Why Career Coaching Is Incomplete Without Existential Awareness? (Podcast With Britt Mari)

Career Coaching is no longer only about identifying transferable skills, refining a CV, preparing for interviews, or finding the next sensible move. Those things remain valuable, of course. But as industries shift, jobs disappear, artificial intelligence reshapes work, and career paths become less linear, deeper questions move to the foreground.

Who am I when the professional identity I relied on is no longer available? What does meaningful work mean to me now? How much choice do I really have? What am I holding on to, and what am I ready to let go of?

Existential career Coaching makes room for these questions. It adds a vital layer beneath strategy, helping people understand their lived experience of work before deciding what to do next.

Before We Dive In – A Word of Caution

Before you read on, please note that this article is an AI-generated summary of the above podcast episode. While prompted carefully, it’s possible that some views may be misrepresented and/or information incorrect. If you find any errors please report them to us by emailing report (a) existentialcoaching.net . If you find something that seems odd, untrue, or difficult to believe, my encouragement is for you to go to the source and listen to the episode to get the full context. If it turns out to be false or misrepresented, kindly let us know! Due to the volume of information and limited team resources, we can’t check all AI-generated articles for accuracy, but decided that these are good enough, and hence valuable resources.

Beyond Strategy: The Deeper Work of Career Coaching

Traditional career Coaching offers genuinely useful support. Labour-market research, job-search strategy, interview preparation, CV development, skills assessments, and practical planning can all make a difference. The existential perspective does not dismiss any of it.

The question is one of sequence and foundation.

When somebody faces a career transition, especially one they did not choose, practical interventions can arrive too quickly. A person may understand intellectually that a role has ended, that their sector is changing, or that they need to retrain. Yet they may be unable to move because something more fundamental is happening: their identity is under pressure.

It is one thing to accept that a job has been phased out. It is another to accept what this might mean for how one sees oneself, how others may see one, and where one belongs in the world.

Career Coaching becomes richer when it asks not only, “What job could suit you?” but also:

How are you experiencing your working life at this stage?
What does this change mean to you?
What has work given you beyond income?
How do you bring this role to life?
What kind of contribution feels possible, blocked, or important now?

A job description can list responsibilities, but it cannot capture the human being who inhabits the role. We often answer questions about work with generic language: multitasking, communication, leadership, stakeholder management. Ask somebody how they actually work, how they bring their role to life, and the conversation changes. It can also stump people, which is often where the interesting work begins.

Work is not simply something a person does. It is a relationship. It can provide structure, security, purpose, status, connection, frustration, boredom, agency, constraint, or a complicated combination of all of these.

Listening for What Is Really There

Existential career Coaching depends less on applying a fixed formula and more on deep, interested listening. The coach listens for the moment when a request for strategy carries something else at its edges.

Perhaps a client says, “I’m exhausted.” “I’m bored.” “I’m frightened.” Or, very commonly, “I feel stuck.” These are not merely obstacles to work around. They are experiences worthy of attention.

“What does stuck feel like for you?” is a deceptively simple question. The answer is rarely simple.

Sometimes people respond with an explanation of the market, the organisation, the economy, or the lack of options. All of that may be true and important. But the invitation can gently return to lived experience: “That is a helpful description of what is happening around you. What is happening for you?”

There is no need to force depth or turn career Coaching into therapy. It is simply about recognising that the client is not separate from the job. They are the person engaging with it, resisting it, shaping it, enduring it, and deriving meaning from it.

Useful follow-up questions might include:

Can you describe a recent moment when you noticed that feeling?
Have you always felt stuck in this role?
When did work feel different?
What was happening when you felt more open, engaged, or alive?
What has changed in your relationship with this work?

This is phenomenological inquiry in a very practical sense: staying close to what is actually being experienced rather than rushing to categorise, diagnose, or solve it.

The Career Narratives That Quietly Shape Us

Career lives are saturated with narratives about what success should look like. We should be further ahead. We should know our purpose. We should have a clear plan. We should be passionate. We should want more.

The word should is often an opening.

When somebody says, “I should be further along,” there is room to become curious about who authored that expectation, how it became internalised, and whether it still serves them. Existential Coaching does not need to attack the story. It can simply explore it.

