Nadir Mirza is a skills coach at Bromford and he spends his days helping customers get into work. Here he talks about the importance of getting to know yourself in the quest for finding a career that suits you.

It’s human nature to want achieve something in life. In my role as skills coach I work with people who are trying their best to find work. The problem that I’ve found is that despite their desire, a lot people just don’t know where to start when it comes to finding a job.

We all face challenges, disappointments, frustrations and failures on the way to achieving our goals and I have learnt the main obstruction that people face in life is not a lack of experience or qualifications – it’s a lack of self-belief.

My role is all about giving people the information they need to make decisions around the kind of job and career they want. The way that I work with customers has been inspired by the ideas that Timothy Gallwey writes about in his book, ‘The inner game of tennis.’ Timothy Gallwey was one of the first people to suggest that the biggest obstacles to progress are internal – self-doubt, fear of failure and so on. He went on to claim that if a coach can help a player remove or reduce the internal obstacles to their performance, an unexpected natural ability will flow without much need for technical input from the coach.

Thinking about this, I started to talk to customers about discovering their ‘core selves.’ In other words, getting to what drives them, what their priorities are, what skills they possess, what interests they have and what they hope to get out of our coaching sessions. These conversations not only help me to guide people down the right path, they also help my customers to get to know themselves a little more. That might sound strange but sometimes it’s only when we talk that we realise what it is we really want in life.

This whole process encourages and enables my customers to take ownership of their personal development – and very often for the first time in their lives, they have a realistic goal to aim for.

Once their priorities and goals have been identified we can then get down to the work of finding the career path that best suits their skills and interests. At this point it’s my job to arm my customers with the tools and tactics to help them get in front of the right opportunities.

The rest is up to them. As a skills coach I can offer all the help and advice in the world, but ultimately the customers need to want to find that job. Hopefully, through our sessions I help people to build the self-belief needed to push on and have the future that they deserve.

The top three ideas that I keep central when building a relationship with my customers are:

1. Help them to learn more about themselves.

2. Give them some ‘tough love.’

3. Agree meaningful, realistic actions that help them achieve their goals.