It's important to understand that coaching is not therapy. Here are some key differences:
Therapy often addresses the past and seeks to heal disorder. Coaching focuses mainly on your present reality, with a view of the future you want for yourself.
Therapy addresses difficult thoughts and feelings as something to be treated, spends time to uncover them as a symptom of what's wrong, and often delves deeply into unresolved pain. Coaching acknowledges all thoughts and feelings and sees them as natural and normal, even though some are not pleasant in the moment. Working with a coach can lead to shifts, insights, and a new relationship with the thoughts and feelings that come with being a human being.
Therapy focuses on diagnosing and providing professional expertise and guidelines for healing. Coaching focuses on your strengths and capabilities to move toward change. A coach partners with a client to choose goals and find solutions.
Therapy is a therapist-patient relationship, where the therapist has the answers. Coaching is a collaborative relationship between equal partners where the coach helps the client self-discover answers.
The coaching process
Coaching is a partnership. A coach empowers, supports, and guides a client as they work toward their goals. A coach does not tell a client what to do or what they should do. The client is the expert on themselves.
Coaching focuses on helping clients draw upon their own experience, insights, values, and strengths to set goals, commit to action steps, and hold themselves accountable to building the future they want for themselves.
Coaching is a process of experimentation and learning. It doesn’t involve dwelling on the past. It focuses on the present and the future the client wants for themselves. It emphasizes possibility and positivity. Coaching is not counseling, therapy, medical advice, or medical treatment.
If your application is approved, we will work as partners. I will give you my full attention. I will listen to you with compassion. I will accept you completely. I will not judge you and I will not tell you what to do.
I will focus on your strengths and what matters to you. I will help you brainstorm possibilities for moving forward and navigating roadblocks. I will bring powerful insights to your attention. I will have the unwavering belief that you can succeed and reach the goals you set for yourself.
I will ask powerful questions and encourage you to arrive at your own answers whenever possible. This will require you to do a lot of thinking. In our sessions, you will be the one doing most of the talking because you are the expert on yourself and all the answers you need are already within you (even if you don’t realize it yet).
It is not my job to solve your problems for you. My job is to help you solve your problems. When appropriate, with your permission and within my scope of practice as a coach, I will offer advice and resources. However, you are the expert on you. It is not my job to fix you — because you are not broken!
You will be setting the goals, you will be making the decisions, you will be responsible for the actions you decide to practice, and you will be the one accountable for your actions!
Since you are responsible for making change happen, there is no money-back guarantee and there are no refunds. For coaching to be effective, you need to be 100% "all-in".