Are you spending hours each day in a LinkedIn scroll-hole, scanning the job descriptions, but never quite finding anything that makes your heart sing? 

After a while, the job descriptions all start to blur together, each one leaving you feeling more uninspired and demotivated than the last.

Should you call it a day and just be happy with where you are?

Or should you ‘lower your standards’ and just take any job that gets you away from the current one you’re in?

Or should you hire a career coach? 

You’re probably here because you fall in the latter camp. 

Good, I’m glad to hear it! 

Because you shouldn’t ever make peace with a job that makes you miserable. Work fulfilment DOES exist. 

In fact, Forbes says job satisfaction is rising – 62.3% of people surveyed were satisfied with their work, which is the highest percentage it’s been since The Conference Board start measuring it in 1987. 

So if dream jobs do exist, how can a career coach help you get them?

After all, they’re not recruiters. They can’t actually find the job for you! 

Before we leap into discovering how career coaching works, it’s probably best to start off with a quick difference between a career coach and a recruiter. 

Career Coach vs Recruiter

Recruiters work best when you know what kind of job you want to do AND it’s in the similar field as what you’ve been doing already. 

Recruiters aren’t great if you want to switch careers. 

This is because they have to sell you to a hiring manager and you’re just an easier sell when your CV matches the job description and they don’t have to explain on your behalf why you’re switching careers. 

If you’re looking to change careers and/or you don’t know what you want to do next, then avoid recruiters and head straight for the coaches. 

Career coaches will help you get clarity on what your next job move could look like. They won’t close off industries or possibilities just because you’ve never done them before. In fact, they would have worked with plenty of career changers before so they’ll have a stack of example of how previous clients have managed to pivot, what they did to get interviews and how they sold themselves into the jobs. 

How can career coaches help you find your dream?

Below are 4 ways in which career coaches can help you. 

1. They’re a guaranteed way to get more confidence and feel more positive

If you have spent months or years trying to hunt down a dream job with no luck, then it’s natural to lose hope and feel jaded about the future. 

You may think that the reason you’re not getting interviews is because you’re not good enough. Again, this is very natural and happens to a lot more people than you think. 

Career change is full of unanswered applications and one-way emails, which will take a toll on even the most confident people. 

And once you’re in that hole of self-doubt, it can be hard to get yourself out of it. 

Which is why it can be refreshing and uplifting to work with a coach during this time. They will help you get out of the swamp of misery and will work with you to restore your confidence in yourself and amp up your belief in a better future. 

They do this by helping your identify how your particular experiences, gifts and strengths make you unique. When you see the value you can bring to a workplace, you can see how you can easily sell yourself to your desired companies even if you don’t match all of the job description. You’ll feel more confident applying to more senior positions or asking for a higher wage, which will make you feel like you have more options in front of you.  

As soon as you start seeing these possibilities, not only will you get excited,  but you’ll start truly believing in a brighter future. 

2. They will challenge you too

Don’t think that they’re just there to cheerlead you. 

They’re also there to challenge your thinking.

Specifically, they’re adept at challenging you on your limiting beliefs and assumptions. 

We all have them, but we aren’t always aware of them.

They lie in our blind spots.

When you think that you’re too old to make a career pivot, or you’d have to take a big pay cut if you wanted to enter a new industry, or that hiring managers will think that you don’t have the right experience – you are having limiting beliefs.  

These are assumptions you’re making.

They’re not facts, even though to you, they feel like reality. 

So then what you do is you DON’T take action.

That’s why they’re limiting.

Limiting beliefs lead to limiting you in your actions, which lead to limiting your results.

That’s why we need someone else to see what we can’t see. 

Here’s an example of how it showed up with a client of mine.

Anna (name changed) used to teach but wanted to leave that all behind and do something within the creative field that involved community work. Before she started working with me, she was applying for entry level jobs and was feeling very dejected about not even getting those. 

Of course she wasn’t getting those jobs not because she was under qualified, but because she was overqualified. I challenged her on why she was going for entry-level jobs when she could definitely do more senior positions. She said didn’t believe she would get them because she didn’t have any direct experience in the field (this was her limiting belief).

