Lasting Change blog posts

Recently, I led a discussion with coaches at AIIR Consulting where we looked at the relationship(s) between coaching and psychotherapist. As an executive coaching who still has an active psychotherapy practice, this is a topic which has interested me for over 20 years, when I went back to graduate school to become a psychotherapist and started also reading and hearing about coaching as an additional way to work with clients hoping to change.

It's possible that there is a niche for clients who come to coaches or therapists for help on how not to change, but so far, all of my clients have come either because they want to change or because (sometimes) someone else wants them to change. So, coaches and therapists should have some theories about how to help people change, and I think that it makes sense that there would be significant overlap between the theories that coaches and therapists use, whether or not they are aware of that.

So, here are some key points from our discussion:

• In a world where there are types of coaching such as "gestalt coaching", "psychodynamic coaching", "solution-focused coaching" (each of these coming from forms of psychotherapy), it makes sense that there is at least some overlap
• There can be a greater difference between different approaches to coaching, or different approaches to therapy, than between some forms of coaching and some forms of therapy
• On the one hand, coaches operating outside of their competence can do harm (which we want to avoid) yet on the other hand, coaches might underestimate how much they might help, especially when they have already established a trusting relationship with a client
• However, coaches often don't know what they don't know, increasing the risk of getting too close to the edge of a dangerous cliff without clear visibility, or staying further back than they need to, "just in case". Coaches need help in understanding where the (blurry) lines are
• There are a number of reasons that coaches have been taught that there are clear distinctions between coaching and therapy. It can be tempting to take this for granted without looking at the various reasons that this has been the position of some coaching and training organizations
• There is a rich history of studying the key factors in successful psychotherapy and it seems to come down to the relationship, trust and the therapist actively soliciting feedback and taking it seriously, not the type of therapy or a number of other factors that were considered. It would make sense that this would be true for coaching as well
• When one of the goals of a coaching engagement is to help create the conditions for lasting change, superficial coaching that doesn't consider and, when appropriate, explore where assumptions and beliefs that might get in the way of change came from seems unlikely to lead to sustainable change. We might think of this as going "as deep, and only as deep, as necessary" until / unless we are reaching a point where therapy would be a better fit

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