Coaching or counselling - what's the difference?

First published in Australasian Coaching News, July 2003

The International Coaching Federation website says about coaching:

“Professional coaches provide an ongoing partnership designed to help clients produce fulfilling results in their personal and professional lives. Coaches help people improve their performances and enhance the quality of their lives.

Coaches are trained to listen, to observe, and to customize their approach to individual client needs. They seek to elicit solutions and strategies from the client, they believe the client is naturally creative and resourceful. The coach’s job is to provide support to enhance the skills, resources, and creativity that the client already has. ...

... Coach and client together choose the focus, format and desired outcomes for their work.” www.coachingfederation.org.

The key ideas in this statement can be summarized as:

• The role of the coach is seen as providing a combination of partnership and support

• The outcomes of coaching are results and performance focused with the overall aim of enhancing the quality of the client’s life

• Scope of coaching includes both personal and professional life of the client

• underlying assumptions are that clients are naturally creative and resourceful and that the coaching process revolves around ongoing increased realization of this in the client’s life.

How does this coaching process differ from counselling? This is a deceptively simple question that is virtually impossible to do justice to within the space of a short article. Because coaching is a new profession, it is still very much in the throes of distinguishing itself from other allied professional areas such as counselling, therapy, consulting and training. Many successful coaches would have come to coaching from these roots and apply many of their existing assumptions, strategies and techniques with great success to their coaching practice.

Another difficulty in giving a simple answer to this question stems from the variety of approaches within each field and consequent overlap in underlying philosophies. For example, like coaching, a variety of counselling practices embrace a client centered, collaborative partnership that encourages clients to acknowledge their own creativity and find their own unique solutions.

It may be helpful to reflect on why we would want to ask about the differences. As coaching focuses on improving performance, how may we as coaches improve our performance by considering this question?

One outcome would be to enable coaches and their clients to start with shared expectations of what coaching can offer. Another would be to clarify criteria as coaching industry benchmarks to assist in developing individual practice.

A third, and perhaps more challenging outcome relates to the ethical issues involved. Can we as coaches recognize when a client may need a skilled counselor rather than a coach? Where is the line between coaching and counselling? Many people who previously might have sought counselling or therapy are turning to life coaches because coaching seems less threatening; it is the ‘in’ thing. Many life coaches may be well qualified to handle these clients: others may be less so. How do we recognize when a particular client needs more than we can offer? Would some of our clients and potential clients benefit more from counselling than coaching?

For example, Client A is a vivacious, attractive, single woman in her mid-30s who through her own determination has progressed to a middle management position. She wants to progress further but constantly sees herself as a victim of circumstances beyond her control. Her coaching sessions are draining on the coach who feels that the client, despite encouragement to be an equal partner in the process, persists in taking a dependent role and treating the coach as a father figure rather than a coach.

This client is exhibiting two factors that suggest she is not able to participate fully in the coaching process and might benefit from referral to a trained counselor. Firstly, by constantly referring to herself as a victim of circumstances, she is not taking responsibility. Secondly, by treating the coach as a father figure she is indicating what counselors refer to as transference issues that are interfering with her ability to progress in her life. These two factors are not necessarily connected but both point to possible family of origin issues.

Factors indicating the need for referral or working in conjunction with a counselling colleague include:

• Where strong emotion such as anger, despair, anxiety, fear is consistently present

• Where the client cannot find hope despite the encouragement of the coach

• Where the client does not or cannot take responsibility for what is happening in her life and insists it is the result of people or circumstances beyond her control

• Where you as a coach feel like the client’s father, mother, lover, husband or wife or the client treats you as such

• Where the client, despite appearing enthusiastic and able to devise a plan of action for success, continues to not follow through or continues to make excuses with regard to follow through

• Where the client wants to retell, in detail, the story of how a particular aspect of their life or life in general is not working for them.

As we become more sensitive to the different emphases of coaching and counselling we can encourage a greater flow of conversation and cross-referrals between coaches and counselors. Coaching clients may benefit from concurrent counselling to remedy current weaknesses that hinder them from moving on in life; and counselling clients may benefit from referral to coaches when family background issues or previous negative experiences have been satisfactorily resolved.

The future directed, outcome oriented, client-centered bias of coaching is reflected in the varying ways that many coaches are now packaging their services to meet specific client needs and situations. Many coaches are moving away from a traditional face-to-face, one-on-one practice to group coaching using telephone or email or combinations of these. Some coaches offer clients multiple options as to how they spend a chosen amount of monthly time with their coach. Because of the embedded assumptions that clients are creative and resourceful and that the coach is partnering with them to assist them to find their own ways to enhance personal and professional life, such options tend to work very well for both coaches and their clients. I suspect that some of these imaginative and flexible approaches to offering and using coaching services may be less suited to the resolution of deep seated personal issues.

In conclusion, both coaching and counselling have important roles in helping people to live more satisfying and fulfilled lives. At times the roles, outcomes, scope and underlying assumptions may overlap. Sometimes it may be a question of ‘different strokes for different folks’. Resolving and reframing the impact of past events through counselling may be a more urgent priority for a client as well as a necessary precursor to recognizing and enhancing the skills, resources and creativity that will transform their lives.

As coaches, I believe it is in our best interest to promote ongoing conversation amongst ourselves and our counselling colleagues so that all of us may extend our understanding and make better use of our resources. From this we can build working referral networks with fellow practitioners that will benefit everyone involved – coaches, counselors and clients alike.

I am most grateful to Judith Ayre, one of our Web Associates and a highly experienced counsellor, for her detailed and constructive critiques of earlier versions of this article.

To arrange a coaching session for yourself or your business, telephone 61 03 0400 156 069 or 61 03 9525 3409.

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