Coaching vs Therapy?

Coaching and therapy are different. You need different skills for each. However it is vital that a coach knows the difference between the two and respects that the therapeutic boundary should not be crossed whilst working with you.

What do I mean?

Well coaching helps you to discover who you are now. It looks at issues in the present and your goals for the future. Therapy helps you to deal with emotional issues which more often than not stem from your past.

Whenever you begin to look at who you are and what you want out of life, you will inevitably look at how you behave. Let’s say for example you are exceedingly shy around members of the opposite sex. That is how you are today. In coaching you would look at how you could change that behaviour in the here and now. All it needs is your commitment to changing your behaviour and learning new ways of tackling relationships with members of the opposite sex.

I know I am making it sound simple, well it is. It’s simple, but not easy, as it takes practise and time, but with both of those it will happen.

However if after getting the knowledge you need to change your behaviour, and you are still terrified of dealing with the opposite sex, then it might be due to something that has happened to you in your past. If it is a coach will not be qualified to help you resolve this. This is when you need the help of a qualified therapist. However the choice always remains yours whether or not you want to explore your problem and resolve it.

You could choose to decide to accept that something did happen in your past, but you don’t need to know what, you just need to look at who you are today and decide that you can make the changes you need to make now. That’s your choice. And that choice has worked for many of my clients.

However in my own circumstances I decided that no matter how hard I tried, I couldn’t get over my hatred of the opposite sex so I decided to go for therapy. Therapy helped me understand why the hatred was there and how it actually belonged with just one person and not the opposite sex in general. It also helped me understand that it was nothing to do with me either. I wasn’t to blame. It wasn’t my fault. When I understood that I could then move on.

That was my choice and that worked for me. So remember you always have a choice.

Some of the people I have worked with have found it hard to choose whether to go for therapy or not, so together we worked out an effective solution. We decided that if they were ‘stuck’ trying to change their current behaviour due to an issue in the past, but weren’t sure that they wanted to explore it in therapy, they imagined putting the issue away gently and safely in a box tied with a big ribbon, then carried on coaching around a behaviour change. If it worked, great, but if it didn’t they promised to take their ‘box’ to a therapist so that they could then deal with the issue. At all times the choice and responsibility remains with you.

However, this is when I will issue a warning based on my own experience.

For some people sitting on an issue from the past is not a good idea and can lead to depression. Depression is where you feel sad or low for most of the time. All you want to do is stay in bed all of the time and life feels pretty meaningless. Depression is actually far more complex than this but in simple terms this is how it mainly affected me. If you think this may be happening to you, then please go and get some help. Depression can be both managed and cured. The faster you get help, the faster you feel much, much better. Trust me, I know from experience.

So I hope that helps to explain the difference between coaching and therapy. I actually think the two compliment each other quite nicely. But not everyone needs both.

At the end of the day you only get one life, so you can choose to make it a happy one. You decide what you need to make it happen for you.

Copyright Lynn Shaw 2005. Not to be republished without express permission of the author and references to Win At Life.