The narrative of passion is particularly pervasive. “Find work you are passionate about and you will never work a day in your life” may sound uplifting, but it can put enormous pressure on people. It suggests that a good career must be one continuous experience of engagement, clarity, and fulfilment.

That is not how career lives work.

Passion changes. Context changes. There are tedious days, difficult teams, barriers, uncertainty, repetitive tasks, and seasons when stability matters more than inspiration. For many people, the option to pursue a passion-driven career is constrained by financial realities, caring responsibilities, access, geography, health, or the opportunities available to them.

The pressure to discover one perfect calling can lead to what Britt-Mari calls passion paralysis. A person becomes so preoccupied with finding the one thing that they do not engage, explore, experiment, or learn from real experience.

Rather than asking, “What is my passion?” a more grounded inquiry might be:

What does passion mean to me now?
When have I felt engaged or fulfilled, and what was present?
Was it the work itself, the people, the pace, the autonomy, or the contribution?
What am I expecting work to provide?

A fulfilling project, a supportive team, meaningful collaboration, or a temporary period of strong engagement may tell us something important. It need not become a permanent identity or a grand career mandate.

Stuckness, Uncertainty, and the Value of Pausing

Stuckness is often treated as a problem to eliminate quickly. Find the strategy. Make the plan. Get moving.

But stuckness can also be informative.

Work can hold us in the world. It offers routine, financial security, social contact, and a recognised place. Yet the same work can also make us feel trapped. This tension is not a mistake to be ironed out. It is part of being human.

For some people, feeling stuck may be a crisis. For others, it may be a pause that allows difficult and contradictory realities to emerge. Perhaps they are grieving a professional identity. Perhaps they want change but fear uncertainty. Perhaps they can see many options and feel overwhelmed by the responsibility of choosing.

Coaching can offer a space where there is no requirement to resolve contradiction immediately. A person does not need to set up camp in stuckness, but neither do they need to leap over it at the first opportunity.

There can be relief in hearing: perhaps this is a place to pause, contemplate, and notice what this experience is asking of you.

Choice, Freedom, and the Cost of Deciding

Existential philosophy has much to offer career Coaching because work brings choice, freedom, limitation, responsibility, identity, meaning, and uncertainty into contact with one another every day.

Jean-Paul Sartre’s ideas about freedom are particularly relevant. We often have more choice than we would like to admit, even if every available option has consequences we do not like. A person may dislike their job intensely and still choose to remain because the income, security, familiarity, or status feels more important than the uncertainty of leaving.

That choice can transform the experience. Staying is no longer only something happening to them. It becomes something they are choosing, at least for now.

Of course, freedom is not always liberating. Søren Kierkegaard described the “dizziness of freedom”, and many people know exactly what that feels like. More autonomy can mean more anxiety. An entrepreneur, a newly promoted leader, or someone with a largely self-directed role may feel uncomfortably unheld by the amount of freedom available to them.

Choice also involves loss. To choose one path means abandoning others. Career Coaching can help somebody consider not only what they want to pursue, but what they are willing to let go of and whether they can stand behind the decision.

Albert Camus’ image of Sisyphus also speaks to work that feels repetitive or absurd. Not every role will feel like a vocation. Yet there can be value in consciously committing to the task in front of us, rather than assuming that meaning only exists in exceptional or prestigious work.

The Existential Gym: Building Reflective Muscles

We live in a world full of how-to guides, systems, optimisation, and speed. The reflective muscles can atrophy if we do not use them.

Britt-Mari’s idea of the existential gym is a wonderful invitation to practise reflection without demanding immediate answers. This is not a cure-all, nor a call to spend every waking moment grappling with life. It is a recognition that pausing, describing, and holding contradictions are human capacities worth exercising.

One accessible practice is reflective career journalling. Set aside five to fifteen minutes at the end of the workday. This creates a little space between work and the rest of life.

Try writing in response to questions such as:

How did I experience this day?
What stood out most?
What am I carrying with me into other parts of my life?
What am I leaving behind easily, and what is difficult to leave behind?
Where did I feel most or least authentic?
How did I relate to colleagues today?
What attitude did I bring into the day, and did it shift?
What felt meaningful, challenging, or unexpectedly alive?

The point is not to judge oneself or fix every discomfort. It is to look with compassionate curiosity. A resentment from a meeting may be coming home with you. A wall you built around yourself may have shaped every conversation that day. An unexpectedly open exchange with a colleague may reveal something about the conditions in which you thrive.

