What is the difference between a Life Coach and a Therapist?

Helping you decide: do you need a Life Coach, Counsellor or a Therapist?

Let’s look at several case stories together, showing the interventions a Life Coach would do, and what the work with a therapist would entail. By reading through these different options, hopefully you will get a real feel of what resonates with you, and which approach you would benefit from most. It might also give you an idea of what type of work still feels a little scary at the moment, but could be exactly what you need.

Below you’ll find three subjects people often bring to a professional for guidance: increasing confidence, reducing stress & anxiety and developing a fulfilling love life. Find out how a Life Coach and a Therapist work in a unique way to support you through these challenges. And once again, at Vitalis each practitioner is qualified as both Coach and Therapist, which means that all of these techniques are available to you.

Working with a Coach or Therapist on lack of confidence and low self esteem - exploring approaches

Life Coaches might invite you to find role models to help you get a more rounded idea of what it would be like to embody and step into that state. You could play with exercises and practice trying on the state of confidence for size, generating some practical tools for applying confidence in different situations. You might be invited to explore yoga or breathwork, vocal or postural exercises. A Life Coach would likely help you determine the situations where you’d like to increase your confidence and importantly, those aspects of your life where you feel like you already have it, and “borrow” some of those behaviours, attitudes, and beliefs to apply to other contexts. Good coaching will likely resource you to tackle some of the limiting beliefs around the subject of self-esteem for you, so you can enjoy more confidence when you need it most. A Life Coach might be able to point out a negative recurring thought, and suggest a mantra to repeat instead, so you can establish a more positive thought pattern.

versus A therapist approach

A therapist / counsellor initial focus might be on the origins of (lack of) confidence for you. For example by doing some work on the timeline of your life to find situations where you did experience more confidence and self-esteem, and importantly exploring what the internal landscape looks like for you when you both feel confident and when it is absent. They might invite you to explore your earliest memories of feeling confident, and especially where it might have been crushed or undermined. Perhaps there were times when your body failed you, or when you were bullied as a child, or more recently by a superior a work. They would explore your relationship to your parents / caregivers around confidence and the messages you received in your formative years and how those contributed to your Life Script (more on that in our post on Transactional Analysis) and your Inner Critic. The way our primary care-givers treated each other, the (lack of) confidence in them, and the way our primary care-givers treated us all informs our own self-worth.

A therapist would work with the part of you that feels the opposite of confident, in order to help ‘reparent’ it. It’s likely that we might disown, reject or even be disgusted by the part of ourselves that isn’t confident or has low self-esteem. We might perceive it as weak, spineless, worthless and have developed an internal relationship based on shame, or even hatred. A therapist would be concerned with getting to the root of this and support you in developing a more compassionate relationship with the less confident aspects of yourself. You would be encouraged, perhaps through ‘chairwork’, journaling and other practical exercises, to befriend that rejected part of yourself, and to offer deep healing. There is an understanding that the part of you that may be keeping you small or less confident was created in order to keep you safe, in order to fulfil a deeper need. Perhaps it’s no longer serving you as well as it might have done in the past, but rather than reject it, the work is to develop a sense of safety in that part of yourself so that you can heal and grow up into a more confident thriving self. A good therapist would be able to lead you back to the early memories where negative conclusions (so called limiting beliefs) originated, and will help you reparent your inner child into a healthy adult, reframing not only with language but with many different practical, somatic and spiritual exercises.  In this way you’ll build a new foundation to rely upon for the rest of your life.

All this work would enable that wounded child part of yourself to grow up into a more accepted, more confident Self, so that the vulnerable part no longer gets to be in the driving seat and, having resolved the issue at the root, you can enjoy more confidence in your day-to-day life.

When you decide to work with a Vitalis practitioner, both the therapy and coaching approaches to help you increase and heal your self-confidence are available for you.

Working with a Life Coach, Counsellor or Pschotherapist to tackle stress and anxiety - exploring approaches:

Working with a Life Coach, Counsellor or Therapist to improve romantic relationships - exploring approaches

A Life Coach approach

A Life Coach might begin by exploring the desires you have around a positive, healthy relationship. What are your goals and expectations? What does love look like for you, and what constitutes a fulfilling relationship? They might get you to consider your expectations of the other person. Other areas to explore are the needs you have in the relationship, and how you are taking care of yourself and each other. A Life Coach could share practical tools from the fields of Non-Violent Communication to resolve any potential conflicts. And Life Coaches might also offer some role play exercises around setting boundaries, as well as education around attachment patterns and the consequential dynamics between you and a partner. The main focus of your work together will likely be on tangible day-to-day practical tools in order to improve communication and connection.

versus A therapist approach

A therapist might approach the subject of relationships by exploring in what way certain earlier experiences are being repeated for you. Therapy often accepts that we unconsciously choose a partner based on our early conditioning, which then plays out our expected Life Script and behaviroual patterns. These can at times be helpful, but unfortuantely often are not. It may be that your relationship is activating unresolved wounds from earlier experiences or childhood trauma, so there would likely be an exploration of this, if you’d like to do so. You might be invited to discuss the character traits of your parents or primary care givers and the impact they had on you. This can identify any repeating patterns in your choice of partner. You would be accompanied in creating space for whatever feelings arise out of that exploration.

Let’s say you had a primary care-giver who was absent. Either due to illness, work, or alchohol addiction. This could have resulted in an inner belief that you don’t matter, will never be a priority and are not important. Without bringing this into your consciounsess and doing the healing work, you might end up in an adult relationship where you feel, guess what, that you don’t matter to our partner. The external reasons can look very different compared to your parents, for example your partner might already be married, smokes too much weed or lives abroad. But the impact on you, that inner feeling of not being properly cared for, is the same.

Therapists might draw on work from the field of Transactional Analysis and the Parent Adult Child Model to determine when and how you might be put back in the position of your inner wounded child, and then work with ways to befriend and heal that aspect of yourself. Therapy explores how you’d like the experience to be different in your current relationship, by bringing past patterns into conscious awareness. These past patterns will be given attention and healed, so that they are no longer repressed or repeated. In this way your relationship becomes a source of immeasurable emotional, mental and spiritual growth.

In a nutshell, Coaching helps to move forwards, Counselling gives heart-felt support to recover from what happened, and Therapy transforms from the root.

At Vitalis the entire team is qualified as both Coach and Therapist, making us uniquely placed to hold you practically and therapeutically as you navigate all the subtleties of your journey to greater professional and personal purpose, joy and fulfillment.

Like to have a free Discovery Call? We are all experienced Life Coaches plus qualified Therapists, and we’d love to hear from you.

 On an ethical note: If you hire us to be your Life & Career Coach only, we will not be giving you therapeutic guidance. This would not be in accordance with the code of ethics of our profession. If we both agree to incorporate the coaching and the therapy, we will make our entire skillset available for you. Whichever path we follow, it only happens with your explicit permission.