“I wish to work with something really meaningful and purpose-driven but I do not know what it is or what I’m really good at. Can you help me?”
“I long to work less, fewer hours and without pressure and stress. And I want to spend more time with my family — is this even possible and how?”
These are examples of questions that drive people to seek out a career coach. Or at least that’s what the career coaches say.
When I asked my LinkedIn network to share the questions they believe are driving the growing demand for career coaching, all the responses I got were from career coaches. Not a single response came from people receiving coaching.
This confirms what my lifelong study of questions has shown time and again: that while some people make it a part of their job to share their own and other people’s questions, the vast majority of us keep our questions to ourselves.
But what if it is this resistance to sharing, reflecting on and listening to our own questions that creates the need for career coaching in the first place?
What if it’s not our lack of answers that makes us feel inadequate and insecure, but our failure to ask the questions that connect us to each other and the world we share?
Young Americans Rely On Astrology For Guidance
According to a new study from EduBirdie, 63% of young Americans believe astrology has positively impacted their careers, and 15% claim it helped them get their dream job. As reported in Forbes, the participants in the study are a biased group of young people who already “embrace astrology,” so these findings cannot be generalized to the entire Gen Z or millennial population.
But according to Pernille Boege, a pioneer in business astrology, the study confirms a growing trend for people to ask deeper questions. When leaders consult Boege, it is with questions like, “Why am I still not satisfied, even though I got my dream job?” and “How can I lead from a place that is true to my company’s DNA?”
Boege believes “the real task of a career coach is to help clients shift their perspective toward a more profound and existential one—one that doesn’t have answers ‘out there’ but requires a much deeper exploration of the self. A perspective that is philosophical, and even spiritual.”
Old Philosophers Rely On Questions For Guidance
While the opportunity to integrate professional astrology into career coaching is a welcome option for some, others might benefit more from reconnecting with the big questions everyone asks themselves from time to time.
In addition to existential questions about who we are and aspire to become, it applies to all humans across age, gender, ethnicity, education, and profession that we grapple with ethical questions about what is the right thing to do and epistemological questions about how we know whether something is right or wrong.
Just as business astrologers help their clients understand themselves in a bigger planetary picture, taking the time to ask yourself—and people around you—these basic human questions can help you tap into a 2,400-year tradition of navigating a (working) life that is defined more by what we don’t know than by what we know.
Unlike other ancient traditions such as religion and science, philosophy is not so much concerned with the answers to the big questions as with continuing to ask and explore the questions. And by unlocking your question mindset, you will see why.
Unlock Your Question Mindset To Guide Yourself
By taking the time to ask ourselves existential, ethical, and epistemological questions about what it means to be me in relation to you and everyone and everything around us, we automatically activate The Magical Question Triangle.
While answering questions posed by coaches, managers and HR professionals who have it as part of their job to ask, interview and conduct surveys makes us react to what others think is important, asking our own questions enables us to proactively,
- Consider our own position
- Connect with people around us, and
- Commit to a shared purpose
This is exactly what it takes to find meaning and purpose in life and work. And this is exactly why outsourcing the responsibility of asking questions to a career coach can have the opposite effect of what you are looking for.
Instead of finding the answers you think you need, you risk distancing yourself from the questions that connect you to your life purpose as well as your surroundings.
Sometimes Your Own Question Is The Answer
Drawing on the tradition of astrology, Boege reminds her clients that we have to navigate the tension between the will of nature and our own will as human beings. “We cannot simply choose whatever we desire; rather, we are woven into the greater web of life. Each of us with our own unique thread to discover and explore.” To find our path, Boege says, we have to listen carefully to what is emerging.
Whether you consult astrology, philosophy, or another tradition to reflect on the big questions that all people struggle with from time to time, the most important thing is not whether you talk to a professional coach or a friend about them, but that you don’t leave it to others to ask, listen to, and explore the magic of your own questions.