Making a career of careers

By JULIE MIDDLETON

Sally found herself stuck at a crossroads last year. She was estranged from her husband Don, but still owned a share in their family-run hotel in a tourist location.

In fact, she was the company's chief financial officer; she had a masters in business administration.

Every two to four weeks she went back to the hotel and the town where she and Don had lived to do the books. But workwise, that wasn't enough. She felt creatively stifled - but had absolutely no idea what she was going to do.

Fast forward to today, and Sally is now a consultant to family-owned and run enterprises. She didn't see that as an option at all before engaging in career coaching with one of the big names in the field in the United States, Marcia Bench.

Sally told Bench she wanted more "fun" in her work, and thought she would like to be an employee rather than self-employed. That idea, however, was to change.

Bench, 47, an American on her first speaking tour of New Zealand, is an acknowledged career coach and teacher of coaches. Educated in psychology and law and a former lawyer, she has coached since 1986, and founded and runs the Career Coach Institute in Arizona.

She has seen the demand for career coaches in the United States explode over that time. In New Zealand, career coaching has also gained traction in the past five years.

But we should stop right here and drag out a definition - career coaches and counsellors are often confused.

Like a sports coach, a career coach's primary role is to act as a catalyst for change and improvement. He or she focuses on asking the right questions to guide people through a process of self-discovery so they make decisions for themselves, given their skills, interests and available time, about what they do next.

Coaching, adds Bench, starts in the present and looks towards the future, and it's generally done in half-hour blocks by phone.

A career counsellor, in contrast, focuses on solving problems through providing the right answers. Counselling starts in the past, may dip into therapy, is generally face-to-face over an hour, and tends to reach no further than the present.

Bench, the author of eight career-related books, says people who benefit most from coaching are often at a turning point. Maybe they have been made redundant, or know they need a change but can't work out what.

So what happened with Sally? Bench, by questioning and observing, taking Sally through assessment exercises and helping her to agree on "homework" between sessions, got her to think through eight issues which led to clarity about what she wanted to do.

Bench has collected these issues into a model she labels "authentic vocation", which she has trademarked and teaches.

Life purpose

Bench says everyone has a life purpose, a calling or overall theme for life. To satisfy that leads to "optimum work fulfilment".

She talks about one man whose life purpose turned out to be promoting peace. So he became a mediator and consciously pursued peaceful relationships.

That may seem an obvious leap, says Bench. But if discovering our purpose were easy, let alone transferring it into working life, then everyone would have done it.

Values

These are the things about work that are intrinsically valuable or desirable. They are conscious things, such as autonomy, or salary. If your workplace's values are out of step with your own, dissatisfaction can be the result.

Motivators and interests

Motivations aren't the same as values, says Bench: to be motivated is to feel inspired, excited, to look forward to something.

"Motives are often unconscious, and as such become a driving force that must be fulfilled. It may be a need, a want or a concern."

The other areas examined are knowledge, skills and abilities; work and other relevant experience; desired job targets; work environment and business reality.

The beauty of the model, says Bench, is that it's flexible: someone who has been made redundant and needs another job pronto might start at the "motivators" level.

People not under the same time pressure can probe more deeply into their world of work, moving from a look at their behaviour and performance, to examination of their beliefs and motivators, then to issues of being and identity.

The process led Sally to decide that consulting to family-owned businesses was her goal.

But hang on: why do we need another person to help us come to our own conclusions?

"We've got other competing concerns which often pull us off-course," says Bench. "Family responsibilities, our jobs, or we just don't find the time or have the discipline to stay on track.

"We can't solve a problem in the same frame of mind we created it. The coach helps to expand the thinking, shift the perspective, help us see it from another viewpoint.

"The better we understand what unconsciously has been motivating us, the better we can make choices."

So how do you know if you have the personality to coach others?

"You need to be interested in people and not just bring your own agenda," says Bench. "The best coaches are objective facilitators."

Psychology degrees aren't required. In fact, says Bench, those from a past-focused therapy background can have a hard time moving to a future-focused coaching structure.

The ideal coach won't have a one-size-fits-all approach, and will probably be in his or her 30s with some work and life experience.

No one personality type prevails. But she suggests extroverts are often not the best coaches because they can be better talkers than listeners. Similarly, introverts might need to become more active communicators.

Compassion is important - "these are people's lives we're working with." Equally, coaches also have to "tell it like it is. One of the roles we have is keeping people accountable and balancing that with being supportive," says Bench.

Coaches need to be happy working alone, have an entrepreneurial spirit and sound business management skills.

They also need a solid knowledge of the job market, as coaching also involves the mechanics of career management - devising strategies, compiling resumes and the like.

What about training? There are no formal qualifications, but the International Coach Federation, the largest gathering of career and life coaches, has more than 5000 members worldwide and over 191 chapters, one of them in New Zealand.

For coaches to gain ICF credentials requires proof of 70 competencies, a certain number of hours with clients and with trainers, and commitment to a code of ethics, says Bench. She is a member and has the top certification.

ICF "credentialling" of both coach training schools and individuals, she says, offers assurance to clients; there are wool-pullers in coaching as in other fields.

Competent coaches learn "how to frame questions in myriad different ways so [clients] have to shift perspectives that help to shift the scripts - the things that keep us going in a circle".

Bench's company offers a virtual training and certification programme and telephone-based classes as well as face-to-face teaching.

But why is coaching so heavily phone-dependent? "Coaching has evolved that way over its 17 years or so," says Bench. "There's a benefit of not having the visual, because your ability to hear inflections in voice and not what's being said is heightened."

So what's the money like? The best coaches, says Bench, earn six figures - she's talking American dollars here. New graduates of her programme can charge US$250 ($450) per month for three or four half-hour sessions; the workload might be 20 clients a week.

In New Zealand, says the local ICF website, the charges work out at about $150 an hour.

Less tangible but just as important, says Bench, is the satisfaction of knowing that you are helping people towards positive change.

"When coach and client come together - whether face to face or on the phone - there's a coach space that's created. It's not just you and me, but us, and this other thing we co-creating, and that's where the magic happens."

Magic? "Where the person begins to understand things about themselves that they didn't know," says Bench. "They realise what they really want - and what's in their way."

Career Coach Institute

Coach Federation