4. Limited vs. open: How you generate new clients. Therapists are limited in the ways they can generate clients and how readily they can approach others about their services; coaches can be free and open about seeking clients and discussing their services.
Let’s take a deeper look at each of these distinctions.
Past versus Future: Perspectives on the process
In general, therapy has historically dealt with the client’s past and some pain or dysfunction. Traditional psychotherapy focuses on the root of the problem, the history, the family of origin, and other causal issues. The helper’s role is to bring the client to an adequate present or reasonable level of functioning (taking the dysfunction into consideration).
Coaching, by contrast, works with an individual who is already adequately functioning and moves him to a higher level of functioning. From a theoretical perspective, coaching focuses on the future, barrier identification, goal setting, planning, and creative action. Coaching works actively with the conscious mind to facilitate the client to step into a preferred future while also living a fulfilling life in the present.
Now, some of you are reading this and thinking, “But I work in the future when I do therapy!” This may well be the case, particularly if you are trained and practice from a solution-focused perspective. However, if you are helping adequately functioning individuals move to higher levels of functioning by using coaching techniques, you probably aren’t doing therapy, or at least not therapy as defined by most insurance companies. There are definitely some coach-like therapists — in fact, they are usually the individuals most comfortable with the therapist-to-coach transition.
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