Deep dive…

Along with my colleague, Ben Graham, we submitted a proposal to the UK ICF conference arguing that with the right kind of training and coaching format, the differences between therapy and coaching don’t need to be as rigid as they can seem. Here is the crux of our argument, for those who are interested in a deep dive into the nuance of difference:

Traditionally in most contexts, coaching has related to therapy through contradistinction. The ICF, along with many other practitioners and institutions, defines the two in this way:  “Coaching [is] partnering with clients in a thought-provoking and creative process that inspires them to maximize their personal and professional potential. Coaching focuses on visioning, success, the present and moving toward the future. Therapy emphasizes psychopathology, emotions and the past to understand the present, and it works more with developing skills for managing emotions or past issues than does coaching.”

Often, the differences between coaching and therapy are set up in contrasting terms: coaches work with the future, therapists with the past; coaches work with healthy clients, therapists with ill;  coaches work with the conscious mind, therapists with the unconscious; coaching work is time-limited, with specific outcomes, therapy open-ended.

In part, a focus on difference is needed - practitioners, consumers and regulators need to know which is being practiced or offered, and it’s important for coaches to know when to refer a client onto therapy. Even in contexts where similar aims of supporting people to live their fullest lives can be agreed to be held by both disciplines, what is often less explicitly said is that therapy aims to help people heal, and coaching does not. As Tom Henschel highlights in his 2017 post in Forbes, most corporate coaching engagements simply do not have sufficient time or spaciousness to undertake the more nebulous work of healing, and instead must focus on providing tools so that clients can ‘stay out of the [metaphorical] pothole.” The ICF’s 2016 Global Coaching Study shows that 53% of coaching worldwide is sponsored, which further supports Henschel’s argument - if your company is paying for you to have coaching, they are likely less interested in your long-term healing and growth, and more interested in you improving at your job right now. 

Through our experience of providing coaching through Sanctus, a model in which an organisation supports individual-led coaching (e.g. coaching goals privately and confidentially set by the person receiving coaching, not the employer), we have come to believe healing as well as growth can be included in the aim of coaching, whether open-ended or results-driven. Sanctus was born of practicing coaches who had trained as Gestalt therapists, and our experience has led us to believe that the sharp boundary between coaching and therapy and dearth of meaningful exchange and dialogue between the two has come at a cost to both industries and ultimately, the people in need of their services.

In this session, we propose to explore some of the areas where we feel coaching practices can be developed and made more robust in terms of safely working at a healing level with a wide range of clients. We will focus on the use of the coach’s personal process and experience of the relationship with the client for more impactful coaching work. We believe that coaching in this way can support growth and healing for clients at the level of self-process, which can be more transformative than work that remains at the content level, even within short time frames.

To provide a safe container for this type of coaching work - where clients are offered a broader invitation to explore their lived experience - coaches require a more extensive knowledge base than that traditionally provided by coaching trainings. They must be able to assess risk, recognise symptoms of trauma, and be familiar enough with psychological theory to be able to work with issues that can arise in a relationship where profound personal feelings are evoked (e.g. transference and attachment). We believe this knowledge can help coaches make more nuanced and informed decisions about which interventions to use in any given moment and when to refer on to other forms of support. In this session, we propose to touch briefly on these areas with an emphasis on self as instrument.