A positive approach to career coaching

Abstract

Seligman and Csikszentmihalyi took the psychology research community by storm in 2000 with their paper on positive psychology, introducing it as an academically rigorous antidote to the pathology driven paradigm that had dominated the discipline for nearly a century. The growing body of evidence around both theory and practice is making the links between positive psychology, career development and career coaching, increasingly clear. This paper will describe the contribution that positive psychology research makes to our understanding of the career context, and will explore how positive psychology can inform and enhance both the process and content of career coaching interventions.