Coaching a client through a career-transition conversation
This is for you if a client is moving into something new, and every option feels like starting from zero. They talk about their old role as if it counted for nothing now. You want them to see the thread that carries into whatever comes next.
Every option looks like starting from zero, and that feeling has one root: the client has tied who they are to the role that's ending. Lose the title and the self seems to go with it. So the first job is to move their identity off the role and onto what travels into any room.
Those things are already named. Open Discovering Your Strengths in their Career Discovery results. The strongest ones there have shown up in every role they've held, and that track record is the proof they carry. The client needs their own results open for this, because the whole move runs on what's actually on their page, not on generic advice.
Then work one through-line with them, in three links.
- Name what carries. From their strengths, have the client pick the two or three that have been true in every job, not just the last one. Check each against a real moment from two roles back. If it was live then and it's live now, it travels.
- Put it in their own words. Turn each carried strength into one plain line: the strength, where it showed up, what it produced. For example: "I get quiet people talking and stalled projects moving." Now it's portable language, not tied to the old title.
- Set the criteria for what's next. Open Aligned Work Areas and read the job areas that fit how they're built. From the ones that land, pull two or three concrete things the next role has to have. Now the search runs on fit, not on whatever will take them.
At the end the client holds a page. On it: two or three strengths that carry, each written as a line they can say out loud. Under that, a short list of what the next role has to have. Read it back, and it's one person's next chapter, not a blank page.
Close on one small probe into the area that pulled hardest: one message, one conversation, one hour this week. Small and soon beats big and someday.
The real work, though, happens earlier, the moment the client hears their own through-line and stops talking about starting over. That flash is the coaching, so follow it. The questions below are built for that moment.
Coaching questions
This isn't a worksheet to run in order. Once the client can name what carries, pull whatever fits the room and follow them. A few that help.
Finding the thread
- What have you been good at in every job, even ones you'd rather forget?
- Which of these strengths were you using long before this role?
- Who were you at nineteen that you still are now?
Sizing up what's next
- Read these areas. Which one makes you lean in, and which one tires you just to read?
- What did this last role give you that the next one has to keep?
- What are you glad to put down for good?
Making the move real
- If none of this is starting over, what is it the start of?
- What's the smallest step you could take this week toward the area that pulled you?
- Who's already doing that work that you could talk to first?
