Where this method came from

01  ·  The diagnostic

First, we find out what’s actually stopping you.

Most careers advice starts in the same place for everyone, because nobody’s found out what’s actually in the way first. And being stuck isn’t one thing.

Researchers have separated it into ten specific problems, in three groups.

There’s a second question underneath that one: not how stuck someone is, but how they got to where they are. Have they explored, and have they committed.

Someone who committed to a path without ever exploring it reports almost no difficulty deciding — because as far as they’re concerned, they’ve decided.

Someone in that position will tell you they’re fine, and they’ll sound more certain than a friend who’s still weighing things up. That’s exactly why nobody worries about them.

Two people can both say “I don’t know what I want” and need completely different things. That’s why we start here — what we find changes what we do next.

Our own questions, written against the ten difficulty categories and six identity subscales these two papers define — not the published inventories.Gati, Krausz & Osipow (1996). A taxonomy of difficulties in career decision making. Journal of Counseling Psychology, 43(4), 510–526. doi.org/10.1037/0022-0167.43.4.510 · Porfeli, Lee, Vondracek & Weigold (2011). A multi-dimensional measure of vocational identity status. Journal of Adolescence, 34(5), 853–871. doi.org/10.1016/j.adolescence.2011.02.001

03  ·  Work values

Then, your values — what you want out of life, and what a job has to give you.

Values are what someone wants out of life and out of work. Not what they’re good at, and not what they’re drawn to. Everybody’s list is different.

Life values. What someone is actually aiming at, underneath whatever they happen to be doing. Two people can end up in the same job for completely opposite reasons, and this is the part that says which.

The ten sit in a circle, and the ones opposite each other pull against each other. Almost nobody comes out high on everything, because wanting one thing badly costs you its opposite.

Work values. The things you’d most want your work to give you. How much independence it gives you. How secure it is. Whether you get recognized for what you do, whether you’re around people all day, whether it uses what you’re actually good at.

Everyone’s set is different, and almost nobody has been asked about theirs. It’s also the strongest thing anyone has found for predicting whether someone ends up satisfied at work.

Someone can be doing work they’re genuinely interested in and still be miserable in it, because the job doesn’t give them something they needed. That’s what this catches.

Life values: the Schwartz PVQ-21, 21 items. Work values: the O*NET Work Importance Locator, version 3.0 — twenty statements from the U.S. Department of Labor, used word for word. Both charts are the client’s own, drawn here with example answers.Life values. Schwartz (1992). Universals in the content and structure of values: theoretical advances and empirical tests in 20 countries. Advances in Experimental Social Psychology, 25, 1–65. doi.org/10.1016/S0065-2601(08)60281-6 · Schwartz, Melech, Lehmann, Burgess, Harris & Owens (2001). Extending the cross-cultural validity of the theory of basic human values with a different method of measurement — the questionnaire used here. Journal of Cross-Cultural Psychology, 32(5), 519–542. doi.org/10.1177/0022022101032005001 · Schwartz (2012). An overview of the Schwartz theory of basic values. Online Readings in Psychology and Culture, 2(1). doi.org/10.9707/2307-0919.1116Work values. Dawis & Lofquist (1984). A Psychological Theory of Work Adjustment — the six the O*NET instrument measures · Kristof-Brown, Zimmerman & Johnson (2005). Consequences of individuals’ fit at work: a meta-analysis. Personnel Psychology, 58(2), 281–342. doi.org/10.1111/j.1744-6570.2005.00672.x

05  ·  Exploring careers

Now, we explore different careers

The second piece of the puzzle. First, we figure out who you are then we find out about careers that might suit you.

We explore them together in layers.

Most people have no idea how to properly research a career path, let alone know what questions and topics are most important to them. And so, left to their own devices, they end up finding information that mostly agrees with whatever they already thought.

So we do the research for them, and we do it in an order.

Each layer costs more time, energy and — for layer three — money than the one before it.

We run the cheap tests first, knocking careers out of the way that don’t deserve further exploration.

The research documents we curate in the first layer are handmade and personalized for every single client. We take personal offense at the way industry representatives hand out the exact same brochure to every single student inquiring about their field. Think of these research documents as the anti-brochure. We personalize it to your country, your psychometric traits, your goals, and everything else we’ve learned about you along the way.

Almost anyone could be convinced of anything if all they’ve seen is a highlights reel.

That’s why we, like scientists, aim to disprove a career-hypothesis rather than talk you into it.

The great sides of every career path make them feel compelling. The bad sides, the boring sides, the average Tuesday — that’s what determines whether it’s the right industry for you.

Earnest, Allen & Landis (2011). Mechanisms linking realistic job previews with turnover: a meta-analytic path analysis. Personnel Psychology, 64(4), 865–897. doi.org/10.1111/j.1744-6570.2011.01230.x

07  ·  Committing to it

Now we commit, build a long-term vision for our lives, and a plan on how to get there.

The first part is a guided reflection exercise, and it takes time. We guide you through building out a multi-year vision for your life — where you could end up, what that would actually be like once you’re there, and the alternatives you’re saying no to by choosing this one.

You write it on your own, and it ends on the obstacles rather than on the good part — deliberately. Your coach reads it before the two of you speak.

Picturing the outcome you want and the obstacle in the way of it, both at once, is what turns a wish into something you act on. Doing either on its own doesn’t.

The plan is the other half: the immediate steps you’ll take toward the things the vision is made of. Where the vision is written in one sitting, the plan is a document you come back to and build out as you go.

You start at the end goal and work backwards. The last thing that has to happen before it, then the thing before that, down to what you’re doing this month.

Obstacles get named against the step they would actually hit, with what you’d do about each one. And where you don’t know something yet, it goes down as a dated thing to go and find out rather than a gap.

