How Christian Coaching Can Help You Create A Career Development Plan

Feeling stuck even in the simplest task? Are you lacking fulfillment in your current job? Christian coaching can help you find the areas that you’re stuck in, the reasoning for it, and how to propel you into a forward motion. Just recently my daughter and I launched our own personal blogging site, but we were stuck wondering what our target content would be.

An email appeared in my inbox from a radio marketer who just wanted to chat about drumming up more business for my coaching. I thought sure why not? It can’t hurt just to talk with him. WRONG! As he perused my personal website, he noticed that I didn’t have any SEOs. Huh? I didn’t know what that was. As if we weren’t already stuck, I felt like we became even more entrenched into the mud of confusion.

My daughter and I began to study everything we could on SEOs and discovered that we needed to have the same key words and key phrases on every web page and blog if we wanted to be noticed by Google. At that point, I wanted to abandon ship, but we plunged forward.

Do you know how hard it is to come up with a key phrase that needs to define who you are and what your message is? My daughter and I were getting nowhere. I had to put my coaching hat on and make myself a client. “Self, what would I tell my clients?” The answer: “Start at the end to get to the beginning.”

Sounds bizarre, but it works. You must first know where you’re going in order to plan how to get there. Up went the large sticky notepad paper all over my hallway walls. There we began pouring out our dreams and visions for the future. A plan was beginning to unfold along with key words and phrases. Having a plan is so important in developing your career. Let’s dive deeper into the steps that you need to have in your plan.

1. What’s your vision/dream?

Look to the future! It could be five years from now or ten years from now. What is the goal that you want to achieve? This is a Biblical principle.

Where there is no vision the people perish. – Proverbs 29:18, KJV

I’ve worked with coaching clients who struggle with seeing a future because no future was pictured for them as a child. Whether the parents themselves were in survival mode or there was a lack of parental affirmation and guidance, a future was not to be seen. This places the child in a state of living only in the present.

Although we don’t want to be so consumed with the future that we miss out on the joys of the present, we don’t want to be so focused on the present that we miss out on accomplishing amazing things. Living is not surviving each day. Living is embracing the past, present, and future. It’s forward motion not stagnation. Looking to the future brings hope, excitement, and perseverance.

Those who just focus on today whether it’s in survival mode or whether it’s just about pleasing themselves, will fall into depression, boredom and regret. They will begin to question if this is all there is to life. Sadly, at the end of their life, they look back with regret because they accomplished nothing. They didn’t leave a legacy for their children.

One Christian counseling method is to grab a whiteboard and scribble all your ideas, dreams, and goals down. Create a vision statement or a vision board. It doesn’t matter if they seem impossible or ridiculous. Just DO IT!

2. Understand yourself.

I feel like cringing whenever I hear of kids going off to college and accumulating school debt only to discover that they hate the career they chose. Now they’re stuck with student loans trying to get any job they can to pay off the debt.

Much of this could be avoided if the student first knew who they were. Within each of us, God has placed a unique identity and giftings to be able to fulfill our purpose. Understanding this will help us live a fulfilling life.

I love walking people through this process. Using secular personality tests as well as several spiritual giftings tests gives us a well-rounded perspective of who we are. To go even deeper, exploring the definitions of our first, middle, maiden, and last names also help create our identity.

Isaiah 43:1 (NLT) says “Do not be afraid, for I have ransomed you. I have called you by name; you are mine.” I was skeptical at first when I began looking into the meanings of my names, but then was shocked to see how it paralleled all the personality tests. I began to test this theory with my coaching clients and found that the results were the same. Our purpose can be found in our names.

To support this even more, deciding on your four core values in life and why it helps you discover what’s important to you. Often, those values that you hold onto will support your name’s definition as well as your personality tests.

People were very shocked with the results. Having a clear understanding of who you are will help filter out career opportunities. It will save money on education and guide you as you set your future goals.

3. Correct your beliefs.

Deep within our subconscious, we store memories that shape our beliefs. Those beliefs then shape our perception of the world and of ourselves. If our mindset has been skewed by trauma, abuse, or sin we will live out what we have perceived to be true. For example, if a friend in elementary school hears you singing as a child and then proceeds to tell you that you sing off key, that put down will be burned into your mind.

Throughout the years, if there’s any opportunities to take voice coaching or join a singing group you will shrink back and avoid it at all costs even if you do have a good voice. To correct this false narrative, as an adult you need to look back to that memory and realize that you were in elementary school. Your voice was still developing!

Also, kids make fun of kids especially if they’re jealous of you. Maybe your friend really wanted the solo and had to put you down for you to not try out. As an adult, you can now understand the bigger picture of that moment and work to let go of the idea that you’re a terrible singer. Exploring your beliefs and where they came from will help you tear down any barriers that will keep you from being successful.

4. Work your way backwards.

Now that you have your vision in place, you know what makes you tick, and you’ve corrected your beliefs, it’s time to go backwards. Look at your future goal. If you want the goal to come to fruition in five years, then pull out another piece of paper and write down what needs to happen in year four.

Then write what needs to happen in year three and so forth. Work your way back to the present. Having that future focus will allow you to live successfully in today. From there, set your year-end goal, your monthly goals, weekly goals, and then daily goals.

Be willing to adjust as necessary but stay on course in coaching.

Let’s rehash these four steps: 1. Discover your vision, 2. Understand yourself, 3. Correct your beliefs, and 4. Work your way backwards. This four-step process will help direct you to your career path.

Still struggling to understand? That’s okay. Many people do. Taking part in life coaching will help you ask the right questions, set the goals, and give you a clearer understanding of who you are and where you are going.