Life Coach vs. Therapist: 8 Myths Debunked (Plus How to Choose)

It’s fair for therapists to say that their training qualifies them to be life coaches. It’s not fair, though, to say that life coaching is the same thing as therapy.

There’s a reason a growing number of therapists offer both therapy and life coaching as separate services. Each one helps you do something different.

Therapy is designed to help you heal. It’s also designed to help you grow and become more self-aware. Therapy is what you need when you want to “feel better.”

A therapist creates a safe space where you’re free from the pressure to perform that you have to deal with at work or home—pressure that might be making you feel stressed out, depressed, or anxious.

Life coaching is designed to help you succeed. It’s also designed to help you grow and become more effective. Life coaching is what you need when you want to “do better.”

A coach creates an encouraging space where they apply gentle pressure and hold you accountable in your efforts to achieve your goals. They can help you make progress on everything from writing a book to losing weight—and identify which goals you want to make progress on in the first place.

As long as they’ve been around, therapists have helped people with personal growth. They still do.

Therapists already do a lot of what life coaches do. While it’s true therapists are qualified to treat mental health conditions, that’s not the only thing they’re qualified to do. Therapists also know how to help you clarify your life goals and overcome obstacles to achieving them.

This can make it confusing when you compare therapy for personal growth with life coaching. They use different methods, but cover similar terrain and the process for clients can often look the same.

Ethical life coaches know that life coaching is not therapy and refer clients who need therapy to a therapist. However, sometimes there are gray areas. You don’t feel great, but you’re not ill.

Many life coaches end up ushering their clients through these gray areas. When a client isn’t clearly depressed, dealing with trauma, or showing symptoms of another mental health condition, a coach may not see the need to refer them to a therapist just because they’re facing something painful.

Yet even when a coach isn’t clearly crossing the line into providing therapy or mental health care, they’re not trained as well as therapists to do this kind of work.

We recommend going with your gut and starting where you think you need to start. But if you’re not sure, it probably makes more sense to start with therapy. If you have personal growth goals you want to achieve, but you also want to address deeper emotional issues, you can work with a therapist who also addresses personal growth goals as part of their traditional therapy practice.

It’s true you sometimes need therapy before you can work effectively with a coach.

It makes no sense to put pressure on yourself to perform when you’re still trying to heal. It’s hard to pursue goals if you don’t believe you deserve the things you’re pursuing. It can even be harmful if you’re laboring under the painful belief you have to perform or achieve to be worthy of happiness or love.

This doesn’t mean, though, that there’s a neat and orderly progression from therapy to coaching. You don’t “graduate” from one to the other. They’re different services that help you do different things. Whether you want coaching after therapy (or therapy after coaching) totally depends on you.

You can do productive work in therapy for years. Whether you keep going depends more on whether you want to do more work than whether it’s possible to do any more.

This doesn’t mean you need therapy forever. You only need therapy when there will be serious negative consequences if you don’t deal with a particular emotional or psychological issue—when that issue is disrupting your life or causing you severe distress. At other times, it’s an optional path to wellness.

Think of it this way. There’s a difference between feeling a little anxious in certain situations and being so anxious you can’t leave your house. There’s a difference between feeling a little “blah” and being so depressed you can’t work, or even shower. In one case, you need therapy. In the other, you don’t (even if it could help).

If you need therapy, coaching is unlikely to work without it. But if you don’t need therapy, you can choose coaching or therapy. You don’t have to do both or do them in a certain order.

Life coaching has a lot in common with therapy for personal growth. It also has a lot in common with other types of coaching.

In general, life coaches distinguish themselves from therapists most clearly in their focus on helping you make progress on concrete, specific, action-oriented goals.

This is the same thing all coaches do—it’s just that many coaches focus on helping clients in one specific area. Sports coaches help you meet athletic performance goals. Career coaches help you achieve career goals. Financial coaches help you achieve financial goals. (You get the idea.)

Life coaches help you achieve life goals, but of course those overlap with all the specific goals that other kinds of coaches can help you with. For example, your biggest life goal might be to write a book. In that case, should you get a life coach or a book coach? Sometimes it can be really hard to tell.

Coaches don’t need to have mastered the same things you want to master to be able to help you. They’re different from consultants.

While consultants lead with their expertise and give you advice on how to accomplish specific outcomes, coaches avoid giving you advice. Their role isn’t to tell you what to do or how to do something. It’s to help you tap into the inner resources you need to achieve your goals.

For example, a book coach wouldn’t necessarily tell you how to query an agent or get a book published (though some might also offer this kind of concrete help). Instead, they would help you explore why you’re not sticking to your daily word count goals or examine the fear that’s keeping your finished manuscript locked up in a drawer instead of out in the world.

Think of a life coach in a similar way. Their role isn’t to give you advice on how to live, but to help you find out how you want to live. They keep you inspired and accountable as you take the steps to achieve your goals. They can check in and nudge you when you get stuck, blocked, or scared.

Therapy is a licensed profession, while life coaching isn’t. This means therapists are required to meet exacting standards to practice therapy, while life coaches aren’t required to meet any standards at all.

