Working with a therapist can help provide insight, support, and new strategies for all types of life challenges.
How Do Coaching, Mentoring, and Counseling Differ?
You can sign up for coaching, mentoring, or counseling, but how will you know which one suits you?
There are many misconceptions about these three areas of expertise.
While each coach, mentor, and counselor is different, the framework for each approach is also distinct. Rules within each framework offer insight into what is available for
someone looking for a helping professional. Knowing which might serve you in your personal pursuit toward success is helpful.
Coaching, counseling, and mentoring are all beneficial for clients.
Knowing the difference in the benefits may help someone choose which approach they would like to pursue.
In an ideal world, people would experience all three approaches to maximize optimal wellbeing. That rarely happens though, so here is a review of the benefits of each approach.
Differences Between Coaching and Counseling
Misconceptions about coaching and counseling are abundant.
There are indeed many overlapping areas, the most prominent being that they are both ‘helping professions.’
With a better understanding of the roles that each professional plays, a collaborative perspective may be forged. In fact, many therapists have made a move to practice both approaches.
The International Coaching Federation is exceptionally mindful of creating a delineation between coaching and counseling. The organization strictly outlines credentialing to avoid a coach performing counseling instead of coaching. No coach should ever provide unlicensed counseling, and good training will allow the coach to know the difference. While coaching can be therapeutic, it is not therapy. Every client should be made aware of this.
Proper training for a coach will also assist them in being aware when a client requires a licensed mental health professional and how to set up a process for doing so in their area of operation. A good coach will also have a positive working relationship with resources so that clients get served well and correctly referred as needed.
In turn, ethical counselors will understand the value of coaching and develop symbiotic relationships with coaches working in their area as well. This would also depend on the counselor’s approach; some approaches in counseling are similar to coaches in that they focus on solution-oriented change. There is room for both coaching and counseling in the service of helping others.
The coaching agreement can be more strict than that for counseling. This mainly occurs because counseling follows the medical model, and the agreement is inferred through insurance, etc.
Counselors inherently hold confidentiality and other parts of a coaching agreement as a part of their practice. Coaches must include their personal values and business expectations in their coaching agreement to protect themselves and their clients.
Another essential distinction between counseling and coaching is the expectation of privacy. Although, ethically, coaches are expected to maintain confidentiality for their clients, under the law, conversations could be compelled by a governing body. The law cannot compel a counselor’s conversations with a patient.
Another difference is that a higher level of self-disclosure is allowed in coaching. Dual relationships in counseling, such as meeting with a client for coffee, are taboo (Hart, Blattner, & Leipsic, 2001), but coaching relationships can often overlap. The protection of boundaries for a counselor is essential and is expected under licensing expectations. These boundaries are in place to protect both client and counselor in a therapeutic setting.
Coaching:
- Focus is prospective
- Orientation on solution and capacity for change
- Achievement focused/goal oriented
- Co-created
- Short term
- Certification and credentialing are strongly encouraged
- Not diagnostic
Counseling:
- Typically retrospective
- Client has decreased level of individual functioning
- May involve medication and collaborative care with a medical team
- “Why” oriented
- Long term, though this varies
- Theory driven
- Master’s degree required for license
- Licensing is required by law
- Typically generated through illness or dysfunction
- Diagnostic
- Healing for maladaptive behaviors
- Recovery from past traumas
- Relieving psychological suffering
- Sometimes covered by insurance
- Unfortunately stigmatized
- Offers guidance and advice
- Practitioner seen as an authority
- Explores cognition and psychological impact on wellbeing
What Is the Real Difference Between Coaching and Mentoring?
Mentors typically work with developing coworkers. Companies often assign mentor relationships, but they can also develop spontaneously. The role can also often be labeled as adviser. In most cases, experienced professionals who have seniority are paired with developing professionals.
Mentors give advice based on their personal and professional expertise. Meeting agendas are typically generated by the mentee, as well as development-based questions. The mentee will benefit from the relationship by choosing to follow the mentor’s path toward development.
The International Coaching Federation (ICF) defines coaching as “partnering with clients in a thought-provoking and creative process that inspires them to maximize their personal and professional potential”.
Coaches work with clients in a collaborative process. The agenda for each conversation is developed by both parties. Typically, a coach will have expertise in the coachee’s desired area of growth. However, as a coach is not expected to have all the answers, their expertise could be diverse.
Rather than giving advice, coaches gather information in the co-created process of change. A coach’s job is to ask questions from a curious stance that will provoke thought in a growth-oriented direction. Coaches see their clients as whole and having the answers inside of them. Together, pathways to new ways of being in the world are developed.
The field of coaching is diverse and covers many different areas of development. Coaches specialize in seeing the potential in their clients. There are many coaching tools that have been developed to aid coaches in providing a safe space for client change.
Coaching Benefits
Coaching benefits clients by creating space for them to move forward in the area of their choice. Certified coaches are skilled at co-creating pathways toward improved capacity for wellbeing, productivity, and goal attainment. This profession can serve people in business, parenting, relationships, health, finances, and many other areas.
Clarity is a significant benefit found by most coaching clients. Quality coaches walk with their clients on a journey toward self-awareness and collaborate on concrete action plans that move them forward. The process helps to create a new way of being in the world that allows clients to move over obstacles that have stalled personal and professional progress in the past.
Accountability is another benefit of coaching. This helps measure successful movement toward desired goals. Milestones set and reached invigorate clients on their path to successful goal attainment. The inclusion of accountability forces us to take more multi-dimensional views in our cognitive processing (Tetlock & Boettger, 1989).
With such a vast amount of information to process in a given time, most of us make self-judgments that utilize as few resources as possible (Corcoran & Mussweiler, 2010). Coaching creates space for more cognitive tools to be used, giving more accurate heuristics for self-discovery. It allows people to see beyond what is right in front of them in favor of the bigger picture.
Abundance and variation in coaching tools are additional benefits. As human beings differ so vastly, it helps to have a large pool of tools from which to draw. Trial and error in finding the right tool for each individual is possible because of this abundance.