Therapeutic coaching
Coaching that starts from the person in the role rather than from the role.
What often goes unsaid
Much of this work starts from something that’s easier to feel than to say aloud. Often it’s a quiet doubt about whether you’re really up to it, even when the evidence says you are. Sometimes it’s the pace, and a private question about how long you can keep it up. And for many people there’s a particular loneliness in being the one others rely on: nobody left to think out loud with who doesn’t also have a stake in the outcome.
Sometimes it isn’t a problem at all, but something you already half-know and haven’t yet acted on. None of it needs to be worked out before you get in touch.
What this is
Coaching, mostly looking forward. Where counselling tends to work with what’s difficult, coaching works with what you’ve already got and where you want to take it, and much of the hour goes on your strengths, your values and what you actually want rather than on what’s wrong.
The difference from most coaching is that I don’t ask you to leave the rest of yourself outside. A decision you keep circling is rarely only about the decision. My counselling training is what lets us go there when it matters, and come back, rather than steering round it because the agenda is where I’m comfortable.
Who it’s for
People carrying responsibility of some kind, mostly bringing their working life. That includes founders, managers, partners and directors, and equally anyone who has become the person others bring things to, whether or not it says so in the job description.
How it differs from both
It isn’t counselling. Counselling is a different piece of work, with a different agreement, aimed mostly at making sense of and easing what hurts. It’s slower, and the relationship itself does more of the work.
It also isn’t ordinary coaching, which would usually stay on the situation and what to do about it. This moves between the two, and the moving is the point. Staying too long in a therapeutic mode can turn into unproductive circling. Staying too long in a coaching mode can mean repeatedly trying to move forward while something unaddressed keeps pulling you back. Either is a way of getting stuck, and I’d rather name that with you than let it happen quietly.
Whether it’s right for you
Coaching assumes a certain amount of ballast. It asks you to be challenged, to try things between sessions, and to look at yourself fairly honestly, and that asks more of you than counselling does at the start.
A rough test: does the thing you’re carrying sit alongside the work, or in front of it? Alongside, coaching often helps, and sometimes a great deal. In front of it, we would only be trying to walk through a wall, and counselling would serve you better first. That isn’t a judgement and it isn’t a closed door. It’s a question about which piece of work would actually get you somewhere.
It also isn’t a question we settle once. I’ll keep asking it out loud with you rather than privately, and if the answer changes partway through, we change what we’re doing. Sometimes that means pausing rather than stopping: not that coaching was wrong, but that this isn’t its moment. If that happens I’ll leave it open and let you be the one to come back.
Coaching also works better when it isn’t the only place you have to talk. It’s an hour with a particular job to do rather than the whole of your support, and if it started carrying more than that, I’d want to say so.
The free first conversation is where we start working this out. If it’s neither of these you want, I’ll help you find what is. There’s a fuller account of what I work with on the counselling side if that would help you decide.
If you’re already getting help elsewhere
Being in therapy, or seeing your GP about something, doesn’t in itself rule coaching out. It tends to work when the coaching has a focus of its own and stays with it, so the two pieces of work aren’t pulling against each other. I’d want us to be clear at the start about where that line sits, and I’d ask that whoever else is helping you knows this is happening. Their work comes first, and mine fits around it.
What we work on
The focus is your working life and the person doing it. If something from home or from your own history is pressing on the work, that belongs here too, and we’d notice together if it started to become the main thing rather than the context.
That’s yours to set, and we agree it early. Common ground is stepping into something bigger, working through a change you didn’t choose, a relationship at work that isn’t working, or a decision you keep turning over.
We’ll get specific about what you’re after, because vague goals are the ones that don’t happen. That usually means separating what you want to achieve from what you want to learn, thinking through what might get in the way, and being honest about what pursuing it would cost.
We can work to clear goals or use the time more openly. Both are legitimate, and we’ll agree which, rather than drifting.
How the sessions go
I’ll ask questions more than I’ll give answers. You know your situation far better than I do and usually have more of the answer in you than it feels like.
I’ll also say what I notice, including about how you’re talking about something rather than only what you’re saying, and I’ll challenge you where it seems useful. That’s the part people find unfamiliar, and it’s where much of the value sits.
If you want me to hold you to things you’ve said you’d do, I will, and some people find that the most useful part. If you’d rather I didn’t, say so.
We’ll review as we go, and again at the end, so that what you’ve worked out doesn’t stay in the room.
Where this comes from
The British Association for Counselling and Psychotherapy has recognised coaching within its Ethical Framework since 2016, and publishes a competence framework for practitioners who work as both therapist and coach: one part on coaching itself, one on integrating the two. It’s the only ethical framework that covers both, and it’s what my coaching answers to.
That framework asks a practitioner to work to at least one recognised way of integrating the two, rather than improvising. Mine is the pluralistic one, which is what my counselling degree is in: it takes your own view of what would help as evidence rather than as something to be worked around, and we decide together what we’re doing and why.
Practicalities
Coaching usually works well as a series of sessions over a few months, though we’ll shape that to your situation. I work in Kingston upon Thames and online across the UK, and sessions can be arranged privately or through your organisation.
If your employer is paying, we’ll be clear at the outset about who decides what the coaching is for, whether it covers work only or personal ground too, and what gets reported back and what doesn’t. Most of it stays between us, but I’d rather that were written down than assumed.
We’d also agree in advance what would be said if the work stopped early, so that you and I aren’t giving different versions of it. What gets said about why is largely yours to decide, within the limits I’m bound by.
The first conversation is free. About twenty minutes, no obligation, and nothing is booked or paid for until after we’ve spoken.