Are you afraid of crossing the line between coaching and therapy? There’s no need to be so squeamish, argues Jenny Rogers
A doctor wishing to re-enter work after a severe episode of bipolar disorder; a chief executive whose presenting issue was her marital problems; a banker whose misery at work meant he was upset through most of the session: these are just some of the situations I’ve encountered recently in my executive coaching practice.
Less experienced coaches may view such clients with dread: surely they should refer the client to a therapist? I disagree. I suggest that any squeamishness is unjustified.
‘Fear’ of such situations is reflected in much of the literature, sometimes suggesting, for instance, that any deep exploration of feelings is inappropriate, that any topics connected with personal life should be avoided in executive coaching or that somehow ‘everyone knows’ where therapy is needed. In my book Coaching Skills: A Handbook1, I went along with this, while privately wondering if it were true. My belief now is that the boundaries with therapy are extremely shadowy, and I am content that this should be so.
Trying to define coaching has preoccupied many hours of many good people’s time. Whole conferences have been devoted to finding that elusive definition. Many discussions have the tone of a religious debate, where the fiercest arguments have been between people on the same side wrangling over words. To me this reflects our immaturity as a profession, our lack of coaching-specific theory and of convincing evidence that coaching really works. We will never be able to appropriate a word that has so many different meanings.
A dangerous profession?
When training new coaches, I notice they worry a lot about the boundaries with therapy. Their fear is of ‘getting in too deep’, or ‘doing harm’. They have many misconceptions – that therapy is always about the past, involves the therapist as interpreter, goes on for years and is somehow mysterious and ‘dangerous’.
These stereotypes fail to represent the vigorous and mutually antagonistic squabbling between therapies and the thin line between therapy and coaching.
Coaches know that some clients suspect coaching is ‘therapy-lite’ – for gullible wimps. We need honest answers to such challenges.
The debate has also been stoked by attacks from therapists asserting that coaching is superficial, short term, ridiculously expensive and conducted by charlatans or by people who have failed in other careers. For a view of this sort, see Steven Berglas’s article2 in which good psychotherapy is compared with bad coaching.
The truth is, without therapy there would be no coaching. Most strands of theory and all of our techniques have come from it. I am shamelessly eclectic in my own choices, lifting ideas and approaches from the humanistic, psychoanalytical, Gestalt, TA and other traditions. If it works, I use it.
Much of the muddle about therapy and coaching starts from the false assumption that human beings are rational. So, coaching deals in rationality and therapy in emotion. In fact, as recent research makes clear, the brain’s emotional centre is far more powerful than the prefrontal cortex – the seat of thinking and reason. Decision-making is emotionally, not rationally led. So how can it make any sense to exclude emotion from our work with clients?
Executive coaching starts with work issues because these are safe to declare – and the organisation is paying. But problems in work life are always affected by what is going on in private – and vice versa.
My client Sandra, came to me for help with giving presentations. She has a senior role in a pharmaceutical company. The HR sponsor told me that Sandra seemed ‘uptight and nervous’. An expensive presentation course had made no discernible difference.
Paradoxical behaviour
The behavioural approach to coaching would be to deliver one-to-one training, perhaps using a video camera for practice and feedback. This is what Sandra told me she expected.
But we didn’t use a video camera. Instead, we looked at the paradox of how she desperately wanted to be better at giving presentations. She already knew exactly what to do, yet through skilled self-sabotage she was making it impossible to achieve.
We explored her assumptions, which included her belief that the lack of a degree from ‘a posh university’ made people conclude she was stupid. Then there was the belief that she had nothing to say, starting in childhood where, as the youngest of six, she was routinely referred to as ‘Fat Piggy’ and told to ‘shut up because who’d be interested in what you’ve got to say?’
She had been silenced. Her deepest fear was finding out that those childhood taunts represented the truth. Together we designed safe experiments to test these destructive assumptions. Sandra is now able to speak confidently and effectively at professional gatherings.
Did it mean weeks of 50-minute sessions? No, it was all over in two blocks of 90 minutes.
This was about uncovering limiting beliefs and assumptions, including their origins, and dismantling them in the context of solving a potentially career-limiting problem, something I believe any competent coach could do.
A duty of care
Was it therapy or coaching? To me it was coaching, but I acknowledge that any therapist might believe it could describe their own work.
There are some areas where I will not venture. These include: addictions; blank disengagement; threats of harm to self or others; flashbacks after trauma; persistent physical symptoms of distress such as sleeplessness, agitation and tremors. I have a bank of professionals to whom I refer such clients, remembering that GPs are always the first and best point of contact for mental health issues. Here, the coaching is about how the client can find specialist help.
What about the fear that we could do ‘harm’? Yes, we have a duty of care. But how do we harm clients? When I ask coaches this question they find it hard to answer. When you work from the principle that the advice clients give themselves is the advice they take, when you see your role as asking a wise question and not giving a clever answer, when you work respectfully, avoid interpreting, believe the client is resourceful, chooses their responses and does not need fixing, it is hard to see how coaching could be harmful.
We can be incompetent, boring and waste the client’s time and money, in which case our coaching careers will be short, but this isn’t real psychological damage.
The great Frank Farrelly3 noted: “the psychological fragility of patients is vastly over-rated, both by themselves and others”.
Meta-research into therapy4 shows that conditions for success do not depend on the theoretical orientation of the practitioner,
nor on techniques. What does work is an emotionally charged relationship of warmth and trust and a mutually shared belief that change is possible together. To me this is just as obviously true for coaching.
Jenny Rogers is an executive coach and a founder member of Management Futures coach training. She will be a panellist at the debate “Coaching versus therapy – is there a third way?” at the Coaching and Mentoring at work conference on 23 November www.coaching-at-work.com/coaching-and-mentoring-at-work-beyond-frontiers
Learning points
- Worry less about being different from therapists; concentrate instead on what you can learn from 100 years of therapeutic tradition
- Stop searching for a non-existent boundary – it is, and always will be, grey
- Take a whole-life approach if you want to do work that will have a profound benefit for clients and yourself
- Listen to worries about being out of your depth, but don’t panic too soon
- Expect paradox and self-sabotage from clients and learn how to deal with it
- Be willing to explore feelings with clients: it’s not rationality that holds us back from making difficult decisions and positive changes
- Trust your clients. If you believe you can help them, you’re probably right
References
- 1 J Rogers, Coaching Skills: A Handbook (2nd ed), OUP, 2008
- 2 S Berglas, “The very real dangers of executive coaching”, in Harvard Business Review, June 2002
- 3 F Farrelly and J Brandsma, Provocative Therapy, Meta Publications, 1974
- 4 eg: D N Elkins, Humanistic Psychology: A Clinical Manifesto, Colorado School of Professional Psychology Press, 2009
Coaching at Work, Volume 6, Issue 4