You may have heard of fitness coaches, sports coaches, academic coaches, but what is a Life Coach?

A life coach is a trained wellness professional who helps you maximize your full potential and make progress in life in order to attain greater fulfillment. They are like a supportive friend and a trusted adviser rolled into one. Life coaches aid their clients in improving their relationships, careers, and day-to-day lives.

Life coaches can help you clarify your goals, identify the obstacles holding you back, and then come up with strategies for overcoming each obstacle. In creating these strategies, they target your unique skills and gifts. By helping you to make the most of your strengths, life coaches provide the support you need to achieve long-lasting change.

Life coaching typically works in a specific, structured format, although your coach will ultimately work with you to create a custom action plan. Assessing your current position helps you and your life coach measure your progress and identify current and potential obstacles. After this important step, you and your coach will review your resources and all courses of action available to you in order to create a plan of action. You’ll then decide which specific steps you will take and when you will take them. You will prepare for potential obstacles and decide how to cope with them. At this time, you will ensure that each step supports your end goals, while your coach will help you stay on track and monitor your progress. If your plan needs modification at any point, your coach will help you with this as well, which will empower you to stay committed.

Many people seek out life coaches for guidance in navigating a significant life change, such as taking on a new career, relationship or health. In plenty of cases, however, people turn to life coaches simply for help in building a happier, more meaningful life. Anyone who wants to do more tomorrow than they can do today should consider hiring a life coach.  

All kinds of people use life coaches, including actors, business leaders, creatives, entrepreneurs, executives, homemakers, managers, professionals, small business owners and start-up pioneers. These are the people who identify a gap between where they are and where they want to be, and turn to coaching when they want help reaching their goals.

There are a number of indications that working with a life coach could be helpful for you. These signs include:

• Frequent irritability
• High levels of stress and/or anxiety
• Inability to break bad habits
• Lack of fulfilment in your personal life
• Persistent feeling of dissatisfaction at work
• Sense of blocked creativity

No coaching is not therapy. Therapy, also called counselling, is a long-term process in which a client works with a healthcare professional to diagnose and resolve problematic beliefs, behaviours, relationship issues, feelings and sometimes physical responses. While in life coaching, a client works with a trained coach who is not a healthcare professional to clarify goals and identify obstacles and problematic behaviours in order to create action plans to achieve desired results. 

Here are key differences between life coaching and therapy, and how to choose one over another.

1. TOPICS: Therapy focuses on mental health; life coaching focuses on goals

The major difference between therapy and life coaching is the focus of the work: therapy focuses on mental health and emotional healing, while life coaching focuses on setting and achieving goals.

While therapists are trained mental health professionals who are in the regulated field of healthcare and require licensure, life coaches do not have mental health training and are not equipped to diagnose or treat mental health conditions (unless a life coach was previously trained as a therapist, which is also common).

Consider therapy if you want to heal or get help with a mental health concern; try life coaching if you need help getting “unstuck” or realizing a fuller potential.

2. SKILLS: Therapy helps you learn to heal; coaching empowers you to achieve goals

Therapists help clients look to their figurative yesterdays in order to overcome deep-rooted issues, whereas life coaches are there to help you jump off today’s launching point to succeed tomorrow.

The skills you learn from a therapist are designed to foster healing from whichever challenge you are facing. Coaching, on the other hand, sets you up with tools to reach bigger dreams or break free if you feel stuck on repeat in your life.

Life coaching teaches you how to achieve big dreams and/or break free if you feel stuck

3. TENSE: Therapy is rooted in the past and present; coaching focuses on the future

In therapy, you face the past in order to move forward  

The therapy that most people are familiar with presents an opportunity to look at what’s going on inside – emotionally, psychologically, or interpersonally.

Coaching focuses on improving the “here and now”  

Coaches (including therapists who practice coaching) will absolutely be interested in what some of their clients’ “source material” is, and will want to know what life experiences have brought you to where you are.

That said, the goal in coaching is not to necessarily go back and address it, or to heal it, or to change it. Instead, it’s just referenced.

What you’re working on in coaching is: Where are you now, and where do you want to be?

4. DURATION: Whereas therapy is not usually time-limited, coaching is often short-term

Therapy often has no set “end date”

Therapy is often not time-limited. Sessions can continue for months, or years, in an ongoing fashion.

Coaching clients often enroll in short-term package sessions

Coaches often offer their services in packages. From 6-10 weeks up to annual options, coaching packages are varied but more commonly short-term.