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When I google the differences, I often find rigid, black and white answers. I find Venn diagrams that have pretty overlaps and differences that often contradict what’s happening in the real world. For me, all this black and white lacks nuance and workability. I’m not aiming here to create a comprehensive anatomical breakdown of the similarities and differences. I’m just zooming in on aspects that intrigue me, and trying to parse out what is just semantic wrangling, versus what is practically useful. What is represented here aren’t facts, they are musings from my perspective.
Here are some aspects that matter more to me than pigeon-holing oneself into a title:
Practical skill
Building relationship and working alliance
Working within your level of expertise and competency
Theoretical underpinning
Establishing and maintaining appropriate boundaries
Personal and professional experience
Aptitude for the work
Being able to justify your actions
Interventions that match the client’s goals and intentions
Working within an ethical and moral framework
Being well supervised
Working coherently within your worldview, and theoretical orientation
Here’s the common distinction I find. Therapy includes coaching, but also holds a space for deeper healing of historical trauma, attachment wounds, and clinical work. Coaching can be deep, but does not actively seek to work on the heavy emotional processing, or clinical work. On paper, this seems OK. Yet in the real world, I know of skilled coaches who are actively seeking out heavy emotional processing and trauma work. Likewise, I know of therapists who don’t demonstrate the competencies to do deep work, who haven’t been taught psychopathology or trauma theory. Equally, people with mental health issues are often perfectly capable to engage in coaching, and people without any demonstrable mental health issues can benefit from therapy.
So rather than trying to pin down exact differences, I think it’s more worthwhile to look at realms that intersect both professions.
Rigour and Education
The dilution of education standards and distinguishing individual practitioner rigor is a problem for therapists and coaches. It makes the marketplace for finding someone to work with tough.
It was not that long ago that you had to be a medical doctor to practice psychotherapy. Now, one can do a short course level 2 Counseling Skills, all the way up to four year level 7 Masters degree that requires years of personal therapy. Anyone can technically and legally call themselves a counsellor or psychotherapist with no qualifications. They are unprotected job titles.
The same is true for coaching. One can be a Cacao Coach in the woods, right through to Executive Coach for big CEO’s in glass towers. One can find free accredited coach trainings, all the way up to a master’s degrees at a prestigious universities. It’s also an unprotected title.
Added to this, going up the education ladder does not necessarily translate into higher quality learning. One might find maverick courses with no accreditation to be deeply profound, experiential, ethical, and practical. One might find high level academic courses to be locked in the halls of libraries, very far from the lived experience of real world practice.
All of this makes finding the right practitioner a minefield. It also affects the reputation and public perception of these roles. It makes carving out a career in either role all the more challenging.
There is an industry shaking attempt to rectify these issues in the therapy world called SCoPEd, which will eventually affect all therapists through a hierarchy based primarily on their level of training. This is a rabbit hole beyond the scope of this essay. Ultimately, clear communication of what you do and how you do it really important. Doing so lifts a practitioner out of the vagaries of the mire, and gives clients a clearer choice.
Past Present Future Split
The main trope I read on articles trying to find the differences is that coaching is about the present and future and therapy is about the past. Look, it’s entirely normal for a person to go through a course of therapy and predominantly focus on the present, and future. These days, not all therapy is talking about Mum and Dad! It’s just as much about dealing with day to day real life challenges, losses, and carving a future for oneself. Equally, enabling a coaching client to unblock in an area of their life may well be inextricably linked to their past. Avoiding aspects of their developmental experience will hinder achieving their goals in the coaching. Their origin stories matter.
I think splitting past present future is a bit of a red herring. In any given moment I can fleetingly have thoughts, experiences, and sensations that relate to all three temporal realms. My desire for a cup of tea is present, I’m hankering for an experience in the future, and my imagining of what it’s going to be like is based on my past experiences of drinking tea.
The Contract
When a client first reaches out, they have some intentions or goals in mind. Sometimes’s it’s really clear, like “I’m finally ready to talk about my fraught upbringing”, or “I’m changing careers and need some guidance”. More often it’s vaguer: “I have this sense life could be better”, or “My anxiety is through the roof”.
This early phase in a new relationship is often referred to as ‘contracting’. It sounds legal and scary, but it isn’t. A less legal word would be ‘agreements’. Transactional Analysis neatly separates the three contracts/agreements that are often going on simultaneously:
Administrative contract - logistical stuff like fees, length, time and location of session
Professional contract - this is about defining roles, boundaries, and what you can expect of one another.
