Counseling life coach

Counseling vs. life coaching - Counseling Today

The relationship between professional counselors and life coaches is sometimes akin to that of stepsiblings. They are loosely connected because they share the same family name — “helping professional.” And because of that name, those outside the “family” sometimes link the two (like it or not).

However, like stereotypical stepsiblings, although counselors and life coaches are familiar with each other and even share some similar traits, they are sometimes prone to less positive feelings of competition and, at times, distrust.

According to interviews conducted for this article, many professional counselors and life coaches agree that they can coexist — even flourish — and that clients will be better off if both services are available from well-trained practitioners. They generally agree that coaches should be certified through a strong, formal process that requires ample amounts of study and experience. And it is broadly believed that there are limits to what life coaches can and should do with clients, with both sides agreeing that coaches should refer clients to a therapist if a significant psychological problem is discovered.

There is, however, often a larger divide when the discussion turns to how coaching and counseling are defined and what each profession offers.

Coaching advocates say they provide a distinct service that helps clients work on their goals for the future and create a new life path. They say counselors spend more time examining the past, looking for solutions to emotional concerns and seeking a diagnosis required by insurance companies. Coaches suggest that the relationships they establish with clients are also more collegial in nature. Coaches and clients work in a less structured environment as a team rather than setting up a “doctor-patient” relationship.

Lynn Mitchell, a business executive and management consultant for nearly 20 years, is working on a master’s degree in counseling in Chicago but wants to be a life coach. She compares coaching with services provided by personal trainers, nutritionists or massage therapists, who help people with health concerns. “There are a lot of people trying to cope with life adjustments, anxieties and personal challenges,” says Mitchell, a member of the American Counseling Association. “Coaching can help, and there is something positive and preventative about it. Wellness is a trend, and coaching is part of it.”

Not all professional counselors, however, necessarily see the distinction. Although acknowledging the value of what properly trained life coaches offer to clients, many counselors maintain that coaches are simply utilizing theories and techniques taught to every counselor as a matter of course.

“We can do anything a coach can do. It is part of our training, and it is part of how we work with clients,” says Sue Pressman, president-elect of the National Employment Counseling Association, president of Pressman Consulting in Arlington, Va., and a longtime member of ACA. “There are coaches who go through good training programs. I’m sure they are skilled and effective, but that is not to say that counselors aren’t, nor that we don’t offer these services.”

Pressman believes professional counselors need to better market the services they are already qualified to provide that allow them to help individuals in the same way as coaches. “Good coaches should come out and make it clear they are not counselors and refer people for the proper services,” she says. “And it is also only fair that good counselors be encouraged to say that they do coaching.”

Larry Pfaff, an ACA member and associate professor at Spring Arbor University in Spring Arbor, Mich., was in private practice as a counselor for 20 years. He has been vigorous in raising concerns about the coaching profession, particularly when he served on the Michigan Board of Counseling. Based on his study of different websites for coach training and services, Pfaff believes many coaches are not adequately trained and might essentially be practicing counseling without a license.

“There are some good training programs out there, and coaches are often doing some good stuff and meeting important needs,” he says. “But there are also a lot of programs that don’t require much more than a few weeks of training.” Pfaff adds that he is also often cynical about the success some life coaches proclaim to have. “I think a lot of it is a placebo effect,” he says. “Clients pay money — and often a lot of money — to coaches, so they think they must be better.”

Despite these differences of opinion, most of the individuals contacted by Counseling Today agreed on one thing: A future in which life coaches and professional counselors can learn to coexist and collaborate is best for both professions — and their clients.

What is coaching?

The International Coach Federation (ICF), which claims to be the largest coaching credentialing and support organization in the world, defines coaching as “partnering with clients in a thought-provoking and creative process that inspires them to maximize their personal and professional potential. Professional coaches provide an ongoing partnership designed to help clients produce fulfilling results in their personal and professional lives. Coaches help people improve their performances and enhance the quality of their lives. Coaches are trained to listen, to observe and to customize their approach to individual client needs. They seek to elicit solutions and strategies from the client; they believe the client is naturally creative and resourceful. The coach’s job is to provide support to enhance the skills, resources and creativity that the client already has.”

Patrick Williams, a psychologist for 28 years who moved into the coaching profession in 1990, helped to found ICF in 1995. He sees coaching as an “evolutionary step” among the helping professions and believes coaching’s definition and boundaries will become clearer with time. He further says that coaching is “the hottest trend to hit the self-improvement business” and regards coaching as being clearly rooted in well-accepted theory.

“Adler and Jung saw individuals as the creators and artists of their lives and frequently involved their clients in goal setting, life planning and inventing their future — all tenets and approaches in today’s coaching,” says Williams, who also points to Carl Rogers’ work with client-centered therapy as a “significant precursor to coaching. ” He says coaching was born of advances in the helping professions that were then blended with consulting practices and organizational and personal development training trends. Coaching takes the best of all those approaches, he contends, to provide a new type of assistance.

An ACA member, Williams is likewise a strong supporter of counseling and does not believe that the emergence of coaching poses a threat. “Traditional therapy will not become extinct but will increasingly offer help primarily to those who need clinical services,” he says. “Therapy is about uncovering and recovering, while coaching is about discovering.”

