How do you determine if you need a coach or a therapist? —Arthur B.
I’ve sat on this question for a while. I wondered about the weight of it. I don’t want to lead anyone astray.
Then I realized that’s silly. I can trust my readers, and I am going to assume you aren’t experiencing a mental health crisis. (And if you are in crisis or danger, if you are dealing with substance abuse, addiction or trauma, or if that describes someone you love, then please seek help from a therapist or medical professional.)
Disclaimer out of the way, I wonder if your curiosities are more about the grey areas of picking one type of professional over the other. Well, recently, someone reminded me the answer to every great question is “it depends,” and this is no different.
You might begin by asking who you want to work with.
Do you have an intuitive sense of this? Because if you are leaning one way or the other, maybe that is enough. You are wise. You will be wasting your time, or you likely won’t be honest or engaged, if you don’t trust the practitioner’s credentials or approach. That said, many people are less familiar with coaching, and it’s tough to trust something you don’t understand.
Broadly speaking, coaching methodologies are built on a foundation of positive psychology, or the exploration of the optimal functioning of people. Personally, I find this to be incredibly liberating and cool, and in alignment with whoever else we understand ourselves to be, which is to say human and flawed. It isn’t a negation of one’s challenges or maladaptations—we might also experience anxiety, or depression, or attention issues, or have suffered past traumas. At the same time, as a culture, we tend to over-identify with our psychological struggles and bestow them with more power than our person. This is a mindset that a coaching approach seeks to balance.
Harvard Medical School researcher and psychologist Susan David speaks about this when she references “creating space” around difficult emotions. For example, instead of saying “I am angry,” David suggests you might try “I am noticing that I am feeling angry.” It’s a simple but effective shift in perspective: we are not our feelings; nor are we our diagnoses. If this type of logic appeals to you, you might be a candidate to work with a coach.
But here’s where it gets a little muddy. Therapists can be trained as coaches; coaches can be credentialed therapists.
Sometimes a person will work with a therapist and discover what they really want is a coach, or vice versa. And while coaching isn’t therapy, it is therapeutic to be seen and heard, to be given the time and space to explore one’s sense of self, and to have someone believe in your potential and wholeness.
I encourage readers to check out the interviews I’ve conducted with coaches to get a sense of the range of what individual coach practitioners can offer. Finally, there’s a slew of articles online that answer this question more concretely, with lists, etc., if I have been too abstract. Hunt them down, or reach out to me to talk. All of this is to say, start somewhere. (You are here, still reading, so I’d say you’ve begun.)
—Steph