Coaching is a collaborative process between a coach and client for the client to achieve life, career or financial goals. Coaches may offer advice, guidance and support through your journey, partnering alongside you as you move through areas of dissatisfaction to areas of growth.
1. What is the difference between therapy and coaching?
Coaching and therapy are not inherently dissimilar. Therapy tends to focus on the root of what causes us to do, act, think or react in certain situations. Coaching, on the other hand, focuses on what might be missing in our lives and building strategies to obtain them. Coaching works to remove blocks that might keep you from achieving your goals. While coaching won’t address mental health concerns like anxiety or depression, it can take these into consideration. For example, if you are looking to work with a coach to develop a strategy to come out to extended family and work friends, you and your coach would work together on taking steps to do that, while being mindful to mitigate anxiety involved. However, if you are looking for support to process painful or traumatic events in your life, alleviation from anxiety, depression, eating disorders, etc, coaching is not necessarily the best fit for this.
Legally, licensed clinicians cannot practice in states they are not licensed in, so many practitioners develop coaching practices that compliment their therapy services for out-of-state clients. The benefit of engaging with iAmCouncil is that our trained staff can provide LGBTQIA+ informed coaching worldwide from the comfort of your own safe space!
2. What does a coaching session look like?
If you’ve ever engaged with counseling before, it may look similar to those sessions, though coaching is usually a bit more active and dynamic. Coaching often incorporates different tools, activities, homework and goal setting to help clients achieve short-term and long-term goals. Again, since many of our coaches at iAmCouncil are also trained therapists, the work itself may look similar, it’s how we go about accomplishing it that makes the difference!
3. Types of coaching offered by iAmCouncil
iAmCouncil offers a variety of coaching, including life, relationship, career, and financial coaching. To learn more about each of these areas, we encourage you to check out our services page here!
This article is written by our sister site iAmCouncil, our LGBTQIA+ Life Coaching Partner. Learn more about our life coaching services today!