Coaching a client through a career-transition conversation
This is for you when a client is moving on and every option feels like starting over. They talk about the old role as if it counts for nothing. You want them to see the thread that carries.
That feeling comes from one place: the client has tied who they are to the role that's ending. Your job is to help them move their identity off the role and onto what travels.
Open Discovering Your Strengths in their Career Discovery results. The strongest have shown up in every role they've held; that track record is the proof they carry. Work from their own results, not generic advice.
Then work one through-line, link by link.
- Name what carries. Have the client pick the two or three strengths true in every job. Check each against a real moment two roles back. If it was live then and it's live now, it travels.
- Put it in their own words. Turn each 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, not tied to the title.
- Set the criteria for what's next. Open Aligned Work Areas. From the areas that land, pull two or three things the next role must have. Now the search runs on fit, not on whatever will take them.
At the end the client holds a page: two or three carried strengths, each a line they can say out loud, and a short list of what the next role must have. Read it back: one person's next chapter, not a blank page.
Close on one small step into the area that pulled hardest: one message, one talk, one hour this week. Small and soon beats big and someday.
The real work happens earlier, the moment the client hears their through-line. The questions below are built for that flash.
Coaching questions
This isn't a worksheet to run in order. Once the client can name what carries, pull whatever fits the room. 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?
