Even as a career coach, I know career isn’t absolutely everything. To some (many), it is a defining trait of their personality. But by nature of existence, you cannot be exclusively about your career as you continue to breathe, eat, and sleep. However, you can still take advantage of your day-to-day life to support your goals and optimize your professional life. 

Establishing Success

To be successful in your career, you have to have the structure, organization, habits, and lifestyle in place to be really effective in your role. A career coach ensures you are marketable and can obtain your dream role. They also help with other coaching branches ensure you can follow through. 

By maximizing your everyday life, you have more energy to contribute to your professional life. One of the best things about Ama La Vida is the collaboration of our coaching community. Unlike coaches who operate independently, ALV coaches work in tandem and support clients as an agency versus an individual. Coaches on their own can still move you forward. However, together, career collaboration can move mountains. With ALV, not only do we have career coaches, but we also have life, wellness, leadership, and health coaches. By working collaboratively, our branches provide the most holistic experience to a client. When crossing these multiple branches of coaching, individuals become their best personal and professional selves.

Ultimately, by layering these 5 coaching areas you’ll have a:

• Personal life that compliments you professionally & optimizes career growth potential
• Meaningfully leadership skills that showcase your skills and ability to develop others
• Optimal health, which means the best you in big meetings and important one-on-ones
• Wellness approach that prioritizes a self-care focus  so you can excel professionally

So, let’s talk about how these coaching branches can collaborate to optimize your professional life.

Optimize Your Professional Life

Career & Life Coaching

Together, career and life coaches help you optimize your professional life by ensuring your personal one compliments and facilitates your professional goals. 

When a client works with both a career and a life coach, they are able to engage in a process that I call career charting. Career planning is different from career charting as it is singularly focused on your professional avenue and goals. As a career coach, we help you develop that career plan. Together, we explore your professional goals, identify occupations, create your marketing materials, and develop the career ladder. This is what will ultimately take you from now to your final professional goal.

Career Charting

So in conjunction with that, life coaches help create your career chart. Career charting helps you develop your best professional self. This will help optimize your current and long-term career, and will provide satisfaction in your working and non-working worlds. Life coaching compliments career coaching by helping clients develop the tools to address situations that may deviate someone from their professional ladder. By helping clients work through their thoughts and feelings strategically, life coaches help ensure clients are prepared to make professional moves.

Be it moves, new or ending relationships, shifts in financial situations, or more, a life coach can help you develop strategies to conquer these situations in ways that negate the impact or even compliment your career plan. Moving to a new city may mean a host of new opportunities and connections to make. Changes in relationships leave opportunity for great growth and personal reflection, which can inform job searches and occupational choices. 

By working with both career and life coaches, you will have the best opportunities and information to develop a meaningful career. One that is supported by well-executed and strategic decisions made in your personal life. When looking to make a big career transition, consider consulting a life coach to help you through the personal circumstances that may have inspired that change. Exploration related to big life changes may be able to tell you more about your overall desire for career exploration.

In summary, career and life coaches collaborate to optimize your personal and professional life. And they do this by combining career planning and life coaching to create a career chart that will help you navigate your current and future career goals.

Life coaching & career coaching in tandem provide:

• Career planning, which is related to your professional goals and singularly focused
• Career charting so your personal life compliments your professional
• Strategies & support to tackle career-impacting personal situations
• Opportunities to develop your professional options by developing your best self
• Optimized career planning and growth through career charting

Career & Leadership

For many, leadership is the goal at the end of their professional journey, or at the very least a stop. Be that a manager, team lead, mentor, or another role that involves you working with and developing others, having strong leadership and communication skills is key.

A career coach will always ensure you are seeking and landing the perfect leadership role for you. Our role is to make sure you’re an exceptional and obvious choice for that targeted leadership role of your dreams. Leadership coaches will make sure you showcase your skills and achievements in a way that exemplifies your leadership abilities. Leadership coaches help you develop others in an engaging, effective manner.

As a career coach, we will help you find and obtain those leadership opportunities. Be it the next promotion or building a long-term path to that VP role, you should be constantly reflecting and building your portfolio of achievements and create a “brag book”. If you’re an external applicant, we will coach you on making and finding those top-notch materials and presenting your best professional self. For internal candidates, we will talk about showcasing your general and company-specific achievements and demonstrating your value add in your current role. We will create 30/60/90 day plans for your first days at your new job. We do this to ensure you prioritize skills and responsibilities that propel your career growth and make the most out of your next role.

