The personal coaching profession vs. psychotherapy and its benefits

What is understood by the term “coaching” has evolved over the course of humanity. Traces of its

altruistic objective can be found in ancient human cultures, where those more skilled and

knowledgeable coached those less experienced to reach a deeper level of understanding. For

example, in sports and mechanical engineering, but also philosophy and religion. The personal or life

coaching profession as we now it today, however, only started to materialise from the ‘80s thanks to

spearheading figures such as Thomas Leonard and Sir John Whitmore. As a result, the number of life

coaching professionals has grown exponentially from the ‘90s – and is still increasing. Estimates of

how many people call themselves professional coaches today range upwards of a hundred thousand.

Personal coaching can be defined as a partnership between a coach and a client, where the coach’s

role is to facilitate the client’s personal development so they can achieve pre-set goals. In contrast

with other “processes of human improvement” such as mentoring, teaching and consulting, a

personal coach uses powerful questioning methods and follows coaching models to do so. This process is reminiscent of the Socratic method of questioning to reach deeper insights about nature.

Personal coaching, then, specifically aims at developing and structuring a client’s introspective,

intellectual perception toward a desired future state of being.

Two key assumptions underlie this process. First, that clients have the capacity to reason and reach

desired outcomes themselves. Second, clients need to experience a discrepancy between who, what or where they are now, and what or where they want to be. The former implies that clients are considered "coachable" if they are (mentally) well enough. In case they are experiencing a personal crisis or show consistent aberrant behaviour, counselling or psychotherapy might be better suited before starting a personal coaching process. The second assumption is only unique to coaching in that the client sets their own future-orientated goal(s), whereas in medical consulting and therapy, for instance, the goal is always the same – patients want to get rid of their physical and mental health problems.

As someone with a BSc in psychology, these are especially important principles to acknowledge. as

they contrast with the psycho-diagnostic process I once studied. Following these coaching principles

completely changes one’s perception of and approach toward clients. In particular, while both

psychotherapy and coaching engage with a person’s cognition, coaching shifts the focus from fixing

what is “wrong” about it to what is possible after a provocative set of questions. Naturally, the client

relationship feels more horizontal in coaching and, perhaps implicitly, more hierarchical in

psychotherapy.

Several factors facilitated the development of and rising popularity of the personal coaching

profession, apart from the fact it can really benefit individuals. Various executive leadership and

management training programs were developed in the past century for people facing or preparing

for the pressures and expectations inherent to senior leadership roles. These typically lasted up to

several months, were priced at executive level tiers and followed a “one size fits all” approach. Yet,

when the United States experienced an economic downfall in the ‘90s, organisations were less

willing to invest in these expensive management trainings and demanded more personalisation to

organisational contexts. Such more tailormade approaches required discussing more sensitive

topics, and likely boosted the development of professions like business psychology and executive

coaching. The time was ripe to sow the seeds of influential voices promoting models to achieve

personal growth – which is currently finding a much wider audience beyond the world of corporate

executives.

Nowadays, the modern world can be characterised by widespread secularisation, in which people

tend to play multiple roles (e.g. juggling multiple jobs, parenting and simultaneously needing to take

care of elderly parents) and experience choice overload (e.g. hundreds of study programs to choose

from, thousands of potential dating partners to swipe through, decisions around family planning and

career sectors to explore). The freedom of having this myriad of choices, and at the same time less or no societal expectations, nor religious guidance, seem to create the perfect environment for people to want individual guidance, which personal coaching can provide.

Personal coaching can be done through all the possible media of interacting with one another –

from coaching over the telephone, video calls, e-mail and chat applications, to face-to-face sessions.

Each of these means exist because they work in different scenarios. Coaching over the phone

requires coach and client to focus on what is being said, while maintaining both parties’ full

intellectual presence. Like other non-face-to-face means of interaction, it also reduces time wasted

on commuting to a physical location and makes coaching accessible to a larger geography.

Asynchronous communication (e.g. e-mail or even letter writing) is both time- and location-agnostic.

This further increases the accessibility of coaching, but trades off losing the emotional dimension to

language that may lead to miscommunications.

With modern technologies from the likes of Zoom and Skype, coaching through video calls poses

another cost-effective alternative – especially since the COVID-19 pandemic. It requires stable and

fast internet connectivity, and a proper technical setup to mimic live in person interaction as much

as possible. If virtual reality ever becomes a reality, coaching may even shift to the metaverse. Coaches may provide differently priced packages, according to the chosen coaching medium(s). For

example, a series of telephone coaching sessions may be topped up with unlimited “on-demand” email and text message coaching at a premium price. It is up to the client’s needs and financial

possibility to decide what configuration works best for them and then finding a coach that can suit

these needs. As a coach, I make an effort to negotiate a suitable time and place to conduct

face to face sessions if my clientele prefers so, and can adjust the price accordingly.

The short history of the coaching profession, as different from psychotherapy, described above gives a sense of how it is not yet a mature field. Science and socioeconomic and cultural factors are continuously shaping the way we perceive ourselves, society and what life is about. Unsurprisingly, personal coaching, alongside therapy and other means of advancing our understanding of these matters have only recently reached our collective conscience of acceptable (and accessible) ways to improve life. With it, many individuals without any qualifications in coaching or mental health started earning a living from “life coaching”. Professional bodies such as the Association for Coaching (AC), International Coaching Federation (ICF) and European Mentoring and Coaching Council have therefore been founded to set standards for what coaching is (and what it is not), provide (accreditation of) training and education programs, and function as reference points for practising coaches. Moreover, they are collaborating to make coaching a legally recognised title. Although this may increase the barrier to enter this profession, it would reduce unqualified, ineffective coaching practices. It is hoped that this goal will be realised within the next few years. To compare, “counsellor” and “psychotherapist” have only become legally recognised titles since 2012.

Both the AC and ICF have an official list of core competencies that set a basic standard for what each personal coach should abide by. The two lists mostly overlap. In comparison, the ICF explicitly

mentions powerful questioning, and the AC also enlists continuous coach development and

additional competencies for executive coaches. The interesting part about any “personal”

interaction is that they probe other people’s consciousness and therefore always involve emotions.

As people typically find it difficult to “reveal” how they really feel about their life situations, it is

essential to create a trusting and confidential environment for people to share their thoughts and

emotions. This is true for all professional contexts of psychotherapy, medicine and coaching,

and even in non-professional relationships with friends and family. The first three sets of core

competencies described by both the AC and ICF are therefore absolutely essential and overlap with

professional standards for psychotherapists’ code of conduct (albeit to a less elaborate extent). That

is, setting ethical and professional guidelines, agreeing on these with a client, establishing trust,

managing coaching presence and communicating effectively. The core competencies do not specify

which specific coaching models or media to use, which allows for enough flexibility on coaches’

behalf to specialise in particular methods and choose how they want to run their coaching practice. I

would imagine that, as psychological and coaching research advances, further competency standards

may be set for coaching on what evidence-based techniques and what best practices one should

know of (e.g. in the form of what types of training a personal coach should have completed).

All in all, it is an exciting and fruitful time to practice as a certified personal coach.