Therapy and Coaching - what's the difference?

I m writing this on my blog as there have been so many debates on this subject in the coaching and therapy worlds I wanted to take it a bit wider and see what HR and OD folk think too.

The text below is more or less what I have said on a recent posting to a coaching forum on yahoo groups.



I have have long held the view that coaching and therapy are on a continuum of supportive interventions at different points in people's lives. It's often the context and intention (of both the client and the practitioner) that differentiates them rather than the practise.

Equally, I see "therapy" as being on a continuum from simple supportive listening to complex intensive therapy. If we pathologize the term "therapy" it doesn't help. It's in mainstream use for both counselling and psychotherapy (as far as I am aware, there is still no compelling evidence to prove that counselling and psychotherapy are different activities and have different outcomes) and it can mean different things to people, from "talking about the issue" through to "seeing a shrink"!

So I do have some concern about the idea that some seem to have that therapy is for dysfunctional people. Many people find it invaluable during crises that we might all reasonably expect in or around own our lives and communities at some point: bereavement, divorce, infertility, being bullied, serious illness, disability, relationship problems etc. When people seek support to help them to understand, respond, manage or recover from these challenges, many are actually functioning pretty well. EAPs / workplace counselling services see people like this every day; clients have their session and go straight back to work.

Naturally there are individuals who have greater challenges in coping with distressing past and present life events, in achieving good emotional and mental health and who experience repeated or protracted difficulties, and thus who may need more in-depth work. Yet many of these clients at the right point can benefit from a coaching approach too.

I don't think it's useful either to assume that all therapy focuses on the past or that it's all going to be negative and painful, or that the therapist is expert and the client is not. There are many brief, future oriented and client empowering forms of therapy (for example Solution Focused Therapy and CBT) which have been embraced by the coaching world, and many highly generative ideas in coaching that have been embraced in client oriented therapy (for example, Clean Language and The Thinking Environment).

Many skilful and experienced coaches from non therapeutic backgrounds now do life enhancing and healing work with clients suffering from distressing symptoms such as severe anxiety, panic attacks and phobias, situations which would once have been the sole domain of therapists and hypnotherapists. Professional supervision is much better established as a supportive reflective learning place for coaches as well as therapists, and more coach training and CPD is available to support in addressing the needs of more complex clients; these have both helped to widen out the type of work that coaches do. Whether coach or therapist, their skills and experience will be on a continuum too, so ensuring that the needs of the client and the situation are matched with the skill and experience of the practitioner is key to professional and safe practise.

Our challenge is perhaps how to help clients to decide what they need and how practitioners, whether coach or therapist, we can explain how they work so  that clients can make informed choices.