What is Coaching?
Choosing the Right Support
From my professional experience, I know how important it is to choose the type of support that aligns with where you are right now and what you want to accomplish. Not every challenge requires the same approach and not every approach leads to the same outcome.
To help you make an informed decision, you’ll find a short overview of four different services below coaching, therapy, mentoring, and consulting along with longer explanations you can explore in more detail. This way, you can confidently choose the service that best fits your current needs, goals, and direction.
Which Service is Right for You?
Coaching
Focus: Personal and professional development, mindset expansion, leadership growth, and achieving meaningful goals.
Therapy
Focus: Emotional healing, processing the past, addressing mental health challenges, and restoring stability and well-being.
Mentoring
Focus: Transferring wisdom and strategies from lived experience. Learning from someone who has already walked the path.
Consulting
Providing expert solutions, strategic recommendations, and specialized frameworks to solve organizational or business challenges.
What is Professional Coaching?
The International Coaching Federation (ICF) defines coaching as ‘partnering with clients in a thought-provoking and creative process that inspires them to maximize their personal and professional potential’.
Having a coach means gaining a trusted ally who helps you identify challenges, enhance decision-making, and cultivate a mindset of continuous improvement. In an era where change is the only constant, a coach provides the insights and accountability necessary to push beyond your comfort zone and elevate your professional and personal prowess.
Therapy focuses on healing the past while coaching focuses on creating the future.
Therapy supports emotional recovery, trauma, mental health challenges, and processing past experiences.
Coaching works with individuals who are emotionally well and ready to expand: set goals, challenge old patterns, elevate performance, and step into who they want to become.
Therapy asks “What happened and how do we heal?”
Coaching asks “Who do you want to be now, and what do you want to create?”
Both are powerful but designed for different needs.
How does it differ from therapy?
What about mentoring?
Mentoring is built on experience. A mentor has walked the path before and shares lessons from their own journey for example what worked, what didn’t, and what to avoid.
It sounds like: “Let me show you how I did it.”
Coaching is different. A coach does not lead with their story or their way of doing things. A coach leads with your vision, your strengths, your values, and your leadership style.
Mentoring transfers knowledge.
Coaching awakens capability.
And finally...consulting
Consulting provides expert solutions and strategic recommendations. A consultant evaluates the situation, identifies gaps, and delivers a plan — sometimes even implementing it. Consulting is ideal when an organization needs answers, process design, or specialized expertise rather than personal development.
Coaching doesn’t tell you what to do but it supports you in thinking differently so you can lead differently.
Consulting drives execution.
Coaching drives evolution.
