Career Coaching Real story

Posted on February 06, 2020 by Walid Ashmawy, One of Thousands of Life Coaches on Noomii.

Have you ever wondered should you go for a career change or not?
Here is a personal story that could inspire you.

I met a friend 18 years ago. I was conducting a training and at the end of session, he approached me and said “I hate my job. What do you think I should do?” I asked him “What is your job? What do you not like in your job?” Through my questions, I found his job was quite boring. So the first thing I tried to do is help him look at the bright side of what he is currently doing and to help him plan for the future.
With deep reflection on his current job, he asserted “The bright sides of my current job is that it’s in a very prestigious organization, with acceptable income, offers stability and an excellent career path. However, I hate my job.”
Through my coaching process, I then asked him to identify ‘what he would like to do’ and ‘what he is capable to do’. Sometimes we could like certain position which doesn’t really match our strengths and personality traits. Leveraging ‘what we are capable’ yells better chances of success.

In this case, the key strength identified in my friend was his great capability to build good relationship with people. Therefore, the best career for him could be Public Relation, Customer Services and may be Sales. When I mentioned the next step in his career could be possibly combining customer service and sales, he got frightened. Customer service and sales job post will make him under continuous spotlight and he has to achieve targets, which his current job doesn’t have such risk dimension. It’s worth mentioning that he wasn’t able to make any progress in his current job due to his low performance, which wasn’t satisfactory for his manager. This made him less confident and he started to lose his self esteem. He has been in the job that he hates for almost 9 years.

After our coaching session, he kept struggling for a couple of years, trying to avoid such a risky career move. Finally, he overcame his fear of getting out of his comfort zone, he successfully moved to another organization in a selected position that matches his strengths. The results were shocking for him. He was able to make better results and achieved acceptable career progress for 2 and half years. His success was not only in the numerical results, but also in people management where he got assigned a few subordinates.

Later, he was headhunted by another organization for a higher position with largest set of responsibilities; managing a bigger team and responsible for the most challenging project of the sales team in the new organization. He succeeded with flying colors, reaching the second honorable position in his area within 4 consecutive years.

The morale of the story here is to always believe in yourself. Every one of us has unique potential. If he/she is able to explore the various dimensions of his capabilities and to build on his strengths, he/she may even exceed his/her expectation and make a remarkable achievement.

The success recipe could be:
“Know yourself and what you want to achieve. Build on your strength. Make sound business and risk calculated decision. Defeat your inner fear and get out of your comfort zone. Start believing in yourself and don’t give up. Be like the water that carves the rock.” by “Walid Ashmawy”