What I Learned from Talking to 41 Career Coaches
Working with one means getting comfortable with self-reflection. And lists. Lots of lists.
Five years ago, I lost a job that I really loved — not an easy moment, but not an entirely unexpected one, either. I figured I was built for it. I mean, I’m old. I’m solid. I’d helped other people through rough times. I could change when I had to. I was going to make it, my way.
Then the calendar started its inevitable progress, and weeks started to slip by. I slogged through my unemployment by driving around in my truck, catching free wireless in the occasional commercial parking lot. Eventually I began filling time by buying stuff at various home improvement stores. A chain saw. An air compressor. A safe.
For help in those days, I relied on the usual suspects of advice and counsel: friends and colleagues, former and current. People I admired and people who had my curiosity. Over lunches and coffees, I talked and they listened, and then vice versa. But most of it was ground already covered over decades of friendship. I remember those meetings mostly as a festival of shrugs.
I never once thought I could have used a little professional coaching. I was not rejecting the idea—“career coach” just wasn’t a circuit that fired in my brain at…
