Have you ever wondered why you haven’t got the job or made the career change that you really wanted?
Do you know what you have to do to bring your talents into focus? Have you ever explored the ways to boost your career or considered having your own career coach? Whether you are looking for personal career advice, a new job or career advancement a bit of professional executive career coaching is often all it takes to change things.
Why having your own career coach can make a huge difference
Have you ever felt that it ‘should be’ different? What do you do when your career isn’t meeting your expectations? Do you complain, moan, deny it or maybe even blame yourself or others? Do you explore your options with an open mind?
Exploring the options is the best possible strategy; otherwise you can be tempted to get drawn into all kinds of resistance habits. Resistance of any kind breeds negative thoughts and positive change is less likely if any form of negativity exists.
If you feel that your career ‘should be’ different, have you considered that you are the one holding yourself back? Your mind is focusing too much on protection rather than your new direction and therefore you cannot possibly move forward with ease. Have you considered that your attitude might not be fresh and clear? Are you aware that your applications may have an undertone in them? Are you aware that your requests for help aren’t being heard? Do you realise that as you resist things, the problem cannot be seen fully and clearly?
Making career advancement changes
The first part of change is to accept the situation as it is. Let the problems surface in the full knowledge that you can change things this time around. What don’t you have that you feel you deserve? What opportunities are passing you by? What would you like to be doing? How would you like your career to be progressing? If you can free up your mind, your resistance thoughts will come up and allow you to see a better solution or allow you to begin to completely reassess the problem again.
More Career Guidance for Londoners
Career Choice Profiling
The easiest and simplest way to do this is to complete a career choice personality profile. Profiling is an accurate, detailed way to assess your personal strengths and capabilities. They often put into words the very things you feel about yourself. Profiling is an excellent way to build self-awareness, giving you the opportunity to set your personal career objectives and goals.
Profiling helps you to focus on the important aspects of yourself and it helps you to discard the unhelpful bits. To give you an example: What unhelpful advice do you tell yourself each day? To discover what this is, make a list of ten things that you feel you should do. Should you
- Work harder than everyone else in the office?
- Make more money than your colleagues?
- Come up with all of the best ideas?
- Make everyone laugh?
- Be treated nicely by everyone?
Profiling helps you to begin to see yourself in a more realistic way. It helps you to understand what is making you feel stressed or uncomfortable at work. It helps you to recognise what you need to spend time working on. The additional benefit is that when you begin to see yourself more clearly it is then much easier to see others more clearly as well.
The focus is now on ‘you’ and building the bigger picture. Sometimes people only have an idealised picture of how things should turn out. Others look around them for bursts of inspiration. Others have had glimpses of the possible bigger picture but can’t hold the picture for long enough before it fades. Have you had glimpses of your bigger picture?
What does the career coach do?
The role of the career coach is to help you to unravel your career purpose, dreams and aspirations for change is easy, exciting and fulfilling when it delivers what you want.
Leading London Executive Career Coach, Sarah Berry says, ‘Many people I work with complain that their talents and efforts go unnoticed in the workplace. They all know inside themselves that they are capable of being happier but their capabilities have frozen and their emotions have been put on hold. Their efforts to stay on top of things at work have chiselled away at their individual talents and passion for what they do. Under these circumstances, great ideas and talents do get forgotten about, most of all by the owner’.
Take a second to review your career
Where are you heading? What do you need to recognise in yourself? What talents do you need to unlock? Are you ready to explore things? Why is it that some employees shrink into the background? Why don’t they get rewarded if they aren’t doing anything wrong?
Sarah Berry says ‘In London, it is not enough to be a good employee. You can’t assume that if you let your work speak for itself that one day you will be rewarded. If you wait for other people to recognise you, reward you and promote you – you will find yourself being overlooked. You have to speak up and claim what is yours. You have to be able to resolve your work issues and be able to step out of the pack occasionally’.
Let’s do a quick job and career review
Begin to understand yourself by answering the following questions:
- Are you earning what you would like to be earning?
- Do you get approached to do the best assignments?
- Do you find your work pleasurable and exciting?
- Do companies or head-hunters approach you?
- Are you known within your profession?
- Do you have to turn jobs down?
- Would you like to know how to improve your situation?
If the answer to the above questions is ‘no’, you may have worried in the past that it was a reflection of you and your skills. However, this may not be the case at all. It may be as a result of simply not knowing enough about you, your talents and strengths and how to go about promoting them. Sarah Berry offers individual career telephone/Skype coaching and advice for all those candidates who wish to explore a little more.
With any Career Consultancy session it is important to establish clear objectives in the beginning. If you are interested in working directly with Sarah Berry, please fill out the form below.