How can coaching and therapy help each other?
I often coach leaders meeting big challenges. They also may be carrying things influencing how they’re responding to those challenges. This raises a big question: What’s the difference between coaching and therapy?
Differentiating coaching from therapy is important because they can seem so similar. After all, both coaching and psychotherapy focus on helping people grow and change, and both can be places where people are doing hard, reflective work. And when they’re done well, both can be deeply transformative.
But coaching and therapy are different professions with different scopes of practice. I’m always happy when clients tell me they have a therapist, because it tells me that they have a place to work through issues that come to light during our sessions.
I’ve also encouraged clients to enter into counseling. In fact, sometimes finding a therapist—and getting over the obstacles in the way of getting the care clients need—are part of our coaching agenda.
When doing so, however, I see the process referring clients to counseling as one of broadening the conversation. I believe pairing coaching with psychotherapy can be a tremendously powerful combination, in which people can create a team of supportive presences around themselves.
For this team to work well, though, everyone needs to be clear about their roles, and clients in particular need to know who is best suited to help them with what.
In a whitepaper written for the International Coaching Federation (ICF), Alicia M. Hullinger, Vice President of ICF’s Thought Leadership Institute, and Joel A. DiGirolamo, ICF’s Vice President of Research and Data Science, offer some important guidelines.
Hullinger and DiGirolamo suggest that coaches and psychotherapists are on the same continuum of practice, much in the same way that athletic trainers, physical therapists, sports medicine physicians, and orthopedic surgeons are.
Just like a person would consult a different person to improve their overall fitness than they would to rehab a torn muscle, they argue, coaches and psychotherapists occupy different scopes of practice defined by differences in focus, purpose, and population.
When I meet with clients, I’m always assessing what’s inside my scope and what’s outside. I do this by asking three questions:
Are we primarily focusing on the present or future—or are we stuck in the past?
How deep or complex are my client’s issues?
How well is my client doing overall?
While coaches can refer a client to therapy, going to therapy is ultimately the client’s choice.
But if they take the offer, they have an opportunity to restore deeper balance and health to their lives that will enrich their relationships with themselves and others—and make their work in coaching all the more fruitful.
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