Career stories: evaluating job offers against what's truly important

with Gabi: Anna Hess Career Coaching client and Director of Camp

Gabi and I started working together in September of this year, and from our first meeting, I could tell that we’d be a great team. Gabi is curious, open-minded, and unafraid to push herself out of her comfort zone – what more could I ask for in a client?

I sat down with Gabi recently to catch up, hear her reflections about her experience with coaching after the fact, and understand the impact of our sessions. Read on to learn what coaching helped her grow and achieve.

[Anna] Tell me about what was going on in your life when we started working together. What brought you to coaching?

[Gabi] I was laid off in early June and started to look for jobs soon after that time. I applied to positions that sounded good to me, but there was no intention behind my search and I started to feel lost. That’s when I saw a LinkedIn post about your services and reached out.

I’m glad that we found each other when we did! What did you hope to gain from coaching?

At the time, I thought to myself “I want Anna to get me a job.” [Laughs] It’s not that I thought you were going to give me a job of course, but I came into this experience thinking “Anna’s going to tell me what jobs I should look for, who I should network with, and concretely, what I need to do step by step to get a job.

What kinds of positions were you looking for at the time?

There’s a summer camp that I’ve worked at for several years, and I thought that I wanted to optimize for jobs that would continue to allow me to do that. I was solving for one outcome and one outcome only: keep my summers free. So of course, I thought I wanted to work in education.

I didn’t consider other factors that were important to me (because I didn’t have access to what those factors were). Our work revealed to me that there were much deeper, much more significant elements that I wanted to center my search around – things like trust between teammates, the moral and ethical disposition of the employer and their work, and a strong community.

What reservations did you have about working with me at the start?

I had worked with a career coach in the past to help me with my resume and cover letter, and from that experience, I had a very narrow idea about what a career coach could provide: light application advice, tips on how to respond to professional emails in order to get a job, and relatively simple things like that.

I didn’t know if it would be worth my time and my money, or if it would push me enough. I was worried I’d fall back into old patterns of taking jobs that I thought I was supposed to have, and not figure out what I truly wanted. I was a little bit nervous that this experience would again be surface level.

I get that. There are a lot of different kinds of coaching services out there. What helped you overcome those reservations?

From our first talk, I could tell that this would guide me in the right direction and in a language that I could understand. I liked that it wasn’t going to feel formulaic; I would get to the core of what I really wanted and needed in my next position.

It sounded to me like you broadly already knew how to secure a job, but what you didn’t know was what was most important to you as you searched for jobs.

Absolutely. That became very clear to me once we started to work together. What I found so useful is that we got really clear on what I was specifically looking for in my career. It genuinely adjusted the way that I approached the job search and helped me put intentionality at the center of it.

And look where it got me! I got two job offers! And when I got those offers, I thought really critically about whether or not I wanted to take them. That would have been scary if I didn’t have access to the language or skills to figure out if those jobs were aligned with what I wanted.

I’m so happy that you had that clarity going into that decision process. Can you summarize what we did together during our coaching sessions?

First, we dug into my professional history, what I liked and didn’t like about my previous positions, etc. and took that and compared it to what I wanted from the future. Each week during our session you’d help me to answer questions that I would have never asked myself – they consistently pushed me out of my comfort zone and made me face things that I hadn’t wanted to examine. Then, I had time to process and get comfortable with those realizations and dive deeper on my own through homework assignments that we’d build on during the following session.

And it’s not like we didn’t work on concrete tactical things too; we revised my resume and drafted applications, but those actions clearly aligned with my wants and needs for my next chapter. We evaluated jobs against my criteria before spending energy on the tactical pieces.

And what did that work lead to?

I mean…I got a job! But it led to other outcomes, too.

For one, I now have the "coaching book" that you created with extensive notes from the weeks that we spent together that I own and can reference whenever I want. And I genuinely come back to it often; when I got a job offer, I wanted to confirm whether or not it was a dream job for me, so I returned to the insights in my coaching book and evaluated the job against my personal criteria.

I chose to move forward with the job because it was so aligned!

Amazing. What do you want other folks to know about coaching?

I’ve been trying to answer this question myself, because every time someone tells me that they want to make some kind of professional shift, I’ve tried to articulate why they should consider coaching.

What I want folks to know is that this work is worth it and that it has the potential to open something up within you. I was extremely skeptical at first – I knew I liked you and would like talking with you, but I didn’t know if it would provide the help that I was looking for. It turns out that it actually didn’t provide the help that I wanted, but it did, more importantly, provide the help that I needed. *

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