Navigating Career Transitions: How Coaching Can Help You Find Clarity
If you’re searching for a new role and keep hitting roadblocks, this one’s for you. Learn how Wave coaches can help you find clarity in the chaos of a stressful job search.
It’s hard out there right now.
With layoffs hitting almost every industry, hiring freezes, and fewer open roles, it’s a hard time to be searching for a new job. The process can require a lot — filling out applications, writing cover letters, scheduling interviews, completing test assignments, not to mention having to be “on” for multiple rounds of interviewing.
How can Wave coaching help?
Job searching is often an emotional process. It can cause you to confront uncertainty, rejection, financial stress, and deep questions of identity and purpose. For those with social anxiety, the interview process itself can be especially taxing. Good news: Emotional wellbeing coaches are experts in helping people navigate tough life transitions. Here’s how your Wave coach can support your search:
Identify your strengths and values. With your Wave coach, you’ll get crystal clear on what you value most. Is the salary, flexibility, or mission most important to you right now? Do you need room for growth? What does that look like? Coaching helps you explore your values, so you can align your efforts in the right direction. You’ll also discover your many strengths. Through StrengthsFinder and Character Strengths tests and in-depth conversations, your coach will highlight your strengths so you can seek out jobs where you’ll thrive and feel more confident in the interview process.
Figure out what you’re really looking for. Do you know exactly which role you’re looking for so you can recognize it when you see it? If you’re like most people, you might start your search before defining this for yourself. Wave Coach Megan Murk helps her clients list out what they need to have in their next role, what would be nice to have, and what would be fun to have. She encourages her clients to look for jobs that have all of the needs, along with some of the nice and fun. (No one job will have everything on all three lists!) She also asks her clients “What characteristics of managers are really important to you? Where do you want to stretch and grow in the next year or so? What would good communication look and feel like for you?”
Determine what’s in your control. Hiring processes can take mere weeks or drag on for many months. Your coach can help you identify what’s in and out of your control, so you can focus your efforts and manage anxiety and uncertainty. For example, while you don’t have control over whether you’ll hear back, you do have control over how many applications you send. While you don’t know whether they’ll choose you, someone else, or decide not to fill the role, you can prepare well and then try your very best in the interview.
Help you take small, actionable steps. The job search can leave many people feeling fatigued, avoidant, or overwhelmed. Your Wave coach can help you fit the search into your days in a way that feels actionable and realistic. Wave Coach Megan Murk says “Don’t take on the mountain. Break things down hour by hour.” When are you prepping for interviews? When are you studying? When are you prioritizing time to relax? Often, the mental block makes the task seem more daunting than it is. (Scrolling LinkedIn for 20 minutes isn’t as hard as it seems!) Your coach will also help you identify practices to help you get in the right headspace for your job search.
Get to the root of the problem. Emotional wellbeing coaches are experts in identifying what’s really getting in your way. Maybe procrastination is at the root of your job hunt stress. Maybe it’s social anxiety. Maybe your inner critic is so loud you can’t hear anything else. Wave coaches are equipped to help you handle the full range of emotions you might experience during a difficult job search.
Build your capacity for sitting with uncertainty. You might feel exhausted or discouraged. If so, you’re not alone. It’s time for radical acceptance. You’ve been putting in a lot of effort and that’s something to be proud of. Unfortunately, no one has full control and that’s really hard. Your coach will help you find time for fun and rest during your application process. Since we don’t know how long you’ll be searching for, your coach can help make the process feel more sustainable.
What does this look like for real people?
Let’s take a look at a few examples of people who navigated career changes with the help of Wave coaching:
Gen got laid off in June and was feeling overwhelmed. She knew she needed a break before starting her next role, but felt pressure to jump into something new right away. Gen’s Wave coach helped her take a detailed look at her finances so she could make an informed decision about how much time she really had. They determined that she had 6 months of financial flexibility before starting her next role, so she would begin her job search in 3 months. Her coach also helped her create a contingency plan: If Gen hadn’t found a job by 5 months, she would start putting out feelers for contract work to meet her financial needs and goals. Coaching helped Gen turn a vague feeling that
“it just wasn’t time” into a 3, 5, and 6 month plan.Maliya has worked with her Wave coach through 4 different jobs. When Maliya first started working with Wave, her coach helped her realize her current job was holding her back and they worked together to help her prepare for and land a new exciting role. Unfortunately, she was part of a round of layoffs from that same job a few months later. And the same thing happened shortly after at her next job. Now, she’s in her 4th job since starting Wave coaching. Maliya shares, “I’ve learned that no job is perfect…You’re going to run into changing personalities everywhere. People are human. My coach helped me see that it’s more about where I want to be, how I want to spend my time, what skills I want to grow…I’m doing less people-pleasing and worrying about other people’s moods. And having my Wave coach as the one constant supporter during this rollercoaster (I mean, 4 jobs!) has been so incredible.”
Sam couldn’t even find something to apply to. Sam was out of work and looking for his next role. He’s a writer and was running into a scarcity problem: there were too few jobs and they were very highly sought after. Before starting with Wave, he would scroll the job boards, get discouraged, and find a way to distract himself. This went on for months and months and he knew something needed to change. When Sam shared more about his process with his Wave coach, she was able to help him uncover how his procrastination, avoidance, and anxiety were holding him back in his job search. Yes, it was true that jobs were scarce! But it was also not helpful to abandon the task entirely. Sam and his coach created a plan to break the day into different phases: For the first hour of the day with coffee, he would sit on the couch and peruse job openings and save ones he liked. After, he did the more focused work of working on cover letters. Finally, he applied to the easier, more straightforward roles. This whole process was over each weekday by noon, and he was able to go live his life knowing he had made progress. By chipping away at this day by day he was able to release perfectionism and land a new role in 7 months. Now, he’s working with his coach on addressing perfectionism and procrastination at his new writing job. When his goal shifted, his coach adapted to help him focus on what mattered most.
During a tough job transition, your coach is your sounding board, collaborator, accountability partner, and nonjudgmental supporter. They can help you create the structure and process you need to turn a very amorphous and stressful experience into an ordered list you can tackle. Schedule your first session with a Wave coach today to get the clarity you need to take the next step in your job search.