The real breakthrough came during the seventh session when I asked Emily what she enjoyed doing as a child. She replied that she has always been interested in the beauty business and was thinking of studying art and dance. She also thought about becoming a beautician or a hairdresser (which is consistent with the top values the Client chose in the Personal Values Card Sort Test). However, her mother, a speech therapist, persuaded her to study languages and Emily followed her advice, fearing she would not be able to support herself financially if she followed her true calling, and that her profession would carry a stigma of “not being intelligent/academic enough.” The Client said: “I wish I had been more firm and insisted on what I wanted.” We proceeded to explore what she could do right now in order to move closer towards working in the field that truly interested her (beauty), what kinds of jobs could possibly link her current profession and experience she had gained so far, who could support her in this transition (and how), what additional information she would need, and what courses or studies she would need to pursue in order to make herself more employable it that field.
In the beginning of the eighth session Emily reported still being excited about the new field she was exploring, which seemed to be proof that we had finally got on the right track. We worked further on a list of things she might want to do in order to move closer towards working in the beauty industry (she scheduled a few meetings with friends who had connections in the business, started looking at salaries and job offers as well as beauty courses). At the end of the eighth session, we decided to take a longer break so that she could do some work that we had agreed on. I encouraged her to call me or e-mail me anytime she needed support, and we did exchange a few e-mails during the following months. The Client wrote that she continued with her work as agreed.
We resumed our sessions in mid-December. First of all, I inquired about her current situation and the progress she had made in moving towards working in the beauty industry. She reported that she had reduced her working hours by one day and started to attend a college on Saturdays in order to qualify as a beautician. what is more, she did not abandon her plans of becoming a coach and had started taking part in networking events. The remaining concern was that she did not fully believe she would be able to cope financially should she become a coach and we decided to dedicate the remainder of our sessions to working out the financial aspect of being a coach.
Main tools used
A few of tools were used in order to broaden the awareness of the Client’s values and dreams and to shift her perspective towards noticing more opportunities and advantages of pursuing her true interests. She found the Cartesian questions and the visualization exercise especially useful.
Personal Values Card Sort Test (Miller et al., 2001)
The test was performed in the beginning of the coaching process. In this test, 83 values can be assigned to three categories: “very important to me,” “important to me’” and “not important to me,” and then arranged hierarchically within those categories. Also other values can be added by the person taking the test. The first five very important values Emily listed were health (to be physically well and healthy), attractiveness (to be physically attractive), justice (to promote fair and equal treatment for all), simplicity (to live life simply, with minimal needs) and fitness (to be physically fit and strong).
Cartesian questions
This is a technique used in NLP that consists of four questions:
Visualization
I instructed Emily to notice what her feelings were during the exercise, especially as she had expressed suspicion that she often tried to control her emotions too much, possibly preventing her from taking action and moving towards her goal.
I asked the Client to imagine that she had boarded a hot air balloon and was going up slowly, gaining more and more view of her professional life. She noted her feelings upon “seeing” her current workplace and some other places she was interested in working at.