Be descriptive. “It was challenging” is only a label. What made it challenging? Was there fear, responsibility, resistance, disappointment, pressure, or a conflict of values underneath it?

AI as a Tool, Not a Relationship

AI can support career Coaching in useful ways. It can help organise information, generate ideas, analyse job descriptions, suggest practical next steps, and provide a starting point for research. Used at the right time and in the right context, these tools may be genuinely helpful.

But they cannot replace the quality of a human relationship.

An AI system does not care. It does not have experience. It cannot be spontaneously affected by the person in front of it, notice a subtle dissonance in a story, or genuinely celebrate a phrase that emerges from someone’s own creative process.

The human coach can sit with ambiguity, hear the tremor beneath a polished explanation, and say, “That is a fascinating phrase. Tell me more.” The conversation can go somewhere neither person predicted because both are engaged in a living dialogue.

That is particularly significant as AI itself becomes what Britt-Mari calls a “third voice” in the room. It is increasingly part of how people think about work, job security, human value, and their future. Career Coaching needs room for this voice, including the fears, opportunities, resistance, and existential questions it brings.

AI may be a useful layer. It is not the foundation.

Conclusion

Career Coaching is increasingly existential because work is increasingly uncertain, fluid, and bound up with larger questions about identity, contribution, freedom, and what it means to be human.

Practical tools still matter. Strategy still matters. But when these are layered upon reflective inquiry, they become more personal, creative, and relevant. People are not generic skill sets moving through a job market. They are living, changing, meaning-making human beings, navigating work in the context of an entire life.

Perhaps the invitation is simple: make space for the conversation underneath the plan. Exercise those existential muscles. Be interested in the words people use. Stay with the tension long enough for something more truthful and useful to emerge.

Attribution

Britt-Mari Sykes

Britt-Mari Sykes, Ph.D., is a Career Counsellor and Consultant, a Career Development Practitioner (CDP), and the founder of CANVAS Career Counselling. She is a member of Career Professionals of Canada and received the 2024 Outstanding Career Professional Award of Excellence. She holds certifications as a Career Strategist (CCS), Work-Life Strategist (CWS), Employment Strategist (CES), Interview Strategist (CIS), and Résumé Strategist (CRS). Britt-Mari has supported a diverse range of clients across Canada for over 16 years, assisting those facing career changes, burnout, or feeling unfulfilled, as well as individuals exploring new work options later in life. She also works with emerging young leaders, senior leaders managing multigenerational teams, and career development practitioners seeking mentorship and guidance.

Yannick Jacob

Committed to helping leaders and coaches do their best work and live their best lives, Yannick Jacob is a Coach, Trainer & Supervisor with Masters degrees in Existential Coaching and Applied Positive Psychology.

He is part of the teaching faculties at Cambridge University and the International Centre for Coaching Supervision, and he’s the Course Director of the School of Positive Transformation’s acclaimed Accredited Certificate in Integrative Coaching, for which he gathered many of the world’s most influential coaches and earliest pioneers.

Formerly Programme Leader of the MSc Coaching Psychology at the University of East London, Yannick founded and hosts Yannick’s Coaching Lab which gives novice and seasoned coaches an opportunity to witness experienced coaches live in action.

Yannick presents at conferences internationally, his book An Introduction to Existential Coaching was released by a leading academic publisher, and his self-study online course on the subject is now available for instant access.

Across four seasons as host of Animas Centre for Coaching’s popular podcast Coaching Uncaged, Yannick engaged the thought leaders of our industry in dialogue, and he passionately hosts his own podcasts Talking about Coaching and Talking about Coaching and Psychedelics.

A Note from the “Author”:

I hope you enjoyed this article. If any of it resonates, make it swing! Start a conversation with someone about what came up for you, or let me know what you think. I’d love to hear from you!

And please keep in mind that, while I’ve personally engineered the prompt for these articles and everything that’s written will be based on the above video, this content is AI-generated, so the general guidance is to go to the source, if you have time.

It will also help us to reach more people if you support the video by sharing it, liking it, or leaving a comment on the platform where it was published.

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That’s it. Be well!

With Love,

Yannick

This article was created from the video Why career coaching is increasingly existential – Talking about Coaching w/ Dr. Britt-Mari Sykes with the help of AI.