SHOULD I HIRE A THERAPIST OR A COACH // Therapy vs Life Coaching

Welcome back to my channel. There are a lot of resources available to us these days, and with so many people being online, with so many services being online, the resources are endless. But I want to talk about the difference between therapy and coaching, because there is a difference. Even though you see things like life coach or relationship coach, I've seen people that. That have titles like anxiety coach or coach for people coming out of codependent relationships. Those words, codependent, anxiety relationships, things that also have to do with the world of therapy. People can get confused because they think, anxiety coach, this is therapy specifically for anxiety. But that's not the case. So in order for you to be able to pick who's best for you, who would be best to help you? Yes, you need to know what's going on and what you need help with, but also the difference between coaching and therapy, because while there are a lot of similarities between the two, there are a lot of differences. And with terms like anxiety coach and relationship coach, or a therapist who specializes in codependency and having some of these words used interchangeably, it's not bad, but it absolutely can be confusing. So let's say separate the differences between coaching and therapy so that you know when you're looking for help, who to best pick so that you can get the help you need. There are a lot of similarities between the coaching world and the therapy world. Both coaches and therapists want to help their clients make positive changes. We want to help you move forward in life, overcome obstacles, work through things, identify patterns of behavior that might be holding you back. There's all these things that both worlds have in common. There are things that we do with clients and our goals a lot of times for our clients that look similar from coaching to therapy. So therapy, which is often called psychotherapy or counseling, there's all these different words. And honestly, depending on what state you're in, what country you live in, there's different regulations. So depending on where you are, your counselor or your therapist might be called something different. My designation, the letters after my name. I have a master's degree in counseling, and I am a licensed clinical professional counselor. So there's all these different nuances even within the therapy world when we're talking about letters after somebody's name, their designation, their title. So that also might be another step in another direction, depending on what kind of therapist you're looking for. A lot of what you see with therapy is that we deal with the past traumas, patterns of behaviors, habits, negative feelings, and things like that. And we go back and we deal with the past a lot, which is the case. We have to, in my opinion, know where we've been in order to figure out where we want to go. So, so that is a key piece of therapy. Therapy isn't just looking at the past. We're not all about making sure we only focus on where you've been. There are some therapists that, that's their specialty, they spend a lot of time in the past, or they might specialize in trauma and helping you work through it and process it to kind of bring you into the present so, so that you can function better on a daily basis. Therapy isn't just all about working in the past, but that is a big piece oftentimes of what we do that helps us help move our clients forward. So there is a lot of past work unraveling, uprooting things so that we can help our clients get to the present, figure out what's going on now and set goals for the future. The other difference is that you can use your insurance to, to see a therapist so that you're maybe not paying so much out of pocket or anything like you would a coach. Because insurances usually don't cover coaching services. There are some things that they might cover that is up for you to look at with your insurance company. But for the most part coaching really isn't covered under insurance, but therapy is. The important thing is that when we bill insurance there has to be a mental health diagnosis. So just like when you go to the doctor, there are special codes that the doctor puts in. When they looked at your knee or they did X rays because of patella, something, something, something, right. But those are codes in order for them to bill insurance for your physical body. The same thing goes with us. If I have somebody that comes in with anxiety, I have to provide a diagnosis for the insurance to be billed on. Unless that client wants to self pay, wants to pay out of pocket. So for payment purposes that might matter to you. There are some people who don't want to deal with their insurance at all, whatever that looks like. Right. It's going to be up to you. Now with coaching, it's usually more, shorter terms. You can hire a coach for a one off session, you can hire a coach for three months, for six months, for kind of however long you want to pay a coach to work with them. But in a sense it is usually more of a shorter, more focused plan of action. They take their clients, coaches take their clients from where they are in their life. Maybe they do look at some past Patterns and behaviors. They can't treat things like trauma and depression and anxiety and mental health stuff. But they take their clients from pretty much where they are. And again, maybe looking at the past, but from where they're at to a point in the future or they're setting a goal. Maybe it's a coach. When it comes to your work or entrepreneurship or relationships, coaches usually have really specific