Spiritual coaching isn’t therapy in disguise; it’s a service designed to help people through the growing pains of life challenge, spiritual inquiry, and conscious awakening. Here’s more on the differences between coaching and therapy to help you decide which is best for you.
What is Therapy?
Therapy, also called counseling or psychotherapy, is typically a long-term process in which a client works with a healthcare professional to diagnose and resolve past trauma and/or problematic beliefs, behaviors, relationship issues, and emotions. The idea behind therapy is to change self-destructive habits, repair and improve relationships and work through painful feelings. In this sense, therapy focuses on the past and on introspection and analysis, with the hope of resolving issues and creating a happier, more stable future.
Therapists determine illnesses and pathologies so their patients can be clinically treated. They analyze their client’s past as a tool for understanding present behaviors. Therapy is focused on bringing people from suffering to baseline and works to bring clients back to normal functioning by healing or surfacing disfunction.
What is Coaching?
The emphasis of coaching is on guiding, teaching, skills development, accountability and a clear process for attaining a desired state or goal. Life coaches, spiritual coaches and others in the personal and professional coaching fields identify and describe current problematic behaviors so the client can work to modify them. In other words, therapists focus on “why” certain behavioral patterns occur, and coaches work on “how” to transform them and achieve desired goals.
Coaching is focused on bringing people from baseline to flourishing. Coaching helps functional people achieve higher goals and achieve excellence while creating their ideal life. The main focus remains on architecting the future to thrive.