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Coaching and Psychotherapy
Coaching and Psychotherapy have a lot in common, particularly if you seek psychotherapy for your own personal growth. And the skills that a coach and a psychotherapist need are also very similar, such as good communication skills, good calibration skills and a deep understanding of how the mind works and what is means to be a human being. So what is the difference?It is often thought that coaching is something you mostly do on the telephone and it is future oriented and goal oriented, whereas psychotherapy is done face-to-face (or with the client on a couch!) and is past oriented, seeking answers to why-questions. At Human Communications Centre these distinctions have no meaning. We practice psychotherapy on the telephone, we use therapeutic approaches in our coaching and most of our work is present and future oriented, although we may well find it useful to work on past experiences both in coaching and psychotherapy if it serves a purpose for the client's present and future. Psychotherapy, furthermore, is often seen as something you need when you are mentally ill (which by the way seems to be something embarrassing as opposed to having a flu), whereas coaching is seen as a fashionable thing for the high-flyers. Again, we don't make that kind of distinction. We may coach people to lose weight and to get out of their depression - and we practice psychotherapy on executive high-flyers to help them perform better at work and in their private life. There are times when it is necessary to draw a clear line between the two, such as the clinical cases in psychotherapy (and the ethical and professional guidelines we need to follow may differ). However, even in these cases coaching can be a very valuable tool. So, whether you want coaching or psychotherapy is entirely up to you! If in doubt, ask us and the choice will always be yours.
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Copyright © 2002
Human Communications Centre
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