What is the Difference Between Coaching and Counselling?

What is Counselling?

According to the NHS, counselling is a talking therapy that involves a trained therapist listening to a client and helping the client find ways to deal with emotional issues. Counselling is most often focused on issues in the past or present such as depression, anxiety, trauma, bereavement, infertility, self-esteem, or sexual identity issues (among many others).

The British Association for Counsellors and Psychotherapists (BACP) notes that a counsellor will not give their advice, opinions, or prescribe medication. Their role is to help the client to find their own solutions by talking through problems, offering different perspectives, and asking questions that will help to explore and open up the issues at hand.

Most counselling is conducted face-to-face (although with the Coronavirus pandemic, most counsellors are now also offering online counselling), and either one-to-one or in a group.

The majority of counselling is offered on a weekly basis, with sessions being 50-minutes long. Although some therapists might offer 30-minute, 45-minute, or 60-minute sessions, 50-minute sessions are the most common. Some therapists might also offer fortnightly sessions, but this might depend on the therapist or the particular client.

Generally and traditionally, counselling aims to get a person from a place where they don’t feel good to a place that they feel okay. For example on a numerical scale (which represents general emotion and ability to function), counselling might aim to get a client from a minus-fifty to a zero or twenty.

What is Coaching?

The International Coaching Community states that coaching is a professional relationship in which the “coach helps the client to achieve their personal best and to produce the results they want in their personal and professional lives.”

Coaching is often present- and future-focused, with coaches being focused more on particular niches. For example, you might go to different coaches for things such as relationship coaching, confidence coaching, career coaching, or executive coaching. Some coaches might focus less on a niche and be more of a general “life coach”, but they will still have some specialisms, much like a counsellor will be based on their own experiences and their professional experiences.

More often than in counselling, coaching is executed online or in some way virtually. It might be via scheduled video calls, emails, text messages, phone calls, or a combination of the above. Executive coaching is probably the most likely to be conducted in-person, as the coach might be based in your company or office.

The frequency and length of coaching depend on the coach and client, more so than in counselling. In counselling, there is somewhat of an “industry standard” that some choose to deviate from in terms of how long sessions are and how often they occur, whereas in coaching this depends much more on the type of coaching and the way that the coach chooses to work.

The coach might choose to do fortnightly video calls with various check-ins during the week via text or phone call. Or the coach might do monthly video calls, weekly phone calls, and daily text messages - for example.

Generally and traditionally, coaching aims to get a person from a place where they feel okay to a place that they feel great. For example on a numerical scale (which represents general emotion and ability to function), coaching might aim to get a client from a zero or twenty to one hundred.

What is Psychological Coaching?

As mentioned, there are many niches within the world of coaching which a coach may choose to specialise in and/or offer to their clients. I, for example, integrate psychological coaching into my therapy practice, where appropriate.

The way that I see psychological coaching is that it is slightly more directive than traditional counselling (which is more about listening and exploring), but not as directive as coaching (which is often more about the coach sharing their expertise.

When I integrate psychological coaching into my practice, I am sharing psychological theory and tools which apply to what my clients are bringing into the session - when I think this might be helpful. It is not always helpful, for example, if my client is emotionally fragile, it is not a good time for me to excitedly share theories and research into what they are talking about, but if my client is questioning why a particular thing has happened, it is then more appropriate.

For example, if a client is explaining to me how a relationship started, progressed, and then broke down and is explaining that they don’t understand what they did wrong, it might then be appropriate for me to share information about how narcissists conduct themselves in relationships, or to teach the client about cycles of abuse and how that might be causing them to blame themselves. Obviously, this depends on the content of what the client has spoken about, in terms of what actually happened in the relationship.

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