Proverbs 19:20

Career counseling is heavily focused on testing and on specified steps to reach a decision. Career coaching focuses on what a person needs to learn in order to design a career or to develop a life plan that fits for that person's current stage in life. Career counseling tends to be more of a formulaic walk-through. Coaching tends to be more tailored to the individual's whole needs.

It depends on the type of career coaching. In career discovery, individuals don't know what career they want. The coaching approach is not a matter of giving a formula, but of finding what's keeping them from making that discovery. In career-development coaching, individuals typically have a direction within a career field, but they want to build upon their career foundation or find a niche within it. The approach that coaching takes is to find out about what's missing and what's keeping them from moving to the next level.

I had a client who is very much a futurist. He easily saw and lived in the future. While that was one of his assets, it was also a detriment. He was stuck living in his dreams in "what might be." Unfortunately, whenever something didn't lead quickly to that vision, he became despondent and sought some other goal. Living in the future kept him from becoming successful. He was missing the idea of focusing on the present steps that might eventually lead to the future he hoped for. For him, the missing piece of the lesson he needed to integrate into daily action was doing the next step. It was daily asking himself, "What is it that I need to be doing that's leading me toward my hope?" While he still needed to ask what he really loved doing and hoped to be doing, he actually needed to get involved with that work at some level. Then, day after day, he could build upon that foundation and allow it to evolve toward his ideal.

I had a client who sold his business but stayed on for a year or so to make the transition to the new ownership. When he stepped out of his role, the new owner didn't manage things properly, and the business was forced into bankruptcy. This affected my client's present-day income. He'd had success. He'd risen to the top, so to speak. But it had slipped away through circumstances outside of his control. Like most adults, it was some unsatisfactory situation in life that forced him to reexamine his career path and his work life. He was asking what happened and what's really important and what should he do next. He was searching for a new path.

Unlike young adults, who are more able to choose a career based simply on what they like, adults who are older need to consider their financial needs, personal values, and life circumstances to a far greater degree. They consider their abilities and what they lack, their personal styles and work interests, the societal and family influences, and they balance these against what they love and value. Almost always, those who come to me are faced with a dilemma—a dilemma that pits a strongly held value against a financial reality, for example—and seeing no easy solution for it. Coaching helps the most at this point. Why? Because the coach asks the questions that sift through all the "trash talk" and "second guessing" we adults tend toward. I've seen it help many people just like this client to arrive at the solution to their career dilemma most quickly.

My Christian perspective pervades everything I do. It pervades the concepts I know about and the concepts I introduce to my clients. Yet, I don't necessarily introduce them as Christian concepts. I have to be able to present them in a way that the client will hear them. Just today, I spoke to a client about forgiveness. I guess my Christian paradigm is so much a part of me that I never realized that some people might not understand forgiveness. This particular client had been very turned off to anything that is Christian, and I've had to educate him about forgiveness in a way that he could hear it and allow it to benefit him. I needed to teach him what forgiveness "looked" like and why it was a necessary part of moving forward in his career as a leader.

Yesterday, I was listening to someone in my Sunday school class who I thought was a phenomenal coach! She asks questions of everyone in the class, and encourages them to answer the questions for themselves. She didn't answer them. There are people like that in every church. Much of the coaching is at the pastoral level, but effective teachers and spiritual laypeople can be superb coaches as well. They ask the questions that help people make shifts in their lives. I personally think the coaching model is very helpful in the process of discipleship and spiritual growth. Through the coaching process of asking key questions and calling for commitments to change, individuals are discipled to grow in Christlikeness and become models of happiness and personal success to the world.