|
Getting your Trinity Audio player ready...
|
I recently met a client at an outside location with a view to spending a couple of hours walking by the river and talking about careers. It was the third occasion I’ve taken this approach with private clients and it has proved to be very effective and congenial. The locations have been different each time, the first of them having been an early evening walk along the shoreline.
It wouldn’t be everyone’s cup of tea, but it’s an option that I personally find enjoyable and I know that my clients have too. For my own reasons, I also now choose places to meet that I can reach on foot and/or by train, so the car is left in our driveway and my carbon footprint is zero.
On each occasion, the meeting point has been a location where there are other people around, rather than somewhere remote, and the route taken has been one where we pass other walkers – or, in the case of my latest walk, runners and swimmers too – which adds to the general ambiance and feeling of safety and well-being. For this particular walk, I set off on foot to our local station (about a mile away), caught a train to the village where we’d agreed to meet at around 10.30 a.m., and then we walked along the river and back for about an hour and a half. What made it even better was that we finished up in the beer garden of the village pub for a leisurely drink and a bag of crisps before going our separate ways just before 1 p.m.
The purpose of each of my walks so far has been to discuss my clients’ career ideas and dilemmas, which makes it easy to get the discussion started. The surroundings have also added a natural flow to the conversation, which means that the dialogue never dries up, or even if it does for a while, it doesn’t matter because moments of silence and reflection can be golden.
My clients have enjoyed the meetings immensely. On the latest walk, we not only covered numerous career-related themes, but the topics also extended to football and other common interests at the pub afterward, which added even more to the rapport we’d built up during the walk.
Reflecting back on this particular walk has also got me thinking about how it differs from a face-to-face meeting or video call. When you start to analyze it, you don’t actually walk face to face but side by side, which isn’t the same because you’re not making eye contact most of the time. What’s more, on the riverside walk much of the pathway was quite narrow, which required us to walk in single file in many places. But that didn’t seem to matter either and it didn’t disrupt the conversation in any way, as it was all so natural. You can walk with your head down, or you can be looking around at the surrounding landscape (or seascape), but once the conversation has started to flow nothing seems to disturb it. We would also exchange friendly greetings with some of the other walkers or the occasional runner who passed us by, but that just added to the joy of being out in the open air.
As for paperwork, I carry a small notebook with me in case it comes in handy and I subsequently correspond by email if I want to send suggestions or a list of ideas.
From a personal point of view, I got back home from the latest walk feeling a double sense of satisfaction. We’d had a very positive meeting that my client had found beneficial, while I’d also walked over 20,000 steps (around eight miles) and discovered a delightful slice of countryside and river that I hadn’t visited before. When we were chatting in the pub, my client also remarked on how the prospect of a careers walk had felt less intimidating than facing a one-to-one video call or a meeting in a more confined space. It had been something to look forward to, rather than feel anxious about.
The only downside was that the river had been in flood and the path was muddy and almost ankle-deep in water in a couple of places. So it took me the best part of an hour to clean up my trainers in the afternoon and you certainly don’t have to do that after a Zoom call. But otherwise, a careers walk adds a dimension to an advice and guidance session that can’t be experienced in the confines of an office or sitting behind your laptop, and it can certainly be an inspiring and memorable experience for client and adviser alike.
In the photos of my latest walk, I’ve tried to capture some of the ambiance of a careers walk on a spring day, with the lush greenness providing a reminder of the wet winter we’ve endured but making it all the more pleasurable, and also featuring the cold-water swimmers we encountered along the way and the delightful beer garden at the pub.
Whether the careers walk concept develops further remains to be seen, especially as I’ve personally reached a time in my career when I’m scaling things down rather than up after nearly 47 years as a guidance practitioner. But I do hope this latest walk won’t be my last.
This article was originally published on alanbullockcareers.com and has been reprinted with permission from the author.
