Therapist or Life Coach

So how can you decide? A life coach, or a therapist?

Clinical therapy is a very important part of the medical community. There is a place for both in the world today.

Here are a few reasons to choose traditional therapy over life coaching:

• Mental illness
• Thoughts and the threat of suicide
• Drug addictions
• Other types of addictions
• Clinical depression
• Abuse
• Difficult, complex problems
• Post traumatic stress disorder
• Whenever a life coach feels that the client’s problems fall outside the scope of his or her level of competency
• Lastly, when the work between a life coach and client seems to go nowhere

Life coaching may be the way to go if:

• You want to create a more satisfying balance between your work and home life.
• You want to get healthy: lose weight, build muscle, avoid disease, live longer.
• You’re thinking of changing jobs. You want something more challenging, something that will reward you financially and personally.
• You and your spouse want to increase your satisfaction and happiness: you want to deepen your relationship with each other.
• You want to recover from a traumatizing event such as a break-up, a job loss, foreclosure, bankruptcy, a health issue.
• You want to start your own business and build it into a successful career.
• You want to maximize business and increase profits in your current career or company.
• You want to attend college or go back to school.
• You want to reenter the work force after a long hiatus.
• You want to “get out of your rut,” change your old ways of seeing things, create new positive habits and thought processes. You want to expand and escape your old comfort zone.

Life coaches are tailor-made to help you achieve all these goals.

A good life coach won’t be afraid to refer you to a therapist

If it becomes clear that your problems don’t fit into the scope of what life coaching can cover, a good life coach won’t hesitate to work with you on finding a therapist. Life coaches are not in competition with clinical therapists.

Sometimes, it may be advisable to consider seeing both a therapist and a life coach concurrently.