What is a life coach? A life coach is a supportive professional who uses a set of tools and techniques to help you get clarity, identify and overcome obstacles, and attain your goals.
Most of us could benefit from the guidance and support of effective life coaching services in building the life we desire for ourselves. If you’re feeling stuck at work, would like to build a healthy relationship, or are just generally feeling unfocused and dissatisfied with your life, your first instinct may be to seek out the services of a therapist. But for high-functioning people who aren’t suffering from a mental health condition, life coaching can actually be a more satisfying experience and a better use of time and money than traditional psychotherapy.
Why? There are so many benefits of life coaching, and the coaching process often feels like a faster and more direct route to helping you make real and lasting positive changes in your life (especially in comparison to slow, introspective, past-or-pathology focused therapy).
Effective life coaching can help you gain insight and get clear about what you want, understand the obstacles in your path, and the best strategies to traverse them. The best coaching experiences are life-changing in terms of personal growth, leaving you with a stronger sense of who you are, what’s most important to you, and how to get it. Working with the wrong coach, however, could be counterproductive, or even dangerous in some cases.
I hope that, by answering the questions “what is a life coach” and “what does a life coach do” this article gives you a clear idea of what to expect from life coaching, as well as how to avoid some of the industry’s biggest pitfalls.
What Does a Life Coach Do?
Let’s tackle some of these coaching questions together. Broadly, a life coach is a professional dedicated to helping you achieve your most important personal and professional goals, improve your relationships, increase your life satisfaction and happiness, and grow as a person. Unlike therapy, coaching focuses less on analyzing the past, and more on creating new self-awareness and an action-oriented plan to move forward.
But in order to increase your understanding of what life coaching is, and what life coaches do, it’s really important to understand what life coaching is not. That will help you achieve clarity and enable you to make informed choices about whether or not coaching is right for you.
What a Life Coach is Not
While there’s much overlap between counseling vs coaching, it is extremely important to understand two things:
1. The coaching “profession” is not regulated.
2. Coaching is not mental health treatment.
Coaching is a completely unregulated profession thing that people do. True professional titles are regulated. For example, nobody is legally allowed to represent themselves as “marriage and family therapist” or a “psychologist” unless they have successfully completed all of the requirements set forth by state licensing boards to become licensed as such.
This includes things like getting a graduate degree that covered specific coursework requirements, accumulating thousands of clinical experience hours under the supervision of a senior therapist, and passing national board exams — the whole enchilada. It’s a lot. It took me, personally, over ten years to do all the things I needed to do in order to legally be able to represent myself an MFT and a psychologist.
There is not even a whiff of that when it comes to calling yourself a coach, life coach, career coach, dating coach, etc. Life coaches are not required to have any specific educational background, license, or certification. You do not need a high-school diploma, you do not need to be a citizen, and you do not need to not be a registered sex offender. Literally anyone can call themselves a coach and begin selling their services to potential clients, without taking a class or even reading a book on the subject.
Want to be a life coach? Poof! [Lisa waggles magic fingers in your direction.] You are now a life coach, just like approximately 15% of the residents of California. Godspeed.
This rolls through to the next important thing to know, which is that life coaches are not mental health professionals, and that life coaching is not mental health treatment.
What a Life Coach Does Not Do
Even if someone goes through the trouble of taking an (also completely unregulated) online course or program to obtain a coaching credential they are not qualified to identify, much less treat, any type of mental health condition.
AND, furthermore, even a licensed therapist who provides coaching, like myself, cannot, and should not, use coaching methods to diagnose or treat any kind of mental health condition. I have people reach out to me all the time for coaching but after learning more about what’s going on, I need to refer them for therapy instead, because I know that coaching will not be helpful for them until their psychiatric symptoms have been successfully treated.
These boundaries and distinctions are so vital to understand, because many people unconsciously lump therapists and life coaches together in one general “mental health professionals” bucket in their mind (along with social workers, who are also trained to do a completely different thing than either therapy or coaching).
This “mental health professionals” bucket sits between the “financial professionals” bucket (containing everybody from the bank teller, the H&R block tax person, the CPA, and the hedge fund manager) and the “medical professionals” bucket (containing the phlebotomist, nurse practitioner, cardiologist, radiologist, dermatologist, person wielding vaccine shots at the Walgreens pharmacy counter, and Dr. Oz.)
Obviously, as we peer into these mental buckets together, we know that these professionals are very different although they occupy the same broad category. Your bank teller, assuming you still engage in such antiquated activities as visiting a bank, has no idea whether you should buy or sell, or the tax implications of either. The person at the Walgreens counter cannot look at an image of your lungs and know whether or not it’s cancer. And, it would be weird to ask them, right?
But people go to self-anointed life coaches all the time for assistance with things that are on the same order of magnitude in terms of importance. “Should I leave my husband? What will this do to our kids?” “What career path should I devote the next forty years of my life to?” “Why do I feel so bad about myself and my life? What is wrong with me?” Concerning, for sure, that people are placing the trajectory of their lives in the hands of “coaches” with a good TikTok game.
But the most important and serious thing to know here is that, unless your coach is also a licensed therapist, they are not qualified to diagnose or treat mental health conditions. If you’re experiencing a mental health disorder, coaching will not alleviate your symptoms, and in some cases could even make them worse. You need (and deserve) competent, evidence-based therapy.
So, with this (hopefully) clear understanding of what a life coach is not, now we can turn our attention to understanding what a life coach is. Next, we’ll talk about what life coaches do, the different types of coaches, and how working with a skilled and competent coach can help you make real and lasting positive changes in important areas of your life.
