02/01/2026

Career Wellness: A Powerful Addition to the Coaching Toolkit

By Binta Brown

Despite an abundance of career development resources at individuals’ fingertips, gaps in career wellness persist. Many clients show up to coaching sessions having checked all the proverbial boxes (e.g., having leveraged upskilling platforms, career assessments, and job search tools), but nevertheless feel unfulfilled, fatigued, or unclear about what growth really looks like for them. Research underscores the urgency of addressing this disconnect to reduce turnover and increase engagement. Specifically, employees who strongly agree their employer invests in their growth are up to 59% less likely to be job searching, and high workplace engagement can reduce turnover by as much as 45% (Gallup, 2024). Addressing fulfillment, satisfaction, and engagement is just as essential in career coaching as it is in the workplace. This means the role of the career professional is not only to help clients make informed decisions but also to help them sustain their energy, well-being, and sense of purpose over time.

One underexplored reason behind client stagnation is the absence of career wellness—the intentional integration of career development with emotional and psychological well-being.

Defining Career Wellness for Clients

Career wellness goes beyond landing the next role or chasing a promotion. It emphasizes sustainability, adaptability, and values-aligned growth—guiding clients toward professional lives that support both achievement and mental health.

This perspective builds on established frameworks such as the Surgeon General’s Framework for Workplace Mental Health and Well-Being (2022) and the Wheel of Wellness model (2000), both of which highlight the connection between thriving individuals and thriving systems. Career wellness extends these foundations into practice, giving career professionals a lens to integrate growth with overall well-being in client work.

For practitioners, this means expanding the definition of “career success” beyond milestones to include:

• Energy and engagement in daily work
• Healthy boundaries between achievement and over-functioning
• Legitimacy of nonlinear or multidirectional career moves
• Integration of reflection and meaning-making into decision-making

Career wellness does not replace traditional coaching goals like clarity, confidence, and execution. It deepens all three.

Spotting the Signs: What Might Show Up in Client Work

Career practitioners are often the first to notice when wellness is missing from a client’s growth strategy. Signs that often mask deeper misalignment between a client’s identity, values, and current path, may include:

• Clients going through the motions: Showing up but unclear on what they want next
• Development fatigue: Feeling pressured to continuously level up without clarity or rest
• High-achiever burnout: Reaching goals but at the cost of well-being or fulfillment
• Misaligned promotions: Advancing only to realize the new role is not a fit
• Career cynicism: Questioning whether development efforts actually lead to meaningful change

Career wellness is gaining traction for good reason. A growing body of evidence supports its inclusion in client-centered practice:

• Thriving employee well-being correlates with 18% higher productivity and 23% greater profitability, while access to mental health resources significantly boosts engagement (Gallup, 2023–2024).
• Roles at organizations with visible sustainability commitments attract up to twice as many applicants, and candidates with green skills are 54% more likely to be hired (LinkedIn Global Talent Trends, 2024–2025).

These findings underscore a broader truth: well-being is not a side conversation but a driver of performance, satisfaction, and long-term retention. For clients, integrating career wellness into coaching creates more than short-term solutions. It fosters lasting growth that is values-aligned, sustainable, and supportive of both career momentum and personal well-being.

A Wellness-Infused Career Development Approach

As career professionals, we can embed career wellness into our sessions and services in practical, relationship-centered ways through questioning, reframing, and encouragement. Rather than adding new tools, this approach invites subtle but intentional shifts in how we structure conversations, define progress, and support decision-making.

1. Use Reflective Prompts to Deepen Insight
Career wellness conversations often begin with different questions. During intake, coaching check-ins, or career transition discussions, reflective prompts can help clients move beyond what comes next and name patterns that might otherwise remain unexamined:

• What aspects of your work feel most energizing right now? Most depleting?
• How sustainable is your current pace?
• Where are you feeling misaligned with your work, values, or priorities?

2. Support Nonlinear Career Narratives
Many clients implicitly equate growth with upward mobility. A career wellness lens broadens this narrative by acknowledging that meaningful progress can also involve recalibration, lateral movement, or intentional pauses. Normalizing these paths allows clients to consider options that protect both ambition and well-being, such as:

• Job crafting to re-energize a current role
• Expanding responsibilities without formal promotion
• Leaving the workforce temporarily for caregiving, study, or rest

When reframed as purposeful rather than regressive, these choices reinforce wellness as a legitimate and strategic dimension of career growth.

3. Build “Wellness Breaks” into Action Plans
Career wellness is also reflected in how progress is paced over time. Not every action plan requires continuous forward motion. Building intentional pauses into career development allows clients to process, recover, and sustain momentum over time. Wellness-infused planning might include encouraging clients to:

• Schedule decompression time between major career shifts
• Take a brief processing period after interviews or intense work phases
• Design micro-recovery rituals such as reflection journaling or creative play

A Call to Practice

Career wellness is not a symbolic or short-term intervention offered in response to burnout. It is a durable framework for building a life that is both ambitious and humane. The career professional’s role is to create conditions for reflection, thoughtful pacing, and intentional choice so that progress reflects a client’s definition of success rather than external milestones alone. As AI-powered tools increasingly reshape how clients explore career options, assess strengths, and plan next steps, career wellness provides a grounded, human-centered lens to guide these emerging practices. Importantly, this work does not require a complete overhaul of existing approaches. Often, one well-timed reflective question, a shift in pacing, or a reframe of what success looks like is enough to help clients engage their careers with greater agency and ownership.

Dr. Binta Brown, EdD, LPC, CCC, is the founder of Career Prompt, LLC, a career development solutions firm based in Austin, Texas. She is a licensed therapist, certified career coach, and learning and development practitioner with nearly 20 years of experience supporting individuals and organizations through career transitions and growth. She is the author of The Layoff Playbook: What to Do Right Now and Dear Career, We Need to Talk, which blend therapeutic insight with practical career strategy. Her work sits at the intersection of career well-being and workforce development, with a focus on employee-driven growth, leadership capability, and the evolving role of AI in career development.