Do you ever feel stuck on a problem or situation in your personal or professional life? Do you have goals you want to reach, but see more obstacles than solutions on your path to get there? Do you feel overwhelmed or lacking confidence in an area of your life? Do you wish there were someone who could be a confidential source of support and encouragement on your growth journey?
If you answered yes to any of these questions, coaching may be exactly what you need!
A life coach is a trained professional with communication tools to help you explore your situation from many angles and partner with you to make your desired changes possible. The life coach uses questions to help the client identify where they are at, where they want to be, what obstacles get in the way, and develop a plan to overcome them. Once the plan is formed, the life coach keeps on working with the client as a source of support for troubleshooting, encouragement, and accountability. This is an exciting and creative partnership in which the client directs where they want to go, and the life coach is the curious partner who brings clarity and support on the road to get there.
Life coaching is similar to mentorship and therapy in that all of these resources aim to help a person create change in their lives through conversation. However, they are different in important ways, with each being ideally suited for different contexts.
Life Coaching vs. Mentorship:
A mentor is someone who is more experienced than the mentee in a specific area that the mentee wants to grow in, often in a professional area. A mentor mainly provides advice and guidance out of their own experience and knowledge. Mentors are excellent sources of information and support for the mentee and play a critical role in the development of the specific skills needed for a particular field. However, mentors are limited to their own experience or statistics, which may or may not be directly useful to the context of the mentee.
In life coaching, the coach assumes that the expert on the life of the client is the client. Therefore, the client is the best source of information regarding the problem, the desired outcome, and the preferred path to get there. However, the needed information is often on a subconscious level or too abstract for the client to tap into it on their own. The role of the coach is to partner with the client by asking questions that bring out the answers needed.
A person can highly benefit from both relationships. For example, a student can have ongoing meetings with a mentor to receive advice and feedback on their writing skills, while concurrently having life coaching sessions to overcome their anxiety-induced avoidance of writing.
| Life Coaching | Mentorship | |
| Provides: | questions | advice |
| Source of information: | the client | the mentor |
| Assumes: | the client has the answers | the mentor has the knowledge the mentee needs |
Life Coaching vs. Mental Health Therapy:
Mental health professionals and life coaches have some similarities, such as being confidential and safe resources, understanding of psychological processes, communication styles that support the client’s exploration of their thoughts, feelings, and behaviors, etc. However, there are key differences between these professions.
Psychologists, therapists, and counselors are mental health professionals (with a master’s or doctorate degree in this field) and licensed (through the state) to evaluate and treat mental health conditions. They often focus on exploring events that happened in the distant past to understand unhealthy states of mind in the present and treat them through clinical approaches.
In contrast, life coaches assume that the client is in a healthy state of mind (in the area of life they agreed to work on). The life coach will not diagnose or treat any mental health condition, nor will they focus on the distant past to understand past traumas. Instead, the life coach works mainly on the present circumstances of the client to help them reach the future (goals and dreams).
Individuals with mental health conditions can certainly benefit from life coaching as well. A client can have ongoing therapy sessions to treat the mental health condition, while concurrently having coaching sessions that target another area of their lives. Example: A graduate student with diagnosed depression can receive treatment from a therapist (psychotherapy) and a psychiatrist (medical treatment), while at the same time having life coaching sessions to feel more confident in public speaking.
| Life Coaching | Mental Health professional | |
| Assumes: | client is in a healthy state of mind | client is in an unhealthy state of mind |
| Focus: | exploring the present with a focus on the future | exploring the past to treat the present |
| Provides: | questions to help the client increase self-awareness. | diagnosis and treatment |
Author: Stephanie Palacio, Ph.D.
References:
- The Science of Effective Mentoring in STEMM, National Academy of Sciences
- International Coaching Federation
- Jordan, M., & Livingstone, J. B. (2013). Coaching vs Psychotherapy in Health and Wellness: Overlap, Dissimilarities, and the Potential for Collaboration. Global Advances in Health and Medicine, 2(4), 20–27.
Beautiful and clear description of the similarities and differences between these professional fields and how a client can benefit from them!