For most young Nigerians, the big conversation has always been about choosing the “right career.” From secondary school to NYSC to the early years of working life, we’re constantly asked: What do you want to be? And naturally, career guidance becomes the go-to solution. It helps you pick a path, understand your strengths, and navigate the job market.
However, the truth is that your career is only one part of your life. And you will live far beyond whatever job, title, or industry you choose.
That’s where life coaching becomes not just a nice-to-have, but a must-have. Career guidance helps you thrive in one area: your work. But life coaching helps you thrive everywhere.
Career Guidance Matters, But Has Limitations
Let’s start with the obvious: career guidance is important. For young people who are confused about what career to pursue, where they fit, or how to enter a particular industry, a career guide can be, and often is, life-changing. In fact, career guides are so important that both novices and seasoned professionals benefit from them.
Career guidance helps by:
- Clarifying your strengths and interests
- Helping you choose a reasonable career path
- Providing insider knowledge about industries
- Connecting you with opportunities
- Helping you avoid mistakes that could set you back significantly.
For a fresh UNIBEN graduate struggling in a competitive job market, this is valuable. Whether you want to be a tech bro, a nail tech, a finance specialist, a creative, or a health worker, the right career direction prevents years of trial and error. It helps you avoid using experience as the best teacher. Experience is a very expensive teacher, and the cost may be too great.
But here’s the issue: Career guidance is often narrow. Most times it focuses on your profession, not your personal growth, mental clarity, emotional strength, or life outside the workplace.
A career coach can tell you how to level up your CV, but they may not help you handle a toxic work environment.
They can help you choose a field, but they may not help you build relationships or confidence.
Career guidance is a piece of the puzzle, not the whole picture.
What Life Coaching Brings That Career Guidance Cannot
Life coaching is broader. It covers everything that influences the kind of professional — and human being — you become. It teaches you skills you need before your career, during your career, and long after your career ends.
A life coach focuses on:
- Emotional intelligence
- Communication skills
- Conflict resolution
- Self-awareness
- Decision-making
- Leadership
- Mindset
- Boundary-setting
- Personal values
- Goal execution
- Handling transitions in life
These are not “extra” skills. They are the skills that affect every area of your life, including your career.
This is why many young Nigerians are beginning to realize that life coaching is not just for people going through a crisis, it is for anyone who wants to grow into a stronger, clearer, more grounded version of themselves.
Life Skills Follow You Everywhere, Your Career Does Not
This is the part most people overlook: Your career will not last forever. But your life skills will.
A person may retire from football at 35, but their communication skills, discipline, resilience, and emotional intelligence will carry them for the next 40 years of their life. A tech professional may switch careers multiple times, but their ability to lead, to communicate, to manage people, and to handle pressure will remain useful. Life skills do not expire, but career skills often do.
Life coaching helps you build the backbone behind every professional achievement. It teaches things your industry cannot. Skills that make a person truly successful, not just employable.
Why Young Professionals Need Life Coaching Even More Than Career Guidance
Young Nigerians today face unique pressures: Economic uncertainty, social comparison, family expectations, hustle culture, and a rapidly changing job market.
And if you cannot manage yourself, no career strategy will save you. Life coaching becomes essential because:
1. Your career journey will not be linear
You will change jobs, industries, interests, and goals. Life coaching prepares you for the transitions.
2. You need more than hard skills to thrive
Soft skills like communication, confidence, leadership, are life skills first.
3. You’re building a life, not just a CV
Your relationships, your mental health, your values — these influence your career far more than job titles do.
4. Work is only one chapter of your life story
You spend years before your career and decades after it. Those years matter too.
Conclusion
So, is life coaching more important than career guidance for young Nigerians? You better believe it, because your life is bigger than your career.
Career guidance helps you choose and grow in a profession. Life coaching helps you grow as a person, and that growth affects everything else, including your career.
Every young Nigerian deserves both. But if you must choose one to start with, choose the one that follows you everywhere, in your home, your friendships, your career, your decisions, and your future.
Remember, life coaching builds the person behind the professional.
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