Coaching is NOT counselling or therapy. 
 

Counselors and therapists have specialized training in such things as healthy communication, good parenting, effective social skills, mental/emotional & spiritual health, and the like. They are skilled in uncovering underlying reasons for dysfunction and debilitating conditions such as depression, anxiety, and other mood and thought disorders.*

 

                          Coaching is about stability and growth rather than dysfunction and healing.

                             Whereas psychotherapy & counselling are primarily about the past and present,

    coaching is primarily about the future.

 

Please note that a person in need of healing is not yet ready for coaching and should be referred to a therapist. There are more basic issues to be addressed before they can effectively pursue greater fulfillment.*

 

Coaching is also NOT consulting.

 

Consultants are hired because of their expertise in a given area. They provide information and give direction and advice to clients.*

 

By contrast, coaches do not necessarily have expertise in an area in which a client wants to grow. Their role, instead, is to ask powerful, probing questions which enable clients to discover their own answers.

 

In a sense, coaches help clients to hear themselves more clearly and gain a greater sense of what God is speaking to their spirits. They then help them develop plans to take action to ensure follow-through.*

 

Coaching is NOT discipling or mentoring.

 

As with consultants, counsellors, and mentors, a discipler has considerable experience from which to draw in helping persons make desired change. A Christian who disciples is mature in the faith and is able to impart that faith to others – to instruct them in the tenets of our faith, its moral code, spiritual disciplines of the faith, and the like.*

 

Discipleship is tremendously helpful, and coaching in no way replaces it, but the mode and methods of people-helping are dramatically different.*

 

Discipleship is more of an “outside-in” model of people-helping versus the “inside-out” of coaching.

Coaching is non-directive, non-advisory, non-instructional. It is inquisitive, exploratory, genuinely curious.

 

A coach could not possibly be an “expert” on the things around which they coach because no one could be an expert on someone else’s future. No one could know for certain what someone else’s life path should be; what their core values are, their sense of life purpose or calling, their unique giftings, their passions, etc. Clients are often not aware of these things either, but the assumption of coaching is that the answers they seek can be found within themselves and  through their individual walk with God.*

 

                                                        Romans 11:29 states “…God’s gifts and his call are irrevocable.”

 

It doesn’t say we will necessarily discern those gifts and calling, nor fulfill them – it just says they’re inside of us and they’re not going to be taken back. 

 

A Christian coach helps clients discern and then fulfill what God has uniquely placed within them.*

 

                                                       Proverbs 20:5 captures this beautifully: “The purposes of a man’s heart

                                                            are deep waters, but a man of understanding draws them out.”

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*noted text is taken from Professional Christian Coaching Institute's website.