For the scoffers

TL;DR: It’s a tool that works for me to help open people up to career coaching conversations.

For a lot of us, updating our résumé or performance review sounds about as fun as a trip to the dentist. So to enliven the conversation, I draw from the rich tapestry of archetypes known in popular culture as astrology. My goal is to help you see yourself as clearly as possible so you can understand your own strengths, grow in your career, and live your best life. 

Humans of all cultures, for millennia, have looked at the night sky with wonder. Even now, with advanced telescopes and datasets, there’s plenty of room for poets to ponder the meaning of life. When you and I look at your astrology chart together, we are two human beings looking at the sky—a specific snapshot of sky, viewed from the time and place of your birth. The culturally-specific framework of western astrology gives us one lens, and our brains superimpose additional lenses based on our lived experiences. We end up with an artistic and poetic interpretation of the sky that’s personal to you and unique to our session together.

And why invoke the ineffable when we could use a professionally-sanctioned personality assessment like Myers-Briggs, Clifton Strengths, or Insights Discovery? I personally love all those frameworks. They work by assigning us a personality type from a predetermined list of a few dozen types, based on our answers to a set of multiple choice questions. Astrology, by contrast, gives us our personality type up-front from a set of trillions, and we get to invent the questions and answers ourselves. Why trillions? Because the 12 usual answers to “what’s your sign?” are one dimension among many. Multiplying together the 12 sun signs with 12 house signs, 12 moon signs, 12^7 planet signs, and all the possible conjunctions, oppositions, trines, and more, to say nothing of asteroids, we get to very large numbers very quickly.

Given the many-layered “type” for your snapshot of sky, we get to figure out what it means for you. That’s the heart of my coaching process. It’s a creative, open-ended, cosmic game of Mad Libs. And the fun has a serious role, because the whole point is for you to end up happier and making more money.

Another reason I use astrology as a tool of choice is because of what Bertolt Brecht called the verfremdungseffekt, also known as the distancing effect. Imagine a painter looking at their work from multiple angles. They might look at the painting backwards in a mirror to check its proportions, turn it upside down, or walk away for a minute and then look back. 

In the context of career coaching, astrology provides just enough distance that we can consider our own strengths and flaws without offending our egos. Professional challenges become just unfamiliar and exotic enough that we can look at them full on, bypassing old assumptions and ego wounds that would threaten to warp the view. By defamiliarizing the everyday, we see it with new eyes.

Since we can’t change our birth time, astrology is sometimes taken as deterministic or prescriptive. That is not my approach. The planets are not controlling your mind. What I do believe is that we can draw on all 12 signs’ energies as needed. Insights Discovery is my favorite of the professional frameworks because it encourages us to learn how to act “red” even if our main colors are green and blue, like how the best basketball players learn to play right- and left-handed. Clifton Strengths is my second favorite because it encourages us to leverage our strengths, which to me is a variation of that old self-help chestnut: what you focus on expands, so focus on the good stuff.

As an example of how you might use any sign’s energy, imagine you’re applying for a job and you need a jolt of confidence to perform well in the interview. Well then, let’s talk about the Leo archetype and its warm and audacious on-stage presence. You don’t have to have a Leo birthday to channel the poise of, say, Jennifer Lawrence for the duration of a Zoom call. Going deeper, we can look at the part of your chart that contains the constellation Leo and talk about what would help you tap into its energy. For example, maybe Leo is in your sixth house, a keyword for which is service. You can envision how you’ll be of service in your new role, how approaching the interview with candor is itself a service to your future colleagues because they need to know what they’re getting, and so on.

As another example, maybe you have the opportunity to play a mediator role among teams with diverging viewpoints. In that case, let’s talk about the harmonizer of the zodiac, Libra, and reflect on what John Lennon or Gandhi would say in this situation. Which part of your chart supports your own inner Libran, and which touchstone words and phrases might help you find that part of your voice?

A final reason I’ll offer to the scoffers as to why I use astrology is simply that there's a market for it. Astrology is enjoying a moment in the zeitgeist among Millennials and Gen Z, as reported by the BBC, New Yorker, Atlantic, Marketplace, Business Insider, and more. Taking the surge in astro-interest together with the ongoing Great Resignation/Realization, I hope even the most cynical scoffer will grant me that there’s a reasonable business niche for an astrology-informed career coach.

And there, my friends, you have it. Now that your scoffery has been addressed, here’s the link to schedule a free one-on-one. And while you’re at it, thank you so much for sharing Résumé Signs with your cherished friends!

Love and rockets,

Jo