A client came to me last year seeking support to build a career coaching practice.

He'd spent years as a mental health counselor and was making the pivot deliberately and carefully, the way you'd expect from someone good at his work.

He was convinced he was starting from zero.

Not underqualified, exactly. He knew he had skills, but he'd categorized all of them under counseling and drawn a hard line between his expertise in that area and what he was pointing towards. Career coaching was a new area, and he felt he needed training, a credential, a body of knowledge he didn't have.

He talked about it like he was switching professions cold.

He wasn't. 

Without breaking confidentiality, he described story after story of helping clients overcome challenges that ultimately stemmed from job loss. People undone by a layoff, or by work that over time was breaking them. He'd helped them unpack their situations and think about what came next.

That's career coaching. And he'd been doing it for years in a clinical seat.

This connection genuinely hadn't occurred to him.

I see this constantly in my work. 

Every one of them arrives into this profession believing that they're new to this. What they do (what they’ve done) is stored under the old job's name, and the name is what makes it invisible.

What's strange is how it looks from the outside. 

You can watch someone do a thing expertly for years and then hear them say they've never done it (we call that a strength!). They're not being modest and they're not lying. They genuinely can't see it. 

Their work got logged under one occupational label, the new goal wears a different label, and their own mind files the two as unrelated.

There's a body of research that explains how the mind retrieves what it already knows.

In 1980 and 1983, cognitive psychologists Mary Gick and Keith Holyoak published a pair of studies in Cognitive Psychology on what they called analogical transfer: whether people can take a solution they already hold and apply it to a new problem that shares the same underlying structure. 

What they found was that when people weren't cued to connect the two, only about one in ten spontaneously made the connection.

In the research, this is named surface versus structural similarity. 

Two situations can share the same deep structure, the same actual mechanics, while looking completely different on the surface. If the new problem doesn't look like the old one, most people never notice they've solved it before.

That's the counselor exactly. 

Career work done in a therapy room has the surface features of therapy. Career work done under a coaching title has the surface features of coaching. 

Yet, both roles do similar work: helping a person find a path they can sustain. In the case of my client, his expertise failed to get retrieved across a mismatch in what the work looked like.

The great news is that Gick and Holyoak also found what fixes these mental mind maps. 

When people were given an abstract schema, a general model of the problem type, or asked to compare several examples side by side, the transfer they'd failed to make on their own started happening because the underlying structure let them see instances they'd otherwise have missed.

The proof accumulates on its own. 

My client didn't need me to tell him he was qualified. He needed a standard to validate his existing experience. 

Once he had it, he found the instances himself, dozens of them. The schema made his own past legible.

The instinct with a client who's underselling themselves is to talk them up. 

The challenge with this strategy is that you're pushing them to retrieve something they can't yet see.

Helping them retrieve and see the pattern is the work. Give them the map of what the work is, then let them walk their own history across it, and they'll find the evidence faster than you could feed it to them.

And more importantly, they'll believe it. Because they found it.

That's the difference between a client who takes your advice or one who believes in their own abilities.

Most of the people who come to me from adjacent fields don't need to acquire the expertise. They need a foundation and a language to organize the expertise they already built. 

The credential works for the same reason the research says it should: it hands them the schema, and their past reorganizes under it.

My client is deep into career work now, helping others carve out their professional paths. He was never starting from scratch. 

He just needed the words for what he already knew how to do.

A quick question for you.

When you meet a professional pivoting into career coaching from an adjacent field, what do they most need first?

Heather

The Coach for Career Coaches