To live balanced lives, investing in relationships that enhance and enrich our experiences is essential. Both life coaches and counselors can provide a safe space for us to discuss our problems, fears, and aspirations, allowing us to show up as our best selves. In this article, we want to break down the key differences and highlight the core strengths in both practices.
What is life coaching?
Life coaches motivate, help strategize, and hold their clients accountable as they work to achieve specific life goals. Like a personal trainer helping you achieve your fitness goals, a life coach uses a variety of exercises to help you become stronger in your personal life.
Life coaching often uses or borrows therapy models like Cognitive Behavioral Therapy, to help clients reshape unhealthy thinking patterns. However, being a life coach requires no specific education or credentialing in such practices. There is also no ethics board or set of HIPPA requirements, so the structure of each session allows for more flexibility in practice and location.
What is counseling?
Counselors are licensed mental health professionals who can diagnose and treat mental health conditions. This requires a master’s degree for counselors and a doctorate for psychologists.
Counseling addresses underlying issues like trauma, mental illness, or unhealthy family dynamics, aiming to remove barriers hindering your progress toward goals. It can also proactively develop skills such as coping mechanisms, communication, healthy habits, setting boundaries, and achieving work-life balance. Contrary to life coaching, which targets specific goals and behavioral changes, counseling delves into root causes for profound healing and transformation.
What are some strengths of life coaching?
Like counseling, life coaching is a great way to improve your career goals, work on your health, or receive weekly accountability and motivation from an outside perspective. Life coaching can also help with stress management, basic parenting or leadership skills, and overcoming limiting beliefs. Life coaches are the perfect people to help you set your goals and practically achieve them.
The statistics are extremely encouraging when it comes to life coaching. Research says that 80% of people saw an increase in self-confidence after receiving life coaching. 70% of people saw an improvement in their work performance, relationships, and communication. And amazingly, 99% of people who have received life coaching were satisfied with their experience. People want to meet goals and achieve success, and usually, we just need a sounding board to get there.
Using an attachment model framework, it makes sense that any time you have a healthy relationship, your life will immediately and significantly improve. Often when we find ourselves in toxic relationships with friends, family, or romantic partners, it can be difficult to find a sounding board and encourager to achieve our goals. We were not meant to figure out how to live our lives alone, so when we open ourselves up to a positive and judgement-free human connection, like a life coach, that relationship can help us navigate and significantly enrich our lives.
What are some strengths of counseling?
While life can be a series of setting goals and achieving them, often there are hefty barriers in the way, and the only way to remove them is to face them. Each person will inevitably face a series of goal barriers, such as self-doubt, trauma, or mental illness, and counseling can help you identify and demolish those barriers. Life coaching uses the present moment choices and actions to impact the future. Counseling does the same but goes a step deeper by identifying and processing what past experiences keep you from reaching your current and future goals.
Often, counseling sessions involve exploring past life experiences to clear baggage, hurt, and pain. The goal of exploring and unpacking your past is to see how your specific life experiences affect and limit your ability to show up in the world as your truest self. This can include clearing old triggers using psychoanalytic therapy, which explores deeply buried thoughts, healing past trauma using EMDR (Eye Movement Desensitization and Reprocessing therapy), or utilizing a wide variety of other therapy modalities to heal the mind-body connection.
While life coaching can still be beneficial, counseling is required to receive a diagnosis and treatment for a mental health condition. Though it is still beneficial to have help identifying your thought patterns and managing your habits from a life coach, a counselor will be able to go deeper into the genetic cognitive barrier causing mental illness, such as what causes depression, bipolar disorder, and schizophrenia. Ultimately, the goal of counseling is to dig up the root so that you can have the awareness and tools to prune the branches.
What does God have to say about life coaching and counseling?
It is our job to be good stewards of the gifts God has given each of us. In Matthew 25, God uses a parable of a master giving money to his servants to get his point across: when we use the gifts he has given us, he will multiply them. When we seek out life coaching or counseling, we are taking the opportunity to be good stewards of God’s greatest gift to us: life itself. When we use our gifts to be better leaders, healthier in our careers, or stronger in our finances, we are not only being good stewards of our minds, but the material possessions God has gifted to us.
While the journey may seem overwhelming, we find solace in God’s constant presence as we engage with a counselor or life coach. Romans 8:38-39 assures us that nothing can separate us from God if we belong to Jesus. As reflections of God’s image, every facet of our lives is meant to mirror His character. Stepping into a path toward wellness, whether through counseling or life coaching, is an act of faith, trusting that God will accompany us and empower us to overcome the challenges we seek help for.
