Academic Student Career Coaching
Here is a detailed and explained presentation of the career coaching services I offer.
It is an accompaniment that is both a real work of reflection guided by our discussions in which you must invest yourself, and also research or exercises, to which you will have to devote a little time between sessions.
This is not a service where I tell you what job to do or what you are cut out for by means of a test or questionnaire and suggest the corresponding training courses, all according to your grades.
I will explain below why this would be against your interest and I will start by introducing the context and the prerequisites for an intelligent and thoughtful orientation by integrating explanations and argumentation.
In a context where we are all formatted, conditioned, normalized and influenced, there is a lot to unravel to ensure that you make a reasoned choice, but first and foremost what we are going to focus on in the work is questioning and then validating what you like and what is important to you. Sometimes we want something for the wrong reasons, and we believe that some things are important when they are not.
It is necessary to start on the right footing, to refocus on yourself, not in the mysterious sense of the term used in the world of wellness, but in the concrete sense, that is to say, to make the distinction between your value system, your thoughts and ideas and those (of others) that you have ended up adopting without realizing it.
The advantage of coaching is that it is a problem-solving process that encourages action and is adapted to each context, specific situation and personality. Wherever you are in your reflection, whether you have already spent hours or very little time, whether you think you know what you want to do as a profession or are totally lost, my role is to adapt and help you validate and make your choice.
What I propose as a guidance service is pure coaching, i.e. based on your own resources. Of course, I could propose you open exercises that do not influence you and that I could develop and refine since more than 17 years to accompany students in their orientation, in order to help you to bring out important elements for you on which to reflect.
An example: It would be a shame if you were to leave a job simply because of a self-confidence problem or a shyness in public speaking, you will agree.
Sometimes the work on the main problem naturally makes us wonder about certain points that are external to the problem, but which are linked, and of which I have just given an example.
Why do these coaching and accompaniments answer your need and not especially your desire?
I offer you a service that I consider essential. If I propose to guide you according to this method it is for very specific reasons.
Indeed, this does not ideally correspond to what you are looking for and I know it well. On the other hand, it is ideally what you need.
I consider that it is my duty as a professional to offer you what you need before anything else. Imagine that you go to a DIY store, this is an example I often take, would you prefer that the salesman directs you to the product you say you want, or the one he will advise you according to what you have to do? You should trust the professional (if you think he is one), to guide you in the choice of the most suitable tool for the task you intend to do. You will have to listen to his explanations and determine if they are relevant and convincing.
For your orientation, a subject with much more at stake, it is the same thing, you must trust me to propose the best method. So why would coaching, and more precisely the type of coaching detailed above, that I propose to you, be the best method?
To answer this question, we must also talk about other methods and analyze their contributions and limitations, and make a comparison, I talk about this in my article on choosing a guidance service which I invite you to read. It would be too long to detail in this presentation of the service. This one is accessible via the menu of the site. I also talk about it in much greater detail in my modest book "L'orientation aujourd'hui ou l'art de ne pas se planter" available on Amazon, Kobo, iTunes and Google Play, of which you will find a short presentation in the "books" section of this site.
It is impossible for me to summarize more than 50 pages of explanations and argumentation in a few lines, but here are the main reasons:
(For each of the items below, I invite you to do some additional research, if you don't know what it is about).
- I followed one of the most complete French University coaching courses, lasting 1 year
- Following the above point, therefore I do not propose any kind of test or questionnaire
- I do not use any particular toolbox and even less tools used in NLP
- I do not base myself mainly on the themes of the pyramid method which are of little interest
- The client is in an active and participative position and is involved in the reflection process, which cannot take place without him/her
- The client is at the center of the process and of his choices, he is responsible and empowered
- Coaching is based on your situation, your experience, your personality, your resources and your elements
- As a psychoanalyst and with my training as a psychologist and my personal work, I know myself and try to minimize the effects on the coaching,
- I have the skills to identify psychological issues that are beyond the scope of coaching
- I assume that everything can be questioned, including the nature and quality of my coaching
- I know the types of questions and their effects and have been doing my best for over 17 years to master their use
- I do not look for the easy way out and only propose questions and open-ended exercises that allow you to answer in your own way, reframed if necessary to allow you to move forward
- I am careful not to give you advice and it is imperative for me not to influence you, I have been questioning myself for years about influence, especially in terms of orientation (I refer you to my blog and my books)
In all aspects of their orientation, except perhaps the knowledge of the different paths, pupils and students are almost left to their own devices, whether in high school or in university, during important stages of their student and professional life and they need to be accompanied in a more conscientious and personalized way to put all the chances on their side to flourish!
You will find in the details below an expansion of some of the items listed above.
Coaching for academic and professional orientation/construction of a professional project
Generally, the students' request is quite simple. They want to find their profession. They are not aware that it is not enough to find one's profession and that it does not come down to deciding: "I want to be an engineer" or "I want to be a lawyer".Defining one's orientation means first of all finding what really interests us in order to define a precise profession, but also necessarily specifying a sector and a field, a speciality.
It is a matter of building your professional project.
My goal is to help you discover yourself, to awaken your desires, what makes you tick, what you like, what makes you want to move forward, what excites you, motivates you, has meaning for you.
In short, make sure that these vague ideas evolve little by little to allow you to choose a profession, a clear, exciting, passionate professional project, matured by deep reflection.
