Years of practice taught me what no textbook could
Early in my coaching practice, a client came to me with what sounded like a straightforward request: help me find a better job. He was 63 years old, recently retired from a distinguished career in risk management, and deeply miserable. On paper, he had everything — credentials, experience, a new position he had landed within days of leaving his previous role on the strength of his reputation alone.
What he didn’t have was a reason to get out of bed.
That engagement taught me something I have since seen confirmed dozens of times: you cannot separate what someone does from who they are. Career coaching that ignores the person carrying the career isn’t coaching at all. It’s resume editing.
The Moment the Real Work Begins
I have a self-discovery questionnaire that I give clients before we touch their resumes or LinkedIn profiles. It asks about values, peak professional moments, what problems they find themselves solving without being asked, and where they want to be in three years — professionally and personally. I developed it so my clients can get a better understanding of themselves. It also adds to my understanding of who they are.
The client who says she needs interview preparation is often really saying: “I’ve been passed over so many times that I no longer trust myself in the room.”
The client who says he needs a resume rewrite is sometimes saying: “I’ve spent twenty years building someone else’s vision and I don’t know what mine looks like anymore.”
The client, who says she needs help targeting the right companies, occasionally says, “I need to leave my marriage, and a new job is the only path I can see to independence.”
In each of these cases, the career problem is real. But underlying it are personal issues that need to be addressed alongside career discussions. A coach who only addresses career issues cannot help clients in their careers or personal lives.
What the Textbooks Say
Abraham Maslow argued that human needs operate in a hierarchy. Safety, belonging, and self-esteem must be reasonably intact before a person can effectively pursue growth and actualization. Career coaching, at its best, is a conversation about growth and actualization. But clients don’t arrive there ready. They arrive carrying financial anxiety, fractured confidence, complicated relationships, and sometimes grief they haven’t fully named.
Maslow gives us the framework. Experience gives us the instinct for when someone is trying to climb the ladder before the foundation is secure.
I have worked with a service-connected veteran navigating PTSD alongside a career transition, a new father whose financial panic was driving him toward the wrong opportunities, a professional returning to work after years away who needed to remember who she was before she could articulate what she wanted to do, and an executive whose identity had become so fused with his title that retirement felt like erasure.
None of these were purely career problems. They were issues of identity.
My background spans counseling, social psychology, couples and relationship work, and career coaching. I facilitate intimate discussions in my personal life because I believe that examined questions — who I am, what matters, what constitutes a life well lived — are not separate from professional development. They are its foundation.
When a client can answer those questions honestly and clearly, career work accelerates dramatically.
Suddenly, the resume isn’t a list of jobs. It’s a narrative.
The interview isn’t a performance. It’s a conversation between two people trying to determine fit.
The job search isn’t a numbers game. It’s a targeted pursuit of something genuinely right.
That shift — from mechanical to intentional — only happens when life coaching and career coaching work together. One without the other produces either a polished candidate who doesn’t know what they want or a person with deep self-knowledge who can’t communicate it to a hiring manager. Neither outcome serves the client.
I don’t announce to clients that I’m doing life coaching. I simply create the space for the whole conversation to happen. Sometimes that means asking a question about a relationship that seems unrelated to the job search. Sometimes it means slowing down a client who is moving fast out of anxiety rather than clarity. Sometimes it means naming something I’ve observed — gently, carefully — that the client hasn’t yet said out loud.
Not every client needs this depth. Some genuinely do just need interview prep, or a LinkedIn overhaul, or a positioning strategy. I provide all of those things, and I’m good at them. But the clients who experience the most significant and lasting change are almost always those who were willing to look at the bigger picture.
The career is not separate from life. It is part of it. Coaching that treats them as separate disciplines does the client a disservice — regardless of how clean the resume looks.
A Final Thought
The 63-year-old executive I mentioned at the beginning eventually found his footing — not by returning to a corporate role, but by getting honest about what he had actually valued all along and building toward that instead. The career conversation we needed to have was never really about career at all.
That’s the work. And it’s the reason I believe the best career coaches are, by necessity, also life coaches — whether they name it that way or not.
Rob Kaminoff is a certified life and career coach with a background in counseling and social psychology. He works with professionals at every stage of life and career. Learn more at robkaminoff.com.