Coaching or therapy: which one do you need?
They are not two grades of the same thing. They solve different problems, and picking the wrong one wastes months.
The distinction
Therapy works on what happened, and on conditions that need treatment. It is delivered by licensed clinicians, it can diagnose, and it is the right instrument when something is injured: depression, anxiety disorders, trauma, addiction, grief that has not moved.
Coaching works forward from where someone already functions. It assumes the machinery is intact and the direction is not, and it is aimed at decisions, structure, and follow-through. It cannot diagnose and it does not treat anything.
Neither is the lesser version of the other. A great many people do both, often at the same time, and plenty of people who arrive at coaching are better served by a therapist, which is a reason to say so rather than to take the booking.
Which describes you
This points to coaching
- You are functioning, and the problem is direction rather than capacity.
- You know roughly what you want and cannot make yourself do it.
- There is a decision in front of you and nobody neutral to think it through with.
- Things are objectively fine and you cannot say what any of it is for.
- You want somebody holding you to something between now and the spring.
This points to therapy
- Something happened, and it is still deciding how you react to things.
- You are struggling to get through ordinary days rather than to optimise them.
- Sleep, appetite or mood have changed and stayed changed.
- There is a substance, a compulsion, or a pattern you cannot stop on your own.
- You are carrying loss that has not moved in a long time.
If several of these are true, a licensed clinician is the right first call, not us. That is not a soft no. It is the accurate answer.
Where our own boundary is
We are not therapists and this is not therapy. Limited trauma that needs reframing is within what we do: a single hard event that is shaping a decision, worked on so it stops doing that.
Layered trauma is not. Where that is what is in the room, we refer it out, and we make the referral rather than taking the engagement anyway and hoping. That is a policy, not a disclaimer. It has cost us work and it will again.
If coaching does look like the right instrument, here is exactly how an engagement runs, including what it costs.
If it is therapy you need, go and get that first.
And if it is this, tell us what is going on. If we read it and think you would be better served elsewhere, we will say so and point you there.
Tell us what's going on ↗ Or book a 20-minute call