Coaching
A professional life coach is someone who...
Helps you be the best version of yourself
Helps you through difficult transition periods in your life
Is your thought partner
Helps you get clear on your life purpose and values
Helps keep you on track with achieving your goals and dreams
Provides a framework for working through challenges
Provides support and accountability
A life coach is a type of wellness professional who helps you make progress in your life in order to attain greater fulfillment, help you grow as a person, and become the best version of yourself. This may involve helping you achieve your personal or career goals, introducing you to new ways of thinking, challenging your limiting assumptions, sharing valuable life lessons, and much more. Coaching services may include setting priorities, establishing goals, identifying resources, brainstorming, creating action plans, asking questions, and making direct requests, among other things. By helping you to make the most of your strengths, life coaches provide the support you need to achieve long-lasting change.
Differences among coaching, therapy, mentoring, and consulting…
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, 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, coherent, and passionate life.
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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, rather it provides a safe container for inspiring you to come up with your own best solutions.
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Consulting is about solving specific problems. A consultant brings the knowledge, skills, and experience in a particular area and often does the work for you. 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!
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Therapy - healing past wounds and addressing mental health issues
Mentoring (for adults) - advising you on how to achieve a particular career goal
Consulting - fixing problems
Coaching - helping you envision, create, and live a more fulfilling and resonant life
Effective coaching brings what you need to meet your goals. As such, a coaching engagement 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 whether coaching is the best choice for you.
