What do you need: Coaching or Counselling?

A coach is someone who provides guidance to a client on their goals and helps them reach their full potential. A life coach can help a person to identify strengths, develop them, and identify personal and professional goals. Their role is to assist the coachee throughout the change process.

Ok I get that! But how is coaching different from counselling or mentoring?

Great question, and thank you for asking!
The answer depends on one’s goals.

Mentoring, is a form of professional growth in which a less experienced person seeks guidance, knowledge, and support from a more experienced or senior person. It is an advisory process where the mentor shares their knowledge, skills and/or experience, to help another to develop and grow.

A mentor’s focus is partly on compatibility with the mentee. The mentor and mentee might engage with each other through social or professional events to determine ‘fit.’ In most cases, the mentee must prove themselves worthy of a mentor’s attention. Outcomes from a mentoring relationship can shift and change over time. There is less interest in specific, measurable results or changed behavior and more interest in the specific professional career development of the mentee.

Coaching is structured and result focused. The outcome of coaching is specific and measurable, showing improvement or positive change in the desired performance area. A life coach is not your superior or advisor! The relationship is a non-judgemental and safe partnership that encourages thinking and introspection. And thinking is hard! In coaching, thinking is encouraged to overcome a situation and to optimize potential. A coach combines the art and science of the profession to deliver life-long transformation in a person.

Counselling resolves clients’ pasts. Coaching transforms clients’ Future. According to author and Certified Life Coach Dr. Lisa Marie Bobby: “The objective of counselling is to help people address and resolve problems that make them feel bad emotionally, or are impairing their ability to function well”. The biggest difference in coaching and counselling is the difference in approaches. Life coaches focus on creating a new life path to achieve certain goals. They help you introspect and help you find your solutions. They focus on the now and what is next.

Whereas counselors focus on specific problems in hand and look into emotional resolutions to past problems. A counselor may offer advice and guidelines to help the client follow a position to healing; a coach, on the other hand, works with the client to identify challenges and then partners with him or her to turn those challenges into victories, all while holding the client accountable and motivating and encouraging them to achieve their desired goals. In other words, Coaching Helps You Take Action and Counselling Enables You to Cope.

Interestingly, a certified professional life coach is the person that helps you unclutter and provide the clarity you require to decide on what is needed to move you forward, whether it be mentoring, counselling or coaching! Usually, this is done through a clarity call.

So when do you seek a Life Coach.

You seek a life coach when/if:

• You are surrounded with stress, feel stuck in life with a problem or an issue, not knowing how to handle it and feeling frustrated.
• You have low self-confidence, you are feeling low and lack motivation.
• You desire to be a better version of yourself and need that push to get you there.
• You need help to reflect on your next step, you are unhappy and unsatisfied in your job and want to change your job or your career.
• You have relationship issues, you want a better work-life balance.
• You want to improve your health and weight but keep failing at it.
• You lack self-discipline, you procrastinate and need help in planning and organizing your life better.
• You don’t know your next step in life right now and you need someone you can trust and to assist/handhold you.

In the end, the only person who knows what you need is YOU! It is time to stop faking it and start taking REAL actions towards the future you desire and the person you want to become.