Coaching Explained
“Unfortunately, we don’t get an instruction manual at birth for how to make sense of our lives,” writes Andreas Salcher. A reflection on his essay — and on what a career-choice coaching practice in Vienna sees of that gap, almost every day.
“We can learn this skill, though,” Salcher continues. “Once we recognize how often it was the detours, the setbacks, the paths we feared most, that led to our greatest successes. Striving for success is nothing bad, as long as it’s our own idea of success.” His essay describes, with real precision, the gap between a flawless résumé and a fulfilling life — and the difficulty of telling whether you’re doing something because you truly want it, or because society has decided it’s admirable. As someone offering career-choice coaching in Vienna, I run into this theme almost daily.
The Perfect Résumé and the Real Life
I work in Vienna with people who have done everything right on paper — good education, fitting positions, no obvious gaps. And still they sit across from me and say: “Somehow none of this feels like me.” That’s not a rare phenomenon. It’s one of the most common experiences people bring into business coaching in Vienna.
What Salcher describes so well is something I see constantly in career-choice coaching: the résumé tells a story. Just not necessarily one’s own. Often it’s the story that parents, teachers, or a diffuse cultural image of success wrote instead. And the longer that story continues, the harder it becomes to find the thread back to one’s own voice.
What Detours Actually Mean
In our culture, detours have a bad reputation. Dropping out of a degree, switching to a completely different industry, a period of not knowing what comes next — in a classic job interview, all of this reads as something you have to explain or justify. And yet these are often exactly the moments in which people learn the most about themselves.
I’ve experienced this myself: the situations where I didn’t know what to do next were, in hindsight, the most revealing. Not because failure is valuable in itself, but because it forces you to stop and genuinely ask: what do I actually want? And why? These are questions people rarely ask themselves while everything is running smoothly.
Setbacks and course changes are not flaws on a résumé. They’re signals. And sometimes they’re the clearest signal you get.
Socially Desirable, or Personally True?
This distinction sounds simple and is enormously hard to make in everyday life. We’re social creatures. Recognition, belonging, the sense of doing something meaningful — for most people, that’s closely tied to what others think of them. That’s not a weakness. That’s human.
Still, it’s worth asking the question honestly: am I doing this because it feels right to me, or because it looks good from the outside? Sometimes the answer is uncomfortable. Sometimes you realize you’ve spent years on a path that was never really your own. That can be painful — and it can also be the beginning of something that, for the first time, genuinely feels right.
What Coaching Can Offer in This Process
When people come to me for career-choice coaching in Vienna, many expect a kind of signpost at first — someone to say, “you’re a fit for this profession, go there.” That’s not my approach, and it wouldn’t be honest either.
What I do instead is help make a person’s own patterns more visible. Which decisions felt right in hindsight? Where did the feeling of “I have to do this now” actually turn out to be an echo from outside? What are the values someone genuinely wants to live by — not the ones they list in a job interview?
That takes time. And it takes a space where those questions can be asked without needing to produce a usable answer right away. That’s exactly what I try to offer in my work.
Salcher’s idea — that we can learn to make sense of our lives once we take our detours seriously — captures the core of it for me. It was never about designing the perfect résumé. It’s about living a life that feels like your own.
Further Reading
- Andreas Salcher — the original essay that inspired this reflection.
Frequently Asked Questions
What’s the central message of Andreas Salcher’s essay?
Salcher describes the gap between a flawless résumé and a genuinely fulfilling life. His core message: detours and setbacks are often exactly the experiences that lead to the greatest successes — if you’re willing to learn from them.
Why are detours in a résumé often judged negatively?
In classic hiring logic, dropped-out degrees, industry switches, or periods without a clear direction are treated as flaws that need justifying. Yet these are often exactly the phases in which people learn the most about themselves and their real values.
How does career-choice coaching help people reconnect with their own voice?
Coaching isn’t about handing someone a ready-made signpost — it’s about making their own patterns visible: which decisions felt right in hindsight, and where an impulse was actually just an echo of outside expectations.
What’s the difference between socially desirable success and personally authentic success?
Socially desirable success is oriented around what looks good from the outside and earns recognition. Personally authentic success is what feels right regardless of others’ opinions — honestly making that distinction is often the first step in the coaching process.
