Unemployment - not just a technical challenge. How job-coaching can benefit from a body-oriented approach
Since 2022 I’ve been working as a coach within the German government-funded jobcoaching industry - specifically with people who are currently unemployed and jobseeking.
Traditional job coaching aims to equip a client with the skills and techniques to meet the job market's challenges:
Crafting a CV which will impress hiring managers and recruiters
Using AI to write a professional, yet individual cover letter
Develop an effective job search strategy
Using social media, such as LinkedIn, for networking purposes
Effective interviewing, using STAR techniques.
Identifying strengths and transferable skills
These are real skills, and mastering them can genuinely be a great help in navigating the jobhunt. Nonetheless, again and again, clients arrive in my practice having already been through this kind of coaching elsewhere - sometimes more than once - and it hasn't touched what's actually blocking them.
Here are some real life examples of what clients have told me:
“I’ve done loads of strengths and orientation exercises, such as Ikigai, but I don’t feel like I’m any closer to knowing what I want to do.”
“I’ve practised interview techniques, but they haven’t stopped me being anxious and overwhelmed in the actual interview”
“I’ve got a job search plan, but whenever I sit down at my desk, I start procrastinating.”
Each of these clients had already met the technical challenge. They had the CV, the strategy, the technique - and still, something wasn’t moving.
My first client had done the exercises but still couldn't locate what she wanted, because she couldn’t take her “secret” career dream seriously. My second client had rehearsed his answers, but still felt overwhelmed in the interview room - a result of his feeling like an imposter. My third client had a plan but couldn't sit down and follow it, because the desk had become, without his realising it, the site of an old fear of failure he was avoiding rather than confronting. In each case, more technique would not have helped. What was needed was a different kind of work altogether.
Ron Heifetz’s distinction between technical and adaptive challenges is useful here: a technical challenge can be met by learning and applying a skill; an adaptive challenge can only be met by a shift in mindset, a change in how a person makes sense of themselves and their situation. Heifetz observed that our most persistent failures often come from misdiagnosing an adaptive challenge as a technical one — and then wondering why the technical fix won't hold.
When I clarify this perspective to clients, I like to use a Sufi parable I heard from Ram Dass:
“A man is searching for his lost key under a streetlamp. A passerby asks if he's sure he dropped it there. "No," he says, "I dropped it over there, in the dark — but the light's better here."
Technical coaching - and the mentoring aspects it involves - is the streetlamp: well-lit, teachable, reassuring to work in. The key - what's actually keeping my clients stuck - is often lying somewhere less visible: in the body, in an old belief or script, or in an unspoken fear.
It’s often a great relief to my clients when they realise that feeling stuck, lost, confused, even hopeless, in their job search is neither a sign of personal failure, nor an indication that they’re a lost cause.
So here are 3 concrete ways a body-oriented approach can support my job coaching clients:
By offering my clients tools to support them in their nervous system regulation, my clients are more likely to face the uncertainty and pressure of unemployment from a place of patience, attentiveness, curiosity and kindness.
By tracking what’s feeling particularly alive in our shared space, my clients find it easier to tune into their unacknowledged dreams, desires and hopes for the future.
By working with the felt sense, we’re able to begin attending to parts of us that are feeling scared, anxious and left behind.
None of this replaces the CV, the strategy, the interview technique. But it reaches the part of the client that technique alone was never going to touch - the human behind the applicant!