HOW IS COACHING DISTINCT FROM OTHER SERVICE PROFESSIONS?
Professional coaching is a distinct service which focuses on an individual’s life as it relates to goal setting, outcome creation and personal change management. There is often confusion between coaching, counseling, consulting and mentoring. It’s helpful to understand the distinctions between these four unique approaches:
- Therapy—Coaching can be distinguished from therapy in a number of ways. First, coaching is a profession that supports personal and professional growth and development based on individual-initiated change in pursuit of specific actionable outcomes. These outcomes are linked to personal or professional success. Coaching is forward moving and future focused. Therapy, on the other hand, often looks to the past in order to heal and understand. The focus is often on resolving difficulties arising from the past which hamper an individual's emotional functioning in the present. Therapy outcomes often include improved emotional/feeling states. While positive feelings/emotions may be a natural outcome of coaching, the primary focus is on creating actionable strategies for achieving specific goals in one's work or personal life. The emphasis in a coaching relationship is on action, accountability and follow through.
- Consulting—Consultants may be retained by individuals or organizations for the purpose of accessing specialized expertise. While consulting approaches vary widely, most often the consultant is an expert who dispenses advice and has answers. The consultant holds the agenda, imparts knowledge, and offers suggestions to improve effectiveness and increase success. Coaches act on the premise that the definitive expert regarding your life and work is you. In general, the assumption with coaching is that individuals or teams are capable of generating their own solutions, with the coach providing supportive, discovery-based approaches and frameworks.
- Mentoring—Mentoring can be thought of as guiding from one’s own experience or sharing of experience in a specific area of industry or career development. Mentoring is akin to role modeling where the client sees attributes, qualities or abilities in the mentor that he/she wishes to learn or emulate. Coaching is a partnering of two equals, which focuses on the unique and intrinsic qualities already within the client that may not be recognized or appreciated.