What is Therapeutic Coaching?
The Thriving in Complexity program offers a hybrid therapeutic coaching approach to personal work. Therapeutic coaching is an approach to personal change that harnesses the different but complementary powers of coaching and psychotherapy in a single way of working.
In this post, I will break down the difference between therapy and coaching and describe the key characteristics of Therapeutic Coaching.
How are Therapy and Coaching different?
Curious humans seeking to work with me often feel unclear about the difference between coaching and therapy, and even less clear about which approach might best address their needs.
Therapy usually focuses on relieving distress by healing trauma, managing anxiety or depression, resolving inner conflicts, changing unhelpful patterns of thought and behaviour, dealing with relationship challenges or fashioning new personal narratives. The goal is usually to help you live a more fulfilling life today.
While in therapy we may seek to understand the cause and impact of certain patterns of belief and behaviour, and to shift those patterns, in coaching the focus is on closing the gap between the present and a future goal. The coaching process uses dialogue, powerful questions, coaching techniques and accountability to guide people toward achieving goals so they can live a more fulfilling life tomorrow.
Coaching is a largely future-orientated process that enables people to identify personal and professional goals and why these goals are meaningful and help map out the best route to their destination. Coaches often support their clients to identify personal strengths, qualities and values that can be further cultivated and applied in response to opportunities and challenges.
What do Coaching and Therapy have in common?
Coaching and most psychotherapies share a common belief in each person’s ability, given the right circumstances, to live a constructive life and to continue developing across the lifespan. Coaching also shares with some therapies (particularly with existential-humanistic modalities), a belief that each client is the expert on their own experience and that the practitioner’s role is not to interpret, educate, or advise, but rather to facilitate awareness.
Both disciplines understand that awareness is the foundation of responsible, constructive living. When clients have greater self-awareness and complementary tools, practices and techniques, clients can better differentiate themselves from past experiences, traumas, and self-limiting beliefs and behaviours to make choices that better serve them.
Where the two meet: Therapeutic Coaching
Therapeutic coaching is predominantly present and future-orientated. Like therapy, it furnishes a relational space for a deeper exploration of the self than is generally found in coaching. Like coaching, there is still a focus on future goals, actively crafting a more fulfilling life and committing to change.
Therapeutic coaching may at times involve exploring the past to understand how developmental experiences may continue to shape how you habitually think, feel, behave and relate to others and yourself. In therapeutic coaching, this type of exploration is tied to understanding and shifting particular resistances or blockages that are preventing you from achieving goals.
As an internationally accredited coach and PACFA-accredited gestalt psychotherapist, Manav understands the nuances and value of both therapy and coaching in personal transformation. The Thriving in Complexity coaching program seamlessly weaves together the depth of therapeutic exploration with the future orientation of coaching so that you can clear the path to a more fulfilling life and walk it.