You are here: Home / Career Coaching / Career Coaching Tools

Career Coaching Tools: Test Your Personal Temperature

October 6, 2010 By Jeffrey T. Sooey 1 Comment

The benefit of career coaching tools is you can test out where you’re flaming hot and where you’re as cold as an iceberg. Coaching tools help coaches peel back the onion on their client’s dirty secrets and berried strengths. Like a hot yellow onion, you may get some piercing feedback that’ll knock you to your knees because you really don’t want to hear bad news which makes you’re eyes water and your nose tingle, but it’s best to find out now before you launch head first into a new career.

Do you know yourself? Does your breath smell like day old onions? Do you know what your family, friends, and colleagues know about you that you don’t know? Are your hands as cold as ice?

One of the best career coaching tools is the personal 360° survey. It’s a strategy for identifying your situation for what it really is. The way it works is you ask people who know you well enough that give you valuable feedback to help you improve personally.

Do a personal 360° interview with at least 3 people who know your strengths and weaknesses. You can select from your colleagues, friends, and family to get a clear sense of how they perceive you. They can see what you can’t, because you have your own blind spots. As a career coach, you should be constantly asking for advice on how you can get better because when the blind lead the blind, both of them will fall into a ditch.

Career coaching tools: personal 360° feedback

.
This is a strategy for discovering where you already are. Anytime you want to make a serious change in your life like a career move, you’ve got to start from where you are currently. What good will a map do you to find your way home if you don’t know where you’re right now? You need to select a starting point before you can get going using this career coaching guide, and then you’ll be able to strike out on your journey.

Here are the simple 360° questions to gage your career temperature:

1 ) What are my strengths?
2 ) What are my weaknesses?
3 ) What does everyone know about me?
4 ) What can I be counted on for?
5 ) What can I never be counted on for?
6 ) Is there anything else you would like to tell me or anything that you have never told me that you would like to now?

Personal 360° strategy for discovering where you already are

.
If you’re really a brave soul, you can get this brutally honest career advice by interviewing each person face-to-face. You may want to get pointers from someone who lives far away, so email them these 360° career questions, and then ask them for their honest opinion.

Career coaching tools can arm you with valuable insights about how you show-up with those who know you well. These responses will help you face the real truth about your strengths and weaknesses. You want to pay close attention to the areas where you get the same feedback over and over. These can be your biggest areas for personal and professional growth.

Hope you took some great value out of this post today! I’d love to hear your feedback, so make sure you leave a comment with your thoughts or questions. And also, you can click on the Twitter button below to retweet this article… Thank you!

Donald R. Hunter, MBA, Certified Financial Planner
JTS Certified Accountability Coach

Technorati Tags: ,

Filed Under: Career Coaching, Career Coaching Tools Tagged With: ,

Career Coaching 101: Career Coaching Tools to Promote Effective Communication

July 20, 2009 By Jeffrey T. Sooey 3 Comments

One of the basic career coaching tools to master is effective communication. This skill is important for your clients, and also in your own career coaching practice. The biggest problem with communication is that we hear through our own filters, and often attach meaning that was never intended. The results are often disastrous to our life and career coaching practice. Here are some career coaching tools you can implement immediately to improve communication.

Career Coaching Tool #1: Don’t Assume Meaning

E

The first of the career coaching tools is to improve communication is to ask, “What else could this mean?” Let’s face it, when we get upset it’s not just about what someone said. It’s also because we attach some type of meaning such as ‘they don’t care’ or ‘they’re irresponsible’. When you go into this state, how will you treat that person? Maybe you’ve overwhelmed that person with too many requests or something else came up in that person’s life that was a higher priority. The golden rule is to never assume that it’s about you. But that’s what we do, in our own lives and career coaching practices. And in that moment we stop relating to others, and they won’t relate to us.

Career Coaching Tool #2: Don’t Take it Personally

e

The next of the career coaching tools is to remember that when someone gets upset with us, it’s rarely about us. Most of the time we just happen to get in the way. Even if it is about something we did intentionally or unintentionally, the other person adds meaning. In that moment that person most likely sees us as something that is going to get in the way of one or more of their basic needs getting met; such as love, significance, certainty or variety. You play a powerful role in your career coaching practice and your personal life when you choose to take the high road and continue to listen with the intent to understand the other person.

Career Coaching Tool #3: Are You Dealing With the Past or the Present

e

Another great career coaching tool is to identify if you are reacting to what’s happening in the past or the present. Our reality is filtered through the subconscious part of our brain. Every emotional event is stored there since birth, and when something or someone really pushes your buttons, past events are recalled at the subconscious level as well. This usually just adds fuel to the fire. The first step to diffusing the intensity of our emotions is to identify where they are coming from. Are you upset because a career coaching prospect rejected your offer, or are you upset because a more significant person from your past rejected you?

The key to these career coaching tools is for you to be elegant. If you assume the worst, even if you’re right, communication breaks down. By choosing to take the high road, and help your career coaching clients do the same, you’ll be able to transform most mountains into molehills.

Colette Seymann

JTS Advisors Designated Accountability Coach

Technorati Tags: ,

Filed Under: Career Coaching, Career Coaching Tools Tagged With: ,

How to Become a Career Coach Who Conquers Their Own Fears: Career Coaching Tools That Get Immediate Results

March 26, 2009 By Jeffrey T. Sooey 1 Comment

 

When we first decide we want to learn how to become a career coach, we have lots of ideas of what our life will look like. And if we just have enough career coaching tools we will figure out how to become a career coach who lives the life others only dream about. But the truth is, our lives are filled with fear…or the more politically correct word for achievers would be “stress”. The most important step is to begin. Just like children who are learning to walk, everyone stumbles and falls on their face from time to time. Here are a few career coaching tools you can use to move past your fears when that happens.

The First Step to Help You Learn How to Become a Career Coach Who Can Eliminate Fear is to Identify What You Are Afraid Of 


What happened in your life that makes you afraid now?

The best of the best in career coaching tools to use when fear is interfering with your life is to use the Erasure Technique. Erasure techniques are great career coaching tools to use when you make a mistake and then find yourself replaying it again and again in your mind. Have you ever had this type of experience, and each time you see this “movie” of your error, you feel the pain acutely again? When you use the Erasure Technique, instead of playing it back as you remember it happened, you can choose play it back in a way that makes the whole thing seem ridiculous. Play back the experience like a cartoon. Play the movie back at different speeds, changing the scale of the characters, add music, play it in reverse. For example, if someone yelled at you, you can replay this movie with the cartoon character “Dumbo” portraying that person. You could have that person sounding like Mickey Mouse!

Go through this process at least a dozen times while playing around with the experience, making it so funny that you can’t think about the experience without laughing at least a little.

The Key to These Career Coaching Tools is to Make The Other Person Seem so Ridiculous That You Can’t Possibly Take Him Seriously


This is a simple way to learn how to become a career coach who can eliminate fear.

The next step in these career coaching tools is to ask yourself, “What did I have to believe in order to feel fear?” And the last step of these career coaching tools is to find a more empowering alternative. Ask yourself, “What could I believe that would eliminate the possibility of fear?”

If you learn how to become a career coach who stops beating yourself up over mistakes and how to become a career coach who gets past your fears, then you can help others to do the same.

Colette Seymann
.
JTS Advisors Accountability Coach
.

Technorati Tags: ,

Filed Under: Career Coaching Tools, How to Become a Career Coach Tagged With: ,