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Quarterlife crisis—just like the midlife crisis, only a few decades earlier, and without the new clothes or German sportscar.
While many coaches may not have even pondered the concept, it’s one life coach Kirk Akahoshi has built his business around—helping 20 and 30-somethings who feel lost, lacking passion and confused about where they’re headed in life…and why.
“For thousands of years there was a rite of passage, and there was a clear delineation between adolescence and adulthood,” said Akahoshi, who says he went through a quarterlife crisis himself and ultimately decided his path led to coaching.
“A lot of my clients, they’re in a certain industry, for five or ten years and they come to me and they say to me, I don’t even know if I like engineering…this was kind of pushed on them either through their family, or society or their peers, and they weren’t given a chance to say, who am I and what do I really want?”
Akahoshi says clients in quarterlife crisis often can’t explain how they ended up where they are—feeling as if they were following a path someone else set for them; leaving them as bystanders in their own lives.
The economy, meanwhile, has left them with great fears about taking a leap into something else.
“The harsh reality is,” Akahoshi says, many of his clients can’t even pay their bills, let alone answer fundamental questions about what do no next. “They’re in a job they don’t really like to do…do I really want to do this for the rest of my life?”
What does quarterlife crisis look like?
Akahoshi says it’s a lot like the traditional midlife crisis, only without a middle-aged person’s sudden drive to reclaim a lost youth. The underlying problem, Akahoshi says, is nonetheless the same.
“Deep down it’s an existential identity crisis.”
So, where the crisis in mid-life is spurred on by a realization of impending mortality—“I’ve lived half my life, I can’t believe I’ve done this what am I doing?”—in the quarterlife crisis, Akahoshi says, “they’re not exactly reliving their youth, but they’re asking these same type of questions…they’re asking what do I do with my life because they’ve never actually secured what that is.”
Akahoshi works with clients one-on-one, and through intensive workshops and retreats… engaging tough-to-reach 20 and 30-somethings with a heavy reliance on social media. “it’s a lot of social marketing, be it Twitter, Facebook, YouTube, or Yelp. Of course, the best marketing is still word-of-mouth.”
But while they may not be the easiest clients to reach, they tend to warm to coaching quickly—once they understand what it is. “With my peers, (coaching) is still something new and I have to do a lot of education.”
The positive nature of using a coach to help determine a career path or climb the corporate ladder resonates with members of Generation Y, who tend to share success stories with their friends.
“They’re more open to telling people, yeah I had some great results with coaching.”
Listen to Kirk Akahoshi’s conversation with CoachReporter Mark Joyella here: (podcast runs 14 minutes)
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