Coaching for Purpose & Meaning

It’s hard to coach a client down a path you haven’t been on yet.

If you’ve been a coach for a while, at some point you’ll find yourself across from someone who feels lost. They use words like stuck, untethered, unsure. Often, they are navigating a change big enough to make them question who they even are anymore and what they’re about: in their work, in their relationships, in their corners of the world. We are trained to hold space for that. We ask good questions. We open up possibilities.

When our clients are raising the questions common to work and life transitions: What am I meant to be doing? What matters most? Who am I in this season? What’s next? They’re raising the need for purpose work. Supporting clients in connecting with purpose asks us to have done that work ourselves first.

What I have learned after years of this work: a coach who has never named their own purpose can unintentionally rush their client toward an answer. We ask big questions without creating the right pathway into that depth. We try to fit people into a “purpose statement” and mistake a good-sounding phrase for a true one. When you have done your own purpose work, taken time to do the depth of reflecting and understand the process from the inside out, you hold a client’s stuck moment completely differently. You trust the process because it worked on you and you know where to gently ask deeper questions and when to take a different tack to guide them through the work.

This is a wildly important moment to be doing this work. We find ourselves at the edge of a technological shift that is changing our relationship to work and pressing hard on the question of what we uniquely offer that a machine cannot. Our clients are going to be navigating that question for years, right alongside us. Purpose is becoming one of the most relevant, practical things a person can get clear about. Not only does it have the power to serve as a compass keeping us directionally correct in the relentless pace of change, but it creates clarity and confidence in decision making, not to mention a whole host of well-being benefits including living longer, decreasing stress and keeping our brains sharper as we age.

In this continuing education offering, you will not learn about Purpose in Practice. You will go through it for yourself. You will build your timeline of meaning, tell your strengths stories to a partner, and begin the process of naming your own core gift: the thing you are here to contribute in this season of your life. It is reflective, connecting, concrete. Think of it as a gift to give yourself.

Join us the following week for the companion session, and I will show you how to coach it.

If you work with people in transition, and most of us do, this is a framework worth having in your hands.

Join us Wednesday, November 11 | 1pm ET Register Now: Coaching for Purpose & Meaning