- Imagine you are walking through a museum with an exhibition about you. Which experiences and aspects of your life are shown?
- If you get up early tomorrow morning and your most challenging pain point is solved, what does that mean exactly?
- What would you do if you weren’t afraid of anything? What is your fear caused by?
Reframing a problem is the process of looking at it from another angle to generate more options and refine the question instead of jumping right into action-taking. (If you’re interested in the technique, there is a great article on Medium explaining the method in more detail with examples.) The lesser I thought about measures and measurable outcomes, the more I focused on the impact I wanted my job to have on my life.
Eventually, I understood what clarity meant. I wanted to be able to formulate answers to questions I deem relevant. Where do I see myself in ten years? What is my overall career goal? What do I want to achieve with my work?
The goal is not to look for the solution, but the right question instead.
Track your evolution.
No type of transformation happens overnight. I rephrased my goals multiple times. I eagerly developed plans with my coach just to reject them the next time we spoke. I enlisted opportunities and crossed them off in the midst of explaining them. I let old ideas fuel new ones to slowly draw a picture of where I wanted to be at a specific time in my life. The most valuable method to keep track of all these changes was to write them down.
Neuroscientific studies have shown that writing improves the encoding process. Forbes says that “encoding is the biological process by which the things we perceive travel to our brain’s hippocampus where they’re analyzed. From there, decisions are made about what gets stored in our long-term memory and, in turn, what gets discarded. (…) When you write it down, it has a much greater chance of being remembered.”
Memory storage may be one of the most obvious advantages of keeping a work journal. It is by far not the only one, however.
- It increases the pressure of walking the walk. Once you have written it down, your goal remains a constant reminder of what you need to do. As such, a work diary helps to hold yourself accountable and actually go through with your plans and review them later on.
- It allows you to track your progress when you need encouragement. Ten months ago, I sat at my desk with droopy eyes, feeling unmotivated to so much as going out for a walk. Today, I feel accomplished. Having invested a lot of time in myself and my future, I’m inspired to continue working on my own plans for a change.
- It facilitates interview preparations. Remember when they ask you to describe the steps you followed to deliver a specific result? Instead of spending hours rethinking good examples for behavioral questions, you just flip through the pages of your work journal.
- Similarly, it reduces the time you prepare for performance reviews and may even help in discussions surrounding your bonus. Your notes allow you to specify accomplishments that may otherwise be forgotten.
Although I completed my sessions, I continue to use my little black book as a tool for personal growth. In a time of lockdowns, restrictions, and routine, the average day seems even more mundane, filled with to-do lists, e-mails, and Zoom meetings. It’s easy to get frustrated with how much time we spend on minor issues and secondary tasks instead of working on the things that actually need to get done. Looking at my notes helps me stay positive, see a vision and understand why I’m dealing with the daily load.
Do your homework.
If you are familiar with the Latin phrase non scholæ sed vitæ you probably had a scholar who used it on you every time you did not hand in your assignment. For me, it was my sixth-grade teacher who kept repeating a variable of said expression (“You do not learn for school, but for life”) when 24 tired kids moaned about the load of homework he assigned.
I hate to break it to you but in this case, it’s true.
Doing homework means applying what has been discussed to real life and thus manifesting personal growth.
As part of almost every session, my coach specified tasks that I had to complete by the next meeting. Some of them were mental exercises, but I also had to sign up for a pottery class at one point (to retrieve my creativity) or to present my latest idea to my partner (to get a different perspective). Completing these tasks helped me to connect the outcomes of each discussion to my daily life and, in a way, assess whether the session had been effective or needed an extension.
I mostly enjoyed pondering the information I gathered during my sessions and put them in a bigger picture. It felt empowering to work independently on certain questions and share my thoughts with family and friends (who sometimes, too, were part of an assignment without knowing). Doing my homework helped me understand that to move forward, we must connect reflection with action.
Overall, I found that working with a career coach is similar to booking hours with a fitness trainer. You can certainly train by yourself to maintain your health and make good progress. But only a professional instructor will push you to your limits and know when to add some more weights. If you go for gold, it pays to have a specialist in your corner that helps you get to that next level.
The same rules apply to your professional life. I found it highly motivating to identify areas for personal growth and define a clear plan on how to achieve my goals.
No To-Do list, mentorship, writing retreat, or performance review was nearly as helpful to my career, or my life for that matter, as career coaching.
In his piece on How To Achieve Your Goals While Working A Full-Time Job, fellow Medium author Marvin Marcano wrote: “Your goals should not be placed on hold for your full-time job. It’s important that we hold our jobs down, but we still have parts of our lives that need attention too.”
I couldn’t agree more.