Edward Colozzi, a career development expert and author of the book Creating Careers With Confidence, says although coaching has its limitations, its practice harkens back to times in many cultures when spiritual leaders, shamans, mentors or others in the community offered informal guidance. “It is, in a way, a back-to-the-future paradigm shift,” Colozzi says. “A life coach is like a mentor — a person who joins us on a journey. Many people have performed that role in the past. But in a society such as ours that starts to have rules and regulations … that may be where counseling was born. Now, perhaps, we are seeing a return to something more basic.”

In the early 1970s, Colozzi says that he, along with others, pioneered “career life” counseling, which may have been the precursor to coaching. Today, the distinction between the two is often described as a difference in thinking about the significance of the past.

“Coaching is more focused on the present and the future,” says Paula Padget Baylor, a graduate student adviser in Eastern University’s Counseling and Psychology Department in St. Davids, Pa. A trained counselor and coach who works in both areas and trains professional counselors to use their coaching skills, Baylor is an ACA member who has been in private practice for 10 years.

She explains that coaches generally work on four areas with clients:

Defining goals
Formulating a plan that will use the client’s skills
Holding the client accountable for progress
Providing structure, encouragement and support

“Through coaching, clients can learn how to use healthy and helpful ways of navigating through life,” she says.

What’s the difference?

Both professional counselors and coaches see similarities between the two fields, but also draw sharp distinctions. “There is a spectrum of need,” Mitchell says. “Currently, counseling focuses on moving people from a state of dysfunction to one of being functional. But there are many people who are very functional, yet maybe not highly functional or achieving their full potential. The only place they could turn is the self-help section of the bookstore. Coaching provides an alternative.”

“Coaching has a role, a narrower focus than counseling,” says ACA member April Summers, a counselor at a maximum-security prison in McLoud, Okla. Summers has herself used a coach and believes coaching is an important helping profession, although one with a limited reach. “It helps clients set manageable goals and reach them, especially someone who doesn’t know where to start or how to tackle a big change in their life,” she says.

Most counselors who contacted Counseling Today for this article said they see some similarities between coaching and popular counseling theory. Coaching’s emphasis on setting goals and focusing on the future reminds some of solution-focused counseling. Others see the work of Carl Rogers in coaching’s suggestion that clients themselves have the capability to find solutions to the issues that confront them.

But other counselors, such as Summers, are concerned by the prospect of coaches overreaching. “I think good coaching should start with the disclaimer that coaching is limited and that more serious, deeper issues may need therapy,” she says.

Peter Moskowitz, an ACA member who coaches health care professionals and is the executive director of the Center for Professional and Personal Renewal in Palo Alto, Calif., concurs that coaches need to understand the difference between the services they provide and counseling. “I do not take on clients who, in my judgment, have serious mental/emotional problems — problems such as substance abuse, major depression and personality disorders,” he says. “When I suspect any of those issues, I refer the client to an appropriate mental health professional for a thorough evaluation and resume work once the client is emotionally stable. ”

Stephanie Baffone, an ACA member and Licensed Mental Health Counselor with her own practice in Newark, Del., has worked with a coach personally and says she found the process helpful “but only in regard to setting life goals and working on some of the more superficial challenges I run into while working on those goals. From my limited experience, the opportunity for psychological exploration is not inherent in the life coaching process.”

Williams wholeheartedly agrees that coaches should steer clear of certain areas and be quick to refer clients to the appropriate mental health professional. And he doesn’t view the client bases for coaching and counseling as being interchangeable. Coaches work with healthy clients who are striving to improve their circumstances, he says, and counselors work with persons needing help and hoping to identify dysfunction or trauma to heal and resolve old pain.

“Counselors assume emotions are a symptom of something wrong; coaches assume they are natural and can be normalized,” Williams contends. “Therapists diagnose and provide professional expertise and guidelines, and coaches help clients identify the challenges, then work in partnership with clients to obtain their goals.”

Another difference? Progress is often slow and painful in counseling, but it is typically “rapid and usually enjoyable” in coaching, according to Williams. Again, he attributes this to the differences between the client base of each profession. “(Clients who seek coaching) aren’t usually coming with a dysfunction or because they are in pain,” he says.

That distinction is what drew Mitchell to coaching, where she hopes to provide “wellness counseling and personal coaching.” She draws the boundary line as such: “If you are ill, see a counselor. If you are focused on prevention and maximizing your emotional health, see a coach.”

Michael Walsh, president of the Counseling Association for Humanistic Education and Development, a division of ACA, says the boundaries may not be that clear. “Like many things in life, rarely are things so simple. Clearly, there are counselors who focus on prevention, maximizing emotional health and achieving peak performance,” he says. “The difference is that counselors also have the additional training to help clients when things are not going so well.”

