What Is Life Coaching?
Life coaching is a widely misunderstood approach. Some consider it as a modern form of counseling and others consider it as an expensive agony aunt. People often get confused in life coach vs counselor. A life coach is someone who is trained to help you see clearly where you are today, then find ways to move forward towards your goal. Actually, they don’t tell you what to do; they are a sounding board to help you discover what it is you want to do.
What Is Counseling?
Counseling is a unique, one to one relationship between two people who agreed to meet privately and regularly with the aim of restoring emotional well-being to the client. A counselor is someone who creates a safe and supportive space for you to explore who you are what you want in your life. Basically, they are a support system to help you gain the strength and clarity to cope the situation.
Life Coach vs Counselor
1. Education
The biggest difference between most coaches and counselors is their educational requirements. Licensed counselors have had education and training around many aspects of the human experience. In contrast, a life coach is not required to have any training or education in coaching at all. Literally, anyone can call them a life coach and go into business and earn money.
2. The Objectives of Coaching vs Counseling
The objectives of counseling are to help people in addressing and resolving problems that make them feel bad emotionally. Once they are feeling stronger, then they can start taking actions to change their circumstances.
On the other hand, the objective of coaching is to help people in achieving their goal. The basic presumption of coaching is that coaching clients are in a good place mentally and emotionally, and ready to receive guidance on how to make changes that will help them in achieving their goal. The work focuses on creating and maintaining motivation for change, exploring obstacles to change and creating plans for change.
3. Ethics and Boundaries
Counselors are required to maintain very strict ethical guidelines around the way they handle professional boundaries and confidential information with their clients. On the other hand, there is not any regulation or educational requirements for life coaches, ethical standards for coaches are highly variable.
4. The Approach
Counselors and coaches, they both have different approaches towards the lives, its problems, its goals and deal differently.
Counseling research shows that more active models of therapy tend to be more effective at producing positive outcomes for people.
In contrast with counselors, coaches will make recommendations, and help you brainstorm solutions and strategies for changing things in your life.
The Bottom Line
So above were the findings regarding coach vs counselor. Counseling is often times conducted for the use of revisiting one’s past and finding healing from his or her wounds. On the other hand, coaching is a helpful method that looks towards the future. Coaching is for people who desired to see improvements.
