Hi friends! –Work on intro- Want to talk about the mini-sessions. 

One of the most frequent questions that I get is about the difference between coaching and counseling, so I decided to dedicate an entire episode to it. I am going to speak in generalities for most of the episode. I recognize that every person and situation is unique so the goal is to provide a basic understanding of the two disciplines, both as separate things and how they also work together. 

I have a lot of experience with therapy, as a client, as a consumer. I have 15 years of Social Work experience, but I did not pursue the clinical certification in order to do therapy, for several reasons but the primary one was that was not the way I felt I could be help people. 

However, I have worked with Clinical social, Marriage and family therapists, Licensed professional counselors, and PhD psychologists – very closely throughout my careers. My mother is an LCSW and has been I think for the vast majority of my life. 

I have studied, been exposed to, and utilized therapy/ counseling/ and psychology in every facet of my life. I have many friends that are counselors and we love to talk about the differences and complementary aspects of coaching vs therapy. All that to say, there’s no turf war here. Whatsoever. 

Coaching and therapy are beautiful and amazing things when used individually and separately. 

In the most simplistic terms, therapy is designed for someone that is not functioning. Someone that cannot care for themselves, navigate their lives, or is a danger to themselves or others. For those individuals, therapy is lifesaving and I will never downplay that importance. 

Whereas coaching is typically taking someone, that is already functioning, to the next level of their personal or professional development. 

The analogy that I love for coaching vs therapy is from sports. You have the team doctor and you have the team coach. If a player is injured and cannot play, that is to say if they cannot function, the team doctor is who is called in to help them heal. Get them back to functioning so they can get back to playing the game. 

The team coach is the one that guides, teaches, and helps them gain breakthroughs in performance to win championships. They work together. 

So, let’s talk therapy. 

What is therapy?

Therapy is based on a diagnostic model. A clinician goes through an evaluation process of comparing symptoms exhibited by a client with that of diagnostic criteria. For counseling the standard is the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental disorders version 5 (DSM5). Similar to the medical model’s framework of obtaining an accurate diagnosis to treat the disorder. Therapy looks toward deficits that need to be addressed, whereas coaching starts from where the client is and the best path forward. 

Therapy is instrumental in helping people get back to a level of functioning. Back to baseline. Therapy can help you process grief and trauma. When we experience a crisis that is so significant, we need someone to help us make sense of it. To be a neutral party in processing what it means for us and our lives. 

For some us, just being able to get out of bed, go to work- those things are so taxing, and we walk around with this sense of dread or doom- that is a good indicator that you could probably benefit from therapy. 

Therapy is retrospective in nature. It focuses on past traumas and issues to change potentially self-destructive habits, repair and improve relationship and work through painful emotions. It focuses more on the past and on introspection, analysis, and resolving past issues in order to have a happier, more fulfilling future. 

In therapy sessions, you’re often returning to the emotional experiences, the patterns, the trauma, the learning, and the beliefs that you had in the past – and connecting the dots to understand how they have now brought you to this time with challenges. The goal of therapy is to release any places where you're blocked so you’re able to be happier, more settled, and at peace. Therapy, at its core, is working on the psychological problems from their source and doing healing work. 

Therapy is a regulated industry. Each state has regulatory guidelines that clinician must adhere to in order to practice and call themselves a therapist- this typically means that the therapist can only practice within the confines of the state in which they are licensed. Often, therapy is covered under insurance and is conducted face-to-face, although COVID certainly has changed that landscape, considerably.  

 What is coaching?

The underlying philosophy of coaching is that you are already whole, and you already have everything you need to succeed. You may just need help getting out of your own way. That’s why my job as a coach is to ask you powerful questions and serve as a sounding board to guide you towards your own inner resources. 

Coaching primarily focuses on the present and moving into the future whereas therapy emphasizes and dwells on the past. As a coach, I do explore my client’s background, but only so far as it’s in service of understanding how it influences their current beliefs and actions and promotes their growth.

