What is the difference between Life Coaching and Counseling?

What is Life Coaching? Coaching is a professional relationship of accompaniment that helps people produce extraordinary results in their lives, careers, and relationships, helping them to bridge the gap between where they are now and where they want to be. Coaches partner with their clients to design the life they desire by helping to create clarity and perspective which moves the client into action, accelerating their progress by providing greater focus and awareness of all the possibilities which exist to create fulfilling lives and relationships. I, Ellen Truschel am an ICF trained coach. What is Counseling? In addition to being a coach, I am also a California licensed Marriage and Family Therapist with training and experience in diagnosing and treating mental health issues and relationship dysfunction. While there are some similarities between coaching and counseling, they are very different activities and it is important that you understand the differences between them. Counseling is a health care service and is usually reimbursable through health insurance policies. This is not true for coaching therefore no insurance will be billed for coaching sessions. Both coaching and counseling utilize knowledge of human behavior, motivation and behavioral change, and interactive counseling techniques. The major differences are in the goals, focus, and level of professional responsibility. The focus of coaching is development and implementation of strategies to reach client-identified goals of enhanced performance and personal satisfaction. Coaching may address specific personal projects, life balance, job performance and satisfaction, relationship skills or general conditions in the client’s life, business, or profession. Coaching utilizes personal strategic planning, values, clarification, brainstorming, motivational counseling, and other counseling techniques. The primary focus of counseling is identification, diagnosis, and treatment of mental and nervous disorders. The goals of counseling/psychotherapy include alleviating symptoms, understanding the underlying dynamics which create symptoms, changing dysfunctional behaviors which are the result of these disorders and developing new strategies for successfully coping with the psychological challenges which we all face. Another difference is that psychotherapy patients are often emotionally vulnerable. This vulnerability is increased by the expectation that they will discuss very intimate personal data and expose feelings about themselves about which they are understandably sensitive. The past life experiences of counseling patients have often made trust difficult to achieve. These factors give psychotherapist greatly disproportionate power that creates a fiduciary responsibility to protect the safety of their clients and to “above all else, do no harm.”