Both coaching and psychotherapy are effective help-by-talking professions that serve to support people into personal growth. Both are professionals trained to provide powerful, empathic listening in a safe and confidential space.
The following is a list of some of the differences between psychotherapy and coaching.
• Therapists clinically diagnose (based on criteria from the DSM) and are trained to treat clinical pathological disorders, and coaches do not.
• Therapy develops the personal self (ego development), whereas coaching assumes client already has an intact ego and sufficient ego strength.
• Therapy is generally hierarchical in nature (therapist is expert, authority, one with power, and client doesn’t know and deals with therapist like a parent), and coaching is a collaborative partnership.
• Therapy deals with issues of transference and counter-transference, and although that’s always happening during any personal interaction, coaching does not focus on those issues.
• Therapy deals more with the past, and coaching focuses on the present, future and moving forward (although CBT is an orientation most similar to coaching).
According to Dr. Rosie Kuhn, author of Self-Empowerment 101 and creator of the Transformational Coaching program at Institute of Transpersonal Psychology:
Coaching DOES work well for individuals who:
• are experiencing success in some areas and feel ready for a bigger game
• are open to new ideas and new ways of looking at their lives
• find their vision is getting lost in day to day activities, they’re not accomplishing what they say they want
• want to experience meaning and purpose in their lives
• have great ideas and are not bringing them to fruition
• are interested in making a difference in the world
Coaching DOES NOT work well for those who (and who are more appropriate for therapy):
• are prone to psychologically diagnosable disorders
• are not willing to be accountable for their actions
• maintain rationalizations and justifications for why their life isn’t working
• haven’t developed the ego-strength to the degree to which they can move beyond perceived ego-identification
• have difficulty engaging in introspection
• not ready to put in effort to become aware of, examine and modify problematic thinking