niches that they work with clients and help them in that specific area. Like my focus in therapy is anxiety. That's very much my lane, my area of expertise, my. The same thing goes with coaches. They usually have a niche or an area of expertise tends to be a little more short and a little more solution focused in the sense that the coach wants to take you from where you're at to at some point in the future for whatever that goal is. Coaches aren't necessarily health care professionals. They can be. I do a lot of coaching in my therapy. It's my style. I am both a therapist and a coach. But a coach in a sense is not necessarily a healthcare professional. But anybody essentially can be a coach. You are encouraged to get a certification and things like that to expand your ability to know how to help people. Because there's so many different ways to coach. But it's not regulated in the sense that you don't need a graduate degree or a license to practice in different states. It's not regulated in that sense. So if I want to go online and call myself an anxiety coach, I. I absolutely can. If I want to go online and call myself a clinical therapist, unless I have the schooling and the training and the license in my state, I can't do that. So there are different regulations. Coaching really doesn't have a lot in that sense. So that's where you're going to see a lot of the differences when it comes to the designations, the letters after somebody's name, education, experience in that realm. So it's not that coaching is less than therapy. Coaches aren't less than a therapist. I think coaches are amazing. I have coaches, I have people that help me move my life forward. So I think they're fantastic. You just have to know who is going to be best to help you. Another way to look at this, if you're figuring out, do I need a therapist, do I need a coach? And you're still wondering if. Here's a good analogy. If you want to run a marathon but you have knee problems, you can hire a running coach. You can absolutely do that. You can do whatever you want, whatever you think is Best. But if you hire a running coach and something really is wrong with your knee and that running coach can't do X rays or can't treat the knee problem because they're not a doctor, that knee might get worse, or there might be an injury in your knee that they might not see just because they're not a doctor, and that's totally fine. So you can hire a coach and it might go well, or it might not. But if your knee hurts, that coach might say, hey, you should probably go get X rays or an MRI or go get that checked out. And then the doctor can check on your knee and see what's going on and clear you to keep running or come up with a plan of action or. Or a treatment plan to figure out what's going on so that they can fix the knee and get you running again. So you could have a coach and a doctor at the same time. You might hire a coach and realize, ooh, there's a lot more going on here. And then you might go see a doctor for a little bit until it got better, and then go back to the coach. Or you might just choose to go see the doctor first, make sure your knees all good, and then totally switch over to the coach. So both a doctor and a coach can help you work toward the marathon. But depending on what's going on with your knee is going to depend on who you need to see first or who you need to be seeing at that certain time. So both can help you work toward the marathon. But whatever's going on in the moment is going to depend on who you need to see and who you need to work with. So both therapists and coaches are amazing. Again, we have the same goals. We want to see our clients succeed. We want to see our clients do well and make positive changes. My big goal for all my clients, this big, like, overarching goal is to help them make positive and lasting change. That's my goal for every single client who walks into my office. What that looks like for them is going to be dependent on what's going on their life. So for you to be able to pick between a therapist and a coach is going to depend on what's going on in your life, maybe what you've been through. If there's been trauma that you haven't worked through yet, you might want to see a therapist. If you're struggling at work with some relationships or taking your career to the next level, a career coach might be a really good fit. It's going to depend on you I think what's really cool about what I like to do is that I blend the therapy and coaching. Not all therapists do this. Just like with coaching, there's so many different coaches who focus on different things. The same thing with therapists. There are therapists who focus on working with millennials or millennials with depression, or they focus on anxiety like I do. There's all kinds of therapists who focus on so many different things. So the options are endless. And I don't want to overwhelm you, but you have a lot to pick from. But if you're starting to figure out, do I pick a therapist or do I pick a coach? Those are some good things to ask yourself and to work from as you're making that decision. And then when you decide which way to go, then you can figure out what kind of therapist you're looking for or what kind of coach you're looking for. But always just make sure that you're picking what's best for you, and then you can absolutely change your mind at any point. There's so much help out there. Don't get bogged down by making the decisions or just having so many resources available to you. But when we talk about the world of therapy and we talk about the world of coaching, while there are similarities, there are a lot of those differences. Sam.