Psychological contract- this is what is really happening in the relationship. These are the undercurrents.
The psychological contract is interesting when we’re attempting to distinguish coaching and therapy, because they can be explicit, or implicit. An explicit psychological contract is something like: “Ben, I’ve chosen you as a man deliberately because I had an aggressive father growing up, and I want to try out what it feels like to have a man with empathy listen to me”
Sometimes the psychological contract is far more implicit and not out in the open between the practitioner and client. This could look something like this: “I’m going to see how Ben operates for a few sessions, then maybe I’ll bring the big stuff I’m afraid of approaching”.
Any competent practitioner will be listening the explicit contracts, whilst being curious and aware of the potential implicit contracts not being vocalised. There are nearly always multiple psychological contracts going on simultaneously. Furthermore, it’s entirely normal to re-contract during a process. One might start at a more surface coaching contract, and decide to delve deeper. Equally with the deeper healing completed for now, a client may still value here and now coaching.
A common issue that is jarring is when practitioner and client are working to different contracts. This can lead to all manner of misunderstandings. Here’s an example. The initial contract is “help me with a new career path” and early on the practitioner asks “how was your relationship with your mother?!” The work can fall apart when you’re not on the same page!
Perhaps, in the early stages, the implicit and explicit contracts will give indications as to whether the work has a leaning toward the therapy or coaching realm. Another way to frame it might be ‘how deep are we going here?’. It could be helping a client decide which new car to buy, right through to finding a safe person to walk alongside the un-earthing of deeply repressed ancestral intergenerational grief.
This is where the rigor and education massively intersect with contracting. Someone might present with a desire to choose a car, but the issue they are deeply yearning to touch upon is the ancestral grief. In these instances my hope is the person chooses a practitioner that can safely and competently take them where they really want to go. What is sad is when there is a subtle mismatch of depth and rigor. An example of this is when a person with complex trauma wanting to really dig deep gets assigned a counsellor who has not been to those depths themselves. They will struggle to be a good guide.
As I write all this, a simple and very reductionist metaphor comes to mind. Find the right tool for the job. It’s No good trying to build a space rocket with an axe. No good trying to demolish a house with a teaspoon. The equivalent is finding the right relationship with the right practitioner, that feels good, and is able to meet and be with you at the level you desire to go.
Modality Matters
A Jungian psychoanalyst is probably going to have a different opinion than the IAPT CBT therapist here. Their theoretical orientation, or core beliefs, as a practitioner will guide their attitude to the coaching therapy split.
I think one of the reasons why I in particular want to answer this question in my own practice, is because my core frame of parts work happens to span both coaching and therapy realms. I read of parts work practitioners who go into businesses, to do deep vulnerable repressed exile-healing sessions that are ‘on the spot’ with clients. It’s not part of a long term therapy, it’s short term work in a very different context to the therapy consulting room. It’s only this year in the UK that the IFS trainings have made their training pathway exclusively for mental health professionals. It always used to be open to coaches and people more broadly in the helping professions.
With the parts work language, the question becomes something like this. Are we doing deep work with vulnerable exiled repressed parts of ourselves, and creating the slow and safe container for these parts to emerge and heal? This is work that requires particular boundaries, experience, and skills. We’re probably more likely to call this therapy. Or, are we working with day to day parts dynamics that are well known, easily accessible, but require some more airtime. Perhaps it’s about parts of ourselves and how they’re interacting with relationships at work, or at home, but there is a lower level of emotional weight and pain. Maybe we’re more likely to label this coaching.
Summary
Skilled therapy often incorporates coaching. Good coaches and therapists will understand that the past present and future are interwoven, and inseparable. In an ideal world, both coaches and therapists trained at all levels would understand the nature and effects of trauma and understand how to spot mental health challenges. Ideally anyone working in the helping professions will have the humility to recognise when the client’s psychological contract is beyond their level of competency, and refer on. Perhaps what matters is the practitioner and the client are working from the same page, there is clarity and agreement on what is happening, which means good and thorough contracting.
To me, the distinctions between therapy and coaching are still not semantically clear. Perhaps they are old terms, and ‘change work’ has evolved beyond the old distinctions.
Upcoming Course
Starting in March 2025, I am part of a team of trainers running a 2 year accredited Transformational Coaching Training at the beautiful Trigonos Retreat Centre. I wrote this essay with the new cohort in mind, but thought I’d publish it for all. If a 2 year face to face deep dive into yourself, into a small group, and to becoming a coach is something you're interested in, get in touch and I can send you some more information.
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