What is Coaching Anyway?
Many people are not clear about what professional coaching is and often confuse it with therapy, mentoring, or consulting. Although there is some overlap among these four modalities, each is its own distinct practice.
Therapy and coaching are often confused. Therapy is best utilized for mental health issues and for healing past traumas. Therapy focuses on how past traumatic events impact the present well-being and functioning of the client.
Coaching, on the other hand, focuses on the present and the future. Coaching is about helping you discover what you most want to create in your life moving forward. Coaching is about helping you set and achieve goals. Coaching is about helping you live a more fulfilling, passionate, and coherent life.
Mentoring (for adults and in the business world) is another helping practice that is often confused with coaching. A mentor is someone who has specific domain knowledge and experience that you want to acquire. The purpose of a mentor is to help you achieve a particular goal that the mentor has already achieved. Mentoring is very focused and the mentor is providing the content (information, knowledge, wisdom) to you.
Coaching on the other hand is much more broad (it is not focused on one particular area) and in its pure form holds you naturally creative, resourceful, and whole. Coaching acts as a catalyst to help draw the answers from you. Pure coaching is not about advice or problem solving. Coaching provides a safe container for inspiring you to come up with your own best solutions.
Consulting is about solving specific problems. A consultant brings the knowledge, skills, and experience in a particular area and often does the work for the client. Examples of consultants are accountants, lawyers, plumbers, and business consultants.
In coaching, you bring most of the content and you do ALL the actual work!
Therapy - healing past wounds and addressing mental health issues.
Mentoring (for adults) - advising client on how to achieve a particular career goal
Consulting - fixing problems
Coaching - helping you to envision, create, and implement a more fulfilling and resonant future
Effective coaching brings what you need to meet your goals. As such, coaching will often include some level of mentoring and/or consulting depending on your needs and the coach’s areas of expertise. Therapy should never be a part of a coaching relationship.
Hopefully, this explanation of the differences among coaching, therapy, mentoring, and consulting will help you decide if coaching is the best choice to meet your needs.