I’m a career, life, and executive coach, and I was recently laid off. It was a shock to say the least, but it wasn’t near as soul crushing as I would have expected. Let me tell you how I’ve decided to approach my circumstance. Maybe there’s something here that’ll help you too.

Before we start though, let’s talk about bruised egos, like mine. Have you ever read Moneyball or watched the movie? I’m not a baseball fan, but I love the story surrounding how some skills on the field were wrongly undervalued and other skills were wrongly valued.

If gross miscalculations of a person’s value could occur on a baseball field, before a live audience of thirty thousand, and a television audience of millions more, what did that say about the measurement of performance in other lines of work? If professional baseball players could be over-or undervalued, who couldn’t? Bad as they may have been, the statistics used to evaluate baseball players were probably far more accurate than anything used to measure the value of people who didn’t play baseball for a living.

Michael Lewis

You have value, even if those in authority didn’t see it. Never forget that.

When I first meet with clients, we talk about the difference between mentoring and coaching. These two spaces share a lot in common so they’re easily conflated, and I’ve shared previously my pithy way of approaching the topic:

Mentors answer questions. Coaches question answers.

Even after we had talked it through, clients would struggle. I would see them give a deer in headlights look to some of the “weird” questions I would ask. Or clients would ask me questions in the hopes that I would supply the answer. It was clear a pithy description wasn’t enough. After all, what does it even mean? And I suppose we could turn those questions back around on our client, but I felt like there had to be a better way.

There is. And it starts with four lines and four words, one on top of the other.