Coaching vs. Therapy

In today's health and wellness world, there are a wide variety of services being offered, but not all of them are fully understood. Most people understand what therapy is nowadays, but coaching still remains a bit elusive. What is coaching exactly, and how is it different from therapy?

On the surface, coaching and therapy look very similar. You sit with another individual who serves as your facilitator for clarity and healing. Both are grounded in psychology, but they each have different strategies and goals.

Both are helping you to unlock your psyche, but therapy is more trauma- and past-experience-based, and coaching is more based in "where are you at today and where do you want to be tomorrow?" Coaching works on unblocking your limiting beliefs to create space for you to reach your goals.

Why I decided to become a coach rather than a therapist:

As a child, people would always ask me: “Do you want to follow in your mom's footsteps and be a therapist when you grow up?” My answer was always very clear in my mind: no, but something similar. I knew I wanted to be in a people-facing and healing-centered profession, but something about therapy never really called to me. 

Perhaps it was that my own feelings were too big for me to handle myself. I couldn’t imagine making my life’s work centered around other peoples’ feelings as well. The heaviness of therapy seemed too much for me to handle. However, I found a route that is much more positive and strengths-focused.

I’ve always been a natural cheerleader, cheering on not just my friends and teammates, but anyone that I crossed paths with. I wanted everyone to see and feel the potential I saw and felt in them.

I didn’t know that Coaching existed. And even after I heard about it, I had no idea what it consisted of or how powerful it could be—until I experienced it for myself.

Here it was: the magic formula I’d been waiting to find my whole life! Coaching: 30 minutes of talking to someone in order to learn more about yourself. 30 minutes of having someone be your sounding board as you get to process where you want to be and what’s been holding you back. 30 minutes of self-exploration, self-discovery, and most of all, self-love.

I always was frustrated when people would say, “the key is to learn to love yourself.” Great, but how does one do that??

Well, it turns out: it’s a journey. But one great step to starting that journey is coaching. It is 30 minutes that you allot for yourself to focus on just yourself, your health, your goals, and how to better show up for yourself. This is the stuff that truly matters, but that we rarely prioritize for fear of being too "selfish." I think our world today could actually benefit a lot from more people putting on their own oxygen mask first before helping others with theirs.

And the best part about coaching is that there is someone there along the way with you, walking you through the whole process. A coach is not someone who points out what you’re doing wrong and has you strive for perfection, but they are someone who sees your strengths, encourages you to pursue your dreams, and believes in you. They see your potential, and they help you to see it too. Coaching allows you to connect again to your own light within.