Coaching

What is Coaching?
There are many different definitions of coaching in print right now, as the coaching profession is being defined. Read the four definitions below. How will you answer when someone asks you, "Just what is coaching?"

How do we distinguish between doing therapy and doing coaching?
The generalizations below – over-generalizations, we realize – are offered to support you and your clients in knowing how to tell the difference between Therapy and Coaching. There is a great deal of overlap, particularly in the techniques that therapists and coaches use. However, whether you are doing coaching or therapy is less defined by what you are doing than by what the client understands the work to be.

To be doing coaching, the client (and whoever is paying for the services) must know that she/he is engaged in coaching and have a clear understanding of what coaching is. If you are accepting insurance reimbursement and are offering a medical diagnostic code as a description of a disorder that the client has, then you are not coaching. You are either doing counseling or therapy, but what you and the client are engaged in is not coaching.