Is it coaching...or therapy?

Growth in both professional coaching and psychotherapy has led to confusion about the differences and similarities between the two.

Last week a client let me know she had stopped seeing her therapist; she said she was getting what she needed from our coaching sessions.  On one level, I was pleased to know that our sessions were adding significant value to her personal and professional growth.  On a different level, it surfaced an ongoing need for clarity about coaching versus therapy as two potentially overlapping modalities of human development and support. Since it comes up often, and many of my clients have both a therapist and a coach, it’s time to address this topic directly. I hope those considering one or both types of support will find this discussion useful as they reflect on their situation, needs, and expectations. I will also stipulate that I am certified as a Co-Active coach and am not a therapy expert (although I have experienced therapy as a client). Nothing in my discussion is meant to diminish or misrepresent therapy as a practice, and the brief nature of my Substack format cannot do full justice to this enormous topic.

How Coaching and Therapy Are Similar

Both executive coaching and therapy are meant to lead to personal development and improved well-being.  These disciplines can work with fully functional individuals facing difficult situations and focus on helping people make changes and accomplish goals that are deeply meaningful to them. Therapy and coaching explore a client’s whole being, not only the often-artificial divide between work and personal life.  Therapists usually work with deeply emotional material; coaches sometimes do.

And Yet, Coaching Is Not Therapy

While there is much in common, there are also significant differences. It starts with a cornerstone of my coach training through the Co-Active Training Institute.  Being a Co-Active coach means holding all your clients as naturally creative, resourceful, and whole.  That “whole” cornerstone may be a different assumption than a therapist makes.  While many therapists work with clients on topics that are not crisis-oriented, they are trained to work with individuals who are not currently “whole” in some way, who may have major mental illnesses, addiction problems, deep traumas that are holding them back, and the like. 

I worked with a therapist for about a year after a major bicycling accident that left me both physically and emotionally broken in fundamental ways.  She was enormously helpful in my healing process. I would not have engaged a coach for that purpose.  I did work with a coach about a year after I joined Bain & Company as a direct-admit partner, as was standard practice for Bain at the time. After my 15 years at another firm, he helped me figure out how I was adapting my new environment, colleagues, and culture; identify the things I needed to work on to reach my full potential within the Bain context; and develop a tangible action plan. I would not have hired a therapist to work with me on these topics, even though the Bain coaching relationship delved deep into my self-limiting beliefs and behaviors.

There are other differences between coaching and therapy.  Therapists derive their training from a medical model of diagnosis and treatment. Coaches don’t diagnose or treat clients.  Therapists largely decide on and design a treatment plan without a lot of input from the client (it may be collaborative, but there isn’t a standard expectation of co-design between therapist and client), whereas coaching, especially Co-Active coaching, begins with the designed alliance between coach and client that is mutual and co-equal. While therapy is often rooted in past and present feelings and experiences, coaching focuses on the present and future.  Coaches generally expect some homework and specific accountability between sessions; with therapy, accountability is less commonly expected.  Therapists seek to help clients gain insight by examining the historical root causes of negative self-beliefs and problems; coaches think about negative self-beliefs as temporary obstacles in the form of self-sabotage and tend to be solution-oriented in their coaching. Therapists ask, in one form or another, “why and from where?” while coaches ask their clients “what’s next/what now?”

Admittedly, the differences can often be subtle and there is often overlap between these disciplines. Plenty of coaches can be effective at helping clients identify and deal with internal issues and beliefs, and many therapists motivate clients to plan for the future and reach their full potential.

Creating Clarity About the Scope of Coaching

These distinctions often arise in my discovery (first) session with new clients.  We define the alliance that will set the context for the coaching, establishing our mutual ways of working together. The “not therapy” distinction is important to me for a few reasons. First, since I am a proponent of radical honesty in the coaching relationship and I am not licensed as a therapist, I want to make it clear to my clients what they should expect from me and what they shouldn’t. Second, many of my clients already have a therapist. I never ask if they do but many volunteer that information. If they choose to tell me about their therapist, I never inquire about the purpose or scope of that relationship; but I do want to help them map out their intention for each type of support to make it easier for them to integrate them.  Doing so puts them in a position to get the most out of their coaching and therapeutic interactions.

Question(s): What do you think are the primary differences between coaching and therapy? If you have had personal experiences with both, under what conditions and circumstances have you gotten the most out of each discipline? Where have they overlapped?

Note: I owe a deep gratitude to the wise folks at the Co-Active Training Institute, who have written deeply on this topic and who embed these principles in their coaching training and certification modules.