Coaching outside your comfort zone
How career coaching can help you challenge negative beliefs and explore amazing opportunities
I’m pretty upfront with my clients when I tell them that successful career coaching isn’t a passive process that will allow them to sit back and relax while I do the heavy lifting.
As with most things in life, you get back what you put in.
Though I’m certainly an aggressive advocate for my clients, showing up to support them throughout the challenging work we do together, the magic of coaching is only possible when a client is also fully prepared to go ‘all-in’ and deal with difficult subject matter that arises.
‘Getting coached out of your comfort zone’, as I call it, is a practice that asks the client to move away from what’s safe and expected into the unknown, where anything is possible.
My clients often know they want to make big changes in their professional lives, but are reluctant to face what this might involve, aware that difficult and disruptive feelings might surface.
While it would be wonderful if all aspects of our work lives could be hunky-dory all of the time, in reality, career journeys can be messy, meandering, and difficult to manage. It’s also probable that we’ll need to examine our own failings and weaknesses in order to unpick where professional pathways have gone wrong, and to set ourselves on a better course to career fulfillment.
It takes genuine courage and commitment to uncover and address our blind spots, but only by doing so can we make real progress and clear the blocks that we’ve allowed to build up, resulting in us feeling ‘stuck’ in our working lives, unable to see the possibilities around us.
Of course, I don’t expect my clients to be brave in isolation. As part of my commitment to a successful and nurturing coaching process, I promise to be courageous on their behalf, supporting them as we work through difficult areas together, and championing them as they do the hard work that results in deep and lasting change.
A common misconception about the coaching process is that it’s all about the coach inspiring, motivating, or pushing a passive client into making decisions or changes. This couldn’t be further from the truth.
My sessions are based on relaxed conversations, often with no fixed agenda, and are held in a safe, non-judgmental, and unhurried environment. And the coach / client relationship is a partnership, not a dictatorship!
So what exactly is a comfort zone, and why is it so important that I coax my career coaching clients out of theirs and into a brave new world, filled with possibilities?
Your comfort zone is a place of familiarity, where things have always happened in a certain way, and where beliefs and behaviours remain (blissfully) unchallenged. Staying in your comfort zone feels safe and allows you to coast through life.
When a Coach asks powerful and probing questions, this allows you to revisit the long-held beliefs, familiar perspectives, and old-habits located in your comfort zone that may no longer be serving you well in your working life (though they may once have been effective, they could now be holding you back from what you truly want to achieve).
Getting out of your comfort zone also means tackling binary thinking, something many of us do without realising it. Thinking in black and white is highly restrictive, and can result in rich seams being left unmined. Being coached out of your comfort zone helps you begin to examine problems and situations in a new way, bringing them in technicolour where a greater range of interpretation and choice is possible.
Exploring your comfort zone is, ultimately, about having the courage to discover what’s not currently working for you. This information can then be used to build a new vision of your professional life alongside developing new approaches to help get you there.
By the end of the coaching process, you should feel there’s been a shift in your energy, clarity, and motivation, and that together, we’ve worked through enough options that your chosen outcomes resonate, and feel ‘right’. If you’re someone who lives life with your foot firmly on the accelerator, the process will also help you learn how and where you can relax your grip and let go, in order to allow growth to take place.
As a coach, I encounter so many clients with entrenched beliefs around having to ‘be the best’ and ‘do their best’ in every aspect of working life. In my experience, this attitude can quickly lead to high levels of stress and burnout, which is why my career coaching programmes are designed to help clients discover how and where they would like to stretch themselves in ways that are meaningful to them. Every action should take place in line with an overall vision that incorporates their values. There’s little point in striving for someone else’s definition of ‘success’.
If you’re experiencing a ‘stuck’ feeling in your career, or feel like your working life lacks direction and new opportunities often evade you, it could be time for you to shake things up a bit with a career coaching programme that takes you outside your comfort zone.
To kickstart your career development, I offer a free Chemistry Call where we canstart exploring what your comfort zone looks like, and why it might be time to venture out of it and into a brave new world!