Therapists have to get specific degrees, accumulate supervised practice hours, and uphold ethical and professional standards to maintain a license and legally practice therapy. Life coaches don’t have to do any of that, because life coaching is an unregulated profession.

This doesn’t mean life coaches don’t do any of these things, though. Like therapists, many life coaches feel called to their field. Like therapists, most life coaches want to do a good job. Just because they’re not required to do so by a licensing board doesn’t mean good life coaches don’t opt to get education or training or uphold ethical standards in how they practice. Many do.

A growing number of therapists are choosing to offer both therapy and coaching services because they see the value of both. Some therapists leave the therapy field to become full-time coaches because they feel it’s a better fit for their skill set or because their careers have naturally developed in that direction.

Therapists who become coaches don’t see their training and experience as irrelevant. They see them as strengths that can make them better coaches—in the same way coaches that come from different backgrounds see their prior experience as relevant. Many coaches believe nothing qualifies you as much to help others as having walked the same path they’re walking.

So, just because life coaches aren’t required to meet specific professional standards doesn’t mean they don’t have any standards. It just means it’s up to you to find out what standards a specific coach has chosen to meet and to figure out whether you personally feel they are qualified to help you.

You can vet a therapist by checking their license, but you can’t do the same thing with a life coach—because life coach licenses don’t exist.

This doesn’t mean that there’s no way to vet a life coach. It also doesn’t mean you’re in the clear after you check a therapist’s license. A clear license doesn’t guarantee that a therapist is ethical.

You have to have other ways to vet a therapist besides checking their license to get a sense of whether they’re a good one—and most of those are methods you can use to vet a life coach as well.

If a life coach says they’re certified, you can check their certification the same way you’d check a therapist’s license. Go to one of these sites to check a therapist’s ICF or CCE certification:

• Find an ICF-Certified Coach
• Verify a Coach’s ICF Certification
• Verify a Coach’s CCE Certification

Keep in mind that just because a coach isn’t certified doesn’t mean they’re unethical. But being certified does say good things about them. It also makes it easier to hold them accountable. Just like you can file a complaint against a therapist, you can file an ethics complaint against an ICF- or CCE-certified coach. Go to either of these pages to learn more:

• ICF Ethics Page
• CCE Ethics Page

This means life coaches who get certified are choosing to be held accountable by the organization that certified them. This is one of many ways they can show their commitment to being a good coach.

One of the ways to vet any coach whether they’re certified or not is to interview them. This gives you a chance to learn about other ways they may have invested in being a good coach. You can read the tips box below for some sample questions you can ask.

Whether a coach’s standards are high enough for you, or relevant to your needs as a client, is up to you to decide. Whether it’s important that a coach has a certain level of education, a specific kind of life experience, or certification as a coach will depend on your perspective and needs.

The important thing to keep in mind is that you do have ways to evaluate whether a life coach is qualified to help you and is the right match for you as a client.

Therapists do more than treat mental health conditions. They can help you recover your creativity, improve your relationships, and discover your true self. In other words, they can help you achieve personal growth goals.

Therapists don’t see your desire to fulfill your potential and realize your dreams as any less important than your desire to recover from depression or heal from trauma. Many therapists offer sliding scales to help people afford to do personal growth work as well as work on mental health issues with them. (Some life coaches offer sliding scales, too.)

The only time you have to have a mental health condition to work with a therapist is if you want to use insurance to cover your therapy sessions.

Insurance won’t cover therapy unless you’re diagnosed with a mental health condition (and it doesn’t cover life coaching at all). Many therapists choose not to take insurance for this reason—they want to use the same business structure for all their clients, some of whom have mental health conditions and some of whom do not.

Some therapists specifically focus their work on areas other than mental health treatment and market themselves to self-pay clients who want to work on something else. So, it’s definitely not as simple as, “See a therapist if you need mental health treatment, see a life coach if you don’t.”

It’s true that therapists can—and often do—help you delve into your past. They can help you make sense of it and heal from it.

That doesn’t mean they always do. In fact, some styles and methods of therapy focus on the present moment almost exclusively.

One way therapists help you cope with anxiety is by helping you learn how to reconnect to the present. Cognitive-behavioral therapy (CBT) and mindfulness-based therapy help you work with your thoughts as they arise, and they don’t need you to talk about your past to work. It’s entirely possible to get effective therapy without talking about your childhood or your parents.

It’s not true that therapists don’t look toward the future with you. The only way to measure progress in therapy is to see how much closer you are to the version of yourself you want to be than you were when you started.

It’s also untrue that life coaches don’t look to your past to learn more about you. The only way a life coach can help you change your behavior is to understand why you haven’t gotten the results you wanted in the past.

The difference is that each has a different focus and way of working. Therapists focus on changing how you feel and helping you understand how you got here, while coaches focus on changing how you act and helping you understand what works and what doesn’t.

In the end, though, both can help you do both—change how you feel and how you act. Both can help you clarify where you’ve come from, what you want now, and how to work toward a better future. Both can help you gain insight, change your behavior, and achieve your goals.