Coaching vs Counselling: what’s the difference?
It's important to get the right kind of support: do you want a coach or a counsellor? In today’s blog I’ll talk about the differences and share 5 ways in which they differ. Counselling and coaching are both “talking therapies” that help you overcome problems and move forward in your life. They can both revolutionize and transform your life by giving you crucial life-skills and a shift in perspective. They both use the latest psychology research and techniques and they both work by accessing the conscious and unconscious mind through speaking and listening.
But they’re different in some important ways. Picking the right kind of support is crucial - counselling and coaching have different objectives and they work for people at different points in their journey.
Lighting a fire
Let’s say you want to light a fire, but you don’t know how. You want certain results (a fire, warmth, a cosy space to share with friends, the ability to cook food in the wilderness…) and you need a skill to get there (fire-making).
A coach would teach you about fire. They'd explain what materials you need and where to source them, they'd teach you the theory of combustion, they'd take you through various ways to start a fire and they'd encourage you to try them and become skilled at fire-making.
By the time your coach is done with their work, you'd have a roaring fire be a confident fire-maker.
We’d consider that a great result from a coaching process!
However, if we imagine that there's more going on in this scene…
perhaps you're injured and you can't make a fire
perhaps you're so convinced that you can't make fire that you can't even try
or perhaps you were badly burnt once and you don't want anything to do with fire, even if it means you'll be cold...
In those situations you clearly need a different kind of support. You need a healer, or someone who will patiently, painstakingly guide you until you're ready to make a fire. This is what counselling is all about.
Very broadly speaking, if you feel that you’re in crisis, that you don’t feel like you can take control of your life even with the right support, counselling might be right for you. If you feel daunted and overwhelmed, but you’re ready to tackle the challenge, coaching might be a good way forwards.
It isn’t a black-and-white situation: I've coached plenty of clients who've experienced depressive episodes and a coach helped me emerge from a long, dark period of my life. Equally, many counsellors use techniques that you’d expect to find in life coaching. The crucial difference is in the intention of the therapy. Even if they sometimes use similar tools, the intention is different.
So here are the 5 main differences I’ve noticed between counselling and coaching...
Present vs past
Your past will have a direct impact on your beliefs, thinking and behaviour, so as a coach I do explore a client’s background and how it’s affecting now. But the focus is on NOW, and what you can be doing to make your life better. What can you do TODAY that will give you the skills, confidence and positioning to make your future better?
Counselling will often delve much more into your past in order to heal the wounds that are still causing you pain.
Mental health
A life coach is advised not to work with clients who are really struggling with mental health issues. This could be a depressive/bi-polar disorder, schizophrenia, or any other condition which makes it difficult for a client to clearly see how their world really is. I work with plenty of clients who’ve been through rough patches (you don’t have to be on your top game to see me!) but I leave any ongoing mental health issues to counsellors and psychotherapists who are better trained to help.
setting and reaching goals
I’ve found there’s a difference in energy and momentum. Life coaching is about solving problems to reach goals. It has a positive, determined, resilient, focused energy. Counselling would be less effective if there was an intention to get somewhere. In general it will focus on problems and issues rather than goals. If a client is struggling with a great deal of psychic pain, they need support that meets that pain, rather than a focus on achievement and success.
Values-free vs values-driven
In general, counselling will work with your inner landscape, but it won’t label things as positive or negative and it won’t develop a sense of values or ethics. Doing this with a vulnerable person runs the risk of putting too much of a burden/expectation on them, it blurs the lines between the client’s values and the therapists’ values, and it plays havoc with the healing process.
But in coaching that’s a core part of the work - exploring what you most deeply value so that you have a strong sense of being powerfully aligned with your beliefs about right and wrong. Values and beliefs are an absolute core part of my work.
Healing vs Growing
Counselling will focus on getting you back on your feet, whereas coaching will generally assume you’re ready take positive steps towards growth, development and self-improvement.