How is Coaching Different from Counseling and Therapy?

Coaching, counseling, and therapy share a lot of things in common. All of them focus on helping people make changes and accomplish goals that are important to them.

Coaching focuses on accomplishing identifiable and specific goals or outcomes so clients can meet meaningful life challenges and create the life they most want to be living. The focus is on the client taking his or her own action. Coaching keeps clients focused, challenged, and motivated for living their lives on purpose. Coaching is about possibilities and the coaching relationship is the vehicle that can shift and change everyday life into realized hopes and dreams.

Coaching is not therapy; and emotional healing is not the focus of coaching. Coaching clients are not seeking emotional healing or relief from psychological pain.  Coaching assumes that coaching clients are experiencing their emotional reactions to life events and that they are capable of expressing and handling their emotions.

In coaching we ask HOW? Coaching clients move forward toward the goals they intentionally create with their coach. Counselors and therapists often ask why, the focus is often on history and gaining understanding, and clients are often moving away from pain and out of distress. In coaching we hold a vision of the future and all its possibilities.