ASPIRE

A Coaching Model By Sing Lee Lim, Career Coach, Performance Coach, Transition Coach, SINGAPORE

ASPIRE – Career Discussion

The only way to do great work is to love what you do. If you haven’t found it yet, keep looking. Don’t settle. Steve Jobs

As an HR practitioner, I have been a go-to person to many when they face challenges or choices for their professional career. Through those conversations, I reckoned that career discussion is strictly a personal decision, which is fully owned by the individual. As a result, I aspire to master professional coaching skills to drive a meaningful career coaching conversation to help individuals to learn about themselves and grow into someone they have always aspired to be.

In a Corporate Setting

In the current corporate world, organizations are no longer needing their employees sitting in a role that they do best for years. Many organizations have started to transition from job-focused to individual-focused in their people strategies. Other than performance coaching, career and talent coaching are the hot topics facing many people managers nowadays. To support this transitional change, HR professionals have become the first to adapt to this change, to learn new skills to support the organization, as well as people managers.

For Individuals

Nowadays, it is so common that an individual may find themselves landing a job that they are not familiar with or don’t enjoy, through a series of transformational changes introduced by the organizations they serve.

As much as they would like to cope and get up to speed with the role, they need ample guidance from their people managers, peers, family, and friends. Often, HR in the organization is the first neutral party that they may want to explore alternatives to progress from there. Eventually, the conversation may lead to career development, growth, or change, for the next steps.

ASPIRE Explanation With Visual

In my career-related conversations with my clients, I always partner with my clients to clarify or explore their career interests or goals for their next steps, using ASPIRE model. This model is particularly useful for individuals who are at the inflection point of their career, be it driven by the individual owing to his/ her childhood dream or impacted by the ever-changing business environment.

Stage 1 – Create Awareness

This is the most critical step in the entire coaching journey. In the first stage, it is imperative that the coach partners with the client create awareness, so the client knows his/ her personal goals and true aspiration. When new awareness is evoked, clear coaching goals would set a good foundation for a successful coaching session.

Examples of questions from the coach to help create awareness:

• What would you like to achieve through our coaching session today?
• What are the goals that you would like to achieve in 3 years?
• What do you envision for your career in the next 10 years?
• If there is no limitation, what is the dream that you would pursue?
• What does success look like to you?
• How would you know that you have succeeded in your goals?

Stage 2 – Know the Situation

With the new awareness, stage 2 is to assess the external factors in the current environment, as well as via different types of assessments to know more about the client. The assessment tools include psychometric tests, wheel of life, and strength finders, just to name a few.

A coach could leverage the following questions to learn more about the current situation:

• What are your strengths?
• What prohibits you to unleash your strengths?
• What are the gaps between your goals versus your current career?
• How do you feel about the gaps?
• What would be different if you are able to fully utilize your strengths?
• How can your manager support you to pursue your goals?

Stage 3 – Explore Possibilities

At stage 3, it is where the coach and client focus on exploring various possibilities and options they could consider moving forward. The client would be encouraged to think beyond boundaries, and to consider as many imaginable options as possible.

Example of questions from a coach in this exploration stage:

• What are the options that you could think of?
• If there is one thing that you haven’t explored, what is that?
• Who could support you to explore the possibilities?
• What would they suggest to you?
• How would you go about exploring more opportunities?
• How will you know that the explored possibilities are well aligned with your goals?

Stage 4 – Implementation

Once the client has explored various possibilities and determined which option to go for, the coach plays a pivotal role to facilitate the client’s plan to move to implementation. This stage could be accomplished by asking the following questions, such as:

• How motivated/ confident are you to take the first step?
• What resources do you need to begin with?
• Who could support you to ensure you take the necessary actions?
• If there is any roadblock, what would that be?
• What structure you could put into place to ensure the actions taken are well aligned with your goals?
• For those beyond your control, what kind of influence do you have over the situation?

Stage 5 – Self-Reflection

At stage 5, the client would take a step back to pause, and reflect on his/ her progress over the last few weeks/ months, to achieve the career goals.

• What are you feeling right now?
• How well have you progressed so far?
• On a scale of 1 to 10, with 1 being the lowest and 10 being the highest, how would you rate your achievement so far?
• How would you know you are now one point higher compared to when you set out on the journey?
• If there is one thing you could do differently, what would that be?
• Assuming that you are unable to change others, what could you do to make the situation better?

Stage 6 – Seek Enrichment

At the final stage of the ASPIRE coaching journey, the client would seek further enrichment to make his/ her life more fulfilling, not only limited to his/ her career development, advancement, growth, and change.

Examples of questions that the coach would ask to facilitate the client’s growth:

• What have you learned so far?
• How can you apply this learning to the other aspect of your life?
• Where do you want to duplicate this success?
• What else that you haven’t thought of pertaining to this success?
• Is there anything else you could do?
• What will be the one baby step you could take now/ next?

References

Lifeskills Institute Pte Ltd, a provider of ITOL Accredited Training. (2022). CertifiedCareer Coach Programme. Retrieved from CCC-Brochure_11012021.pdf (lifeskillsinstitute.sg)
Marie Holive. (2019). Coaching Model A-S-P-I-R-E. Retrieved from Coaching Model: A-S-P-I-R-E (archive.coachcampus.com)