“The whole I-don’t-know-what-I’m-doing thing is driving me absolutely bonkers.”
“And then you’re like, stressed about being stressed, right? That’s the irony. You’re anxious about being anxious about being anxious. It’s like a terrible cycle.”
“Maybe wanting emotional clarity is just wrong. Maybe it’s better not to know.”
“I’m really, really nervous, too. My husband is like, ‘well, if it will make you happy.’ And I’m like, I don’t effing know if — how the hell do I know that?!”
“I don’t like to churn the past, because when you do that, you create the same thing, right?”
Talking about work with smart people entails a fair amount of confessions like this. I hear about dread, resentment, anxiety. Pride, delight, admiration, fascination. Conflict, shame, doubt. Sometimes clients apologize, as though they think feelings are irrelevant to the decisions ahead.
I’m not sure why people think that work should be an unbroken stretch of logic and reason, a clear-headed game of chess. I stand with the people who think it’s good to care about work.
On the other hand, our moods shift around a lot. It’s hard to take action when you don’t know how to interpret a signal. Clients sometimes want to wait until they’re fully confident before they begin. And who’s fully confident?
Many of my clients have therapists. They recognize the value of working on themselves, and getting expert help. The most successful people I know attend to nutrition, physiology, stress management, and self-talk.
My work is to acknowledge feelings without wallowing in them. Coaching is explicitly focused on the next forward-looking decision you can make. We have to take the mucky, ambiguous, jumbled up information about the world and then DO something with it.
One client framed the distinction this way.
“My work frustrations are something I could talk to a therapist about, and I have. But I find that you come at it with a different perspective because of your experience and expertise. Like a career therapist in a way…. When I talk to a therapist or a friend or my spouse about this, they’re empathetic and they’re listening, but don’t have the same skill set to guide me for this particular area of my life.
You do it in a way that feels authentic. It has the empathy and humanity and the raw anecdotal side, but then it also has, like, here’s this template. Here’s this data. Here’s this study. You’re bringing the experience and tools to help guide me towards… what is next?”
I think of feelings as a version of highly sensitive radar detectors. They alert you to something in the environment that you’re going to need to handle. It would be foolish to disregard or suppress them.
My line of questioning is: what’s the truth behind this feeling? And: how might we turn this feeling into a research project? What does this feeling suggest about what you need to learn, handle, or become?
Here’s what that might look like:
Maybe there’s something you don’t know, or you’re not sure how to do. Is it a knowledge gap? Where can we look to learn more? Is it a skill gap? Who do we know who has this skill? How hard is it to learn the skill?
Maybe there’s a conversational tightrope you need to walk, and getting it right is consequential. How might we be misinterpreted, and how do we construct the message to minimize that?
I have worksheets and frameworks and templates, ready to help you take a vague unsettled feeling and turn it into an action, a decision, or a specific conversation.
We never ignore feelings in career work, but you’ll save the deep explorations of their source and how they move through you for your therapist. With a career coach, we’ll use them to guide us toward your next action.
If this sounds like something you need, book a free 30 minute conversation and we’ll see if career coaching can help.
