Coaching provides a distinct service that helps clients work on their goals for the future, and create a new life path.  The International Coach Federation (ICF), which claims to be the largest coaching credentialing and support organization in the world, defines coaching as “partnering with clients in a thought-provoking and creative process that inspires them to maximize their personal and professional potential. 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.”

Coaching focuses on the present and the future, with an emphasis on four areas:

• Defines goals with client
• Formulates a plan that will use the client’s skills and resources
• Holds the client accountable for progress with structure, and measures progress
• Provides hands-on structure, encouragement and support

Psychotherapy focuses on examining the past, seeking solutions to emotional dysfunction, and often includes a clinical diagnosis according to the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders (DSM), which is required by insurance companies for treatment purposes.  While psychotherapy is not without treatment goals or supportive professional care, the need for psychotherapy arises from a serious problem needing clinical attention and intervention, focusing on moving people from a state of dysfunction to one of being functional.

• Deals with identifiable dysfunctions in a person
• Focuses on a person’s past and trauma, and seeks
emotional healing
• Helps patients resolve old pain
• Doctor-patient relationship (therapist is the expert)
• Aims to help regulate client’s dysfunctional emotions
• Therapist diagnoses, then provides professional expertise
to provide a path to healing.
• Progress can be slow and emotionally challenging.

COACHING
• Deals with a healthy client desiring an improved situation
• Focuses primarily with a person’s present life, and seeks to help
them design a more desirable future
• Helps clients learn new skills and tools to build a more
satisfying successful future
• Co-creative equal partnership (coach helps the client
discover own answers)
• Client’s emotional skills are already within the functional range
• The Coach works with the client and helps him or her
identify the challenges, then partners to turn challenges into
successes, holding client accountable to reach desired goals.
• Growth and progress are often immediately measurable.