Career Transition Coaching: Foundational Questions
This week I’m spending time hiking in Northwestern Tuscany, eating good food, and finding joy in the local mountain town’s chaotic but well-stocked enoteca. My hiking partners have been curious about what I do for a living and how I made the career shift from banking. These conversations have me thinking about how I switched careers and how I help others contemplate changes in their own lives.
When I work with clients who are interested in career transition coaching, we often start with some foundational questions.
❓What is work for, for you, now?
❓How do you want to live your life, now?
❓How does your current work and current life align with these two answers?
When I last made a big career change, questions like these inspired me to flip the script on a way of working and living that had served me well for decades, but no longer fit.
For most of my adult life, I designed my life in such a way as to support the career choices and goals that were important to me then. I still had a life; and I liked it; and I have no real regrets about those decades. That script served me well.
Until it didn’t.
And I wondered, what would work and life look like if I designed my career around the life I want to have?
That simple switch unleashed a ton of creativity and allowed me to design a new stage of life. Work remains important to me, and in fact I find I enjoy it and enjoy sharing about it more than ever. Yet it’s essential, to me, now, that the career adapts to the life I want to live. So work is more flexible. It allows me to meet more people. It feels impactful in new, personal ways. And I can manage the intensity and volume of the work I do much more effectively than before.
With my clients I emphasize that there are not right / wrong answers to these questions in any strict sense. The questions are about where you are, now.
Are your work and life goals aligned for you today? What would it take to uncover them and move toward better alignment?
To engage further, connect with me here or at john@aconnectedcoach.com