The Difference Between Coaching and Therapy

This is one of the most common questions I get, and I think it deserves an honest answer — especially because the lines have gotten blurry in recent years.

Therapy tends to look backward. Coaching tends to look forward.

Traditional therapy — psychotherapy, counseling, CBT — generally focuses on understanding your past, processing trauma, managing symptoms, and working through emotional pain. A good therapist helps you make sense of what happened to you and develop healthier ways of coping. The work is often slower, more exploratory, and oriented around healing and understanding.

Coaching is more action-oriented. A coach works with where you are now and where you want to go. The focus is on identifying what's in the way, shifting it, and building momentum forward. Coaching assumes you're already functional — you're just operating with invisible constraints that are limiting what's possible for you.

Where it gets interesting.

In my practice, the lines blur intentionally — because real change requires both. I'm a coach, and my focus is forward-looking: your freedom, your power, your next level. But the tools I use — hypnotherapy and NLP — go directly into the subconscious, which means we often encounter the past along the way. Old beliefs, old emotional charges, old protective patterns that were set up in childhood or during difficult experiences.

I don't do therapy. I don't diagnose. I don't treat mental illness. But I do go deep. We find the root of what's holding you back — even if that root was planted decades ago — and we change it. The difference is that we don't stay there. We clear it, learn from it, and then move forward into what you're building.

How to know which one you need right now.

Consider therapy if: You're dealing with active crisis, severe depression or anxiety that affects your daily functioning, unprocessed trauma that feels overwhelming, or you need a clinical diagnosis and treatment plan. A trained therapist is the right support for these situations.

Consider coaching if: You're functional but stuck. You've possibly done therapy and it helped, but there's still a core pattern that won't budge. You're ready to take ownership of your life and you want someone who will help you see your blind spots, change the patterns driving your results, and hold you accountable to becoming who you know you can be.

Consider both if: You want the safety and processing support of therapy alongside the forward momentum and pattern-breaking of coaching. Many of my clients work with a therapist and me simultaneously, and the two complement each other well.

The bottom line.

The best choice is the one that matches where you are right now. If you're unsure, I'm happy to have an honest conversation about it. I've referred people to therapists when that was clearly the better fit, and I'll always tell you the truth about what I think you need — even if it means pointing you somewhere else.