What's the difference between coaching, consulting, and therapy?
I often hear the question: what's the difference between coaching, consulting, and therapy?
Coffee. Coffee. Coaches drink the best coffee.
With caffeinated beverages in mind and all jokes aside, it is very common to be slightly unclear on how coaches, consultants, and therapists vary in process and philosophy.
The way I like to talk about these three roles is through the lens of learning how to ride a bicycle.
Learning how to bike
A consultant’s approach
A consultant is somebody that considers themselves to be an expert in riding a bicycle, and they will teach you all of the ways in which they know how to be the expert.
So they'll show up and say, hey, you push the pedals this way. You sit on the bike this way. Since they are an expert, they are essentially guiding you and leading you to the place in which they have been.
A therapist’s lens
A therapist, on the other hand, is considering all the ways you've been shaped or impacted by learning how to ride a bicycle in your early years.
They're looking backwards mostly and trying to understand the stories, the experiences, and the ways in which you are riding a bicycle now have been impacted by your parents, your relationships, your trauma, and so forth.
Oftentimes, they're providing space to work backwards to understand what is, based on what has been. This approach can invite reflection of your past experiences.
A coach’s framework
A coach is asking the questions:
How are your earliest experiences or your experiences in general impacting you now, and how do you want to shape your future forward?
How can we begin to cultivate and create a life looking forward while also knowing how you've been shaped in relationship?
How have you been impacted in relationships?
So you can begin to see where therapy and coaching start to blur because really good coaches, really seasoned coaches, know that in order to shape behavior moving forward, we have to look backwards so we can't get stuck.
Truly, that’s the differentiator between therapy and coaching.
How coaches help you cultivate your future
Coaches are really thinking about the ways in which you want to cultivate and create a life, but also not forgetting that you're just a bunch of patterns bundled up in a brain, and those patterns are ultimately there to keep you safe.
So let's both know your shaping and also be creating the future that you want and not get stuck in the past.
This brings up the question: what coaching is not?
Coaching doesn't come with an answer book, meaning the solutions, your solutions, are going to be unique to you - including the way you self sabotage and the way you get in your own way.
Only you know your life challenges intimately, and what we know is that we heal in relationship.
No amount of self help or independent development while really beneficial in a lot of ways and can move you forward, will ultimately bring your breakthroughs because those will happen in relationships.
Coaching is not a one size fits all answer book. It's an exploration, an understanding, and a partnership and through that partnership, that's where a transformation can ultimately happen.
Coaching for true long-term behavior change
The most effective coaches have learned how to not bind consulting and coaching together but have effectively learned how to shape and change adult brains. Basically, they're experts in adult behavior change.
The reason science says this is so effective is because we need someone to provide unique and alternative perspectives.
We can't see our own blind spots.
We can't see where we get in our own way. And we also need education and intellectual stimulation enough to inspire us or to see an alternative path.
Qualities of an effective coach
The most effective coaches are teachers / facilitators / coaches; they have this amazing hybrid of science backed knowledge and they can pair it with tremendous amounts of curiosity that both inspires someone to change their behavior, but also gives them the tools to do so as well.
The most impactful step a coach can take (and there's an opportunity for a lot of therapists to grow in this space too) is to give us language to help us integrate, understand, and belong to ourselves more effectively.
Coaches can give us language to help us map our internal experience and help us understand why we are behaving in the way that we are. This gives us the knowledge and power to transform the ways that we are behaving to get us more of what we want.
Bringing language into how we experience our belonging
We don't recognize the importance of language perhaps because it's mostly invisible. Meaning every moment of every second of our lives, we're actually using language - our brain is using language to make sense of our reality in the world.
Especially, when we're trying to cultivate a sense of connection or belonging we require language to understand that reality. If we can bring language to our emotional experiences and to our intellectual experiences, we have the capacity to belong in a different way.
That's exactly what we're all searching for - a better life, more belonging, more connection, and more growth.