The title of this post came out of a group supervision session today - don't worry, I'm not breaking confidentiality as it was my issue that I brought to the group and this title sums up what came out of it for me.
I was looking at whether working with a particular new client was really coaching or was straying over the boundary into the area of therapy. And where is that boundary anyway, given that the process of coaching is for me undoubtedly a therapeutic process - using the relationship between coach and coachee to bring about change. What brought new clarity to a distinction I had always worked with (ie that the difference is not in the process but in the objective) was a physical mapping process using objects to represent me, the coachee and the issue we were working with.
In a coaching context, the coachee and I are both facing towards the issue in a sort of triangular arrangement. The arrangement if I were to stray into therapy would be that I would simply be facing the coachee and they would be the primary issue we were working on. If the difference in these images doesn't speak clearly enough to you, I also articulated how the goal could be expressed differently in each case. In coaching the question is "How can I help you (ie someone with your personality and history, strengths and weaknesses etc) deal better with this issue, eg a work situation or relationship?" It is not "How can I help you change yourself?"
Of course, the self-developing nature of people (even the way our brains re-wire themselves) means that in finding new ways to deal better with something you will (over time) be changing yourself - that's how therapy works. But that is a secondary outcome, not the primary goal. So I am not a therapist. But I am a therapeutic coach.
