While both coaching and counselling are practices dedicated to enabling you to create positive changes and outcomes in your life, it is important to make some distinctions. For example, life coaching is often attached to the measured success of key life performance outcomes as well as to behavioural goals and observable outcomes. On the other hand, counselling is more of an exploration into why you have the symptoms, behaviours and life patterns that you do. And to do that requires exploration into both the conscious and unconscious workings of your mind.

The best way to determine whether coaching, counselling, or a blend of both is best, is to think about what you would do if you entered a race car competition.  Would you need to hire an experienced driver to train and coach you? Would they be a passenger in the car? Would you need to get your car tuned up, repaired, or overhauled to such a degree so you could do the race? What is holding you back from competing at your highest potential?

The answer to the first questions is a coach, and the answer to the second questions is a counsellor. If you need both, then you need to find the right combination of professional or work with both a coach and counsellor as needed.

And for the record, counselling and therapy are truly interchangeable for those in the field, even thought “counselling” is often used for short term engagements while “therapy” is often used for engagements that go on over longer periods of time.