Professional Development

On the other hand, leadership coaching ensures you perform your best at your new role. Leadership coaches support career coaching clients who have landed that dream leadership position. They ensure that you have the ability to self-guide and can lead with authentic, genuine, and compassionate authority in your work. So career coaches set up clients to find a role successfully and leadership coaches will help clients be the most effective leaders. They do this by teaching you how to articulate your value add as an individual and a leader.

Leadership coaching helps you chart new territory when it comes to having effective 1:1s, engaging groups, managing performance, building teams, making decisions, etc. Leadership coaching helps you define your unique leadership style and be your best professional self. Whether it be as an individual contributor or as a lead to others, leadership coaching will help you effectively approach your work, collaborate with others, and build meaningful relationships based on your leadership style. Leadership coaching helps new and aspiring leaders develop the confidence and abilities needed to excel in current and future leadership opportunities. 

Leadership coaching and career work together to help you:

• Develop your professional presence so you can apply and obtain a leadership role
• Develop a leadership trajectory that will serve your entire professional career
• Propel into leadership via professional development at your current role
• Learn effective strategies to navigate complex leadership situations
• Develop self guidance and sense of authority
• Articulate your value add in a leadership capacity

Career & Health

When your health isn’t at its best, your career rarely is. If you feel tired or worn out, the days seem longer. If your stomach grumbles for the 5th time in a 13 hour shift, you aren’t at peak performance. When you are sitting at your desk for 6 hours straight and aren’t moving your muscles and joints, you are reducing your ability to do your best work. As a result, all the best career intentions in the world can be washed away by poor health.

Invested in Work Well Being

Health coaches work alongside career coaches by ensuring people nourish their minds and bodies in ways that’ll best support their career ambitions, whatever they may be. So if you’re going to be a desk dweller, a health coach will help you strategize ways to work movement and activity into your office hours. A health coach will help you put mental and physical practices in place that optimize your well being, so you can feel great inside and out, both personally and professionally. 

Health coaching gives you:

• Strategies that match your personal and professional lifestyle
• An ability to prioritize your personal well being during the professional
• New perspectives on optimizing your mental and physical well being 
• Meal prep and fitness routines that fit into your work schedule
• Sleep strategies that support you brain and body

Career & Wellness

Health and life coaches focus on strategies that help you address physical and emotional well being. While both physical and mental well-being come into play with wellness coaching, wellness work helps you set in the life habits and strategies you need to do to successfully nurture the other parts of your life. Wellness will help you coordinate your life via approaches that help alleviate common physical or emotional ailments associated with lack of self-care or positive ritual.

Supporting Career Performance & Growth

Career coaches benefit from wellness’ support as clients have the mental strategies and habits to keep reaffirming their positive behaviour and actions both personally and professionally. Habit building makes approaching physical, mental, and emotional improvements considerably easier, which makes it easier to be your best professional self. So wellness coaches are always there to ensure you prioritize self care as you travel down your professional journey. 

Wellness coaching supports career coaching by helping you:

• Build sustainable boundaries between your personal and professional life
• Incorporate self care strategies worked into your daily care
• Practice and prioritize self care in personal and professional life
• Balance habits that support your personal and professional growth

In Summary

By including other forms of coaching, your career coaching experience can be more holistic and it will help develop across your personal and professional spectrum. So by taking advantage of the overlaps of coaching, you can work towards–and achieve–your best professional and personal you. Capitalizing on all types of coaching, throughout your career, will ensure you’ll come out a better, more empowered you. 

In a nutshell:

• Career and life coaches optimize your professional life by complementing it with your personal through career charting
• Career coaches guide you to leadership roles  and leadership coaches help you maximize your professional abilities in those roles
• Health coaches support career coaches by encourage physical and mental wellness to optimize work performance and overall fulfillment and satisfaction
• Wellness coaches collaborate with career coaches by ensuring clients are their best selves at work through self care and positive mental and physical habits

Interested in trying out coaching after this article? Intrigued on how you can add other forms of coaching in your career journey to optimize your entire life? Reach out and meet with one of our relationship strategists. Our collaborative coaches will develop the perfect path through your professional story!