Coaching vs Therapy
I wanted to share with you a really interesting insight from yesterday’s session at Brendon Burchard’s certified high-performance coaching program.
Yesterday Brendon laid out the distinction between coaching and therapy. If you’ve ever done any kind of coaching or training, sometimes you feel like you’re more of a therapist. You’re kind of helping people through their problems, through their past and it can be exhausting. But what is therapy? Therapy is starting from the present and looking backwards to the past. Therapy breaks down what happened in your past to understand where your issues started and repairs and builds into the present.
With coaching you start in the present and you push people into the future. Instead of looking back, you ask your clients what they see for themselves in the future. You ask them where they want to go and help navigate them to achieve that goal. It’s full of hope, it’s full of progress and it is outcome-oriented.
At one point in time, we have all been a coach or a trainer. It is important to remember that in order to be a good and effective coach, we cannot get mired in conversations that spiral out of control, that look to blame, that look to excuses. It is very easy for a client who possesses a lot of fear to look outside of themselves and pass blame onto their past for being who they are today. What coaching does is it brings it back to what’s called agency. “Yes, some things have happened to you. But what can you do about it? How can you approach your next conversation differently?” Coaching propels a person to not dwell on their past but rather grow from it in the future.
Getting people to focus on their future despite their pasts is not always an easy task. First you have to get them to acknowledge that they’re trying to go somewhere. The second thing you need to get them to do is to acknowledge that they want it. Then what you do is operationalize it by helping them come up with their own ideas for how they’re going to get there.
Did you know there’s also a difference between consulting and coaching? Consulting is where you give the ideas, coaching is where you help the person come up with their own ideas and you guide the conversation. You might suggest some of your own ideas, but again it’s a fine art of trying to make them believe that they came up with it themselves.
Children are coached and consulted every single day, it’s what we try to do as parents. For example, my son is of working age, so I ask him if he’s thought about getting a job. If so, what kind of a job does he want to have? What kind of environment does he want to work in? Start helping your kids visualize some goals for themselves, because while school is amazing, it cannot parent our children the way we can. Schools don’t focus on the individual goals of their students because a school’s main goal is to ensure good grades for students. Good grades do not always translate into student success or happiness. That’s where we step in as parents. Help your kids avoid anxiety, help them find confidence, help them see that they can make progress towards something. When we feel in control, we feel that we can accomplish anything. It’s when we feel out of control that we feel lost. So, help your kids, help your clients, help your colleagues, help your bosses to feel totally in control and you can be an agent of change for them.
I hope you have a great day. Be awesome, be a coach to someone today. Help them see a future outcome and be a part of the process to help them get there. In the end, it will probably help you get what you want too.