coaching or therapy, what's actually different
People sometimes ask me this directly, and it’s a fair question given my background. The short answer is that coaching and therapy can look similar from the outside, a good listener, a considered conversation, real attention, but they’re doing different work. Therapy is concerned with emotional distress, where it comes from, and how it’s maintained. Coaching is concerned with where you are now and where you want to get to. As a psychologist who also coaches, I hold that distinction carefully, and it’s something I actively manage in every conversation, not just a line I draw once at the start.
What coaching is for
Coaching starts from a different question than therapy does. Rather than asking why something keeps happening, it asks what you want and what’s getting in the way of it. Performance rarely comes down to a lack of ability. More often, something gets in the way, an assumption, a habit of mind, an old pattern, that limits what’s actually available to you. Coaching brings that interference into view without needing to fully explore where it came from. The aim is to see it clearly enough to have a genuine choice about it, then move.
What therapy is for
Therapy asks a different, and often deeper, question. The coaching psychologist Jonathan Passmore distinguishes the two partly by focus: therapy tends to sit with distress and difficulty directly, understanding where it comes from and helping it ease, while coaching tends to sit with direction and possibility, understanding what’s next and helping you move towards it. Therapy will often explore your history, your relationships, and the roots of a difficulty in real depth, because that is exactly where the useful work happens. That isn’t what coaching does, and it isn’t meant to.