The Mindset Breakers: The Value of Strategic Career Coaching in Legal Practice

Career coaching is a valuable process that supports and assists individuals on their professional journey. It can mean different things to different people, but ultimately, it involves clarifying personal and professional goals, identifying strengths and areas for development, and creating effective strategies for success.

In this episode, we dive into the fundamentals of engaging a career coach, highlighting the benefits it brings to young lawyers and the transformative power of coaching in legal practice.

• A career coach often begins the coaching process by assessing the client’s current state.
• This is not a physical assessment – in terms of their job position or firm – but also their emotional wellbeing, skill sets, belief system, and values.
• A coach will then ask questions to help the client define where they want to be or what they want to achieve through coaching.
• A coach also tries to uncover what the client sees as the obstacles that are preventing them from reaching their goals.
• This might involve identifying biases, limiting beliefs, anxiety about change or fear of failure.
• A coach can then propose strategies for overcoming these obstacles or adjusting the client’s mindset to see these obstacles in a new light.
• For example, by reframing a failure as an opportunity for growth.
• A coach can also help the client identify and leverage their strengths, skills and resources, in order to reach their goals.
• Lara sees the role of a coach is to help them uncover and realize a client’s own potential, their own capabilities, their own resources.
• They might offer advice on professional development opportunities, such as courses or networking events, but their main role is to help the client develop a plan and stay accountable for their progress.
• A coach remains open to the client’s needs throughout the process and adapts their approach as required.
• This could include shifting the focus of the sessions, introducing new techniques or revising the client’s goals.
• Throughout the coaching experience, a coach might weave in principles and techniques that a client can take away and use in their everyday lives.
• Whether it’s how to handle a difficult conversation, or how to manage their time more effectively, or even how to stop the inner critic from taking over seemingly every aspect of their life.
• Lara sees coaches as helping clients to develop the critical habits of self-exploration, continuous learning and self-improvement, not just in their professional life, but their personal life as well.
• It’s important to keep in mind that coaching is about enhancing people and helping them to move forward, not necessarily fixing people.
• High-performing individuals, such as athletes, often have coaches to help them continue to improve, not because they are broken or need to be fixed.

• For early career lawyers, it can be beneficial to seek coaching earlier rather than later to establish good habits and resourceful patterns early on.
• This can help avoid the need to unlearn negative habits or unproductive patterns later in one’s career.