“I think that both coaching and counseling can be an incredibly beneficial process for folks,” Walsh continues. “The key here is the training of the counselor or coach and the personal fit between the client and the counselor or coach. I would encourage folks to first be sure that any professional has the requisite training and credentials in order to ensure the quality of the services provided. This is especially important in fields in which there is limited regulation and oversight, such as coaching. Then, I would encourage folks to look for a good personal fit with the style, approach and training of the provider. We know, based on the literature in both peak performance work and in counseling, that personal connections often foster the greatest motivation toward success. ”

Straddling the line

Not every counselor would say they are focused on “dysfunction.” Many ACA members take a “wellness” perspective with clients and see their main purpose as helping individuals to reach their full potential. But as Williams points out, many people are reluctant to see professional counselors for any reason because there is still a prevailing notion that only individuals with serious problems seek out counseling or “therapy.” Young people, in particular, are much more likely to want to see a coach, he says.

Diane Bast, who received her counseling degree after 22 years in human resources and now practices coaching in Elm Grove, Wis., says professional counselors are often faced with a “mental health” label and an insurance reimbursement process that requires assignment of a diagnosis. “I see a lot of people in my practice who really want coaching and more direction, and they balk at having to fill out all kinds of paperwork implying mental problems,” says Bast, a member of ACA. “They want to talk about their careers and what is holding them back or causing them problems on the job.”

Joey Harman was a teacher before getting her master’s in counseling. She was working in a community mental health agency and in private practice when she decided to get her coaching certification through the MentorCoach program based in Bethesda, Md. Like Williams, she believes coaches have a unique role to play as helping professionals, primarily working with people who are generally healthy but still need support. Harman, an ACA member, says her understanding of basic counseling techniques makes her a better coach, and she still practices in both fields, although she keeps them entirely separate.

Pfaff believes most professional counselors are already qualified to also coach clients without additional training. “Counselors can use parts of what they had in training — some cognitive therapy and solution-focused work and a little Carl Rogers. Most counselors with very little other work can do (coaching). Eighty percent already are.” He says counselors simply need to do a better job of defining their expertise, highlighting their coachlike services and marketing themselves to the public.

But professional counselors who offer coaching services should understand that, legally, they are still practicing counselors. “Be aware that licensing boards do not necessarily differentiate between counseling and coaching activities,” says ACA Chief Professional Officer David Kaplan. “Your licensing board may well view your coaching as falling under their scope of practice. Therefore, you should fulfill all mandated state licensing requirements — for example, obtaining informed consent, reporting child or elder abuse, etc. — with your coaching clients just as you do with your counseling clients.”

Because of the lack of differentiation, professional counselors who conduct “coaching” can have complaints lodged against them by their coaching clients with state counseling licensing boards. In addition, coaching clients can sue counselors for malpractice and attempt to hold them to the standards of Licensed Professional Counselors, even if the counselor was providing services as a “coach. ” The bottom line, Kaplan says, is that counselors who identify themselves as “coaches” to clients must still maintain the same standards as professional counselors.

Coach training

Some professional counselors are using their high level of training and skill to also dip their toes in the coaching pool; others are concerned that too many unqualified or underqualified “coaches” are diluting the professionalism and true value of the helping professions. Pfaff, for one, complains that coaches charge considerably more than most counselors — $200 to $300 an hour — even though they don’t necessarily have the same level of training or experience. He suggests strict certification laws should be established for the coaching profession and that some coaches should be investigated for practicing without a counseling license.

Jason Newsome, director of clinical services for Family Counseling Connection in Charleston, W.Va., agrees. He claims there are no repercussions for ethical breaches in the coaching profession, no standards of practice and no guarantee of competence. “Life coaches are permitted to practice without a license,” says Newsome, a member of ACA and president of the West Virginia Association for Spiritual, Ethical and Religious Values in Counseling.

Newsome also believes that counselors have allowed “too many ad hoc services to be provided under the guise of counseling, diluting the value of the services we provide. As a profession, we have to be able and willing to stand up for ourselves.”

In the past, ACA has not addressed the issue of coaching, but President Colleen Logan says she believes it is now an issue to which the association should pay attention. “We’ll need to study it,” she says. “Certainly, coaching is a valuable service when offered by well-trained, caring people, but the public should be protected from those who aren’t qualified or those who offer counseling services they aren’t trained for.”

Williams and other coaches say the coaching phenomenon is market driven — that the public wants and needs this type of service. Coaching proponents also say that most legitimate training programs describe the boundaries of the coaching profession and make it clear that coaches should not offer counseling services. The ICF has three levels of
accreditation:

Associate Certified Coach — Requires 60 hours of coach-specific training and 100 hours of coaching experience with at least eight clients
Professional Certified Coach — Requires 120 hours of coach-specific training and 750 hours of coaching experience with at least 25 clients
Master Certified Coach — Requires 200 hours of coach-specific training and 2,500 hours of coaching experience with at least 35 clients

The ICF also sets objectives for ethical and professional behavior.

One program whose requirements for certification meet those set by ICF is Martha Beck’s Life Coach Training, which takes 39 weeks and costs about $6,000 for those wishing to be certified. Beck’s training for life coaches includes a prework homework packet that must first be completed, followed by six 90-minute classes, nine 60-minute classes and 15 75-minute classes, all taught by Beck, who holds a doctorate in sociology from Harvard University, has written and lectured broadly on coaching and is a contributor to Oprah Winfrey’s O magazine. All classes require completion of homework and include 25 students. Certification requires completion of 20 paid hours of coaching and passing a written test, in addition to being interviewed by Beck.