A plan on its own is what schools have been handing out for twenty years, and nobody has been able to show it does anything. What the evidence is in is the checking in. Progress you report to somebody makes about two and a half times the difference that progress you keep to yourself does. So it gets reported back, to the coach.

The vision. Oettingen (2012). Future thought and behaviour change. European Review of Social Psychology, 23(1), 1–63. doi.org/10.1080/10463283.2011.643698The plan, and the checking in. Harkin, Webb, Chang, Prestwich, Conner, Kellar, Benn & Sheeran (2016). Does monitoring goal progress promote goal attainment? A meta-analysis of the experimental evidence. Psychological Bulletin, 142(2), 198–229. doi.org/10.1037/bul0000025

09  ·  Why a person

“Why does this need a person at all?”

The parts of career guidance that work best can’t be done from a worksheet.

Two major reviews of what makes career guidance work, published in 2017 and 2025, both found that individual feedback matters. The 2025 review narrowed it down: what made the difference was feedback on the option someone was actually weighing, from a person who knows both them and the field.

That same review, the first to look at one-to-one counseling on its own, found two more things that earlier reviews of classes and group sessions never had: challenging the beliefs that keep people stuck, and planning around what’s in their way. The researchers’ explanation: they’re easier to work through with one person.

The same technique, delivered two ways, across 21 studies and nearly 16,000 people.

Then someone has to keep an eye on progress. Across 138 studies, reporting progress to someone else made about two and a half times the difference that keeping it private did.

The obvious someone is a parent. But young people whose parents get too involved in their career decisions tend to end up less confident and more stuck, and the ones whose parents step back entirely have more trouble deciding too. What helps is a parent who supports without taking over. So the coach keeps track of progress, and the parent gets to stay on the support side of that line.

Individual feedback. Whiston, Li, Goodrich Mitts & Wright (2017). Effectiveness of career choice interventions: a meta-analytic replication and extension. Journal of Vocational Behavior, 100, 175–184. doi.org/10.1016/j.jvb.2017.03.010One-to-one counseling. Milot-Lapointe & Arifoulline (2025). A meta-analysis of the effectiveness of individual career counseling on career and mental health outcomes. Journal of Employment Counseling, 62(1), 49–57. doi.org/10.1002/joec.12239With a person vs. from written material. Wang, Wang & Gai (2021). A meta-analysis of the effects of mental contrasting with implementation intentions on goal attainment. Frontiers in Psychology, 12, 565202. doi.org/10.3389/fpsyg.2021.565202Progress someone else can see. Harkin, Webb, Chang, Prestwich, Conner, Kellar, Benn & Sheeran (2016). Does monitoring goal progress promote goal attainment? A meta-analysis of the experimental evidence. Psychological Bulletin, 142(2), 198–229. doi.org/10.1037/bul0000025Parents. Dietrich & Kracke (2009). Career-specific parental behaviors in adolescents’ development. Journal of Vocational Behavior, 75(2), 109–119. doi.org/10.1016/j.jvb.2009.03.005 · LeBlanc & Lyons (2022). Helicopter parenting during emerging adulthood: consequences for career identity and adaptability. Frontiers in Psychology, 13, 886979. doi.org/10.3389/fpsyg.2022.886979

11  ·  Where the method came from

“Where did your method come from — did you just make it up?”

Five things predict whether career guidance works. How many you use matters more than which ones.

Written exercises, individual interpretation and feedback, information about the world of work, seeing the work modeled, and building support around the decision.

With none of the five, career guidance beats doing nothing 56 times out of 100, which is a coin toss. With three of them, 76 times out of 100 — twenty more people in every hundred, from the same field, changed by nothing except how much of it gets done.

That’s why we run it as four separate phases with a coach in every one of them (09 above), rather than picking a single thing and selling it.

The four rungs are the effect sizes reported for career guidance using none, one, two and three of the five components.Brown & Ryan Krane (2000). Four (or five) sessions and a cloud of dust: old assumptions and new observations about career counseling. In Handbook of Counseling Psychology (3rd ed.) · Brown et al. (2003). Critical ingredients of career choice interventions: more analyses and new hypotheses. Journal of Vocational Behavior, 62(3), 411–428. doi.org/10.1016/S0001-8791(02)00052-0

13  ·  Showing the hard parts

Showing people the hard parts of a job makes them more likely to stay.

That has been known for forty years. The interesting part is why, and for most of those forty years everyone assumed the answer was obvious: they knew what they were getting into.

The most rigorous test of it modeled four possible explanations. Accurate expectations turned out to have essentially no effect. The one that survived was whether people felt they had been told the truth.

Commitment comes from being told the truth, including the parts that do not sell the job.

Earnest, Allen & Landis (2011). Mechanisms linking realistic job previews with turnover: a meta-analytic path analysis. Personnel Psychology, 64(4), 865–897. doi.org/10.1111/j.1744-6570.2011.01230.x

15  ·  If they still get it wrong

Every direction gets stress-tested before anyone commits to it.

This finding decides the order we do everything in. Ask someone who has not yet decided to weigh a direction up properly and their commitment to it drops — they are genuinely examining it. Ask someone who has already decided to do exactly the same thing and their commitment goes up, because what they produce is a case for the decision rather than a test of it.

Deliberating and committing are different mental states, and they interfere with each other. One is open and realistic, the other focused and optimistic. Both are useful, and the order they come in matters.

So by the time someone commits, the objections have already been raised and answered. That is also why the commitment holds.

Nenkov & Gollwitzer (2012). Pre- versus postdecisional deliberation and goal commitment: the positive effects of defensiveness. Journal of Experimental Social Psychology, 48(1), 106–121. doi.org/10.1016/j.jesp.2011.08.002