Hello again, and welcome to another minisode on the conversations with coaches podcast feed. This one is another another lesson that I’ve learned from quite a few coaches. I think reflecting back, I’ve learned it from all of them. But a number of coaches make a specific, they articulate this very specifically, and call this out. And I’ve been pondering it and thinking on it for a while. And just as I’m trying to understand better, not just that coaching is such a rising tide and is growing, not just in popularity, but in usefulness. And in the way that people are more accepting of coaching is something that could be powerful and useful in their own lives. But just understanding more why that’s happening, and that kind of think of this like, well, the phrase that pops into my head is continuing education, which typically is a phrase that’s used to describe someone like going back to school later in life or taking night classes to like get a law degree or, you know, learning a track, a craft or a trade or, you know, going back to school to get a masters or whatever, or just just wanting to learn something more continuing it. And that’s something that I know, a number of coaches I’ve spoken to have specifically identified. And I think all coaches understand on some level, that there is a gap from basically all that time we spend in our early formative years, engaged in some kind of formal education, whether it’s public school, private school, homeschool, any and all of the above, preschool, post school, college, continuing education, master’s programs, getting a doctorate, you know, internships, and, and Ta positions, all this stuff that we spend, like so much of our early lives engaged in this formal education. And then at a certain point, that quote, unquote, education just stops, and you’re out in the world.
And you’ve still got lots to learn, you’ve still got lots to grow into, and become and find and, and work through and over and around. But there’s a significant lack of even formal, just guidance, just people that you can go to places you can go to, to understand like, well, I’m kind of stuck, I don’t know what to do, or I have this, maybe you don’t even know you have a quote unquote problem or an issue, but you maybe you’ve maybe you’re stuck in a plateau or, you know, you can’t figure out how to get the promotion that you want or to develop the skills that you need, or you struggle with interpersonal relationships, or, you know, it’s a laundry list of skills, abilities, thought processes, emotional capacity, that we’re just kind of out here fending for ourselves, for the most part. Now, obviously, we have we have some help. We have friends, some people, we have therapists, we have all sorts of people who can help in these different ways. But there’s been at least up until relatively recently, last few decades, a pretty significant gap that I believe very strongly coaches fill. A lot of the coaches I speak to, I’m thinking specifically, in this case, I’m thinking specifically about coaches who have plans for career development. A lot of times a lot of our education is just focused on getting a job or training for a job getting a degree that will then allow us to like, show someone that degree and be like, Please give me money for work now. It’s a strange society that we live in. But once you’re in that job, or you’re in that career, navigating it, not something we often get help with. And so again, being very specific, with my example, certain career coaches, they’re like, so say you have a career in a certain industry. Maybe you’re an engineer, maybe you’re in tech, maybe you’re in medicine, maybe you’re in law, or whatever. There are coaches I’ve spoken to that specifically, focus on here are the techniques, tools and tactics and strategies, if you want to advance in this specific career. Or if you want to advance as a woman in a specific career, I’ve spoken to a number of coaches that focus on that because obviously, there are, I’ll put this as politely as possible.
There are unique challenges to acquiring positions of authority and advancing through a corporate hierarchy as a woman, at least in this country, in my experience, and I’ll just, I’ll leave it there, there are plenty of better people that I’ve gotten a chance to speak to actually, who are more than helpful when it comes to this kind of thing. And that’s, that’s where I really feel like coaching, just thrives is in that ability to be so hyper focused on specific needs, and have literally the actual tools and strategies, tactics flowcharts infographics, combined with their personal one to one coaching, where it’s just like, it’s not just that they have a system is that they derive this system from their own experiences and informed by their own education and tested and tried out in the field by people who have had great success with it, navigating whatever career or business or executive or life path that they might happen to be on. It’s just amazing. It’s an And it’s consistently amazing to me how powerful it is. And I really truly do feel like it is a it is filling a significant gap in our personal and professional development coaching. And so that’s why I’ve kind of, I’ve been thinking of it as sort of a redefinition of what the phrase continuing education can mean. Play yeah, those are my somewhat raw and very imperfect thoughts on some of that. Obviously, this comes through quite a bit in my conversations with coaches, especially when I’m speaking to coaches who think of it this way and see it this way. Like I said, I wasn’t just blowing smoke, it really is amazing to me, I am amazed on a regular basis by the work many of these coaches are doing. So yeah, that’s my that’s my lesson for this minisode I hope, I hope these lessons are I hope you’re enjoying them and getting a lot out of them. And I also I hope this is coming through in the regular conversation episodes. I feel like it is I know it’s coming through for me. But basically everything that I’m saying in these minisodes is just something that I feel like has come out repeatedly over the course over the life of the podcast, so yeah, thank you for listening. And you know what, we’re gonna have another lesson for you relatively soon it will be sprinkled throughout the feed. Depending on how many how many episodes we have in the backlog. Sometimes the calendar fills up awful quickly. And I love that because I love talking to coaches. be weird if I didn’t at this point. Anyway, thank you for listening, and I’ll talk to you again soon.