Williams’ program, the Institute for Life Coach Training, requires students to pass a 40-hour foundational course as well as a written exam. Other requirements include 50 hours of coaching, along with two 20-hour practicums with coaching sessions, an ethics class and 42 hours of elective courses.

Other coaching programs, however, require far less training. Pfaff and other professional counselors urge that something be implemented to ensure that coaches receive a set amount of minimum training. “My bigger concern here is that the next step might be a state legislature passing a coaching license law,” Pfaff says. “What’s to stop them from getting a 10-hour training program that would qualify them for a license? Then we will wish we had done something about it.”

Some counselors contacted for this article also said that, given some of the overlapping characteristics of coaching and counseling, they would like to see ACA play a guiding role in coaching’s future development, perhaps by stepping in to offer certification to coaches or by giving its blessing to some set of minimum standards. The main concern expressed by professional counselors, however, was that coaches need to be more closely regulated so they will not be tempted to cross the line and offer counseling services unless properly trained and certified.

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Jim Paterson is a school counselor in Maryland and a frequent contributor to Counseling Today. Contact him at [email protected].

Letters to the editor: [email protected]

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Brief perspectives

Coaching can take many forms, dealing with everything from financial or job concerns to issues with partners or unruly teens. Counseling Today contacted several professionals whose counseling experiences have informed their perspectives of coaching (or vice versa).

Peter Moskowitz, executive director of the Center for Professional and Personal Renewal in Palo Alto, Calif., coaches health care professionals, particularly in managing stress and “burnout issues” and making career changes. A physician and clinical professor of radiology at the Stanford University School of Medicine, Moskowitz is also a counselor. He is a member of both ACA and the Professional Coaches and Mentors Association and has a coaching certification from the Hudson Institute in Santa Barbara, Calif.
Marit D. Weikel was a licensed counselor and ACA member in Durham, N.C. But when she began coaching at a weight loss center, she felt she needed to be thoroughly trained in coaching techniques to work with “highly motivated clients who want additional support and accountability.” She eventually became a health coach. “Coaching is based on the belief that the client has the answers,” she says. “My job is to listen and to ask the right question.”
Robert Yourell, a San Diego-based ACA member trained in counseling psychology, provides coaching and consulting on a range of issues and has written and spoken broadly on self-help concerns. He contends that coaching can soothe a wide range of problems, including family issues, attention deficit disorder, preparation for anxiety-filled events, neurological problems, brain injury and excessive stress (in which he offers a program of stress-relieving sounds). Yourell also says that coaching can be critical to the process of recovering from mental illness.
Martha Atkins provided grief and loss counseling and founded and directed the Children’s Bereavement Center of South Texas, which now serves 300 children a month. An ACA member who has nearly completed her doctorate in counselor education, Atkins also recently finished coaching course work through the Martha Beck Life Coach Training program and began working with people who want to start a business in human services, which is her forte. “My clients got great things from counseling and wanted to do something that would help them move forward in a different way. They are delighted and elated with their progress, as am I. I’m having a blast,” she says.
Leslie Griffen, head of the Griffen Group in Lee’s Summit, Mo., is a veteran business executive who, after losing her job 15 years ago, decided to assist outsourced executives and others as they attempted to re-enter the workforce, helping them to find their fit and use personal benchmarks to move forward. A member of ACA who considers herself a coach, she believes she is qualified and experienced and wishes the counseling community would recognize professionals such as her for the work they do. “I am life qualified. I am experientially qualified,” she says. “I have helped hundreds of individuals to successfully move to new chapters of their lives.”
ACA member Nancy Duffee, a counselor in Columbus, Ohio, was trained as a coach and received coaching personally, but she returned to school to get her master’s degree in counseling. “I found early in my coaching career that many clients clearly had issues I felt unqualified to address, and I realized that my lack of foundational counseling and development concepts could potentially harm a client,” she says.

— Jim Paterson

Life coach vs. therapist: similarities and differences

One of the most common misconceptions about life coaching is that it is therapy in disguise – or worse yet –therapy from an unlicensed practitioner. In reality, life coaching is truly its own unique service designed to help ambitious achievers meet the outcomes that will bring them success and fulfillment in any and all areas of life. Here are some of the differences between a life coach vs. therapist and a basic guide for when each service is appropriate.

Defining terms: life coach vs. therapist

What is therapy? Therapy, also called counseling or psychotherapy, is a long-term process in which a client works with a healthcare professional to diagnose and resolve problematic beliefs, behaviors, relationship issues, feelings and sometimes physical responses. The idea behind therapy is to focus on past traumas and issues to change self-destructive habits, repair and improve relationships and work through painful feelings. In this sense, therapy focuses on the past and on introspection and analysis, with the hope of resolving past issues and creating a happier, more stable future.

