What Coaches Need to Know About Therapy (And What Therapists Need to Know About Coaching)

This is the third in a series of blogs exploring how we naturally help people make change. If you haven’t read the first piece yet, start here: Why Coaching Anyone Doesn’t Require Experience - But Mentoring Does

I want to be upfront about something before I start.

I’m not a therapist. I’m not trained in counselling or psychotherapy. And I don’t pretend to be.

That matters here because this is probably the distinction I get asked about most and it’s one where getting it wrong has real consequences, both for the people doing the helping and the people being helped.

What coaching and therapy have in common

Both involve a one-to-one relationship built on trust. Both require genuine presence, careful listening and a real commitment to the other person. Both can go to difficult places. So it’s not surprising that people confuse them or that coaches sometimes drift into therapeutic territory without realising it or that therapists sometimes wonder whether coaching might be a useful addition to what they already do.

The overlap is there but so is the distinction.

What a coach will work with

Let me clear something up that often gets misunderstood. A coach absolutely will work with emotion. A coach absolutely will explore the past. These aren’t the exclusive territory of therapy.

What a coach does is use emotion as information and the past as a resource and always in service of moving forward. When a client talks about something difficult, a coach doesn’t redirect them away from it. They sit with it, acknowledge it, and then help the person find what it has to teach them and what it makes possible.

The orientation is always towards the future.

Towards what the person wants to create, become or achieve. That’s different from therapy, which is often oriented towards understanding and resolving what’s happened, making sense of the past so that it no longer runs the present in ways the person isn’t aware of.

What therapy is for

Therapy, in its many forms: counselling, psychotherapy, CBT and a wide range of other modalities is primarily oriented towards understanding. Specifically, towards helping someone understand themselves, their patterns, their history, the experiences that have shaped them and the beliefs they’ve formed as a result.

A therapist brings deep relational skills. Genuine presence and the ability to hold space for someone in real distress. These take years to develop and they matter enormously.

And for many people, this kind of support is exactly what’s needed, either before, alongside or instead of coaching.

The red flags every coach should know

Here’s some of what I’ve learned to watch for.

• The moments in a coaching conversation that signal something else might be needed.

• Someone who keeps returning to the same painful territory without being able to move forward.

• Deep emotional patterns that feel stuck, circular, immovable.

• A sense that whatever forward-focused questions you ask, the person keeps being pulled back, not because they don’t want to move forward, but because something unresolved is holding them in place.

These aren’t signs that coaching has failed. They’re signs that something else might need to happen first, or alongside. Recognising that and being honest about it is part of a coach’s professional responsibility. It’s something every coach needs to be clear on.

Something many people don’t realise

Coaching and therapy can happen at the same time. They’re not mutually exclusive. In fact, for many people, they work well alongside each other.

What’s worth knowing is that they don’t have to be working on the same thing. Someone might be in therapy exploring a specific pattern or past experience, while working with a coach on something entirely separate, for example, their career, their leadership, or a decision they’re navigating. The two conversations don’t need to be connected. They just need to know about each other.

Therapy can help someone resolve what’s been keeping them stuck. Coaching can help them move forward in other areas, or once they’re ready. As long as everyone involved is aware of both relationships and the boundaries between them are clear, there’s no reason the two can’t run in parallel.

Some of the most powerful growth I’ve seen in people has happened when they had both kinds of support at once and each doing what it does best.

What this means for you

If you work with people in a helping capacity, understanding this distinction matters, both for the people you support and for your own professional clarity.

Whether you’re a coach learning to recognise the edges of your role, a therapist curious about what coaching could add, or someone trying to work out which kind of support is right for you right now, getting clear on the difference is a useful starting point.

If you’re not sure where your natural inclination sits, whether you tend towards the depth and understanding of a therapeutic approach or the forward-focused, goal-oriented space of coaching then that’s exactly what our quiz explores.

Which are you?

Our free quiz, How You Help People Make Change, helps you find your natural helper archetype in under five minutes. You’ll discover whether you tend towards coaching, mentoring, consulting or a more therapeutic style, and what that means for how you show up with others.

Take the quiz: myimpactprofile.scoreapp.com

Find out more about the Certificate in Professional Coaching at North Point Academy: uae.northpoint.ac/coach-training