So I challenged that belief and said – what if you did have experience but you were discounting it? Shall we see if we can find some?

We combed through her past to pull out any related experience she had, plus any transferrable skills she had that would suit those positions. It may not have been in the exact same field, but we showed hiring managers how it was even better.

By the end of us working together she had found her perfect job, which paid her exactly the salary she wanted and she felt no imposter syndrome about being there because we’d done the work together and she could see the value she brought to that role. 

So you can see how having a coach on your side will mean that they will see when you’re settling for less, and they’ll challenge you to step up to your dreams.

3. They give you insight and perspective you wouldn’t have got on your own

It’s ironic and highly frustrating that during your dream job search, when all you want is clarity, all you seem to get is confusion. 

It’s because we think faster than we speak. 

When we’re trying to find a dream job on our own, we’re in our own heads thinking at lightning speed. As soon as we see one solution, we instantly see the obstacle to it, and so we end up feeling stuck like we’re constantly driving down dead ends. 

With a coach, you’re doing more speaking than thinking. What often happens is when you present an obstacle and a reason why something can’t happen, the coach will challenge you by presenting another perspective, which will show you that the dead end actually has a way out, you just weren’t seeing it.

Coaches are a fresh pair of eyes on your life with none of the bias you have, and none of the expectations your friends and family have, which is how they’re able to see the things you may have missed. 

4. They have systems and frameworks

You know what helps when you’re going round in circles in your mind and getting more and more confused and indecisive?

Structure.

It’s one of the most calming and grounding things to have structure to your thinking and decision-making. Knowing that there’s a method and an order to the work you’re doing. That each step has been thought through as well as tried and tested with previous clients.

Career coaches have a clarity process they take clients through.

So it won’t just be endless talking about what your dream job could be and how to get it.

Instead, you’ll most likely have some worksheets to do to get those thoughts out your head and onto paper which. You will focus on one piece of the jigsaw puzzle at a time so that you get clear on one thing, then another and slowly but surely, you emerge from the fog and into clearer pastures.  

Now that you’ve seen the benefits of coaching you may be jumping for joy thinking that coaching will guarantee you results. Let me manage those expectations with a little information on….

What coaching is and isn’t

Coaching isn’t a magic wand.

You can’t just hire a coach and expect them to have all the answers and do all the heavy lifting. You need to do the work too. 

This means you need to take action, come prepared to sessions and reflect in between sessions.

It’s the same as if you hired a personal trainer to get in shape.

Sure you’d make progress in that one hour a week you saw them for. But the real work happens in between sessions when you take action on eating healthily and make sure you’re moving around. 

Coaches also aren’t there to give you advice.

Don’t ask them what they think you should do. Ultimately, you need to make that decision.

They can help you create options and think them through and make sure they’re in alignment with your values. But you’re the one who has to commit and take action. 

Is it worth it?

There’s no getting round it, coaching is an investment.

So you may be thinking ‘is it worth it?’.

Ultimately, that’s up to you to decide. 

Whilst it may be completely possible for you to find your dream job on your own without spending a dime, a well-qualified coach can cut the time it takes you to do that. After all, a problem shared is a problem halved. 

You will also get added bonuses as a result of working with a coach such as confidence, mindset tools, knowledge of your unique skills, improved interview ability and experience of getting coached so in future you can coach yourself out of some of your problems. 

Finding the right coach for you

Ask for recommendations and do your research. 

It’s a good idea to find 3 – 5 coaches you like and then set up calls with them. 

A lot of career coaches are on LinkedIn which is handy because you can have a look at their qualifications and recommendations all in one place. 

But the rest you can find through Google. You may want to search for local coaches or for coaches within your industry or speciality (eg. Career coach for creatives; career change coach for lawyers). 

Most coaches offer free discovery calls where you can get to know the coach and how they work.

After you’ve had those calls, you’re likely to have a gut instinct for who you got on with best. Go with the one you resonated with the most personally and professionally, and who has the right qualifications.

That’s it, you’re now good to go and I am very excited for you to start taking the first step towards finding your dream job. 

If you would like help from this career coach then book a free call to see how I can help you.