Challengers Agency Podcast with Dominique Gobat, career advisor and coach based in Lausanne
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Some conversations give names to things you were already doing without realising it. My exchange with Dominique Gobat was one of them.
A career advisor and coach based in Lausanne, Dominique Gobat has partnered with over 500 people from more than 60 nationalities in their career transition and development. He holds the position of Senior Careers Advisor within the MBA programme at the University of St. Gallen. Through his independent practice PULSE, he works with individuals on personal branding, competencies, and career strategy.
Behind those titles, though, is someone who thinks in a genuinely non-linear way: and it comes through from the first few minutes of conversation.
The Portfolio Career: When Diversity Becomes a Strategy
The first concept Dominique introduced me to is the portfolio career: a professional life built around several distinct activities, with different clients, contexts, and mandates running in parallel.
In his case, that includes career advisory work with MBA and Executive MBA students, media operations and communications mandates in sport event management, IT contracts, and workshops and lectures on networking, personal branding, and LinkedIn.
What stands out is the common thread he identifies across all of it: people. Regardless of the context — students, companies, athletes, journalists — the central question stays the same: how do you create value for the person in front of you?
"If you look at your customers, those are still people. People are fundamentally the most important asset of anything we do."
For anyone looking to diversify their professional activity or reduce dependency on a single employer, the portfolio career model is worth serious consideration. It isn't instability: it's deliberately constructed resilience.
Coaching vs Advisory: A Distinction That Changes Everything
Early in our conversation, Dominique draws a line that many practitioners blur: coaching and advisory are not the same thing.
Coaching operates on the belief that the person already holds the answers. The coach's job is to ask powerful questions that surface them. The moment you say "have you considered this" or "here's what you should do", you've crossed into advisory.
In his work with MBA students and outplacement clients, it's predominantly advisory: people in career transition often need direction, not just introspection. The distinction matters, especially for anyone seeking support and unsure what kind they actually need.
The Mongol 100: What Endurance Teaches You About Career Transition
The conversation also covered an experience that captures his approach to challenge well: the Mongol 100, a four-day, 100-mile crossing of frozen Lake Khövsgöl in northern Mongolia, at temperatures between -35 and -40°C.
No running water, no showers, freeze-dried expedition food, survival mode from start to finish. By his own assessment, the hardest thing he has ever done — harder than a marathon, an Ironman, or a four-day 33km open-water swim in Montenegro.
What he takes from it professionally: resilience isn't built in comfort. And career transition resembles an ultra-endurance event far more than a sprint — it's the accumulation of difficult days, not any single moment, that determines the outcome.
Business Dating: A Better Frame for Professional Networking
This is one of the most immediately useful ideas from our exchange. Dominique uses the logic of romantic dating as an analogy for professional networking — and the parallel is sharper than it first sounds.
In both contexts, the goal is to build trust. In both contexts, self-orientation — talking about yourself, promoting yourself — is the primary trust-eroder. And in both, the person who asks questions, shows genuine interest, and seeks to understand before trying to convince has a clear advantage.
When someone asks him whether a particular networking approach is appropriate, he simply reverses the question: "Would you do that on a first date?" If the answer is no, it's no in a professional context too.
It also reframes networking for those who find it artificial. It isn't — it's just an attempt to build a genuine connection with someone new. The mechanics are the same as any human interaction worth having.
Social Selling vs Self-Promotion: The Difference That Matters Online
On social media, Dominique draws a clean line between promoting yourself and creating value for your audience — what he calls social selling.
His videos from Mongolia weren't "look what I'm doing." They started from a message — a parallel between physical endurance and career transition — and were filmed around that message. The authenticity came from the fact that his fingers were freezing and he had no time for multiple takes.
For athletes in particular, this is a concrete reframe: rather than asking whether your story is impressive enough, ask what you're learning, what you're going through, and what might resonate with someone else facing something similar. That's the content worth sharing — and it also happens to be the content that builds an audience over time.
Allyship: A 1970s Concept Everyone Should Know
The final theme we explored is allyship — a term Dominique first encountered in 2022, despite the fact it dates back to the 1970s.
The core idea: how does a person coming from a position of privilege use that privilege to create opportunity for those with less of it? Gender, race, sexual orientation — the contexts are multiple. He is actively involved in allyship through the Healthcare Business Women's Association (HBA), serving as an advisor to their corporate partners.
One point he raises that I found particularly sharp: it isn't enough to have diversity in the room. The people present — regardless of their background — need to be actively working toward inclusion, rather than defending a position they've spent years securing. The psychological element is real: people feel threatened, even when they'd deny it.
His Definition of Success
The closing question: what does success mean to him?
His answer: freedom. Not doing whatever he wants whenever he wants, but not being a slave to a system. Being able to work from anywhere, be present for his children, go for a swim at lunch if the day calls for it. The portfolio career isn't only a professional strategy — it's a life strategy.
"I'm not a slave to a system anymore. And that's what I mean when I talk about freedom."
Find Dominique Gobat on LinkedIn and through his website pulse.coach.
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