Overcoming Career Obstacles
Posted on April 16, 2024 by Martin Hahn, One of Thousands of Career Coaches on Noomii.
This article discusses the causes of career hurdles and ways to overcome it with coaching.
There are three clusters of characteristics that can make things tricky in your career: pessimistic views, anxiety and issues about self-identity.
Pessimism is the tendency to focus on the negative aspects of a given situation and to anticipate negative outcomes. In terms of career decisions, a pessimistic view of the world of work, a limited belief in the degree to which one can control one’s own career paths and a negative view of one’s ability to make positive career choices, will all have a negative impact on the ability to make a career choice.
Those who feel pessimistic about the world of work might believe that unemployment rates are high, the chances of getting a job are low, redundancies are commonplace, and robots will, soon, leave us all out of work. People who engage in this kind of thinking will be less motivated to focus their energy on career research and job hunting as they can’t see that it will come to any good.
This idea that energy invested in proactive career behavior will be a waste of time is also seen in those who have an external locus of control. Your locus of control describes your perception of who or what is in control of your life. If you have an internal locus of control, you will believe that what happens in your life is, at least in large part, within your control. You believe that if things have gone wrong that is because you did not try hard enough, or did not focus your energy in the right way. If things have gone well, that is because you worked hard and made good choices.
An internal locus of control is, generally, shown to be positive because it motivates people to make more effort. They believe that their effort will make a difference and therefore believe that it is worth their while to work hard. This then has the knock-on effect that they are then more likely to succeed in any given context, whether making a decision or putting a plan into action. Finally, pessimism about one’s own ability to research and apply for jobs, often described as a lack of career decision making self-efficacy, has been shown to lead to career indecision as people do not feel confident in their ability to get it right so they will not commit to one option.
The second cluster of characteristics that tends to make career decisions more difficult is anxiety-related. This can take many forms and includes perfectionism, fear of commitment, high self-criticism, low tolerance for ambiguity, fear of failure and even fear of success. Three different aspects of anxiety have particular relevance to career indecision. First there is anxiety about the process of career development, often linked specifically to perfectionism. This anxiety can be manifest both before the process has started and during the research or application phase, as individuals worry about not choosing the right (or perfect) option. Second, there is anxiety that is sparked off by the uncertainty of the future, and this manifests itself as anxiety about being undecided.
Third, there is anxiety linked to the fear of getting it wrong: what if your perfect career plan, which has been so lovingly and painstakingly crafted, leads you to a job that you actually do not enjoy?
Finally, there are characteristics around one’s own identity that can make the whole process more challenging. The issues here highlight people’s difficulties in developing or identifying a clear sense of who they are and who they want to be with regards to their career. Young people in particular can struggle to work out where their family’s identity stops and their own identity starts. As a child, identity is very much determined by family but, throughout adolescence and early adulthood, young people gradually break free from this as they start to conceptualizing themselves as individuals in their own right, influenced by, but independent from, their parents. For some this developmental process happens smoothly, but for others it is more of a rocky ride. Finally, self-esteem is contained within this cluster of identity issues. Self-esteem is often very tied up in occupational choices as people opt for jobs that reflect their beliefs in their own abilities.
Implications for career coaching
The next step is to explore some approaches that career coaches can adopt that might be able to support clients in the face of these challenges. The issues described above have been distilled down to ten key questions:
• How can I make sense of my career so far?
• What do I want from a job?
• What jobs would suit me?
• What job do I want to do?
• I want to go for it but I am just not sure I am good enough.
• Part of me wants it, but part of me wants something else.
• It is what I want but my family aren’t so sure.
• What’s the point in trying — I am never going to make anything of myself.
• I just can’t decide between these options.
• I am not feeling very motivated.
The people we work with and the situations they find themselves in are complex, and the career challenges that they face are often multifaceted. Not all career dilemmas can easily be reduced to one of these ten questions and that the simple application of a new coaching technique will solve their problem. But sometimes it can be helpful to try and unpick the complexity of the lives of individuals facing career progress hurdles.
