How is coaching distinct from other service professions?

Professional coaching is a specialised service that focuses on an individual’s life in areas like goal setting, outcome creation and personal change management. To understand what a coach is, it can be helpful to look at coaching apart from other professions that provide personal or organizational support.

• Therapy. Coaching and therapy are different in several ways. First of all, coaching is a profession that supports personal and professional growth and development based on specific outcomes wanted by the individual. These outcomes are linked to personal or professional success. Coaching is future focused, and forward-moving. Therapy, on the other hand, deals with healing pain, dysfunction and conflict within an individual or a relationship between two or more individuals. The focus is mainly based on resolving past issues which affect an individual’s emotional functioning in the present. It looks at improving overall psychological functioning and looking for more healthy ways of dealing with present life and work circumstances. Results of therapy often include improving an individual’s emotional/feeling states. While positive feelings/emotions may be part of the outcome from coaching, the main focus is to create actions and strategies to achieve specific goals in one’s work or personal life. The emphasis in a coaching relationship is on action, accountability, and follow-through.
• Consulting. Consultants are used by individuals or organisations to access areas of specialised expertise. While consulting approaches can be wide and varied, it is recognised that the consultant finds issues and offers solutions. In general, the assumption with coaching is that individuals or teams are capable of generating their own solutions, The coach provides support, with discovery-based approaches and frameworks.
• Training. Training programs are based on working towards certain learning outcomes as set out by the trainer or instructor. Though outcomes are clarified in the coaching process, they are set by the individual or team being coached with guidance provided by the coach. Training also assumes a linear learning path that coincides with an established curriculum. Coaching is less linear without a set curriculum plan.
• Athletic Development. Though sports metaphors are often used, professional coaching is different from the traditional sports coach. The athletic coach is often seen as an expert who guides and directs the behaviour of individuals or teams based on his or her greater experience and knowledge. Professional coaches also have these qualities, but it is the experience and knowledge of the individual or team that determines the direction. Additionally, professional coaching, unlike athletic development, does not focus on behaviours that are being executed poorly or incorrectly. Instead, the focus is on identifying opportunity for development based on individual strengths and capabilities.