When it comes to your career, do you love working with ‘people’ or working with ‘things’?
It’s a great, (simple) and effective question to ask when career planning. As cliché as it may sound, I have always considered myself a ‘people person’, I love meeting and getting to know people. In the past I had thought the notion of someone being a ‘people person’ was cliché. However, while a large portion of us do love working with people, it is not for everyone. In fact, a lot of people enjoy not working with people and prefer to work with ‘things’. Yes, ‘things’ is a really broad category; it is everything else other than people. It can be beneficial to look through a broad lens when reflecting on what you want in terms of your career and then begin to narrow your focus further and further until the picture of your ideal career starts to become clear.
I’ve always enjoyed asking people what they do for work. I am one of those people that would keep asking more questions. I never settled with their job title as their answer. I wanted to know what they actually did. I wanted to understand their role, what the purpose of their role is in the company, what motivates them and even more than that – what they enjoy most about their role.
I now work full-time as a Career Coach, in my own business, where I coach people who are feeling lost or stuck in their career and are unsure which direction to take. A large focus of the work I do around career clarity is based on guiding my clients’ in their own self-discovery journey to getting to know who they are on a deeper level.
I take my clients through a journey of self-discovery followed by a practical action-based process of career transition, implementing job search strategy techniques to help them find and ultimately get hired within their dream job. A typical week for me will encompass; private (one-to-one) coaching, facilitating group coaching sessions, interview coaching, behavioural profiling, creating and refining course content and online resources for clients, facilitating in-person workshops and online masterclasses. Supporting clients behind the scenes with review and feedback on their résumés, tailoring cover letters and LinkedIn profiles plus other questions they may have. I am also my own marketing team, which means a large focus of my role is on generating new clients, being active on social media, email marketing, blogging, vlogging, creating free resources, attending networking events and exploring collaboration opportunities.
My coaching is based on a combination of my own self-discovery journey, and skills developed from over a decade working in recruitment as well as continuous study in personal development, human behaviour and coaching. I absolutely love my job; I love that I get to inspire people to find what they love and love what they do. I am a lifelong learner, committed to continually learning and refining my skills, and keeping up with the new research and coaching frameworks. I will always be learning. We are all always learning.
