“It is good to have an end to journey toward; but it is the journey that matters in the end.”

Ursula K. Le Guin
Author and poet

Life coaches, career coaches, and personal coaches often make a distinction between coaching vs. counseling in their sessions. These two areas are often blurred and sometimes have overlapping gradations.

Basically, the key differences between coaching and counseling are: In the counseling relationship, the counselor is generally considered the expert who offers advice and guides the discussion. In a coaching relationship, the coach and client are equal partners who co-create the session based on the goals, needs, aspirations, and desires of the client. The client always has the choice as to the direction of the sessions.

Coaching arrived in the 1980s, fueled by the human potential movement, which exploded into various types of organizational consulting, counseling, and therapy. Coaching became the vehicle that provided options to guide and support downsized employees or to assist employees in personal growth and self-maximization.

Over the last decade or more, coaching has spread beyond the business world to all walks of life, assisting individuals in achieving a variety of personal and professional goals. Salt Lake City and Utah are just beginning to embrace the concept of personal coaching for self-realization. Although coaching is still a relatively young profession, most successful coaches find they need to specialize within an industry or domain. Specializing allows the coach to claim a niche in the marketplace and establish an area of competence. Thus, there are a variety of coaches for different sectors: corporate, job, creativity, life, fitness, and speakers’ coaching, among others. There are professional associations and federations that set ethics and standards for the certification of coaches and the coaching profession. Coaching is now a $630 million industry and encompasses both corporate and individual applications.

The International Coaching Federation (ICF), one of the largest certification coaching affiliations, defines coaching as “an ongoing partnership that helps clients produce fulfilling results in their personal and professional lives. Through the process of coaching, clients deepen their learning, improve their performance, and enhance their quality of life.”

Differences between Counseling/Coaching Ideology

Counseling tends to look at the past, processing feelings and attempting to understand why the client is having difficulty. The goal of coaching is to focus on change and accelerate the client’s movement forward. The emphasis in coaching is to look more to the future and what the client would like to see altered or ameliorated. In a coaching relationship, the coach may make a powerful request or co-create an inquiry (an open-ended question not intended to be answered immediately, but rather reflected upon) with the client. This is not something typical of a counseling relationship. Like counselors, coaches employ intense listening skills and oftentimes rely on some level of intuition.

One of the basic precepts of coaching is that clients have their own answers and coaches simply assist clients in finding and clarifying their answers.

Thomas Leonard, founder of Coach University, a virtual university for personal and business coaches, makes the following distinctions between coaching and therapy:

Alumni Career Services at the University of Utah

Most clients in Alumni Career Services seek career counseling when they are struggling emotionally with an issue, whether it relates to their work, their livelihood, or their personal values that might be in conflict with a corporate culture.

Clients often turn to coaching when they seek clarity, direction, or greater purpose or meaning surrounding the world of work.

Alumni Career Services tends to favor the coaching ideology as a powerful methodology for promoting change and finding purposeful direction. It employs certain techniques such as “Strategic Career Planning” and “Authentic Vocation.”

“If you don’t know where you’re going, you’ll probably end up somewhere else.”

Strategic Career Planning

Step One: Identify Your Vision and Mission

What’s your “ideal state”? Define this within your personal framework and philosophy. Let’s look at the strategies you will use.

Step Two: Conduct an Environmental Scan including SWOT

Let’s identify external and internal factors in your job search including strengths, weaknesses, opportunities, and threats (swot).

Step Three: Conduct a Gap Analysis

Evaluate the difference between your current situation and desired future. How willl we close the gap? Make certain that your résumé, cover letters, interviewing techniques, and networking skills are top-notch.

Step Four: Benchmark

What’s in your toolbox, and how prepared are you for the job search endeavor?

Step Five: Design a Strategic Plan for your Job Goal

Set clear goals or milestones that are realistic and measurable. Move forward with specialized tactics and adjust the plan as needed depending upon emergent conditions.

Authentic Vocation

This process searches for a real and genuine alignment that designates a calling, a profession to which you are particularly suited. Work that meets this standard emanates from an authentic self and allows you to do what you most love and feel passionate about. This provides meaning and sense of purpose.

Job coaching in Alumni Career Services aims to help clients find that missing sense of fulfillment through work.

Aristotle says: “Where your talents and the needs of the world cross, there lies your vocation.”

Need some career help? Give me a call.

Julie Swaner
Program Manager, Alumni Career Services
(801) 585-5036