How Can a Coach Help Me Assess My Abilities?
Posted on March 23, 2016 by Jim Burr, One of Thousands of Life Coaches on Noomii.
Abilities include job skills but they also include interpersonal/self management skills. A coach has the resources to help assess both.
Recently I wrote an article about career coaching in which I stated that to be effective it needed to cover three general areas. Those areas were 1) interests and personality type, 2) abilities and 3) a collection of practical considerations such as what one had to do to get training, relocation, family considerations, compensation etc. That article focused on the first of the three areas. This article is going to focus on the second.
As I stated in the previous article, but which I believe is worth repeating, the instruments we use in career coaching are tools. They do not give us final answers but only give us some information from which we can start exploring.
Interests, no matter how strong, are not in and of themselves sufficient to assure success in exploring careers. This is true either right out of school or later in life. Abilities are clearly important too. The assessment of abilities is may not as straight forward as the assessment of interests.
I am going to divide abilities into two areas. The first has to do with specific abilities that you might use on the job. This could include computer skills, mechanical skills or a particular body of knowledge. The second has to do with abilities including interpersonal relationship skills and emotional intelligence. Abilities are more difficult to assess in the office setting than interests are.
Specific job-related skills are assessed with your coach by discussing your work and educational history. Additionally, there may be skills that have been developed as you have pursued hobbies and interests apart from work. These are skills you are consciously aware of. These discussions with your coach are not objective and depend to a large extent upon your ability to do some self-assessment and your coach’s ability to ask probing and insightful questions.
There are some instruments we can use which will facilitate a discussion in the second area. Three specific instruments are the books Strengths Finder 2.0 by Tom Rath and Emotional Intelligence by Travis Bradberry and Jean Greaves. Each of these books has within it an instrument which is useful in assessing your strengths and emotional intelligence. The third instrument is the Myers-Briggs Type Indicator (MBTI). In the previous article I discussed the use of the MBTI in conjunction with the Strong Interest Inventory in helping determine interests and appropriate careers. It is also useful relative to identifying certain abilities.
The Strengths Finder includes a list of 34 different strengths such as adaptability, communication, focus, harmony, etc. Upon completing the instrument, you will get a list of your top five strengths. Additionally, the book has what are referred to as “Ideas for Action” and also some recommendations for working with other people who have similar strengths. Theoretically it is easier to work on developing strengths than it is on overcoming weaknesses. Part of coaching would, of course, include both but this particular instrument emphasizes the strengths.
The assessment within the emotional intelligence book gives you scores in four areas. They are 1) self-awareness, 2) self-management, 3) social awareness and 4) relationship management. It then focuses on your weakest area and gives you several suggestions/strategies with regard to how to work on improving that area.
Both the Strengths Finder and the Emotional Intelligence assessment instruments are meant to be a starting point for discussions between you and your coach. Neither of these instruments should be taken as the final authority on your strengths or on your emotional intelligence. In both cases those are abilities which can be further developed.
The MBTI, in addition to describing characteristics which go along with your personality type, also gives some recommendations as to how you could help enhance your communication skills, your decision-making, managing change, and managing conflicts. This part of the MBTI also gives you some additional information regarding your style in each of those four areas. This can again be very useful information for you and the coach to discuss.
All these instruments are useful in career coaching but it is very important that you look at them merely as a starting point. The instruments provide some data and some suggestions that you and your coach need to further consider and talk about. In no case should you allow the instrument to be the deciding factor in the decisions you need to make about your career.
