This interesting article addresses a key question: ‘Life coaching is unregulated and growing rapidly. Should it be reined in?‘. As life coaching becomes more prevalent as a career and service, shouldn’t it become more regulated and should not access to the profession become more restricted?
Of course the article is written by a psychiatrist and therefore he complaints about the amateurish handling by coaches of exchanges that border on therapy (and tends to protect his profession, degree and the many years of associated suffering). Coaching is “intended for individuals without mental health problems. It’s also supposed to be more collaborative, brief, focused, future-oriented and informal than psychotherapy.” However, “it must be difficult for a coach to come across as anything other than a therapist. Common topics for leadership coaches – performance maximisation, workplace relationships and professional anxiety – are the bread and butter of many a therapy session. The confusion is even greater with coaching outside of the work environment, which can encompass, as the ‘life coach’ moniker makes clear, just about anything.”
The author also makes an excellent point on the issue of stigma getting into psychotherapy. “People who are concerned about stigma might think that coaching offers a creative workaround – a malleable means of offering therapy under a different guise and a different name. While the motivation might be noble and understandable, the reality is scary.“
From my own experience of coaching, I believe the point made can be sometimes valid. While coaches have a high-level training about the fact that there is a border beyond which they are not supposed to intervene, and require psychotherapy, this training is quite limited. Also, I have observed that many life coaches have entered into this activity following strong personal issues, questioning and sometimes difficult events, sometimes more as a way to discover themselves. They are not always extremely stable themselves, and they sometimes investigate areas that should be off-limits. They should probably be made more aware of their limits.
I am a strong supporter of coaching as a softer way to challenge people and enhance their underlying performance. Coaching training if done properly is quite thorough, but it is true that more exchange with psychotherapy professionals and more awareness of the limits of coaching versus therapy would probably be useful.