Within the context of infertility and IVF, I work with my clients on the negative thought patterns that exist to help them recognize them, and how they impact their lives. I do talk about trauma and grief because I believe that it has such a strong influence in how we experience our infertility. But it is more about recognizing trauma responses, rather than processing through their trauma, which is what a therapists work would consist of. 

For my coaching clients, therapy is not something that has served them. They are able to function and do all the things and live their lives but they feel “stuck”. For so many of us, IVF becomes our entire world. It’s this big, heavy, painful thing that takes over their lives. My work with clients is dedicated to understanding that it doesn’t HAVE to become their whole world 

Life coaches are in an unregulated industry. There have been some organizations that have tried to regulate us as an industry, but there have typically, in most of those federations, been a conflict of interest because they're trying to regulate the industry and also make money on the industry. Regulating industries need to be independent and not be capitalizing on the industry while they're trying to regulate it because that creates an issue, obviously, with doing motivation. 

So, as of today, there is no regulation. I think this is a beautiful thing for life coaches because we have the freedom to be able to coach in the way that we want. But we also have a huge responsibility to monitor ourselves in terms of our own ethics, and make our own regulations in terms of what we are willing to provide to our clients, and appropriate professionalism and boundaries. And all of those things are something that really fall on our shoulders to be able to manage. That's something we spend a lot of time talking about as coaches as to how we hold up our own professionalism as coaches in our industry. 

I pulled something from Tony Robbins's site. Toby Robbins is kind of like the very first life coach in the world, right? On his site, he says, "The fundamentals of life coaching are what distinguish it from therapy. Life coaches do not diagnose, while therapists determine illnesses and pathologies so they can be clinically treated. Therapists analyze their client’s past as a tool for understanding present behaviors, whereas life coaches simply identify and describe current problematic behaviors so the client can work to modify them. 

I think it's important and never a bad thing to have an experience with a therapist and to talk about stuff in your past that you feel like is holding you back. The people that I am most effective with are the people who have had years of therapy and don't have freedom yet. They've gone to therapist after therapist. They've tried to get over their past, but they're still bitter. They're still resentful. They're still victimized. They're still hating themselves. Those are the people that I'm able to help in the easiest amount of time, because they've already kind of opened up that wound. And now we can move on beyond it. The people that I send to therapy are the ones that have never really looked at that wound. 

This is from Bill Cole. It says, "How Therapists and Coaches Differ. Keeping in mind that contrasting lists such as these can be overly sweeping and not entirely explanatory of the subtleties that exist, here are some of the differences between coaching and therapy. Coaching is an educational, discovery-based process of human potential. Therapy is based on the medical model that says people have psychiatric maladies that need to be repaired. 

"Coaching focuses on self-exploration, self-knowledge, professional development, performance enhancement and better self- management. Therapy seeks to heal emotional wounds. Coaching takes clients to the highest levels of performance and life satisfaction. Therapy seeks to bring clients from a dysfunctional place to a healthy functioning level. Coaching rarely asks about your childhood or family life. Therapy continuously explores early-childhood, family and relationship issues.”

One of my favorite analogies about coaching and therapy, other than the sports one I shared earlier, is that they’re like knives and forks. One is not better than the other they just serve in a different way. 

If you’re trying to cut a steak using a fork, you’re not going to get very far. You need a knife to have the biggest impact. But if you’re trying to eat spaghetti with a knife, well that’s not going to work either. 

They’re separate tools that when utilized appropriately can change a person’s life. 

Not everyone benefits from therapy and coaching is not the most appropriate option for everyone, either. 

Two tools. Both amazing. 

So, I hope this helped shed some light on the differences between therapy and coaching. 

If you’re curious if coaching would be right for you- maybe you’re feeling stuck or maybe you think that you can have a different experience of IVF- that it doesn’t have to be so damn hard- go to my website wwww.ivfthiscoaching.com and hit the “Request a consult” button. 

Until next week, I adore you and you’ve got this. https://www.ted.com/talks/mel_robbins_how_to_stop_screwing_yourself_over?language=end