What is life coaching? In life coaching, a client works with a coach who is not a healthcare professional to clarify goals and identify obstacles and problematic behaviors in order to create action plans to achieve desired results. The main way that a life coach vs. therapist works is that the life coach takes the client’s current starting point as an acceptable neutral ground and is more action-based from that point onward. A life coach enables the person receiving treatment to take control of their life and take action to steer it toward their goals.

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Differences between life coaches and therapists

Although life coaches and therapists occasionally help clients with similar problems, their work is not the same. Here are the main differences between a life coach and therapist.

Difference one:

Focus of the program

The focus of life coaching is one of the main things that distinguishes it from therapy. Life coaches identify and describe current problematic behaviors so the client can work to modify them. Therapists analyze their client’s past as a tool for understanding present behaviors. In other words, therapists focus on “why” certain behavioral patterns occur, and coaches work on “how” to work toward a goal.

Therapy will focus on your thoughts and feelings and how they are informed by your past. Life coaching may touch on these concepts as you break down your limiting beliefs and examine your blueprint, but its ultimate focus is always on the present and the future.

Difference two:

Goals of the program

When you look at a coaching vs. counseling practice, it’s important to recognize that counseling helps clients explore and understand their subconscious and unconscious mind. It aims to reach a deep understanding of behaviors and patterns with a goal of overall mental health. This is why counseling and therapy can be helpful for issues like depression and anxiety.

The goal of life coaching is to help you get “unstuck.” Life coaching is about action and results. Life coaches measure their client’s success with key performance indicators and specific behavioral outcomes. They’ll help you set SMART goals, provide accountability and celebrate your wins – all on the road to achieving your dreams.

Difference three:

Framework

While both life coaching and therapy use talk sessions with a trained professional. Many of the similarities in how they are organized end there. Therapy involves more unstructured sessions that are guided by the client as well as the type of therapy. Life coaching sessions are much more structured and focused on actionable strategies and visible growth.

The duration of the services also varies. Therapy tends to be a long-term commitment – many people go to therapy for years or even their entire lives. The main difference between a life coach and therapist is that a life coach sets clients up with the process and skills they need to eventually coach themselves. Life coaching isn’t meant to be forever. Life coaches also do not diagnose the people they work with, while therapists determine illnesses and pathologies so their patients can be clinically treated.

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Similarities between a life coach vs. therapy

While the answer to “What is therapy?” is very different from what a life coach does, there are some similarities. Both work to enable clients to make positive changes in their lives and become more productive. While therapists diagnose and treat from a healthcare perspective, not all therapy clients are ill; many healthy people seek the services of both therapists and life coaches. Therapists may work with specific results in mind, such as the cessation of a particular problematic behavior.

Despite occasional areas of overlap, the work and processes of therapists and life coaches are distinct.

When to seek out a life coach vs. therapist

Naturally, the decision to seek out a life coach vs. a therapist is a very personal one. It might help to imagine yourself getting ready to climb a mountain. You could either hire an expert sherpa and guide for your expedition or a doctor. Which will you choose? Which one will be most helpful during your specific journey?

If you are physically unwell or would be in danger if you even attempted the climb, a sherpa and guide wouldn’t do you any good. You need to be at a baseline level of good health before you can make the climb at all – if you’re not, you might need to see the doctor before trying something that challenging. However, if you’re healthy and just need someone to help you with climbing strategy, carrying the load of supplies and finding the best path, the sherpa and guide is the best bet.

Coaching vs. counseling is similar to this example. The therapist is the doctor. They get you well enough to take on major challenges in your life by exploring your mental and emotional well-being. The life coach is the sherpa and guide. They have an expert knowledge of your climb and can help you reach the summit.

A life coach offers guidance by helping clients:

✓ Clarify and achieve personal and professional goals

✓ Create business plans

✓ Work to improve communication skills

✓ Achieve financial independence and security

✓ Achieve a work/life balance

✓ Start a new business or growing a current business

A therapist, on the other hand, focuses their conversation on ways to:

✓ Recover from past traumas

✓ Explore why past relationships (business or personal) have been destructive

✓ Work through depression or anxiety that affects the ability to function at home or work

✓ Survive a divorce or loss of a loved one

In order to get the right kind of professional expertise, it is crucial to understand how a life coach vs. therapist are different. Do you need a therapist, or do life coaching services better suit you? Whatever you choose, remember that life coaching is more than a watered-down version of therapy. It is a dynamic discipline designed to help inspire people to achieve more than they believe is possible.

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Who is a life coach, how to choose one and what to expect - Career on vc.ru

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A life coach is a coach who helps to achieve results in life. We at Megaplan became interested in this direction when it turned out that several of our former colleagues had chosen this new profession for themselves. Together with them we will try to figure out what it is.

I came to coaching gradually. I was helped by David Yang, the founder of ABBYY. I then worked as a product manager, and he noticed that I structure processes well and bring order to chaos, I can “straighten out what is confusing”. Then my friends recommended me to Sberbank for the position of an Agile coach and I realized that this was mine. Then there was Avito, where I already have 100 teams. And at some point I just thought that my knowledge and skills can be applied not only in business processes, but also in life. I decided to test this hypothesis by working one-on-one with 20 people, and after the first successful results, I realized that the request is there and very strong.

