Life Coach:
Life coaching helps you determine what you wish to achieve in the present and future. A life coaches main task is to help you to move your life forward and to find fulfillment, success, well-being and happiness. To do this, the coaches may help you form attainable goals, and tasks which will then help you attain those goals. If you find those goals hard to attain, they then can help uncover the obstacles that have been holding you back from achieving everything, after uncovering them they then can help you move past them. They may also guide you through a life transition, such as finding a new career, or looking to start a new relationship. If however, there are more deep rooted problems, life coaching is not enough because they mainly focus on the future rather than dealing mainly with your past. This is where counselling and therapy play a heavy role.
Counseling and Therapist:
Counseling is the process by which a counselor helps an individual understand and solve problems to help him or her cope with mental or emotional stressors. Counseling services are usually short-term where they mainly focus on clients with a specific problem ie. “Stress related problems……” Therapy usually involves talking about your situation in order to gain more understanding about issues such as mood, feelings, behavior, and ways of thinking. The therapeutic process usually delves into the past of an individual and helps the client find the root causes of emotional and behavioral patterns. It is important to recognize that counseling and therapy services may overlap in some areas. The table below shows the main differences:
Counseling:
- Helps people identify issues and helps them to take positive steps to fix the problems.
- Counselling is good to use on people who do already have good coping strategies
- A short-term process that encourages the change of behavior
Therapy:
- Helps people with psychological problems
- These problems have developed over a long period of time
- It will help you understand your feelings, thoughts and actions more clearly
- Long-term process that identifies emotional issues and digs into the past to find the cause of the problem (often delves into childhood)