How Does Coaching Work? - Jeremy Walker, PCC

The International Coaching Federation (ICF) defines coaching as “partnering with clients in a thought-provoking and creative process that inspires them to maximize their personal and professional potential”. It is based on goals that you define and that are meaningfully connected to your own values. Coaching is different from teaching, mentoring, consulting, and psychotherapy in that it does not primarily rely on the coach’s ability to diagnose your problem and tell you how to fix it. In fact, doing so can interfere with your autonomy and does not exercise your ability to discover your own wisdom.

Coaching is an invitation to enter the unknown with curiosity, compassion, and wonder. It can deepen your connection to the authentic wisdom you have inside of you and can take your relationships, career, and well being to a new level. It can lead to the transformation of old patterns in your life that get in the way of what you really want, reigniting that spark of joy you were born with and helping you shift into a more empowered way of seeing yourself and the world. No matter how difficult the journey gets, the good news is that it’s all welcome here, the glory, the shame, and the WTF. The even better news is that you have the capacity to learn how to integrate it all into a masterpiece of beauty and greatness beyond words! We all do.

Sometimes, just talking to someone who is unbiased and really listens, such as a good coach or therapist, will relieve a heavy burden you were carrying inside. This alone can sometimes make a huge difference, and this is certainly part of what coaching can provide. No matter how dark and ugly things might feel, coaching is a safe, confidential space to let it all out. But it doesn’t end there. Coaching can yield new awareness, “aha moments” and transformative ways of reframing the way that you were looking at things. Most of the time, it turns out that it was not the reality of the situation that was holding you back, but the story you were believing about it. The new awareness gained through coaching can sometimes naturally lead to major, positive change that comes automatically as the new perspective takes hold. This is also a big part of what coaching can provide and we certainly welcome this as well! However, it’s important that we are realistic about what it often takes to create real, lasting change. Much of the time, getting a powerful and sustained benefit from coaching will require you to make a deliberate, conscious effort to apply the new awareness you discover in how you live your life. This may require the self-discipline to practice new skills, break old habits, or create new ones. For this reason, a big part my job as a coach is to help you come up with meaningful homework for yourself at the end of each session, to apply what you are learning. Whether you prefer a coach who will crack the whip and call you forth to your potential, or a more gentle and supportive coach who remains patient and nonjudgemental as you gradually confront your resistance, my job is to stay present and create the kind of space you need to hold yourself accountable. There’s nothing that feels more empowering than the hard-earned success reached by confronting and overcoming your own resistance, witnessing first hand what you are truly capable of when you learn to live in accordance with your own higher wisdom!

What's the Difference Between Coaching and Therapy?

Coaching and therapy have many similarities and both have been shown to improve mental health, as measured by standardized testing of anxiety and depression. Coaching accomplishes this by seeking to remove obstacles and generate positive action in pursuit of whatever is meaningful to you. You need not necessarily have a problem to seek help from a coach, it might be that you simply want help to reach your next level of awesome! Coaching can of course help with problems too, but a coach sees you as essentially whole and already in possession of the innate capacities to learn whatever is required to solve your problem. In coaching, we embrace the perspective that nothing is essentially wrong with you. More often than not, you have simply forgotten how creative and powerful you really are. Coaching is about helping you to remember this and activate it. Therapy has been around for longer than coaching and traditional therapy tended to follow a diagnose-and-treat mindset. Similar to a doctor, the therapist is seen as an expert on all of the things that may go wrong with your mental health and strives to gather the knowledge and means to properly diagnose and treat these conditions. Modern therapy has evolved greatly and now recognizes that this mindset isn’t always the most helpful approach to getting results. While the emergence and popularity of coaching has proven it so, there is still a place for expertise-based care. A licensed therapist has undergone extensive education to learn about known mental health conditions and can draw upon this expertise where appropriate. In summary, it is not expected that the coach possess expertise to be able to give advice or tell you what to do, necessarily, in the manner that a therapist would. The coach may offer suggestions but in the spirit of experimentation and discovering together what works. The coach often does so with great humility, curiosity and wonder themselves, as opposed to a mood of authority or certainty in holding the right answers. Therapy is usually a better choice for people seeking help with more severe mental health symptoms, such as severe anxiety disorders, severe depression and suicidal ideation, recent trauma, severe addiction, or situations involving domestic violence and abuse. Therapists can recommend medication-based interventions and have the expertise required to work with clients already undergoing medication-based treatment.