A cynical take on coaching

It's supposed to be different from therapy. Is it really?

— What’s the difference between coaching and therapy?

— About £150/h.

This joke is from an interview with Laurence Barrett, an experienced coach and founding director of Heresy Consulting. I think this isn’t exactly what Laurence meant, so listen to the episode for the full nuance. However, this joke got me thinking. What is the difference between therapy and coaching?

I’ll try to answer this from the perspective of being a coach, but also from my experience of working with about five coaches during my CEO years and about as many therapists, too.

This question came up in every single coaching training programme I’ve taken. New coaches, inevitably anxious and insecure, which is a good thing — a new coach who thinks they know what they’re doing can be dangerous, — want to understand the difference between what they do and what therapists do.

Likewise, coaching course leaders are keen to stress the boundary between therapy and coaching to protect their clients from coaches attempting to do things they shouldn’t do, like treating depression.

And that’s where hand-waving starts. Every coach trainer I’ve seen address the question waves their hands differently.

Handwaving as an answer

Some say that it’s about orientation to the future. Therapy supposedly heals the past, but coaching focuses on what’s happening right now and the goals for the future. There’s a tiny grain of truth to this, but it’s also true that coaching can and does go into the client’s past when needed, and successful therapy can and does enable the client to function better in the present and achieve different results in the future.

Some say that it’s about the issue the client brings. If it looks like something that can be found in a diagnostic manual, like depression or obsessive-compulsive disorder, it’s a case for therapy. If it sounds like helping a well-functioning person function even better, it’s a case for coaching. Again, there’s a grain of truth to it. At the extremes, it’s easy: clinical depression => therapy, executive presence => coaching. The problem is that there are many clients in between who are facing questions that could be approached from either perspective.

One coach who trained me advised me not to try answering this question if a client raises it but instead invite the client to inquire what’s behind it. Are they just curious, or are they worried that a coach will try to use therapeutic approaches without being a licensed therapist? Or something else? Not a bad way to deflect a difficult question.

Three reasons it’s hard to draw the line

This question is hard to answer for three reasons: money, insecurity and lack of clarity on what we’re talking about.

Let’s start with money, which the £150/h joke was about. Coaches tend to charge more than therapists — 3x, 5x, 10x more per hour, and sometimes even more. Such a price difference prompts intense handwaving to explain how coaching and therapy are a world apart. At this point, the truth starts to get stretched like a pizza base.

Why do coaches tend to charge more? Part of it is the business model: fewer sessions per client instead of a weekly slot that can last for years. Part of it is that many coaches carefully position themselves as a business solution, meaning they feed from corporate budgets that are infinitely bigger than individual budgets. Part of it is their expectations: if a high-flyer used to an expensive lifestyle decides to go into coaching, they’ll go either at a high ticket or not at all.

But the bottom line of all of this is that the money question puts pressure on coaches to come up with creative and convincing answers about how what they do is not therapy.

The second reason is insecurity. Therapists are trained and licensed as such. Coaches are not. Anyone can call themselves a coach, regardless of whether they know what they’re doing or have any training or relevant experience, giving rise to a coach industrial complex.

Image credit: Less Foolish substack linked to above.

So, if coaching and therapy are sufficiently similar but therapists are properly trained and licensed, how do you justify being a coach without comparable training and experience? Well, by handwaving, explaining there’s a big difference between the two, of course.

But the biggest reason it’s hard to draw the line between the two is that we haven’t yet defined what therapy and coaching are. It’s easier said than done, given that many kinds of therapeutic and coaching approaches exist. Consider a therapist practising Internal Family Systems therapy and a coach doing “parts work”. Both are using tried and tested approaches of approaching different psychological parts of ourselves as if they were people living inside us in their own right. I can imagine witnessing a session with a client and not being completely sure if I’m witnessing an IFS therapist or a coach doing similar work.

Then, there are wild differences within each field. For example, cognitive-based therapy is very different from Jungian psychoanalysis, even though both are therapies. Yet, Jungian work often focuses on self-actualisation and personal growth rather than addressing any specific “problem," making it sound very much like coaching territory. The differences between different coaching approaches are even greater within the coaching field.

So, we effectively have two fields, which are different at the extremes but have significant similarities in the middle, and strong money-driven and insecurity-driven incentives to pull them apart a bit further than is, perhaps, warranted.

My own attempt at handwaving

I won’t attempt to give a general answer because I don’t have it. Without clearly defining coaching and therapy, I can’t tell what the difference is. Instead, I’ll explain what I have seen in my own work over the years.

As I’ve argued in an earlier essay, “On Therapy and Coaching”,

most challenges I see founders face are psychological in nature, even if on the surface they look practical: fundraising, co-founder conflicts, team restructuring etc.

Despite this, therapists can be ill-equipped to help startup founders navigate their challenges because they also have a strong practical component with which the therapist might not have experience. For example, a founder going through a difficult cost-cutting process or fundraising would benefit from working with someone who’s been there. Even when coaches don’t give advice, their experience helps them understand what’s happening for the client.

Coaches working with founders have the opposite problem: they usually have the experience they need to understand what’s going on for their clients, but they often lack the depth of therapists' training.

The biggest difference I see is the scope of work. As a coach, I always choose how to approach a particular interaction with a founder. Sometimes, the right thing to do is to focus on the feelings, doing somatic or mindfulness work that’s not too far from what a therapist would do. Sometimes, the right thing to do is to focus on the situation's practical aspects and help the founder problem-solve. Occasionally, the right thing to do is ask for permission to offer advice. In some cases, the right thing to do is to refer the client to a therapist.

This is what my own coaches did for me, navigating a wide range of questions with a wide range of tools, whereas my work with my own therapists has been more narrowly focused on what’s happening in my psyche rather than the boardroom.

Whether this difference in scope is worth those “£150/hour” depends on the specific client. In some cases, founders will be better off with a good therapist. In these cases, the £150/hour joke is not a joke. In other cases, they’ll need a specific coach's expertise.

However, whether you work with a coach, a therapist or both, the most important thing is to find the right person for you. The match between you two is probably more important than whether they practice therapy, coaching, or what specific modalities they have been trained to use.

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PPS If you haven’t yet, pre-order the Kindle version of my upcoming book, Startup CEO Succession: a Founder’s Guide to Leadership Transition, out in a week. If you’d rather get a printed copy, it’ll be available in a week without a pre-order.