Psychotherapist or Coach?

Today, Personal Coaching has taken a leaf out of the book of 'soundbites' and is fancifully paraded around as a token of someone who is 'on the road to their aspirations'. Their Psychotherapist is now a Coach, and they wear the badge proudly as a status symbol of their desire for change and success. But is this really how it is?

Coaching can be a powerful and transformative approach to one's life. Coaching can help you to meet your dreams and aspirations or simply improve the quality of your life style; or in work, help to develop and nurture your skills and abilities to be able to accomplish your job and reach for that promotion.

Looking for a Life Coach? Visit our Life Coach website.

What is Coaching? Is it different to Sports Coaching?

Coaching comes in a number of forms, you may hear it as Life-Coaching, Executive Coaching, Team Coaching or One-to-one Coaching. But are they the same?

In short yes. But the differences lay in both the context the coaching is taking place and the style or skills of the coach used in each of the contexts.

At Origyn we use the skills from NLP as a coaching tool.

The act of impartiality

Coaching is the act of having an impartial view of a clients situation and to provide the necessary strategies, motivation and skills for the client in reaching their goals. Similar to that of a sports coach, where from an observers point of view they are able to monitor the level of performance and to continually adjust and modify the behaviour of the sportsperson until he or she performs optimally. But in the end, no matter how good or great the coach the arena is yours, and through diligence and strategic action you will be best placed to enter that arena with the confidence, self assuredness, vision or purpose, motivation and skill sets to meet the challenge. Oh and have fun too!

One of the ideas of coaching is to draw out from the person, latent skills and strengths and to re-contextualise them. For example, a mother who has three children has to be pro-active in organising her day to do the washing, ironing, feeding, shopping, bathing, taking the kids to the school and doctors etc, and then have time to have her own life too. This takes an extraordinary amount of discipline and effort, yet many mothers manage this multi-tasking ability with ease. This ability to organise a family whether that be the father or mother, is a pre-requisite to managing a business or being an entrepreneur. Running a business requires the same ability to multitask and do many different things during a day and keep on top of them all.

This is where the natural skills of a particular context can be overlapped into another area.