Mikhail Sukhov, Agile Coach and Personal Consultant (former Megaplan Mobile Applications Product Manager)

Coaching is my second profession. Behind him is a great experience in journalism, writing, leadership. I came to coaching through a personal change: there were health issues that forced me to rethink my attitude to life and what I do. I began to study spiritual practices, psychology and neuropsychology, began to get to know myself better, and only when I figured out my questions, I began to work with people.

Dina Babayeva, Coach-consultant, integral therapist (former editor-in-chief of Megaplan mailing list)

Training program

Coaching is the art of assisting the development of another person. If you want to achieve certain results in your personal and professional life, then it’s like in sports: you need a coach who will help determine the vector of movement and suggest the right training program. Officially, a life coach does not teach life, cannot give advice. It helps to look at the life path from the outside, asks the right questions and helps to choose the direction of movement.

In 1974, Timothy Galwey rethought his skills as a tennis instructor and developed the concept of coaching in business. A couple of years later, Thomas J. Leonard noticed that the clients who came to him for advice on personal finance planning were actually looking for personal and professional growth. Both of these events were the starting point for the emergence of life coaching.

Although there are international associations and accredited programs for life coaching, it is difficult to define its professional boundaries. The Higher School of Economics believes that life coaching should be based on psychoanalysis. Erickson University coaching trains its graduates to work with problems in the present and not look for the cause of failures in the past. As a result, many specialists develop "rules of the game" based on their life experience.

Mikhail:

— I generated my program based on the business processes that I have been working with in teams for over 15 years. I use Scrum, strategic frameworks, Objectives and Key Results and many other business techniques. At the first stage of work, I help the client formulate a personal strategy for a year, three and ten years. At the second, guided by the strategy for the coming year, we formulate the goals of the quarter. On the third, we go into rhythmic work on weekly sprints, starting with planning and ending with a review of the sprint with a retrospective.

Dina :

— I developed my base through Ericksonian coaching and hypnosis, spiritual practices, body-oriented therapy. I work with a person in a complex way: not only with a specific problem, but also with his attitudes, inner world, body. My approach is about deep motivation, I am not one of those coaches who drives the client to the goal with a shovel. I help a person to understand what he really wants, what is his unrealized potential.

Professional standards

According to the standards of the international association of coaches ICF, a coach must have eleven core competencies. Among them are active listening, asking strong questions, designing actions, and others. The International Coaching Federation (ICF) has its own career growth: depending on the number of hours of practice and disciplines taken, you can get an associate, professional or master coach diploma. But this is the hierarchy of just one of the official schools. Each coach can choose the direction of his development and decide for himself how to measure professional success.

Mikhail :

- I hope to coach all my life. I like to work with business and people, leaders of teams, organizations. I like that I see growth points and can help people become happier, become the best version of themselves. I love my role in the supportive profession. In the future, I want to expand the contexts: I used to work with engineers, now with marketers, I try myself in supporting people with an IT education .

Dyn:

- I don't know yet if I'll be coaching for the rest of my life. The world is very changeable, it is difficult to predict something at this stage. I only know that there is no end point of personal change. At one time, I asked my teachers the question, when will I “pass the exam”. But this is a process: you remove the husk, layer by layer, then you look under a microscope - and there are more layers. And so on ad infinitum. It seems to a person: that's all now, I have solved all my tasks. Time passes and new ones appear.

Profession costs

Working with people is a subtle science. The principle of “do no harm” and the ability of the coach to remain impassive are very important. But coaches are people too, outside of the session they have their own problems, difficulties and anxieties. With close contact, their mood can affect the work, so they bear responsibility for personal difficulties not only to themselves, but also to the client. Professional coaches know that they themselves need to work with a personal coach.

Mikhail :

— The difficulties I face are the internal resistance of clients at the final stages. We quite easily define a strategy and form goals, but when the work becomes the responsibility of the client, where you need to work with sprints, fill in the tables, difficulties begin. Someone is lazy, someone is distracted, someone does not have a resource. Carrying a client is a very exhausting job, so for now I have limited my program to only the first steps. I plan a sprint, and then I release the person. After all, it is very difficult to give all the best at 100% and see that the result that the client has achieved is only 5% or even zero.

Like professional psychologists, coaches feel compelled to charge money for their services. This principle is partly based on the effect of lost deposits: we value more what we pay for, and therefore we will be more attentive to paid advice. But the amount for an appointment depends on the coach himself: there is no average price for services in a professional environment. Beginning coaches choose a starting price based on the advice of colleagues, and then gradually increase it in case of a new diploma or an increase in the flow of clients.

Dina :

— The shortcomings for me personally in the profession are the finiteness of resources and the financial ceiling. I can accept up to three clients a day, and I work with clients only three days a week, the rest of the time I run a Youtube channel, Yandex.Zen, I advise small and medium-sized businesses, and I organize field trainings. And no matter how hard I try, I can’t accept more people face-to-face. This means that I have to increase the cost of the session: the number of applicants increases and the price immediately increases. And this is a minus - few can afford such assistance .

