I’ve been asked by many people, including some of my clients, what the difference is between therapy and coaching. It’s been a tough question for me to answer. In fact, it’s partly what has kept me from moving forward with my coaching business for the past few years. I have researched how to go from being a therapist to being a coach; I’ve attended webinars, read books, and in general stopped my movement. I believe the saying is “paralysis by analysis.” 🙂
I found that the information confused me even more. Some experts say that going from being a therapist to being a coach is a no-brainer. You already have the skills. You just need to use them differently. What? Other experts say that being a therapist makes it even harder to be a coach because we have to un-learn so much of what we’ve learned. What? It’s not just the people skills and training that are a problem. It’s retraining your brain to not look for things. How do you do that? How do you not hear pain in someone’s voice and see their body language and not go into that with them when you’ve been trained to do just that?
After a few years now of “analyzing” this, I’ve finally come up with the solution for me. I can’t undo what I’ve been doing for 22 years. And I don’t want to. What I can do is to notice things but choose to not focus on it in a coaching session. I can even mention it to my coaching client as something I notice but that we aren’t going to focus on that in coaching. “I just wanted you to be aware of it.”
I’m surprised it has taken me so long to get here… I know now that I have been very resistant to giving up something that has been a part of my life for so many years. But I realized that what I’ve been doing for the past several years with some of my therapy clients is coaching. Rather than focusing on the negative and looking for problems, I pointed out the positives and we focused on what the client wanted in life rather than why they weren’t happy. And that is one of the differences between therapy and coaching.
Another difference is that rather than focusing on their past and how we can repair it so they can move on, I am now helping my therapy and coaching clients work with the present and move towards a better future.
According to David Skibbins, Ph.D., CPCC in Becoming a Life Coach: A Complete Workbook for Therapists:
Therapy:
- Therapy is about what’s holding you back.
- A therapy client needs help with a specific problem.
- A therapist is a highly trained professional employing tools from the science of psychology to implement a treatment plan.
Coaching:
- Coaching is about knowing where you’re headed.
- A coaching client wants to achieve a specific goal.
- A coach is a generalist who relies less on expertise and more on trust in the inherent capacity of clients to solve their own problems.
When I looked at these differences, while I have the training of a therapist, I feel more comfortable with the idea that a client has the capacity to solve their own problems. They just need some guidance and accountability. That has always been my philosophy.
I’ve been told that I was born to be a therapist. But perhaps I was born to be a coach! What are your ideas of the differences?
