Author: Emily Ludolph / Source: 99U by Behance
From helping you get unstuck to improving your self-worth, these coaches are masters at guiding creatives through ever-shifting career landscapes.
It’s common for athletes, executives, and opera stars to have performances coaches—people to set goals, benchmarks, tackle potential, and keep them in shape.
But coaching has expanded beyond the C-Suite and the playing field to ambitious creatives at all levels of their careers.Why this expansion? Part of the answer is pragmatic: freelancers and side hustlers now make of 34% of the U.S. economy. These entrepreneurial workers are following trajectories that don’t have built-in career development, pay raises and promotions, or retirement plans; they must create their own career structures. Sans the traditional office environment, an informal network of mentors and service journalism (ahem, you’re welcome) can often be the only sounding board or context to inform that structure.
But it’s not only freelancers who are feeling the pinch of a career without feedback, context, and professional development. During the Great Recession, large companies cut an entire generation of middle management to slash costs. And afterwards? When CEOs saw that workers kept coming in and performing, those managers were never rehired. The dearth of managers could be connected to so many company staffers now feeling adrift at work, just like freelancers, without the typical culture of management and people development from which previous generations benefited. So coaches stepped into the void, working with independent freelancers and self-starters, but also acting as consultants for big companies, serving as a resource for staff and filling in a management gap with feedback, goal-setting, and advice.
Since they’ve seen it all, we asked a few creative career coaches about the most common problems their clients are facing and got some advice on how to cultivate a career when it feels like you’re going it alone.
1. Recognize that tackling career problems may mean tackling problems in your personal life (and vice versa)
For many of us, there are no clear boundaries between our personal and professional lives; pain points in one area affect empowerment in the other. That’s why coaches address both business and personal goals as one.
“People come to me when they want to grow,” says Kristine Steinberg, who started out as an arts psychotherapist before becoming a coach for companies like New Lab, TED, Adidas, and Microsoft. “We work on the future they want to design, the future self they want to live in,” she says.
Since creatives’ future selves aren’t siloed into separate business and personal inboxes, creative coaches often wear many hats: confidante, mentor, and business partner.
2. Take as much care navigating opportunity as navigating hardship.
Contrary to popular belief, coaches are not only called in at times of crisis. In fact, they’re often most useful to those embarking upon exciting opportunities. Their value is that they provide accountability, no matter what the situation.
“Creatives don’t struggle for ideas,” says Tina Essmaker, who spent a decade in social work before launching a design publication called The Great Discontent, and now coaches both independent and company clients. “They struggle to make them happen and take action.”
Whether you need help navigating a new project idea, choosing between multiple job opportunities, or stretching into a promotion, a coach can be a useful partner, providing perspective at times of paralyzing opportunity. The most powerful support they can offer is tactically breaking down the project into steps, suggesting resources, setting goals, and providing accountability in a vacuum. “It’s like having a partner who’s invested in you succeeding, but not invested in the project needing to be a certain way,” says Essmaker.
3. Remember that uncertainty is water in the creative industry. The only island is being brave.
Creatives live in an ambiguous world that is constantly iterating…
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