Case study: Hate Job? Try Change?

Posted on October 26, 2021 by Genevieve Retzlaff, One of Thousands of Career Coaches on Noomii.

With this case study, I would like to paint the picture of how the coaching process is applied in real life and how it helped one of my clients concretely.

For the sake of confidentiality, I will call this client Jennifer. Jennifer was working in an industry that made her initially feel like she was going to have a positive impact on people’s lives. It turned out to be more of a money-making-type of industry but she kind of got on with it for about 10 years. Until she realized that she lost sight of herself in the process. That’s when we started to work together.

Jennifer had zero idea what was going to be next. Work that honoured her true self was what she hoped to achieve when she came to me for career coaching.

GROW MODEL

My coaching approach is based on the GROW model from Whitmore (2002). Through this work with the GROW model, we repeat the same conversation loop but with different topics every time. As we progress in the coaching program, the topics also progress in the direction of Jennifer’s end result (having a fulfilling career that honored her true self).

Jennifer signed-up to a 12-session program over a period of 6 months so we met on a bi-weekly basis. During these sessions, we’ve uncovered what was getting in her way of making that move she was so desperate to make. It has to do with two main aspects. The financial security was the practical aspect that we were able to address and come up with a plan to make her career transition “affordable.” But the main aspect that was blocking her from making this move before, was the good old imposter syndrome.

The imposter syndrome is often anchored in a belief system.

Coaching does not go back into your past and analyze your childhood to understand the root cause of that syndrome like a therapist would do for example. Through the coaching conversation, we simply make the observation that we hear x, y or z facts and it sounds like it’s a belief system and we’re enquiring as to how this belief is serving the achievement of the end result. An example of this belief could be “I was just lucky enough to get where I am”. What made Jennifer believe that this was so true? This is what we question, explore and shift to create a new paradigm that is serving the achievement of the goal.

Let’s break it down:

With the example above, let’s see how the GROW model applies to what we did with Jennifer:

· Reality: explore the current belief system or your current paradigm

· Options: What needs to be shifted in your paradigm in order to achieve your goal? How can you start seeing/doing/thinking about things differently?

· Way forward: Once you have decided on an option that works for you, how are you going to implement this and how are you going to keep yourself accountable for that step? What resources do you need to support you.

And the next session, we apply this same process but a new topic that the client brings into the session until we have achieved the end result.