Career Coaching for Gay Men

Living in a capitalist society, we have a covenant that nearly all of us will work doing something for a living that contributes to the local, national, and global marketplace.

The jobs and careers that people have are overwhelming in their breadth, and, yet, for all of us (if we’re not already independently wealthy, or sometimes when we are), we have to work doing something.

The challenge is to “make a living” while “making a difference.” Doing something, day after day, that we find rewarding. We use the skills we want to use (and are reasonably good at), in a setting we want to use those skills in, and for the benefit of some kind of audience that we deem worthy of our efforts (such as customers, or other people we serve doing our work).

Most people do this by sort of falling into their careers, and that may or may not really work for them. People enjoy or find fulfillment in their job/career to varying degrees in their lifespan.

Career Coaching services is about supporting you in that professional journey. We strive, together, to collaborate a strategy that helps you earn what you want to earn financially, to afford the standard of living you want (or can achieve), while also helping you do things that, in your own personal value system, you find interesting, challenging, rewarding, and worthwhile.

While careers vary quite a bit, Career Coaching has certain common elements that cut across many different types of people, and many different types of jobs. For gay men, we often don’t have children, so our work can take on some extra meaning. Since we often have been subjected to homophobia growing up, we sometimes want to “prove ourselves” in our adult professional lives to show them all just what we’re made of – and that far too many people probably underestimated us in their prejudice.

Career Coaching is a service that helps you acknowledge the reality that, economically, you have to have some kind of gainful employment. It’s part of the covenant, or pact, that we have with society.

But Career Coaching pairs you with someone who is your companion, support, challenge, cheerleader, and occasionally task master – all in service to the goals you want to achieve in your quest to become the Ideal Professional Self that you envision to be right for you.

I bring my long-term experience as a professional working almost exclusively with gay men to your individual situation, and how your job/career can improve over time. After working with hundreds of gay men over my long (31 years in 2023) career, I’ve observed the jobs they do, and learned how they navigated professional challenges at every stage of a career, from a guy who is just starting out, to being entrepreneurs and building a business, to meeting challenges about bosses, peer colleagues, and staff, and working to achieve a work/life balance during your working years, and a meaningful retirement later in life.

Career Coaching helps give you the support you need to identify what you are good at, what you most want to do, what you are best doing (not always the same thing), and what there is currently a commercial market for.

Career Coaching helps you to challenge stagnation, inertia, or “playing it small” that can happen to gay men with low self-esteem as result of abuse, neglect, discrimination, disability, or some kind of hardship. We work together to identify and overcome these challenges, so that you can surmount these obstacles and be on your way, both competitively and rewardingly, in so many different fields.

Guys work with me as their Career Coach sometimes very intensely (with weekly sessions in support of the goals that you identify, or that we clarify for you), occasionally (every other week), or even in periodic support (monthly strategy sessions), or even annual consultations for the new year. How often we meet, and the focus of our sessions, is up to you.

We achieve more together than we do alone. Career Coaching provides you that “advocate in your corner” with privacy and confidentiality to work through your challenges and pursue your dreams for being the professional you want to be.