Get Unlocked from Your Fear of Career Change

An executive of a public company approached me for my coaching. She said she was not happy with her situation at work due to too much workload and too many meetings causing her work-life imbalance.

Staying very late at work really affected her physical and mental health. She also was not happy with her direct supervisor and the next level supervisor. In addition, her subordinates did not perform up to her expectations resulting in poor delivery of product and services! In a nutshell, she couldn’t rely on both the people above and below her! These are all why she wanted to “jump ship”.

However, she was really scared to quit the job and look for new opportunities because she already thought in advance that at a new company, there’s a chance that things could be worse! She felt that her current job was quite secure and she was pretty satisfied with her salary and fringe benefits.

So, it was a big dilemma for her to make a career move. That’s why she brought this dilemma for me to coach her on. After starting our coaching conversation for a while, I asked her with some powerful questions in order to raise her awareness in exploring her situation.

I asked that… “How do you weigh between these 2 sides of the scale; one side is satisfying salary, fringe benefits and job security and the other side is your happiness, your physical and mental health and work-life balance?” She replied, “I would put more weight or more importance on the latter.”

Then, I followed up with another trigger question. “How do you envision yourself in the next 6 months, 1 year or 2 years with this same job or company?” She replied, “I couldn’t envision myself being here for another 6 months!”

Then, I asked her whether she was still afraid of a career change. She said, not anymore! She said, she felt relieved and unlocked from her fear!

Then, we explored the strategies and options together. We could come up with 3 possible options to work on for her action steps.

The technique I applied to help this executive be able to make her decision out of this big career dilemma is… 1) I helped her get clarity on her situation by putting things in perspective. 2) I helped her see into the future of what her situation would be like if she didn’t make a change.

For many situations in our lives, if we don’t want to get locked up by our own fear, we’ll just need to feel the fear and do it anyway!