Life Coaching vs. Counseling: Key Differences Explained

Introduction

There are many differences between life coaching and counseling. While counselors are required by state law to pass specific examinations after meeting requisite hours of education, life coaches are under no such demands and may enter into service without having completed any formal education or achieved any certification or license. Yet both life coaches and counselors work toward achieving similar goals — that is, they both put the needs of the client first and help the client identify objectives and work to meet them for a positive outcome.

Counselors may work with clients who have behavioral and/or psychological problems, while life coaches tend to work with clients who need assistance focusing on a specific outcome and working to achieve it. Life coaches help clients prepare an action plan, stay motivated, structure specific activities, and pursue a life goal that will bring happiness. Counselors tend to be less life-goal oriented and more focused on helping clients overcome a specific problem. Clients who do not require serious behavioral or psychological assistance may find life coaches to be highly beneficial, while clients who need serious behavioral and/or psychological help would most likely benefit from a trained and licensed counselor.

Overview of Life Coaching

Life coaching is a relatively new and unique approach to helping individuals. It is born more out of the motivational speaking phenomenon than out of the science of psychology, though it does benefit from psychological research. Life coaching sees coaches assisting clients in identifying goals that will make the client happy and that the client would like to achieve. Life coaches support the pursuit of these goals and dreams by providing motivation, emotional support, directional guidance, and key analysis of how to better organize one's life in order to overcome habits that may be negatively impeding the fulfillment process.

Counseling, on the other hand, is grounded in psychological science and can take several forms, such as behavioral therapy or psychoanalysis. Counseling approaches disturbances of mind and behavior, seeking to help clients by locating and identifying problems and assisting them in overcoming those issues through a variety of means. Typically, a counselor will specialize in a specific approach, such as Applied Behavioral Analysis or person-centered therapy. Each counselor uses the methods he or she finds most suitable, and clients with specific problems will generally require a specific counseling approach.

Overview of Counseling

For example, a patient who is suicidal will receive counseling from a specialist in working with suicidal clients. Child counselors specialize in working with children rather than adults, and so on. This specialization ensures that clients receive targeted, expert support that is calibrated to their particular circumstances.

A central distinction between life coaching and counseling concerns how directly each practitioner engages with the client. Counselors often allow clients to talk freely, intervening less and wanting the client to uncover problems on their own and identify solutions through dialogue. Life coaches generally do not use this approach. Life coaches tell clients directly what they observe and get to the root of issues that are impeding the client's progress.

Comparing Directive and Non-Directive Approaches

The life coach is similar to a basketball coach who watches a player in practice, identifies the player's strengths and weaknesses, communicates those observations openly, and then works with the player on how to reach his or her potential. The counselor, by contrast, allows the client to arrive at his or her own conclusions and may gently steer the client in an appropriate direction but will typically not prescribe outright what the client should do.

In terms of specific methods, counselors can take non-directive approaches — such as interpersonal therapy, psychodynamic therapy, and person-centered therapy — or directive approaches, such as cognitive behavioral therapy (CBT) and solution-focused therapy. Directive forms of counseling share certain similarities with life coaching, although counseling remains more firmly grounded in psychological theory, while life coaching is oriented more toward a management-style approach with a specialization in motivational skills.

Conclusion

Both life coaching and counseling have their place with specific sets of clients who have specific sets of needs. In some cases a life coach is more appropriate than a counselor, and in other cases a counselor is more appropriate than a life coach. Both have their merits, their strengths, and their limitations. Neither is universally better than the other — what ultimately determines which approach works best is what the individual client is looking for and what he or she genuinely needs.