Many students who have a main interest or a passion rightly think that it is not difficult to define one's orientation. They are right in principle, but in reality it is more complicated than that. And sometimes, they tend not to realize that the reality of a daily life is far from the representation that one makes of it and from the previous experience of this passion outside the framework of paid work with all that it implies. It is not unusual today for these students to question their choice. The status of the "passion" profession, which has long been perceived as the Holy Grail by all, is wavering.
Then, there are many young people who do not have a real passion, a real center of interest, sometimes it is rather because they have too many, that none is really more important than the others, and finally, sometimes, it evolves constantly, from month to month, from year to year. In my last two examples, I am talking about zebras, scanners, two relatively recent names for children who are different, EIP, gifted, who simply have a different way of functioning, a particular way of thinking, and a different relationship to the task and to their interests, but not only.
And for all those who are hesitating, don't forget that double courses exist!
I will be very sincere, for these different students, sometimes it is not a question of helping them to find their job, but rather to help them to define the jobs they will dislike the least, in which they will be the least bothered, the branch in which they will be able to quickly change position, role or activity for example and there is a real work of acceptance, of awareness to be implemented. Yes, there are EIPs (or HPIs) who find it very difficult to accept being confined to a single professional activity and for whom adapted solutions must be found.
I know very well the specificities of these children and young adults, following my readings and research since about 2011 and I have had the pleasure of accompanying many of them.
In short, it is essential to be accompanied in one's choice of orientation and for the student to take responsibility for thinking about and researching this issue. It is important to put all the chances on one's side, and to move forward serenely by asking the right questions, in order to reach one's personal, professional and fulfillment objectives, but above all to avoid failure or dropping out in the first year as is unfortunately the case for 50% of them, according to credoc sources, and thus avoid losing time, motivation and an inevitable part of one's confidence.
The coaching services I offer meet these expectations and allow you to move forward concretely, step by step, in the definition of your career orientation.I do not work with tests but only with questioning, you can refer to the section of this site on the course of an orientation coaching to learn more.
My role is to adapt myself, to meet your expectations and to help you make your choices without influencing you.
Guidance coaching can be more or less focused:
- Job Choice,
- building a professional project,
- choice of university or school.
Our work will depend on your specific request.
The question of motivation and self-confidence
These are central issues in the definition of a professional project, because their action, their impact, their consequences are truly limiting.It is often necessary to unravel this by working on these issues to ensure that the choice of orientation is not biased.
In short, what I call motivation is actually a general observation that the student is not working, is not getting to work, or is dropping out quickly, and that is not the real problem. The real problem is the cause of this lack of motivation and this is what needs to be defined so that the student can move forward again. This is the work of reflection that I undertake: to help the student to look for and express the cause and then to help him to find his solutions.
In 90% of the cases, it is a problem related to orientation, a lack of objective.
I will only address the issue of self-confidence here from the perspective of orientation.
This handicap is most frequently caused, during the school or student career, by fear (or more specifically anxiety, anguish in all its forms). It can "affect" in depth and almost always influences orientation choices.
Sometimes students are really aware of it and come to me to work on it. Sometimes, it is by digging a little that the student becomes aware of the biases and limitations of their thinking because they have :
- fear of defining a goal
- fear of making the choice to reach that goal
- tendency to doubt one's abilities, one's value, one's skills
- tendency to think that he will fail
- shyness, fear or discomfort with public speaking
- fear of facing the gaze and judgment of others
- fear of disappointing parents
- fear of trying everything and failing despite his efforts
- fear of not being smart enough
- fear of being aware of one's limits
Of course there are some redundancies and this list is not exhaustive but it is to illustrate the different ways they have to verbalize it.
Depending on the personalities and the issues at stake, we can approach the work from different angles. A first step of reflection and awareness of oneself, one's experiences, one's history is necessary and this is what will invariably guide the work.
Orientation coaching has a primary interest: it makes you AUTONOMOUS. I am going to make a small aside because it seems to me very important.
I have already insisted on this point which seems to me to be essential in other articles, and it is thanks to the feedback of a client that I understood it. Contrary to other orientation methods, the coaching process will aim at developing autonomy towards the reflection on one's orientation but also towards the coach.
It sometimes happens that when one does not do enough research on a profession and its training (during the coaching or afterwards) one realizes afterwards that it does not (or no longer) totally correspond to one's priorities. Because of course, priorities can change, and sometimes very quickly, especially at 17 / 18 years old! Or maybe you are so excited and euphoric to have "found" your job at the time that you are not lucid enough about the other elements of this job to take into account or about your own priorities.
One student came back to me by email (this email has been traduced from French):
"Where we left off, I claimed I wanted to work in human resources. However, when I researched related courses, I realized that this is not at all what I am interested in.
So I came back to communication and realized that the digital and network aspect of communication makes me vibrate. It's a fast developing and very versatile sector, it allows me to integrate an event or cryptocurrency company.
I wanted to thank you for the help you gave me. We may not have come to the right conclusion together, but you taught me to create a personal reflection and to think about myself. A skill that now serves me on a daily basis."
This shows the importance of this SELF-REFLECTION.
In this last case, we can see that despite the fact that his desires or priorities change (after 3 weeks, or after 10, 30 years), you are autonomous and resume by yourself the reflection with a real structure, on your job, allowing you to reach the goal.
