It’s important to remember that your mindset matters in your career.
TRANSCRIPT
I just want to share a story with you about one of my clients. He came to me in a state of despair.
He was really unhappy in his job and was really looking to get out of there as quickly as possible. He wanted to find something new where he could be happy for a good employer who was going to treat him well, pay him what he was worth and feel like he was respected.
He had worked with a career coach previously, so he knew what to expect. He was expecting quite a prescriptive solution with practical tools to help him move on.
However, I quickly realised that the first thing he needed to work on was his own mindset.
The risk was that he’d be jumping from one frying pan straight into another. He would have found all the same problems coming up as he had done in his current job.
So what I wanted to offer him was an opportunity to change his own mindset so he had a more positive expectation of the way the employer would treat him and how he would be seen and be able to interact with others and how he’d be able to have the necessary resources available to him as and when he needed it.
But to work on his mindset, I had to put together a bespoke coaching programme for him. So we worked together on a fortnightly basis, working through the emotions, from despair through to anger and blame and then frustration.
The aim was to reach a point where he no longer felt so overwhelmed that he just wanted to leave and run away and just find whatever, anything new.
So together we worked on improving his mindset week by week. And we got him to a stage where he actually felt a lot more comfortable in his current role, and it felt a lot more bearable.
He was starting to get the resources he needed. He was starting to feel more in control of his own job, and his boss was ready and willing to listen and step up and do more to help him as best he could.
And suddenly the urgency to run away and find a new job had diminished.
We created space for him to really self reflect and move from “I’m running away from a terrible job” to “now I have the comfortable space to look at what is it I want to be doing instead”.
Yes he wanted to leave his job, but he started thinking about what would he rather be doing.
So now we have the space to work together and really focus on a positive future. We’re also looking to establish what it is he really wants to be doing that will inspire him, that will be satisfying for him so that he’s not jumping from one fire straight into another.
So if you know somebody who is really stuck in a job and they’re desperate to get out, but they can’t find anything positive to look for, it’s all doom and gloom. Send them to me.
I’m happy to have a chat with them, find out what they’re looking for, find out what’s not working for them, and explore what we can do to help them going forward.
Angela Couch – Career Coach in Wellington (or anywhere in New Zealand). Call 022 646 7818 for a free consultation.