Coaching practices for Informational Interviews Life Planning

Describe almost anything you are working through and IX Coach finds the practices whose real-world fit is closest. For Informational Interviews Life Planning, these are the strongest matches in the current practice library.

Does this sound like the set of challenges you might be facing?

• The conversation goes great and then it just...
• I’ve got the conversation booked but I’m staring at a blank page of questions, worried I’ll waste their time asking things I could’ve Googled
• I keep running this other life in my head, imagining how amazing or how awful it would be, but it’s all guesswork
• When I talk to people in the field they give me the polished official version, and I walk away no clearer on what the day-to-day actually feels like
• There’s this other life I daydream about constantly, but it stays a fantasy in my head

Practices that may help

1. Informational Interviews: Career Research That Builds Your Network
   An informational interview is a low-stakes conversation with someone in a role or field you’re curious about — you ask questions, they share experience, and no job is on the table. Richard Bolles’s What Color Is Your Parachute? popularised this as a career research tool; the evidence is largely observational and practitioner, but it consistently shows that direct conversation with insiders produces better career decisions and unexpected referrals.
2. Close every informational interview with one forward step
   End by asking: "Is there someone else you think I should talk to?"
   Informational Interviews: Career Research That Builds Your Network
3. Prepare questions you genuinely don’t know the answer to
   Ask about the unwritten realities of the role — the things no job posting reveals.
   Informational Interviews: Career Research That Builds Your Network
4. Run prototyping conversations before committing to a plan
   Talk to people already living your Plan B or C before you decide whether to pursue it.
   Odyssey Plans: Designing Three Alternative Futures
5. Listen for what isn’t in the job description
   Focus on the texture of day-to-day work, not the official narrative.
   Informational Interviews: Career Research That Builds Your Network
6. Prototype with conversations and experiences
   Test a possible path cheaply — talk to someone living it, or try a small slice — before betting on it.
   Designing Your Life, Made Practical
7. Life Review and Reminiscence Therapy
   Robert Butler proposed that systematically reviewing one’s life narrative — organizing memories into a coherent story, reconciling conflicts, and identifying what has mattered — is a natural developmental task that, when done consciously, produces ego integrity, reduced depression, and greater life satisfaction. Randomized studies in older adults find moderate positive effects; the practice is also used meaningfully across adulthood, not only at end of life.
8. The Life Crafting Intervention: Scripting Your Future Self
   The life crafting intervention, developed by Schippers and Ziegler, is a structured writing exercise in which participants vividly reflect on their core values, write a narrative of their ideal future life, and translate that into concrete goals. A randomized controlled trial found significantly improved self-concordant goal motivation and work engagement at follow-up, making it one of the better-tested purpose interventions available.
9. Practise your story before you need it
   Have a clear, genuine two-minute narrative about who you are and where you’re headed.
   Informational Interviews: Career Research That Builds Your Network
10. Peak experience analysis
    Study your life-line high points for the values and conditions they share — they reveal what fully alive looks like for you.
    The Life Line Exercise

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