Therapy or Coaching: Which Do You Need?

Quest for Success

In this crossover episode between Quest for Success and Off the Couch Psychology, Dr. Jerry Cunningham delineates the fundamental differences between

Key takeaways

• Therapy is primarily focused on looking backward to address unresolved trauma, depression, or anxiety that interferes with daily life.
• Coaching is designed for forward movement, helping functioning individuals achieve specific goals, improve habits, or enhance performance.

Main topics

• Distinction between therapy and coaching
• Mental health treatment boundaries

Notable quotes

If you need healing, get the right help for healing. If you need direction, structure, accountability, or help reaching the next level, get the right help for that too.

Conclusion

The key takeaway is to identify whether you need to heal from what is

Transcript preview

Speaker 5 (0:01) Amazon, a great Indian festival out there. Speaker 4 (0:29) If Speaker 1 (0:30) you break your leg, you probably don't call a personal trainer in sight. I need you to motivate this thing back into place. No, you go to a doctor. On the other hand, if your leg works perfectly fine and you decide that you want to run your first marathon, you probably don't show up at physical therapy and say, good news, nothing hurts. I just want to shave 12 minutes off my time. That sounds obvious when we're talking about a leg. Somehow, when we start talking about our lives, though, that line gets a little blurry. People sometimes take deep trauma, serious depression, anxiety, or these bunch of years of unresolved pain to somebody whose main qualification is a coaching certificate and a really impressive Instagram page. At the same time, somebody else may be functioning well. feeling emotionally healthy, and simply trying to become a better leader, build a business, improve their habits, or figure out their next move, and they assume that therapy is automatically where they need to go. Therapy and life coaching can both be valuable. I do both of them. They can even overlap in some areas, but they're designed to do different jobs, and knowing which one you need can save you time, money, frustration, and probably several months of sitting in the wrong chair. This is the Quest for Success podcast, where we talk about the ideas that can improve your life mentally, morally, physically, spiritually, and financially. And I'm Dr. Jerry Cunningham. I'm a psychologist, author, coach, and your podcast host, as always. Which means today... I'm apparently qualified to explain the difference between two professions while hoping nobody asked me to coach them through assembling some IKEA furniture because that's not my specialty at all. And today is also a crossover episode. We're also bringing it to the Off the Couch Psychology podcast where we take what's going on in your mind, break it down, and help you get back into control of your life. We're drawing a clear line, though, between therapy and coaching. what each one does, how they can overlap, where they absolutely should not overlap, and most importantly, how you can figure out which one that you actually need for whatever is going on in your life right now. The easiest way to understand the difference between therapy and coaching is to think about where you are, what's getting in your way, and where you're trying to go. Therapy often spends most of the time in the beginning at least, looking backwards because the past has a bad habit of refusing to stay in the past. Something happened years ago, but it may still be affecting how you think, how you react, how you trust others, what you fear, and how you handle your relationships today. You may think you're arguing with your spouse about something that happened Tuesday. when part of that reaction actually started about 20 years ago. This is one place where therapy can help. A psychologist or therapist may explore the old experiences, the trauma, the relationships that you had, what your internal beliefs are, and the patterns that you have to understand why certain things happened in certain times in your life. The goal is not to sit around blaming your childhood, blaming your parents, blaming the old bosses, blaming your ex-spouse for everything. Eventually, you're 47 years old and your mother cannot still be responsible for the fact that you refused to put the milk back in the refrigerator. Therapy will ask questions like, what makes this keep happening? Where did this pattern that... of my habits come from and what is keeping me stuck. Coaching, on the other hand, tends to spend more time asking, where do you want to go from where you are right now? Maybe you're functioning pretty well. You have a job. You got decent or stable relationships. You have your responsibilities under control and you have goals in life. But you want something more than just what's written on that piece of paper. You want to become a better leader. You might want to change careers. You want to improve your habits to make life easier and better for you and to get to the next step. You want to write a book. You want to start a podcast. You want to get your office and house and your entire life organized. Or finally, you just want to follow through on something that you've been talking about for eight or nine years. Kind of like me with this podcast. It took me a long time to actually get off the couch and do something about it. I actually did get a mentor to help me through it. Yes, it cost me some money in the beginning, but I can't show you that information right now because this is an audio podcast, but I've made that money back just in the course of the last two years. I don't know how many times over. So it's helped me. One, to get off the couch and to do something about it and to start my quest for success. And it took a mentor. It took me paying someone and getting some coaching in order to do it. A coach can help you define the goal. Again, me with the podcast. I knew I kept saying I want to start a podcast, but I didn't know how to get started. I kind of knew the basics of getting started, but I didn't know. What I actually need to do step by step to do it. Coach will help you identify what's getting in the way. It was my internal thoughts, my imposter syndrome, that I'm not good enough. Why would anybody listen to a lowly psychologist in southeast Missouri? And let me tell you what, listeners, you have came through. I am amazed by the downloads that we're getting nowadays. I had to build a plan, and you can too with your goals. And then the coach is also going to hold you accountable for doing something about it, or sometimes in my case, not doing something about it. And that accountability can be important because apparently writing something on my to-do list did not actually make me accomplish it. I checked. I know because I did it many times with the process of starting these