Coach's Choice

Alas, coaching is not suitable for everyone: only people without mental illness can receive such coaching support. And also it is unlikely to be useful if the client has chosen an inappropriate style of training specifically for him.

Mikhail :

— My method suits people with a rational type of thinking. I have clear boundaries, boundaries, goals for the quarter, we set slots on the calendar and work with specific tasks. And I always have a safety precaution: I don’t go into psychotherapy. If I see that the problem lies outside my competence, I will never work with it, I can only advise a specialist who can deal with it.

A coach can help when there is inner tension. For example, they are not satisfied with the current work and want to change it, or they have their own goal-setting system, but they want to improve it and make it more connected. When there is state A and we want to move to state B. Of course, in most cases we do not know what this state is. Therefore, help is needed to clearly articulate it and develop a roadmap with guiding goals.

Dina :

- My method is not suitable for people who take antidepressants. With them, the hormonal background changes, and we are engaged in bodily therapy, so there may be negative consequences. I also don't work with people with schizophrenia, bipolar disorder, or other mental illnesses.

How do you know if you need a coach? It happens that we have a specific question, we are at an impasse and do not understand how to get out. Or, for example, we know exactly what we want, we are ready to take a step, but we don’t do it - the coach will help you understand why. Or we started a new project: at work or in life, but we doubt that we will reach the end. There are a lot of situations, but the idea to turn to a coach most often comes intuitively.

If a profession appears, it means that someone needs it. Coaches, like sports coaches, are needed to achieve concrete success, albeit not at the stadium, but in life. Some people lack the confidence to move forward. Some people just don't know which direction to go. And someone seems to be so successful that he has lost his purpose in life and he needs to understand himself in order to continue moving.

Have you ever resorted to the help of a coach: in your personal life, at work or to solve career problems? Write in the comments how it was - we will exchange impressions and recommendations. Or maybe you yourself acted as a coach or want to try?

With the accumulation of experience and knowledge, you often begin to transfer skills to others. This happens not only at work, but also in other areas of life, sometimes imperceptibly and unconsciously. Even in our boxing section, it’s the same: after a certain time, newcomers come, and you have been practicing for several years. One day, the coach asks to pair up with them and show, for example, how to defend against a side kick or how to hold yourself in a close kick. Helping others, repeating and explaining, you yourself develop.

Sergey Kozlov, CEO of Megaplan

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Profession: life coach. Natalia Tochilkina

PSYCHOLOGY / October 17

Head of the International Academy of Transformational Coaching and Leadership, practicing coach, host of educational programs0003

- How did you decide to get into coaching?

- In my case, fate intervened. I graduated from an economic university, and I was even recommended for graduate school, but something inside said: not mine. At that time, I ended up in a company that organized trainings, consultations, and even election campaigns. Seeing how psychology works in practice, I got so fired up that I went for professional retraining. I worked in parallel, I had small children, but I did not miss a single lecture. In the middle of my studies, Peter Vritsa, Ph.D., thinker and transformational coach, came to Russia. He led a program on effective business training. For me, all this seemed like a Chinese letter, but I really wanted to figure it out.

“I remember how we worked in small groups until 4 am, asking questions to understand human patterns”

went to study with him. I remember how we worked in small groups until 4 in the morning, trying to understand human patterns with questions.

Now I can smile as I remember, but then it was the door to a new universe. After training, Peter gave each student feedback. He asked me: "How long will you be an ordinary manager when you have the potential for more?" I seemed to wake up after this question, because I had never thought about myself like that before. Now I would call it reflective feedback that expanded consciousness. Thus began my transformation - both personal and professional. I have been coaching for 15 years. I realized a long time ago that helping people is really what I want most in life.

- Tell us about your typical customer. Who comes to you?

— There are many different directions in coaching. I am engaged in life coaching, I also accompany the course on executive -coaching, but my soul, my passion, my love is in life. Both men and women come to me. Typical portrait: 27-35 years old, with higher education, working, quite successful/successful in business, but with a lot of unresolved issues. If we simplify and scale a typical request, then women come to me in order to return to their feminine nature, to feel their destiny and embody it in work and personal life. Men come to learn how to use their masculine qualities, especially in relationships. So my expertise is the relationship between a man and a woman.

- Why do they go with this request not to a psychotherapist, but to a coach?

“Indeed, life coaching has a lot of overlap with psychotherapy in terms of methodology and practice. ”

— Indeed, life coaching has a lot of overlap with psychotherapy in terms of methodology and practice. The difference is that the therapist helps a person to heal the inner pain that seems too big and prevents them from moving towards the goal, and the coach, together with the client, is looking for a way to use this pain for their own good.

For example, a woman - "a man in a skirt" - declares that relationships are impossible for her, because every man is perceived as a rival. In many ways, this attitude is related to what happened in the past, but the coach will not stir up old injuries. Instead, he will help the client see the feminine qualities that she has and establish a new connection with them. As a result, she will be able to perceive her path not as a curse, but as a variation that can be changed while remaining herself. This is not an easy task, but with the help of coaching tools, you can see and reveal new facets in a person.

— What knowledge does a coach need to meet a client with himself?

