Career Coaching

 

What is career coaching?

A career coach can help hold you accountable while compassionately challenging your perspectives and beliefs about your career.

I also bring a structural lens to acknowledge that sometimes—no matter how hard you work and how many goals you set—there are factors outside of your control that impact your career. Let’s talk through that together.

I can help you with gaining clarity on:

  • defining your career path

  • career transitions and advancements

  • practical job search strategies

  • work-life balance

  • getting “unstuck”

  • experiences of discrimination, prejudice, and stereotypes at work

The process works best when you feel ready to embrace change and be reflective, so that we can work towards our collective liberation.

What are the benefits?

My focus is to empower you to find, build, and refine the tool to succeed in your work goals, while acknowledging how factors outside of your control can impact your professional life.

For many folks in equity-deserving groups, this can be a transformative experience; especially if we have been previously excluded from workplaces and opportunities.

I will hold a safe space for you to explore curiosities about career options, while acknowledging and affirming your unique existence.

So bring your whole self to our meetings so we can celebrate our similarities as well as our differences.

To learn about my financially accessible pricing options, click here.

Is coaching the same as counselling and mentorship?

Mentoring is an informal relationship that is usually longer-term and can be reciprocal, where both mentor and mentee learn from each other. Mentors typically work in the same field as the mentee. For some people, a mentorship relationship can span decades and even turn into lifelong friendships.

Counselling is the skilled use of relationship to build self-knowledge, emotional acceptance. Counsellors work on a variety of topics—including career guidance—but can also work on personal topics such as coping with crisis, grief, trauma, and conflict.

Coaching is shorter-term than mentoring and follows a relatively more structured approach, where the focus is only on the person being coached. Coaches do not need direct experience in someone’s field, as the process is tailored to the client's specific needs.

While coaching shares many similarities with counselling, it differs in that coaching focuses primarily on the career and does not centre around working through a client’s childhood problems and interpersonal relationships outside of work.

What does success look like?

 

Recently, a client asked me this question at the end of a session: “what does success look like in career coaching?”

I answered with one word: Growth.

I measure success by how much my client grew and expanded their horizons through the career coaching process.

Whether or not we get the job, get the promotion, feel included, or launch that idea is dependant on many factors outside of our control, but growth is always possible.

Are you ready to grow?

Why do I only coach Black, Indigenous, People of Colour and people in equity-deserving groups?

I learned this term from Prof. Wisdom Tettey, the Vice President and Principal of University of Toronto Scarborough, who said:

“I challenge all of us to start by thinking of, and relating to, those who are marginalized or are constrained by existing structures and practices as ‘equity-deserving groups,’ and not ‘equity-seeking groups’ — a concept which, while well-intentioned, perpetuates a perception of these groups as interlopers.

Those on the margins of our community, who feel or are made to feel that they do not belong, deserve equity as a right. They should not be given the burden of seeking it and they should not be made to feel that they get it as a privilege from the generosity of those who have the power to give it, and hence the power to take it back.”

While not an exhaustive list, people can be marginalized by society because of their:

  • age (perceived or actual)

  • ethnicity, ancestry, place of origin, race

  • disability (visible and/or invisible)

  • economic status, low income, lack of wealth (intergenerational or personal)

  • gender identity, gender expression, sexual orientation

  • education, socio-economic status

  • life circumstances and journeys:

    • incarceration experience (e.g. prison, jail, juvenile detention centre)

    • career and work (e.g. sex work)

    • housing insecurity (e.g. homelessness, couch-surfing)

    • living with stigmatized health conditions (e.g. HIV, ADHD)

All of the above factors can be visible, invisible, perceived, or actual, depending on the individual. Many of the factors have significant overlaps and are — as described by Kimberlé Crenshaw — intersectional.