The boundary between coaching and therapy lies in disputed territory, and there are wide variations in the way each discipline is practised. What follows is therefore a low-resolution image of an intricate reality, though one that still captures the basic features.
Areas of divergence
It is generally agreed that coaching is a largely future-orientated process that enables people to identify where they want to get to in their working and/or personal lives, why they want to get there, and how best to navigate a route to their destination(s). Coaches will generally pay much more attention than therapists to helping their clients to pin point their personal strengths, qualities and values. Once recognised, these can be cultivated and brought to bear on life’s opportunities and challenges.
Coaches also tend to place more emphasis, on a session-by-session basis, on working with their clients to identify specific steps that they can take towards their longer-term goals. Coaches therefore expect their clients to be prepared to commit to making changes from early in the process, and this requires a firm-enough foundation of psychological wellbeing and resilience.
As countless therapists’ websites attest, people generally seek therapy when they are finding it hard to cope without help. Therapy therefore is essentially concerned with relieving distress – healing emotional wounds, resolving inner conflicts, changing unhelpful habits of thought and behaviour, fashioning new narratives, and enabling people to live without chronic or acute psychological pain.
As with the account of coaching above, this is a simplification of a complex field; for example, some people (including therapy trainees) might seek therapy in order to learn and grow rather than to alleviate unhappiness. Some of the more solution-orientated forms of therapy are in some ways closer in spirit to coaching. However, the basic purpose of therapy is indicated by the fact that the word itself derives from the Ancient Greek therapeuein, meaning ‘to minister to, to treat medically,’ and therapeia, meaning ‘healing.’
Points of convergence
Coaches and (most) therapists generally agree that:
- should we so choose, learning and development are lifelong processes;
- we all have a considerable amount of unrealised potential;
- we have the ability, with the right support, to generate answers to the questions that life poses us.
In the last couple of decades, more and more therapists have come to appreciate the value of adopting a coaching mindset at times, in order to avoid what can sometimes happen in therapy: week after week, month after month of visiting present and past unhappiness, raking through the dead leaves in search of something – an insight, a memory, a moment of emotional release – that will loose the chains of anguish.
More recently, an increasing number of coaches have come to recognise that whilst coaching can sometimes achieve significant and lasting change, for some clients this is not the case, and changes can be less than fully weatherproof if not built on sturdy foundations of personal awareness of the kind that therapy can provide.
A different path
My experiences as a dual-trained practitioner have led me to believe that whilst both coaching and therapy can be effective with the right people, there is real value in a way of working that combines their energies in a single way of working. This is therapeutic coaching, and you can read about it here.
York Coaching 