- You need to know the basics by which the human psyche works. Without this understanding, it is pointless to get into the most complex system that our universe has come up with. As for the rest, there is no end to coaching: on the basis of psychological education, knowledge from different areas can be superimposed, from NLP and Ericksonian hypnosis to Taoist practices. The client comes in so that the coach truly understands him and reflects this understanding so that he himself eventually understands himself.

“The client comes in so that the coach truly understands and reflects this understanding so that he eventually understands himself”

As James Baldwin wrote, “not everything you encounter can be changed. But nothing can be changed until you face it." The coach must know that the person has the potential to achieve his goals. And the tools that will help to actualize the hidden are left to the choice of the coach, there is no “mandatory program”.

— Now coaching is quite popular. Naturally, there are many profanations. Is there a recipe for distinguishing a good coach from a bad one?

- It seems to me that normal human criteria apply here. First, the shoemaker must be wearing boots. When you meet a coach, your intuition will tell you if he is congruent, that is, if what he says matches the way he lives. It is worth asking about his life and work: how successful is he himself in what he is going to help you with? Secondly, coaching is an adult-to-adult relationship, not a hierarchical structure. The helping person should not be seen as either a guru (above) or one of the consultants I pay money to do something for me (below). It is very important to look at how the coach can maintain an equal position, recognize the client's expertise in his field and be an expert in his own.

— What should a coach do to develop expertise?

— Of course, a lot of practice. Also give honest feedback to yourself: what you did, what you didn’t do, what you can do differently next time. It is better when there is a competent supervisor: he can guide, help, give feedback and show how you are growing. Endless study and self-development is also normal. The coach must be able to find a balance and use their complementarities such as ego and soul, pride and humility. In coaching, this is the most important thing - to be able to apply both parts so that they can help. It is impossible to stop in development in any case. It is worth freezing once, and exactly the client that you cannot understand will come to you.

— Does it mean that clients also develop a coach?

"A coach's client is the best teacher because coaching always makes the invisible visible from both sides"

- Mandatory. A coach's client is the best teacher because coaching always makes the invisible visible from both sides. The fact is that each person has his own pattern, part of which he is aware of, and part of which is not.

In our professional slang there is the word "napatterning" - this is a meeting of unconscious parts of the patterns of two people. One does something, the second “mirrors” him, and the first one starts to get mad, not understanding what is happening. The consequences of patterning can be very different, from complete denial to awareness and transcendence. From the inside, this process is emotional and complex, and from the outside - incredible beauty. I run a coaching course and see this when students practice with each other.

— Don't people become coaches just to make good money?

— Probably, like a teacher, like a student. From my point of view, the financial side is important, but I have never worked just for the sake of money. For me, it is more valuable when a person’s understanding of the situation changes, old beliefs that did not allow reaching the goal collapse. When you watch a client transform and achieve what they wanted, money is seen as just a means to evaluate my work, but is not at the forefront. Students sometimes ask how long it will take them to recoup their investment in their studies. The question is fair, but as if not from that level. "How long will it take me?" sounds like "When will the universe finally give me back what I put in?" . Rather, it is worth asking about the balance of "take - give." If you only invest money, you are unlikely to get much. If you invest knowledge, soul, empathy, effort, passion and desire to help, the return will be appropriate. Clients feel whether they come to the coach as a gardener determined to plant a seed in the mind, or as a person for whom this is a source of income.

- Thank you for clarifying, because this issue really worries a lot of people.

“People don’t pay for a specific coaching time. They pay for what you can give”

— Yes, I actually heard a lot about colleagues who are concerned about how to promote their brand, how to make money. It seems to me that brand promotion is not based on money, but on what uniqueness and honesty you bring. People don't pay for a specific coaching time. They pay for what you can give. Coaching is a giving profession.

- To give a lot, you need to take somewhere. How to restore a resource?

This is a very good question. When you work with people, a lot of energy comes out, and it is not always possible to return it back. Sometimes it is not even possible to immediately detect that the energy is gone. You work, you work, and then once - and you get sick, the body says: "That's enough, enough for the next week." For me, the most important thing is to listen to yourself and feel how the resource is depleted. A coach can only help when he himself is at the resource.

“A coach can only help when he is in a resource”

Meditation and curiosity help to recover. You have to follow what is interesting. Today you may want to watch an entertaining film, and tomorrow you may want to read a professional book. One is not better or worse than the other. Only if you follow your inner impulses can you truly recover.

- If you summarize your fifteen years of experience, what is the most important thing in the coaching profession?

- For me, this is inner freedom. Clients appear with whom there is a development direction and a contract, but there is no specific plan. I don’t know how the work will go, in which session the limiting belief will come up, what exactly I will have to face. And this is most motivating and gives you the opportunity to use your skills almost every minute. The same freedom applies to professional development: there are no limits in it. Of course, the temptation to spray is great, because there are so many interesting things around! That is why inner freedom comes with inner discipline, and one must be prepared for it. A coach who has learned to build life and fill it with various events for his own benefit becomes like a strong, beautiful bird that can fly in any direction.

Interviewed by Maria Krasheninnikova-Height

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